435. Question Time: The Migrant Return Plan, Colombia’s Drug Cartels, and Will Rory Join Corbyn’s New Party?

Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics.

Sign up to The Rest is Politics Plus to enjoy ad-free listening.

Receive a weekly newsletter, join our members' chat room and gain early access to live show tickets.

Just go to the RestisPolitics.com.

That's the RestisPolitics.com.

The Restis Politics is powered by Fuse Energy and Fuse are now offering £20 credit and free Trip Plus membership if you switch to a fixed tariff before the end of August.

They've listened carefully to their customers and the number one request was gas tariffs.

So now at last you can switch both your gas and electricity to Fuse.

One supplier, one bill, one less quockmire to navigate.

It's also cheaper.

Fuse gas and electricity customers typically save £150 versus the price cap.

Today's political climate is full of talk about control and clarity.

Well Fuse have quietly exercised some, at least when it comes to your energy bill.

And they began with a mission which was to make electricity cheaper, cleaner, simpler.

And Fuse now supplies over over 50,000 homes across the UK, all done quietly, efficiently, and without a single campaign bus tour.

Fuse's support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with real people replying in under two minutes.

So go to fuseenergy.com forward slash politics to switch your gas and electricity to Fuse and get your £20 credit and free Trip Plus membership.

This podcast is brought to you by Carvana.

Buying a car shouldn't eat up your week.

That's why Carvana made it convenient.

Car buying that fits around your life, not the other way around.

You can get pre-qualified for an auto loan in just a couple of minutes and browse thousands of quality car options, all within your terms, all online, all on your schedule.

Turn car buying into a few clicks and not a full week's endeavor.

Finance and buy your car at your convenience.

On Carvana.

Financing subject to credit approval.

Additional terms and conditions may apply.

This podcast is brought to you by Carvana.

Got a car to sell, but no time to waste?

Hop on to Carvana.com to get a real offer for your car in seconds.

All you have to do is enter your license plate, answer a few quick questions, and if you accept the offer, Carvana will pay you as soon as you hand the keys over.

They even offer same-day pickup in many cities.

Save your time, score some cash, and sell your car the convenient way to Carvana.

Pickup times vary.

Fees may apply.

Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

And me, Alistair Campbell.

And Rory, as we're recording, my phone is pinging away with messages about the European Commission ratifying the one-in-one out deal, as it became called, that President Macron and Kierstama struck at the UK-France summit recently, which looks very, very interesting.

Because I think I said at the time I thought there'd be problems in getting the whole of the European Union to buy this, but it seems like they are.

I mean, this is the deal which we've been talking about, the shapes of for months.

And I've been very, very interested in, because as we picked up with my slightly unfortunate, grumpy, regrettable encounter with Gabrielle Latale, your friend, the former French Prime Minister,

I really have felt for a long time that it's ridiculous that people are coming from France, the UK on boats in this way because France is a safe country and that we should have had a very clear deal saying that if people arrived, we would send them back to France and that in return, we should be taking genuine asylum seekers, you know, female judges fleeing the Taliban, for example, and bringing them to Britain.

And it's really good, I think, that they've put the framework of that together.

Again, the devil's in the detail.

How many are they going to do?

How long is this going to last?

And can they put this into a European framework?

But it's definitely, I think, philosophically the right idea.

They may may be screwing up the implementation.

And the reason why I thought that this might fall apart at the European level is because some of the, particularly the countries that are really badly affected

in different ways,

Italy,

Greece, Spain, Cyprus to some extent, that they would have thought, hold on a minute, why is France doing a bilateral deal to get those people who've gone to Britain and coming back to France, which is the European Union, and therefore they could end up on our door as well.

But anyway, whatever has happened within the European Union debate, that seems to have been resolved.

And also, another shout-out for Jeremy Hunt.

He did make another interesting observation.

He said, you know, when Labour came in, they didn't say this is going to be really difficult, really complicated, and it's going to take time to sort.

They said, we're going to smash the gangs.

So even as you and I keep saying, we're talking about relatively small numbers within the whole immigration picture, we're talking about something politically that Labour have to crack.

The other thing, by the way, we've got loads of questions while you were away,

but given you've only just got back, I thought you might want a bit of time to sort of dig into it.

I'd like to talk as well about the Jeremy McCorby New Party.

I think there's lots of interesting things going on there that actually, some of them bad for Labour, some of them not necessarily as bad as people might think.

But

maybe we can come back with both of those next week, either in the main podcast or on QA.

I was at the

North Berwick Fringe by the Sea Literary Festival on Sunday morning and

two people came up and said, Rory, would you consider joining Jeremy Corbyn's new party?

They were both trip listeners.

So there's clearly a part of our listener base that's very excited about what Corbyn's party could mean.

And you said yes, did you?

Despite my love of his ears, I didn't agree on the spot, but I said I'd look into it.

The love of the ears is an in-joke unless you have read Rory Stewart's book very, very, very, very carefully.

Now, for this week, because you announced you were going to Columbia, we actually got a lot of questions about Colombia.

Felicity Anderson here, very straightforward.

Rory, welcome back.

I echo that.

Felicity says, I'd love to hear your reflections on Colombia.

Politics, people, what are your key takeaways?

Oh, well, I think the first thing is that, of course, Colombia still has some very, very serious trouble, and we can talk about that.

There are armed insurgents.

There's a...

a lot of coca growing for the cocaine industry and there's a big uh judicial fight going going on with the former president, the kind of legendary former president now being convicted in court.

But as a place to visit, it's really, really lovely.

I mean, you have to be careful where you go.

But we went to Cartagena, which is this incredible ancient colonial walled city on the Atlantic coast.

We went to the beach.

We went to Bogota, which is right up in the Andes and climbed up to the top of a hill where you're at 3,300 meters, so sort of 10,000 feet in the air.

But most interesting of all, we went to Makarina.

And Makarena is down in the savanna, the Llanos of the southern lowlands.

And it was an area where,

until relatively recently, was basically controlled by a guerrilla group.

In fact, formally, in 1999-2000, the government briefly granted the whole area to this guerrilla group.

The Colombian government backed off and FARC round the area.

And so all the time when you're traveling, traveling with the kids,

you saw all this infrastructure which had been built by the guerrillas.

You know, the bridge had been built by the gorillas, the initial landing strip had been built by the guerrillas, there was a guerrilla radio station.

And it was an area where this leftist group, which had emerged from the civil war of the 40s and 50s in Colombia and was arguing for a particular kind of vision of communist revolution different to other groups and there are nine different armed groups in Colombia currently having peace negotiations but this group controlled the area.

It was almost impossible to get to.

Colombia is 50 million people but the terrain is unbelievably challenging.

As I say you go from these 10,000 foot hills to the Amazon rainforest and bits, coastal regions and this huge savannah.

You simply couldn't get to it.

This area was first spotted from a plane in the 1940s and settled in the 40s.

They just used it for massive coca production and then they began working with the great cartels.

People will have heard of Pablo Escobar, who was killed

in the 90s, but the Kali and Medellin cartels worked with the guerrilla groups initially so that the coca production was got there and I saw the places where the coca had been transported and processed and then fights began between those groups.

So then you had paramilitaries emerging, which were often working for the landowners or for the drug lords against the old leftist guerrillas.

Anyway, back over to you.

What's your sense, Columbia?

I've only ever been to Bogota and that was when I was trying to help Jonathan Powell, who was supporting Santos, then the president, in the first of all, the referendum, which he lost, but then actually did manage to kind of bring the whole civil war to an end and got the Nobel Peace Prize for his success.

Fascinating place.

I found the people

really smart, really interesting,

very hard to get away from talking about drugs.

And I know that irritates them.

But we also had a question here from somebody called Jonas who wanted to know what we thought about Colombia specifically with what's happening in the drugs trade.

And I'm afraid it's not as happy a story as the ending of the civil war because I read a wonderful piece while you're away by a guy called Cesar Alvares, who's a lecturer in terrorism and security.

And it starts by saying, Imagine an area larger than the Australian capital territory, twice the size of London, four times that of New York City, covered in cocoa plantations.

That is the scale of Colombia's coca cultivation, according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime.

And Santos, for whom I have a lot of time and a lot of respect, it's funny sometimes sometimes how things that you think are going to work for you can end up being counterproductive.

So, two things.

In 2015, the Colombian courts suspended some of the herbicides that were used to kill coca because of the concern for health and environment.

And then, a year later, Santos introduced a scheme where basically you incentivized farmers, you paid farmers to grow non-illicit plants.

And the trouble with that is that these very clever people, the Colombians, they thought, oh, so maybe if we start growing coca, we'll start qualifying for some of these new subsidies.

So actually the coca crops doubled during his second term.

And the cocaine has really taken off in a, you know, right across Europe, right across parts of Australia has got a real cocaine problem.

So I think it's a very, very, very mixed picture.

I mean, you and O'Rory an opium man famously, but did you see much of the drug stuff going on?

This area I was in was an area that was very much a traditional drug area.

And I saw coca plants and

I chewed a coca leaf in order to make sure that I can horrify the Daily Telegraph even more.

But of course, all this is

hugely ringing bells with me from many painful years in Afghanistan looking at poppy production and heroin, which was very much a similar story.

You know, could you spray it?

Could you turn off the water?

Should you be paying farmers to grow things that weren't poppy?

So an amazing guy called David Mansfield I worked with there.

And what he discovered is that, of course, it is possible for farmers to make good legal incomes, but it's quite complicated.

So if a farmer, for example, in central Afghanistan, doesn't grow poppy, but instead has a mixed crop, you know, some apricots, some wheat, it can free up family labor, they can go into the town, they can earn some additional income.

You can put a family income together that is higher.

But it's often quite geographically specific.

And of course, security plays into this.

I mean, if it's not illegal, or in effect, the police don't do anything about it, it is a cash crop.

And of course, the drug lords are able to put huge pressure on you if you don't provide.

I mean, Gustavo Petro, who is the new president, is coming up for election in a year's time.

And he's their first ever left-wing president, isn't he?

That's right, and the first ever proper populist.

I mean, Colombia is quite interesting.

It's the third largest population, third largest economy

in Latin America, and after Brazil and Mexico.

So it's a really important place, and it stretches all the way across.

You imagine geographically from the Pacific to the Atlantic, just sitting below the Panama Canal.

And it's the strongest democracy traditionally in Latin America.

I mean, it didn't have military dictatorship when other people did.

So on the one hand there's this very strong story.

It's a place where Gabriel Garcia Marquez is from

Botera the Painter.

So it's an amazingly cultured, educated place on the one hand.

On the other hand,

no roads through a lot of the country.

I mean if you went to Macarenas where I was just with a family, if you had been there seven years ago, it would take you something like three hours to go 15 kilometers

because there's basically no interstellar.

you can't get anywhere you you're dependent on it's got one of the oldest uh airlines in the world Colombia because the only way to get anywhere is to is to land on these small landing strips um and I was hearing a

not a podcast I necessarily would recommend for the general listener

but it was on the details of what Petro is trying to do with the armed groups and even I trying to

mug up for this podcast, Lost the Will to Live.

I mean, he's trying to conduct simultaneous peace negotiations with nine different armed groups.

And as you can imagine, there's a difference between the Bolivar Army, the ELN,

who turns out to be, it seems, with more of a Castro Che Guevara route compared to the FARC that had a non-Castro communist route.

On the Venezuelan border,

There's now not an extraordinary combination of coca growing and Venezuelan refugees coming in and the government sent in 10,000 troops to try to deal with it and that didn't work out.

And all this is overlaid because this is the modern world with

very progressive conversations about gender inclusivity, civil society, indigenous action.

but which seems to be often an alibi for incredible amounts of paperwork, bureaucrats, a huge civil service of peacemakers, which aren't making much progress.

I mean Petro is under huge pressure because the country's in danger of going down and in the middle of this we've got another repeat of what we talked about yesterday which is

the great charismatic former president Uribe who with the US with billions of dollars of American money and American military crushed the FARC before the Santos peace deal.

So one of the reasons the Santos peace deal worked is that he went very aggressively with huge human rights abuses against them.

And then didn't support the peace deal.

And then turned against the peace deal, turned against Santos, his former defense minister, because he thought it was too soft.

He was very close to the paramilitary, and this case is basically saying that he was connected to illegal paramilitaries that killed people.

And of course, now you're getting mutterings from the Trump administration saying this is not fair.

So you've got Marco Rubio out saying this is a witch hunt.

This is a great man.

You know, this is ridiculous Latin American justice.

And it sounds a little bit like the Bolsonaro-Brazil story again.

So are you saying that the

relative peace that the peace deal led to and which led to Swan Santos getting his Nobel Peace Prize, that is

not holding?

Well, it's very, very sad.

I mean,

it still has a very high homicide rate.

There are still, in particular, on the Pacific coast and on the Venezuelan border, whole areas that are out of control of the government where people are being displaced, people are being killed.

I think there are something like 1,200 municipalities in Colombia, and armed groups are active now in over 300 of them, so about a quarter of them.

It's still much, much better than it was in the real horror days when Pablo Escobar was romping around.

It's definitely a place where, if you're thoughtful, is a great place to go on holiday.

And I'd like to pay huge tribute to the Clami Tiluka.

It's one of the most beautiful, fascinating places on earth.

But I'm afraid, yeah,

it's not the horror days before Santos, but it's getting pretty concerning.

How much of it is about

the drugs trade?

Because Colombia accounts for 67% of the world's total, which is up 25% from

the year before.

And I read the other day, Roy, cocaine is now the most used

stimulant in the Americas, ahead of marijuana, ahead of amphetamines, and ahead of opioids.

American demand is up twofold.

There's a doubling in demand and I think just the last few years.

Cocaine in the US.

Yeah.

And so it's basically this is a story about Peru, Bolivia and Colombia.

Yeah.

And the way in which the Colombian cartels took control of the distribution of cocaine.

Presumably loss of deforestation.

Definitely, although

some of this is grown in savannah area rather than forest area.

And it's all intertwined because these groups that began as

ideological leftist guerrilla groups, and Gustavo Petro comes from one of these groups.

You remember

the president was part of an urban terrorist group that in the 80s

stormed the Supreme Court and when the military drove a tank through the front door, ended up with half the Supreme Court justices being killed.

I mean, that's the group that he comes from.

But these groups became increasingly intertwined with

revenue in some parts of the country.

So on the Pacific coast, there are areas now, I was hearing, where all the checkpoints are now manned again by the armed guerrillas, and the armed guerrillas are issuing your effective national ID cards for you to do stuff.

So it's not the bad days, but it's going wrong.

And people are getting increasingly worried.

That's very sad to hear.

I actually looked up my diaries for when I went to Colombia, just to sort of jog my memory.

And my overall observation of Santos was deeply impressive, heart definitely in the right place.

Let's try to get him.

I mean, I've also spent quite a lot of time with Ivan Duque, who's the last president.

So, if we'd want to do a little bit on Colombia, I think Ivan Duque or Santos would be great to talk to you, because it does matter.

I mean, it's a population almost as big as the United Kingdom.

It's one of the

few economies in Latin America that grew at 5% a year for a long time, didn't go through recessions that other countries went through, didn't go through much education.

But it's still, frankly, parts of it shockingly poor.

I mean, the

rural areas, I was seeing things that, you know, people living in tin shacks without electricity, without water, in a pair of shorts.

And honestly, I could have been in rural Kenya.

Well, Santos has actually got a piece in The Economist last week.

Because he's the chair.

The other thing is, is now he's the chair of the elders, the group of elder states, men and women that Nelson Mandela set up.

His article in The Economist is about trying to take the lessons of the peace process that he presided over into Russia-Ukraine.

And I have to say, if you knew nothing about Colombia, you'd read it and think, well, this guy has delivered the most extraordinary success ever.

But where he has one really, really important point, and this is something actually that the Norwegian Prime Minister also said, is that even as war is going on, you have to do everything you can to try to build the framework for the peace that you hope to follow and he's talking here about Russia and Ukraine as was Jonas Garstora we'll put it in the newsletter because a very interesting piece and and he's absolutely right he refers to Northern Ireland and that's very much the lesson from that I mean Colombia had this what they call the general agreement that was signed in 2012 and that

That remained the framework the whole way through.

And it was about recognising victims' rights, how you generate deep political participation, security guarantees, and so forth.

So there he was offering all sorts of advice to Russia and Ukraine, basically to get around a table and try and sort things out.

Great.

And I think it'd be lovely.

It'd be amazing to have mum actually to have a Nobel Peace Prize winner in that way.

And a little shout out again to my friend Michael Reed, who's been the key Latin America correspondent for The Economist for many years, who

just

extraordinary.

I mean, he was in this area in Macarena that I was in.

It's a very inaccessible area.

He was there 10 years ago.

We went to see this incredible place called the Rainbow River, which is unique in the world.

It goes basically red, green, yellow, blue, depending on the light.

And it literally looks like you're looking at rainbow in the water all the way down.

But of course, when he was there, you couldn't get there because it was all controlled by the gorillas.

Let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk about climate.

This is an ad from BetterHelp.

All of us I think often do find guidance in very unlikely places, an accidental meeting, seeing someone that we haven't seen for a long time.

But there's something quite different that you can get from a therapist, from a trained professional who has actually had the discipline and the experience to engage.

And BetterHelp has been doing this, finding the right matches between people and their therapists for over 10 years.

They start with a short questionnaire, which helps you connect to an experienced therapist whose expertise aligns with your needs.

And if the match isn't right, you can change it anytime at no extra cost.

It's entirely online.

You can pause your subscription whenever you wish.

BetterHelp has already supported more than 5 million people worldwide.

And for many of them, a right match can guide them through not just the moment, but can make a real, real difference.

Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/slash restpolitics.

That's betterhelp.com/slash restpolitics.

Bundle and safe with Expedia.

You were made to follow your favorite band and from the front row, we were made to quietly save you more.

Expedia, made to travel.

Savings vary and subject to availability.

Light inclusive packages are at all protected.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Welcome back to The Rest is Politics.

And before we get on to issues of climate, The Rest is Politics, let me tell you, is as ever efficiently powered by our friends at Fuse Energy.

And this week, one of the questions we're discussing is, in fact, behind Britain's energy infrastructure is a lot of complexity verging on chaos.

You know, so we talk a lot about the green revolution, but the nitty-gritty of how you actually build things, how the...

transmission distribution works is really tough.

We've got a question from Violet Green.

So Violet Green asks, why is Britain a global leader in climate ambition still struggling to connect clean energy projects, EV charges, and even new housing to the grid?

And who's to blame for this bottleneck between policy and delivery?

There we are.

Question for your friend Ed Miliband.

I'll blame the Tories, I do.

No,

it's a very good question.

The first thing I'd do, Violet, if you haven't listened to our leading interview with Emma Pinchback from the Climate Change Committee, I thought she had some very interesting explainers about the kind of big picture on this.

But we do seem to have a real problem in the UK at these big modernising infrastructure projects.

But you must have had experience of this kind of thing when you were at the Department of Environment.

The first thing is that all this new electric-based renewable infrastructure requires a completely different model of moving energy and storing energy compared to what used to work when we were operating off coal, gas and nuclear power stations.

Because they could be big centralized things.

You see them often on coastlines or on hills.

And you could build a very straightforward electricity distribution network straight off them.

Once you move to wind and solar, you're suddenly having the electricity generated right across the landscape into the ocean in many different places.

And you're trying to work out how to move it around.

And of course, how to store it.

What do you do when the sun's not shining, when the wind's not blowing?

And then you've got this issue around EV.

We interviewed the Norwegian Prime Prime Minister who said that this year, or this month in Norway, 95% I think of vehicles sold are electric.

But of course, for that to work, you need the charging infrastructure.

And that means everybody's house.

You know, just think about a city, think about London.

How do you get fast charging infrastructure to all those cars on all those streets?

And that's been a real problem because there's planning issues.

A lot of people, understandably, don't want massive massive pylons running straight past their house.

It's an expense issue.

Building out that natural grid is hugely expensive.

And I think Britain just that's exactly what we're really bad at, partly because of rapidly changing ministers, partly because of the way of our planning laws work, partly lack of certainty.

So we're in this weird world where we've

got off coal, we've done huge improvements in terms of our net emissions, we're leading the world in things like offshore wind.

But to really meet our targets, the thing that I guess is keeping Ed Miliband up at night, and we did touch on this in the interview, is this whole question of the stuff that connects it.

Yeah.

Well, look, the government is trying to fix the planning system, but

that is not going to be easy.

But fuse energy is going to help in all sorts of different ways.

The way to think of fuse energy is to think of sort of Amazon Prime for home energy.

Whether you talk about solar panels, EV chargers, thermostats, batteries, starlinks, with lots of installers.

We're back to the theme of paperwork.

You have to do the paperwork, the planning, and the grid approval with Fuse.

They handle it to the end.

They do all the work for you, deal with the planning, grid notification on customers' behalf, so you can sit back and relax.

So for lightning fast and affordable home upgrades, go to fuseenergy.com slash store.

Now, Rory, Jamie Kelly, what do Rory and Alice think of the far-right parties setting the climate agenda in the EU?

What consequences will this have, especially given the particularly extreme wildfires raging through Europe this summer?

The wildfire thing is very, very, very real.

NASA has calculated that the number of wildfires has more than doubled over the past two decades.

And you've seen these terrifying pictures in Europe.

You've seen these terrifying pictures, of course, in California.

I was talking to someone who

basically saw the entire hillside around their house go up in flames and their neighbours burned to death.

300,000 hectares burned in the EU, which is up 78%, so almost doubled on the same period last year.

Number of fires up by 45% compared to 2024.

And I guess the story here is this big story, which is that...

Climate, like artificial intelligence and like international security and nuclear disarmament, is something that needs to be done internationally, globally.

And of course, what these far-right parties are up to is creating isolation, challenging international organizations, rules-based order.

And it's not just the European Union.

I think one of the most influential voices in this, I'm afraid, is Donald Trump.

You have the Europe Environmental Protection Agency in the States recently downgrading its own commitments to environmental protection and to the responsibility for implementing climate policy.

No, I think this stuff's terrifying and

I think the other thing I hadn't, you know, I'm in France at the moment and we had a forest fire near here a couple of years ago and it was terrifying.

You could see it coming across vegetation and a speed that was pretty alarming.

And then you see all these planes flying over, dropping all the sort of, you know, the fire retardant stuff.

I posted my tree of the day, Rory, the other day.

day i found this tree that had survived the fire this one tree all on its own surrounded by what was some growing vegetation but the other thing i read on my one of my favorite reading uh products the conversation it was a very interesting piece about how the the fires

then produce land that is much more liable to flooding.

You get these sort of weird trigger chain reactions so it's one disaster, you deal with that, and then you get a different sort of disaster.

But the big point is that we just have to regain the argument on just how difficult, just how important and just how dangerous this is.

So if you have people like Trump saying it's a hoax and Farage saying that, you know, it's all sort of got up by, you know, the woke lefties, then don't be surprised if we start to see more and more of

you were at burning.

That's what's happening.

I mean, and as you say,

this is going to create conditions that we've really never experienced.

I was just beginning to sort of process what you're saying.

I guess part of the point is that

as the vegetation burns, then the stuff that holds the banks together begins to erode.

The soil

because it's missing the root substrature to hold it together.

Yeah,

we'll put this piece in the newsletter.

It was very, very interesting about how the fires of themselves then change the weather patterns

in those areas.

Staying in Europe, Jacob Lang, I recently read about Palantir, that's the Peter Thiel tech company, being used by the German police, which is making me uneasy.

What do you think about this?

Now, Jacob, I don't know if you're in Germany, because I actually heard a podcast on, I think it was the Zut Deutsche Seitung.

They had a big discussion about this.

It is a huge issue in Germany right now, because what Palantir are doing is they're basically, you know, Germany's federal constitutions.

You have the lender, the regions which have a lot of power, including over policing.

So what you have is a federal home secretary, interior minister, who is very, very wary of Palantir.

But Palantir is going around state by state and selling this thing called Gotham,

which is a sort of data collection system designed to help deal with...

crime, terrorism, etc.

But it is currently, I don't know where Jacob got that from, but it's currently a massive debate inside Germany.

So Palantir does a lot of stuff, and it's been very influential in the Ukraine war because it's one of the integrating platforms that allows them to gather intelligence from cell phones and connect it to drones and connect it to other data.

They came across my desk when I was in prisons because they pointed out that all our data on prisoners was divided into, I think, 150 different databases.

So if I asked a question like, you know, how many prisoners have a university degree, we simply couldn't answer the question.

And what the Palantir system offered to do is to integrate all this different information like a kind of octopus reaching out and put it into a data soup to give you these answers they're also working very closely with the nhs and this has been another both a huge opportunity but also very controversial the opportunity of course is that the nhs has the best big data in the world because since uh the second world war it's been collecting all this information on the whole uk population and there's no equivalent of it anywhere else in the world these other insurance-based insurance-based systems just don't do that.

And Palantir is saying, quite rightly, that if you really were able to read that data intelligently using AI, you could find incredible discoveries and public health and improvements and correlations between things you correlated, I know.

For example, maybe you'd find a correlation between people with blindness and people with some other medical condition, which you never would have expected until you'd looked at the data.

But on the the other hand, the fears about Peter Thiel, fears about data privacy, who's going to get this data,

under the Tories basically stopped all of that happening.

And I think West Streeting has started it again.

And where do you sit on this question of, because you can see the benefits.

Yeah, well, if you remember, when we first discussed Palantir,

probably a couple of years ago now, and we were very much, I think both of us, in the sort of, oh, God, Peter Thiel, this sounds all very, very libertarian, techno-fascist sort of stuff, don't like that.

So I got a call from the chief palantir people in London and got taken in for a briefing.

I was very impressed by some of the stuff that they were doing, but I remained deeply alarmed.

And I do find Peter Thiel a very difficult figure.

to handle.

We talked a lot about him when we did the series on J.D.

Vance.

He's somebody who doesn't really believe in democracy, thinks that these tech bros are and should remain masters of the universe because they're cleverer, they're richer, they should have even more power than they do.

So, I am genuinely concerned, and that's the debate that's happening in Germany.

And of course, it is in a sense, it is quite a philosophical battle between freedom and security, I guess, because you were saying there that you know, you bring all these different data systems together within the prison system.

I can see how that could help.

What they're doing with the police system in Germany, essentially, let's say there's a something happens,

and they think, well, this particular crime has been committed.

You know, find me the 50 people in this area most likely to have the profile that might lend them towards that.

Okay,

and straight away, you will get names, ages, address, criminal record, you'll get stuff from their phone, you'll get all the stuff from their social media channels, you know, past and present.

And then equally,

that may help prevent crime, it may help solve crime.

But what the privacy campaigners are saying is that it is almost inevitable that innocent people get caught up in that.

So that's the debate that's going on.

So far, Bavaria, Hesse, and Nord Rhine, Westphalia have bought it.

Baden-Württemberg, which is one of the big ones, they are buying it or they're about to buy it.

So that's from Teal's perspective and Palantir's perspective is four out of 16.

And of course, if they then start to show progress on tackling crime and antisocial behavior and all the other stuff that people care about, then the others feel they get picked off.

There's another sort of small point on that.

The software is called Gotham.

And of course Gotham is to relate to my

interest in these guys' relationship with superheroes.

So, you know, Musk dresses up as Iron Man.

Gotham, of course, is the world of

Batman.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's and of course Batman is a sort of vigilante super cop.

And so they've deliberately named it after that.

And just as Palantir itself, of course, is is a name from the Lord of the Rings.

And a lot of these new companies come from either their names are being taken either from fantasy or from superhero fiction.

And, of course, neither of those forms of fiction are particularly naturally liberal democratic.

Okay, now here's a question for you.

Probably the final question, but I thought it was one that maybe would really ring a bell with you, and I thought was very interesting.

So, Peter Lowe, as a mental health campaigner, how worried is Alistair about changes to the Samaritans?

Quite worried, I'd I'd say.

Tell us what's happening.

Give us a bit of an explanation.

So basically what's happening, so the Samaritans, everybody will know what the Samaritans is.

They take last year 3.3 million calls from people who are feeling lonely, hopeless, desperate, often suicidal.

And you phone the Samaritans and you talk to a stranger.

The proposals that are the subject of the question essentially are these, that the plan is to close over a hundred Samaritans branches, that's around half of the number of branches, to move to call

center type situations, you know, more people in the same space.

And one of the worries is that's going to mean more the larger towns and the cities.

And then some in some cases for the volunteers, and of course Samaritans is more than 20,000 people volunteer as Samaritans, that sometimes they would work from home.

Now,

why?

The argument that's been put by the chief executive is that they spend too much money on what she calls bricks and mortar.

The argument against that is actually that Samaritans is very much a branch organization.

The branches run the local operation,

they spend some of their resources running it and give resources to the centre.

There's a big debate going on.

The Samaritans head office have said that they're putting out this.

They want to sort of listen, they want consultation.

We should put in in the newsletter an article that was in the Guardian that a Samaritan volunteer wrote, objecting, making clear that he thought this was a bad idea, that it would make the service less effective.

Another person I spoke to, and look, I have no evidence of this, but it was a very interesting insight given what we've just been talking about in relation to Palantir,

said that their fear at a deeper level was that eventually maybe people will move to AI being on the end of the phone particularly for the first stage now I as it happens I was involved in setting up an AI mental health service it's called Jack just ask a question where a number of us both people who are mental you know service users and expert psychiatrists you can go on to Jack

You can ask me a question, say, about dealing with depression.

I've recorded literally 20 hours worth of answers.

And then if you say, should I take medication?

I say, that's not for me.

Speak to a professional.

But I can then link them to a professional on the platform.

So there's a part of me that thinks that's okay.

But I think the thing that's really unique about Samaritans is, you know, and sometimes they're called the sort of fourth emergency service.

And there are other, listen, there are other projects that do the same, listening project and so forth.

But there is something very, very, very special about the Samaritans.

And I think one of the things that one of the people who are worried about this was saying to me is that the Samaritans are a little bit like the royal family.

You can't really criticise them very much.

But actually, there are quite a lot of people within the Samaritans, I think, who feel very, very anxious about this.

It's difficult, isn't it, for brands like that.

I mean, I think the National Trust went through an existential fight in terms of its identity.

My instinct is very, very strongly that this sounds like they're going down the wrong path.

Because I'm sure that providing for advice to people works best if you have a local branch network that understands local conditions.

I'm sure that

your volunteers are much more important than you're acknowledging and you're getting their work for free.

And I also think they're probably underestimating that they'll lose on the fundraising that these local voluntary branches also are very, very good at doing fundraising, raising local support for these things.

And I think most charities, I don't know much about Sparrows, but most charities that have gone down this path of dismantling all their local branch networks and trying to centralize have regretted it and often ended up killing a lot of the soul and the spirit of the organization in the process.

Yeah, well, I think we're pretty much in the same place.

But, you know, anyway, there you are.

Samaritans

wanted consultation.

Happy to be part of that consultation over the podcast.

I'm not sure of the time frame, but I think it's kind of over this summer that they want to try to make these changes.

We shall report back at a later time.

Anyway, lovely to talk to you as ever.

Nice to have you back.

See you next week.

See you next weekend.

So have a great week.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye.