431. Question Time: Netanyahu’s Survival, Deadly Clashes in Syria, and Japan’s "Deep State"

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Welcome to the rest of Politics Question Time with me, Alistair Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart.

And here we are, Alistair.

First one, Andy Kidd, it's a member from Bristol.

Please, can we have an update on what's currently going on in Syria?

There seems to have been some tension brewing there again, but not widely reported.

A shared post on LinkedIn of all places alerted me to it.

Janice member Abington, what's going on in Syria?

Was the optimism about the new regime misplaced?

What does Israel hope to achieve by its attacks?

I mean, let's start on this fact about about it not being widely reported and being picked up on LinkedIn.

I mean, is this a general trend?

I mean, I've worried in the past about the fact that as

the revenue streams of newspapers and televisions collapses, they have less and less money to pay for foreign correspondence.

And they're more and more driven by algorithms which reward reporting on, I don't know, whatever, the Kardashians as opposed to Syria.

And that tends to mean that some really big issues get neglected.

And I know one of them that you wanted to raise, we got quite a lot of questions on, was Japan as another example.

Yeah.

I mean, just first of all, in answer to Andy's question, big shout out here to Alex Crawford, the war correspondent, Sky News.

She's done some amazing stuff in Syria this week, really out there where the fighting's going on between the Druze and the Bedouins and the Syrian security force as well.

I mean, really, really has been unbelievably courageous.

And I saw some very good stuff on the BBC as well.

So

I don't think that's fair.

I don't know what media media you consume, Andy, but I actually think that Syria has been a huge story this week, quite rightly.

And Janice's question about whether the optimism about the new regime was misplaced and what does Israel hope to achieve by its attacks?

Well, if you listen to President Erdogan, who I listened to on TRT last night, he was absolutely scathing about the Israelis and said this is all about trying to prevent the success of a unified Syria coming together.

The Israelis would say that they were Netanyahu who said that he was protecting what he called the Druze brethren.

But what do you make of it, Rory?

Shout out also to Charles Lister, who's done some wonderful reporting on this, who's a real Syria expert.

But very, very quick explainer in response to those questions, what's going on in Syria.

Over the last 10 days, in the south of Syria, around a big city called Sueda, which is dominated by the Druze, and the Druze, just to remind people, are a minority religious sect, esoteric, quite mysterious, but related to Islam.

Islam.

It began, it seems, with somebody from a Sunni Bedouin tribe, so Bedouin, obviously being traditionally nomadic Arabic communities, seizing a Druze truck and essentially robbing the truck and beating up the truck driver.

That was then followed by some Bedouin being abducted by the Druze and the beginning of fighting between the Bedouin and Druze communities.

And the reason why this was important is that Syria is struggling to reunify.

The Druze in the south, people will also remember the fights with the Alawites.

The Kurds control a lot of northeast Syria.

And the challenge for the central government is how do you bring together a country which has all these different ethnic and sectarian divisions.

So the Syrian government claims that they had been speaking to Israel and the US about this and they had thought because El Shara had been at a meeting where he'd actually in Azerbaijan sat down with the Israeli government and thought that he'd got agreement from the Israeli government that it was important for the Syrian state to have control over the country, otherwise the whole thing fragments.

So Syrian military deployed.

The Druze executed nine Syrian soldiers on the roadside, kidnapped, I think, ten others, and then executed them.

Israeli bombs started landing around Soweda.

The Syrian army advanced.

They took Soweda.

They basically recaptured that part of Syria.

It was very brutal.

There were clearly atrocities committed by the Druze, but also atrocities committed by the Syrian army.

There's a big debate about what happened in a hospital, which passed hands between the Druze and the Syrian army, in which people were killed.

Almost certainly the final atrocities were probably committed by the Druze because they were the last people to control the hospital before that film was taken.

But there's no doubt that there was horrible stuff going on on both sides.

At which point Israel then bombed Damascus.

So you'll remember because we drove past that building building when we were together in Damascus.

This is bang in the centre of Damascus.

It's like, for British listeners, it would be like bombing the MOD main building on Whitehall, right next to the House of Parliament.

So civil servants are in there going to work.

Three rockets go straight through it.

Syrian army then withdraws.

And we're now in a situation where the Druze have retaken control of the south of Syria around Sawada.

The Syrian army has completely withdrawn.

The Syrian government has basically had to give up on that.

Big spillover effect, which is that they were in the middle of negotiations with the Kurds in northeast Syria, who control almost everything east of the Euphrates.

The Kurds were increasingly drawing away from the Syrian government and have now made it clear that they have no interest whatsoever in cooperating with reintegrating into a Syrian state.

The American government is very angry with Israel because remember,

and you remember very well, but listeners remember, President Trump made this radical move to recognize El Shara, this man with this al-Qaeda past.

And the US was really hoping that Syria was going to be part of its initiative in the Middle East and all the other Gulf countries, from the UAE through to Saudi and Qatar, very much getting in behind El Shara.

Also very critical of Israel.

You know, Israel that was trying to rebrand itself in the last few weeks as a source of stability in the Middle East, they now think, wait a sec, what on earth are you doing?

You're basically guaranteeing that Syria is going to be a failed state.

And that's where we are.

It's very very hard to know what Israel's motivations are in a lot of this.

But just to give you one sense of some of the former ambassador, I don't know this guy, so maybe he's a well-known critic of Netanyahu.

I just don't know.

But he was an Israeli ambassador.

He was the Consul General in New York.

I call Alon Pinkas.

And he said this, this is on Al Jazeera.

Of course, it's nice to pretend we're helping our friends, the Druze, in the same way as we never helped our other friends, the Kurds.

But he goes on to suggest that this is all about boosting Netanyahu, who's image as a wartime leader, pushing back his corruption trial, which has happened, and reinforcing the delusion that Israel has somehow managed to reshape the Middle East through military force alone.

Lastly, he doesn't want to see a unified Syria, which is the point that Erdogan was making as well.

So there is cynicism amongst some.

Netanyahu's out very, very clearly saying that this is about protecting the Druze and so forth.

But I think what's really

I found fascinating was in,

I watched, call me Sad Rory, I watched watched the Oval Office encounter between Donald Trump and the Crown Prince of Bahrain.

And by the way, our theory that we talked about in the JD Vance series that he basically wants to be the monarch, he introduced the Crown Prince by saying he's the Prime Minister and the Crown Prince.

I wonder which of those titles would I prefer if it was to be, I think I'd prefer the Crown Prince.

And then went to talk about how great it was to think that you could get power just by being the son of the king.

So anyway, when he was talking about this, he handed it straight over to Rubio.

And Rubio, basically, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, was basically saying, this was a misunderstanding.

There's been a misunderstanding, and we're going to just try and sort this out as quickly as we can.

It does appear for now to have been stable, relatively stabilized.

But what you saw if you were watching Alex Crawford on Sky News was that it's very, very tense and very, very volatile.

I also want to say, Rory, to those people, we had so, so many of them, including Joey Barton.

Do you know who Joey Barton is, Rory?

No, you keep quoting Joey Barton, so I must.

I don't keep quoting him.

He's a former footballer who has, shall we say, a certain reputation.

But he was posting pictures of you and me and Al Shara with all this stuff going on, saying, you know, hey, look what your mate is up to now.

I'd just like to point out to our listeners and viewers that if we were to do an interview with Donald Trump, which we would love to do, it does not mean he's our mate.

We will interview people who are in politics who are interesting.

So there you go, Joey.

That one was just for you.

Just on Israel, Rory, I think we've got to talk about Israel because we talked about it a lot in the last couple of weeks, but, you know, briefly, things have got worse.

I mean, Rory, when you were in the military, answer me this question.

When you were in the military, if you were told to fire a warning shot, where would you fire that shot?

Well, the point about the warning shot is that it shouldn't hurt anybody.

It's a warning shot.

Right, so where would you fire it?

Where would you point your gun?

You'd point it in the air.

Yesterday, dozens of people, including children, were killed queuing for food and medicine and so forth.

And they said that they fired warning shots.

Well, then what?

I heard David Lamy being interviewed today because he did a statement in the Commons yesterday.

There was this statement of 27, 28 countries that have come together to condemn what's going on, repeat everything about end the hostages out,

get a ceasefire, end the war, etc.

The rhetoric is ramping up.

But the more and more that it does, the more you get the sense that unless America really calls this out, Netanyahu thinks he can do what the hell he wants.

Two quick things there.

One is that America, I think, is genuinely angry.

I think Marco Rubio in particular was furious about what Israel did in Damascus.

And actually, even for defenders of Netanyahu, this has been a very strange moment trying to justify what on earth they think they're doing.

And it's had a real effect on the region because all this story about how the future for the region is peace, stability, economic integration, which you would have heard a bit of off the back of the Bahrain Trump meeting that you watched.

That is fracturing now because a lot of the Arab countries are beginning to think that if Israel is essentially attacking and fragmenting Syria, then all their plans for trying to create this more harmonious, unified Middle East are being undermined.

Second thing, I think it's very likely that Netanyahu will move to an election soon and may well win it.

So I think there's a good scenario that he goes to the Israeli public saying, I've had this great success in Lebanon against Hezbollah, I've had this great success in Iran against the nuclear weapons program, and I'm going to announce a ceasefire, 60-day ceasefire in Gaza, some hostages get returned, and I go to an election.

And so there's a pretty good chance that he could re-emerge.

as the prime minister for the next few years, maybe with a coalition that doesn't include Smotric and Ben-Gavir.

And that, again, is really serious because

any attempt for Israel to come to terms with what's happened in Gaza, any attempt for Israel to try to rebuild relationships with the region, any hope of Israel beginning to think about futures for Palestinians is not possible so long as Netanyahu is there.

And there's a serious chance he could come back in again for longer.

It just shows you how...

volatile politics is and also how

how much of a survivor he is.

I'm not convinced he would win, but I agree that he's absolutely back in with a chance of winning, as opposed to just being in survival mode.

If you go back to not long after October 7th, it was sort of a matter of when not if he goes.

And now here he is, you know, in a much, much stronger position.

Final thing on Joey Barton.

I mean, that's really interesting, this stuff.

And you're right, we got a lot of abuse.

As soon as anything happens in Syria, there is an immediate move.

And it's often websites and accounts which are Russian.

It used to be UAE, but not anymore.

Now they've got behind Syrian account.

Israelis, Iranian-backed accounts, very, very quick to move and attack Al-Shara, and indeed attack anyone like us who's ever interacted with him.

But of course, Joey Barton isn't really following what's happening in southern Syria, or in particular, one of the stories around the Druze, which is this man, Hikmat al-Hijri.

who was the big leader of this and who's actually emerged stronger from it than before, got much more of the Druze community behind him.

Of course, a lot of these people were pro-Assad.

A lot of them were involved in the smuggling of drugs across the border.

A lot of them are involved in secular military stuff.

A lot of them worked for Israel in the past.

It's a horrible situation.

And nobody should be letting the Syrian regime off, who clearly committed atrocities.

But equally, nobody should be trying to suggest that the Druze are somehow saints in this either.

the stakes for Syria could not be higher because depending on everything that happened in the last 10 days just goes to the heart of is

El Shara's government going to be able to create stability and growth in Syria or is it going to collapse again into a failed state and this certainly set it back a very very long way.

Okay right let's go for a quick break and when we come back we'll talk about Japan and Superman albeit not in the same sentence.

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Welcome back to the Restless Politics Question Time, where Alistair wants us to go into some Godzilla movie, which is combining Superman and Japan.

So here we are.

First question, Ruby Bates.

How is Alistair getting on with meeting Rory's challenge to address the issue of young men being drawn to the right and even to out and out authoritarianism?

Let's start on that and then we'll get on to Superman because there's a related question on Superman.

But how are you getting on with young men and the far right?

Well, I'm getting on with it in that I'm talking to lots of them

and I'm trying to work my way through what I think about it.

I've also been talking a lot to Peter Hyman, who's been doing this huge study,

talking to 17-year-olds and finding out what they really think.

And we'll put in the newsletter an article that the young guy he's been doing it with wrote in, I I think it was the observer at the weekend and one of the things I've been doing which I want to push and promote today is working on this a task force called the Lost Boys Task Force and this was the idea of a guy called Paul Barber who's the chief executive of Brighton and Ove Albion Football Club and he brought a group of us together

And it was it was really interesting because we're all sort of in the same space that Gareth Southgate was in and others have been about role models about mentors and what have you but I think one of of the things I was able to bring to it was to say that, you know, be very, very clear with something like this.

It's not government-backed, but we're going to need government support.

So be very, very clear about what you're calling for and why.

And the thing we've alighted upon as the sort of first step is this, what we call a trusted adult guarantee.

And this is where, and this does need government backing and some government money, but what it essentially means that

there are around about 630,000 young people in England who do not have access to what is called a trusted adult.

That's somebody who they feel feels safe in going to outside their family.

And it's a recognized kind of recognized position within advanced, developed modern societies.

Tell us a little bit more about this trusted adult.

So this is not your dad.

This is what a school teacher or a football

teacher, it can be a football coach, it can be a family friend, it can be somebody in your workplace, but it's somebody that becomes known as your trusted adult that you go to if you've got things you want to discuss that you feel you can't talk to your parents about.

And so a lot of young men do see their teachers in this role.

A lot of young men particularly see their sports teachers in this role, twice as many young men as young women, for example.

And where the government would come in is in essentially in backing it, in funding the training that goes with becoming somebody who becomes a trusted adult in an education and sports setting and focusing first of all on boys who are growing up in poverty, and then having a kind of national tracking system on the number of young people who've got adults that they can speak to when they're struggling.

And I don't know if you remember Gareth Southgate's Dimbleby lecture, which was a lot of it was about this, the young men, a lot of young men feeling lost.

And then they are very, very vulnerable to getting tapped up by these kind of right-wing influencers who are, you know, frankly, most of them in it for themselves.

So I think this is a good, specific, narrow point that we're going to try and take to government and get the government to back.

I'm of course seeing it through the lens of having an eight-year-old and a 10-year-old son at the moment.

My eight-year-old,

very, very interesting, just how much he

really values

the male teachers at his school.

And he's moving schools and he just feels the loss of them so much.

And, you know, he had an amazing, as an eight-year-old, incredible sit-down with one of them, talking through so many many issues.

And yes, you're right.

Partly it's one of them's a sports coach that he loves.

Another one's

a deputy head.

But it's lovely seeing these men who are

just being, yeah, they're great.

I mean, I guess they're guys in their 30s and really, really kind and thoughtful with an eight-year-old.

And

it's wonderful.

The other thing, of course, you see with young kids at the moment, this is obvious to every listener, but they are drenched in violence.

They're drenched in violence from movies,

from video games, from toys.

And even if you're not putting your kids directly in front of this, all their friends are watching that stuff.

So, you know, I can do all I can to shelter my kids, keep them away from the stuff on screens or iPads.

You know, this, and anyone who hasn't listened to our Jonathan Haidt interview on leading, please do, because I think it's just extraordinary stuff on the influence list.

But even if I keep them away from screens, they will come back having spoken to their friends.

And their friends are very, very quickly getting in, even at the age of eight, into influencers who are killing crocodiles or influencers who are bodybuilders.

Even at seven, my little one was very, very excited by Anthony Joshua, who we interviewed on leading.

This then raises the question, what are the values that they attach as they get older?

Who are they looking for in politicians?

Because if you're living in a world which is saturated

with um

with these sort of hyper aggressive

images figures weapons etc

then then who is it that you think is exciting who is it you think is charismatic who is it that you look to by the time you are 16

which isn't very long away and it's only six years away from my 10-year-old yeah and and he's voting anyway over to you

well as long as as he votes labor that's the main thing um what do you think of it as an idea that just to get this concept out there on the map trusted adult guarantee is not a nice state government plays a role in training and in tracking and you know particularly with people who would be identified as being vulnerable or living in you know poor circumstances i think it's incredibly important because you know if i can think of how important it is to my child who is in so many ways so cherished privileged looked after how important it is to him, how much more important it is to people who are in vulnerable circumstances or in poverty.

I think it's an amazing thing to do.

I mean, yet again, you've got to work out how you do it effectively.

I mean, what you don't want is nightmare bureaucracy, another set of paperwork for teachers and all the kind of nonsense that we get.

But look, if we could imitate what I'm seeing with the best men and getting, I mean, you know, part of it is also, unfortunately, getting more men teaching in primary schools.

I mean, those are very, very female-dominated spaces.

Yeah, yeah.

But

some of the best contributions on the task force, quite a big, there's about 20 of us on it, are actually young men who've been through really difficult times and have ended up turning their lives around in part with the help of a trusted adult outside the family who's, you know, sometimes a teacher, sometimes a coach, sometimes a family friend, whoever it might be.

Anyway, I hope people will check it out.

Hopefully that's

going to make a contribution.

But the other question, Roy, on this theme, Harim,

have either of you seen the new Superman film?

If so, did you spot the pushback at some of the anti-woke manosphere ideas that seem to be taking hold among young men?

And I got a fabulous email from a woman who said, I hope, I don't know if you're a fan of Superman, she said, and brackets, I'm not.

But if you go and see it, you'll see that actually that it's, it's even got some subtle messages about Gaza in it.

I don't know if you saw that.

So you went to see it.

I did go to see Superman, and I think it's a lot of fun.

I don't think you'd like it.

I mean, you don't particularly like high-tech stuff.

I watched it with Shoshana, and she did think that the first half of it, she got a bit put off by the violence and the high-tech stuff.

But as it developed, she was increasingly interested.

And there is, I mean, you know, it's pretty good at picking up on problems.

And the first problem is that Superman is a celebrity hero who, from the very beginning, is being completely ground down by the modern world.

So the whole thing is him him being attacked on social media, all his motivations being challenged, made out as a villain, a society that's become completely sort of indifferent to the catastrophic issues surrounding it.

So you get people working at their desks and outside the window are these kind of alien life forms being battled by Superman and they just don't care or they're taking little selfies in front of it.

There's a big push from our supervillain who is again a kind of Elon Musk-like figure in the way that he's portrayed Lex Luther.

He's a sort of tech guy who's got a lot of contracts with the Department of Defense and who keeps saying the problem with Superman is he's an alien,

which explores another theme which is his sense of inadequacy, his sense that Superman somehow ruins his life by making him feel inadequate all the time.

I also thought about it a great deal.

I've just been, partly inspired by you, been working on a BBC Radio 4 series series called The Idea of the Hero from Achilles to Zelensky, which is coming out on the 4th of August, so kind of week and a half's time, where I've been trying to look at how ideas of heroes have changed through time.

And I think superheroes are a really, really interesting example of this, because

on the one hand, they're sort of role models, but on the other hand, they're not very good role models because they are by definition not really human.

They don't have normal.

They're not limited in the way that humans are.

They're not not killed in the way that humans are.

And they actually create a completely unrealistic idea of good against bad, you know, heroes against villains.

The central part of the movie, which maybe you would enjoy, is that a sort of

kind of Russian-style dictator is invading his neighbors.

And his neighbors are basically seem to be Afghans or Pakistanis.

They're dressed in Shawakameez, the women are veiled.

And it's them that that Superman is defending.

It's interesting decision from a Hollywood filmmaker that the sort of victims,

the heroic resistors are Muslims, pretty.

Well, Roy, I haven't seen the film, but I have read The Economist editorial about it.

It points out that the director, James Gunn, had apparently done an interview.

pointing out that Superman was an immigrant and that this was a story of basic human kindness, which sent the MAGA crowd into overdrive, saying the whole thing was woke and therefore nobody should go to see it.

Lots of people have been to see it.

But I love the final line of this editorial: this: The movie is not hid to get better.

Instead, it illuminates what has always been Superman's most important power, a character sound enough to resist the temptation to abuse his other powers.

That is a political lesson for any era.

Donald Trump, are you listening?

Maybe you should, maybe you should go and see it.

Yeah, maybe I'll go and see it.

Junebug, what's your opinion on the election success made by Japan's do-it-yourself party?

Now, this is a big story, which I think you said actually hasn't been properly covered.

So over to you on Japan.

And I've just got back from Japan, so I'm very interested in this too.

So

we had the election over the weekend in the country's upper house.

Unlike the UK, both of their houses of parliament are elected.

They'd already lost the the majority in the lower house, which is like, as with our system, is more powerful.

But then losing it in the upper house is an indication that the LDP, the party that's governed Japan pretty much all of our lifetime,

with lots of different changes of leadership, but they've always adapted to stay pretty much in power.

They've now lost control, lost overall control in both.

And this is another story:

they needed 50 seats, half of the seats up for grabs, they needed 50 of the 124 to get to keep their majority.

They ended up three short.

The main opposition party came second, but pretty badly.

And the two parties that did very well are these right-wing parties, one of them very populist, very Trumpian, calls himself Japan first,

admires Trump.

So the Democratic Party of the People and the more extreme one, the Sanzeto Party, they have basically, you know, they look like they're beginning to break the mold.

And the interesting thing is that it is younger people in particular who are voting.

And this is what I was talking about yesterday on the main podcast, because they think that politics is skewed way too much to the old, that they're worried about demographics, they're worried about their lack of pay rises, they're worried about housing, and they're very worried about immigration and over-tourism.

Over-tourism is a thing we should come back to at some point, Roy.

This is another issue that is really sort of driving this populism.

The Japanese case is extraordinary because

Japan is an outlier in so many ways.

It's not just an island country, but it was a country that was the most incredible economic miracle in the world after the Second World War and, you know, had by the 1980s was getting up to nearly 40% of Americans' GDP and it was taking over Manhattan.

people thought at the time they saw it in the way that we see China now as the economic superpower that was going to run the whole world.

And then, of course, famously, it ground to a halt and flatlined and property prices collapsed.

And it's gone from being the greatest economic miracle to being the most incredible economic paradox, this enormous economy that suddenly stopped growing.

And a lot of this, of course, is about demography, as you say.

It's about a country where people are having very few children and where there are more and more older people.

I'm pretty close to median age in Japan.

Whereas in Nigeria, for example, the median age or in Afghanistan, the median age is 16.

In Japan, it's almost 50.

But it isn't a country that was particularly vulnerable to

populism in elections.

As you say, the LDP, which is a sort of centre-right, almost aristocratic party.

I mean, we've talked about the fact a lot of these prime ministers come from political families.

They're often, by Western standards, quite low-key, quite conservatively dressed.

Many of them have uncles and cousins who've been ministers before them.

The current prime minister is no exception to this rule.

There was a slight exception with Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in 2022,

who had a little bit more of a populist edge, but it's still very relative.

I think, though, he definitely held that sort of very nationalist right pretty much in check,

whereas his successor, Ishiba, has kind of, he's let that go a bit.

And I think that's what's opened the door to this.

There's this guy, Sohei Kamiya, who is the leader of this very far-right party, the very, very populist party.

He talks about the deep state.

He really made his name during COVID, posting videos, which essentially were conspiracy theories about vaccines and masks.

So it's the same story that was fueling parts of MAGA.

One of the strangest things in the politics is, as you said, that...

There's an anti-immigration message here, although Japan has basically the lowest immigration in the world.

3%.

Yeah, you go around Japan, you basically, compared to almost any other developed economy in the world, you basically don't see people who aren't Japanese.

It is incredibly difficult to get Japanese citizenship.

Almost no asylum seekers are accepted in Japan.

And yet, as you say, it's become this political hot potato.

And this is a sort of sense of

the weirdness, the virtual world.

Let's say you thought that all politics was completely just about the facts, right?

And let's say you thought, as some people often suggest in Britain, that populism is just an objective reflection of the fact that growth is stagnant and immigration is too high.

You've got to explain the fact that in Japan, where immigration is almost non-existent, immigration has become the big issue that's helping the populace.

And in America, where growth has been astonishing since 2008, right, gone from being the same size as the European economies to in some measures almost twice the size of the European economies.

And yet still Donald Trump is elected.

So clearly you're not going to solve populism just by reducing immigration and encouraging growth.

I'm not saying those aren't both really important things to do, but you also have to understand that this part of modern policy is completely sort of virtual.

It's about the way that social media, COVID, for example, JFK, Epstein, create conspiracy theories, whip people up, disenchanted young men, lack of purpose.

And in Japan in particular, this incredible, extraordinary traditional society with its very strange relationship with the modern world, which we can see in all my children's toys.

You know, in Hello Kitty, Transformers, Pokemon, all of which are ways in which Japanese young men are moving into a virtual world, creating almost childlike things as a way of responding to this strange moment.

But this is what's going to be so difficult for the LDP.

They've schmoozed along since 1955 as the absolutely dominant political force.

They're suddenly no longer with a majority in either of the houses of parliament.

And yet, the issues, some of them are real and they're driven by, they'll look at the data and say, yeah, I can see where that's coming from.

But, you know,

so the number of foreign residents in Japan

is a record, but it's 3.8 million.

Out of a population of...

of almost 100 million.

Exactly, exactly.

So it's just over 3%.

And so you've got them saying, young people saying, I'm voting for these populists because we're doing too much.

We're going to have to work for too long to keep all these older people because the demography is there.

Well, the obvious answer to that is you're going to have to get a few immigrants coming in to help to do some of the jobs.

But they sort of, you know, they

don't want to see that.

And the other thing that they're doing, which of course Farage does here, is they're basically saying that it's the foreigners that are responsible for the rising crime, the rising inflation, all the problems in our society.

Final point.

The reason this matters, of course, is that Japan is still the third largest economy in the world.

So any hope that we have

of creating a world which isn't dominated by an unstable Trump or an authoritarian China involves Britain and the EU reaching out above all to places like Japan, South Korea, Australia.

So let's say we're thinking about

defense.

Let's say we're thinking about AI.

In fact, almost anything to do with this rules-based international order.

The third way

is going to come from those economies.

But in order to do that, you really need a Japan which is still

centrist, committed to a rules-based international order.

If Japan becomes populist, nationalist, my goodness, they're not going to want to cooperate on international things like AI.

We're not going to be able to rely on them.

And of course, that's also the problem when it comes to Europe.

I mean, I think one of the things that's so mad about J.D.

Vance's attempt to promote far-right populist parties in Germany and Spain and Austria is that these parties are not going to be allies for a Western order.

They're going to become themselves

nativist, isolationist, screw the rules-based order, and then going to retreat in on themselves.

So Japan is a really important bellwether for this.

If Japan goes, then a lot of these hopes we have for some alternative to the US and China really fall away.

Yeah, yeah.

Your mention of JD Vance there.

I must mention the chat that I've done with David Fromm on the end of the JD Vance series.

Honestly, listening to David Frum

talk about how much Britain and Europe need from each other right now in the face of Vance.

He's basically saying, forget that you can trust America.

It's a fascinating listen.

It really, really is.

And that's out on Friday for members.

Now, Rory, we've got lots of questions about the Afghan data leak.

Let's just give this one to Lauren Becker.

What are you?

It's very simple.

What are your thoughts on the Afghan superinjunction?

Firstly, just a quick reminder for international listeners.

The story seems to have been that during the evacuation from Kabul, a top-secret list of tens of thousands of Afghans who'd worked closely with British forces

was left so the Taliban could potentially gain access to it.

And as a result, the British government began a secret policy of evacuating Afghans to the United Kingdom at a cost of billions of pounds and imposed a superinjunction on the newspapers not to report on it from the government's point of view in order to protect the identity of the Afghans they were moving.

And when the news broke

Firstly, the government was very unlucky.

I mean if this news had broken during the evacuation 2022, there was still a lot of sympathy for Afghans who'd worked for British forces.

Three years later, of course, people like Dominic Cummings see Afghans as the sort of epitome of all evil, and the idea is the government's engaged in a cover-up and spending billions of pounds bringing unwanted people to the United Kingdom rather than bringing people who'd work with our troops.

It's also raised questions about the Taliban government itself, because

the last time the Taliban took over

in the mid-90s, they conducted these brutal reprisals.

So everybody was assuming the same thing would happen again.

The truth is that actually the Taliban this time around are not quite like the Taliban in the past.

Yes, a few hundred people were killed, but not the tens of thousands of deaths that people were expecting.

And the Taliban government is a chauvinistic government that has put out very aggressive edicts against women.

Women's life in Afghanistan is very difficult, but as I discovered when I was in Afghanistan

towards the end of last year, in many other ways, security is actually relatively good.

The problems with the country are oppression of women and stagnant economic growth, not so much this reprisal.

So anyway, Ovidi, what did you make of it all?

Oh God, it's a really, really tricky this one because on the one hand, you you think, my God, that these data leaks happen, they shouldn't, but they do, and the MOD sometimes I think it can be a bit loose, but as one individual makes a terrible mistake, these names with email addresses and other contacts, including people who have worked for Britain during the war.

Others are just people who want to come and live in Britain and are making applications to come here.

But you get these thousands and thousands of names go out there, including them, we discover later,

several dozen members of special forces and members of the British intelligence services.

So you can see why when this happened, the MOD thinks, shit, we have got to kind of try to clamp down on this.

So they go and get an injunction.

Okay.

I'm imagining while they work out what to do.

I spoke to somebody about this who's really closely involved in it.

So it was then the judge that decided to make it a super injunction.

What's the difference, Alison, between an injunction and a super injunction?

Well, if you have an injunction, the media can report that there is an injunction.

With a super injunction,

you can't even report that the injunction has been granted.

And I also heard, again, I'm not, I haven't verified this independently, but you can see why this might be the case, that the Speaker of the House of Commons was told by the court that, you know, MPs shouldn't raise it in Parliament.

So you're talking about a level of secrecy that is really, really, really high.

Now, that I think at the time was Ben Wallace, then you had Grant Schaps.

And then, of course, you can see why, with all the toxic politics around refugees, they did not want this coming out during the election campaign.

What's happened since then, as I understand it, is John Healy as Defense Secretary has kind of been landed.

He was briefed apparently in opposition, but he didn't say anything, kept it to himself, in office, checked the policy and decided to publish what was called the Rimmer Report into all this, but also felt that they had to end this secret route for Afghans who were coming here, not least because the costs were astronomical.

And somebody I spoke in the MOD says they reckon they've saved about 1.2 billion by bringing that route to an end.

And also

understanding that, I mean, basically, I think their view was that the Taliban knew all about this stuff anyway.

It's not as if they don't have access to knowing what people are doing, what have you.

So, the thing's been lifted.

But what it means is that something around,

if you include the families of the people who've come, by the end of it, it's going to be about 7,000 in total.

Okay, so 7,000 people will come here.

Now, some of them are already here and are working and their kids are in school.

Some of them probably are struggling.

But it's, you know, in the current environment, and it was, this was on, this was underlined by

Richard Tice, the reform guy, who during the evacuation from Kabul was saying, we must take the Afghans who work for us, no ifs, no buts, and now is saying, this is an absolute abomination.

None of these people should be brought in, et cetera, et cetera.

So reform hypocrisy, wow, breaking news.

But I actually think John Healy's ended up in a, you you know, clearly a mess, but I think he's just about got to the right place.

But now what's happening is the Intelligence Select Committee and the Defense Select Committee are going to have really, really deep dive inquiries onto how this happened, how the schemes worked and how the other schemes involving Afghans have panned out.

It is possible still to support people in Afghanistan.

It's still possible to do really good development work there.

All the time in any of these conflict zones, the non-profits working in them are having to make these very difficult choices of balancing what you can do to help individuals who are in real poverty and suffering against conflicts and regimes

who

are like the Taliban before we can get into the details of this.

And I think in a sense, the British government is dealing with this too.

And I'm so pleased you raised that Richard Tice thing.

It's so strange that the right has gone from the position of these were brave Afghans working with our boys on the ground, we have a moral obligation towards them, to now presenting them as kind of evil refugees who are destroying the United Kingdom.

It doesn't do much for our soft power either

and our reliability.

Well, here we are.

Final question for you.

Tom Henry, Shropshire.

Hello, both.

I know both.

With the British and Irish Lions rugby tour to Australia underway, I wanted to hear Alice's recollection of an event I heard on a podcast recently.

Prior to a big squad announcement press conference, one of the players kegged you and pulled your trousers down in front of the press conference.

Then another player proceeded to steal your BlackBone and text Tony Blair, I love you, to the hysterics of the players.

Please, can you confirm this funny story and give your version of events and give a quick insight into your experience on that tour and the challenges compared to managing political blimey.

Alistair, I mean, talk about toxic masculinity.

What's going on in this anecdote?

You didn't know that I was an international rugby player, did you?

I did not.

No, no, no, no.

The story's sort of true.

It's sort of true.

So I went on the Lions Tour in 2005.

I'm still writing about it.

Les Keep, the French sports newspaper, had a huge piece about it the other day, about the spin doctor who caused chaos on the Lions Tour.

But I actually got on it.

I really enjoyed it.

I wouldn't do it again because I think it was the time when I realized I couldn't really do a normal comms job again because there was too much of a sort of focus on what I was doing and saying.

But this specific incident is true.

And what happened was: do you know about it?

I don't know if you've ever been in a rugby tour already, but one of the things they tell you is always keep the lace on your trapsuit bottom tied, properly tied up, okay?

And so I'm walking out, and I think it was Steve Thompson, the hooker, and Paul O'Connell, the Irish lock forward, who basically grabbed one side of my trousers each and pulled them down as we were coming out.

Now, I hastily pulled them up and then

watched in utter panic, horror, call it what you want, as my then Blackberry flew out of my pocket, okay,

to be picked up by Steve Thompson, who ran away with it, okay?

And

I only got it back by saying to the security people, listen, there's no point in me trying to reason with you.

You'll just tell me to F off.

Would you tell him there's stuff on there, which if it got out, I would be in really deep shit, really deep shit.

And therefore, you've got to go get it back for me,

which they did.

They've always maintained they texted Tony Blair.

and said, I love you.

But if so, they sent it to the wrong number because Tony never got that text.

Did you reach out to Tony and and say, by the way, if you got a text from me saying, I love you, that was sent by a drunken rugby player?

Well, he'd already had the experience of it because I was once on the phone to him when Gareth Thomas, who was

everybody called Alfie, massive character, Welsh player.

And he was, I was out talking to Tony and he came out for a walk and he said, who are you talking to?

And I said, Tony Blair.

And he said, fuck off.

You're not talking to Tony Blair.

Give me your phone.

I said, I am.

Promise you I am.

Let me fucking speak to him.

So I put it on to Tony Blair and I'll never forget.

He said, Anyway, Tony, great talking to you.

Next time you're down in Wales, come and look me up, and we'll go for a paint bud.

And he gave me back the phone and then ran down the street, shouting into pubs and clubs that, you know, he'd just been talking to Tony Blair.

So, no, I didn't tell Tony about the I Love You.

But here's the thing, Rory.

On the back of that tour, one of the players was a guy called Richard Hill, who went on to be the manager of England.

And

at

not long after,

he contacted me and said, we've got this young player, a rising star, who we'd love you to sort of sit down and talk to about dealing with the media, dealing with pressure.

This was, you know, a long time ago now.

And he came to my house here and we sat down and chatted and we've stayed in touch ever since.

And that young star is the name, his name is Marrow Itoji, and he is currently the captain of the British and Irish Lions and they won the first test of the weekend.

So there you go.

Final thing from me just on that.

Just give us a sense of what actually are a couple of bits of advice that you might give someone who is suddenly, I don't know, whether in business or in sports, suddenly getting under the pressures of media for the first time.

What would be a couple of things to think about for listeners?

Understand the difference between pressure and stress.

Okay, explain that.

Pressure is good.

Feeling pressure means that it matters.

It means you work harder, you'll focus better.

Stress is bad because you start to lose your focus, your concentration, and you feel edgy about it.

So understand the difference.

And the other thing we talked about was

the importance of always being, however you're communicating, being authentic to a sense of yourself

and not feeling that you have to sort of pretend that you're something that you're not.

And if you watch, it's really interesting, Marrow at the moment is doing lots of interviews, inevitably, because he's the captain.

And he's got his own way of doing it.

He speaks quite softly.

He's very thoughtful.

He doesn't come out with terrible cliches that a lot of them do.

And And the other thing, of course, is: you know, don't read the papers and don't read the comments about you on social media.

I'm very bad at that.

Anyway, you are very, very, very bad at that.

I don't know.

It contributes to my stress rather than pressure.

The reason we should tell our listeners that you're in Colombia is because you're actually having a holiday with your family.

And for the first time, I think, apart from when you do your funny retreats, you're going to have a week off next week.

So listeners will miss your dulcet tones.

But I shall be joined by none other than our american sister kati k

oh it'd be brilliant and i really hope and thank you guys yes and apologies if you've heard uh strange sounds background these are jungle birds chase about so yeah i'm gonna have a full two weeks off i'm gonna put on the vacation reply email i'm gonna hand my horrible phone away so that i can't get to it um and so at least you're not gonna be able to whatsapp me for the next 10 days um and i'll find a way i'll find i will find a way

and another thing that uh people can listen to while I'm away, apart from the Dulcet Tones Katic,

is our two-part interview with Gary Stevenson.

He is this extraordinary man who came from a tough background, became a

trader, banker, and developed a deep, deep unease with the way that the financial system works and is now campaigning for wealth taxes and an economic revolution, political revolution almost, in the United Kingdom.

What did you think about the Gary Stevenson infused?

Yeah, I think he's an interesting guy.

We both agreed that he wrote a very good book.

I'm slightly worried about people who...

I looked on his Instagram profile and it says, lots of people have ideas, but mine are all right.

There's a little bit of kind of, you know, I mean, when we were in off-air, he was talking about how hard he was finding it to cope with Gary Mania.

You know, I think you've got to have a little bit of humility about this stuff.

But listen, he's an interesting guy and

he's definitely in a big debate here about the nature of our economy the nature of our society how we deal with inequality and he's you know and he's got a lot of followers particularly amongst young people so he is he is without that a voice if i were a political serving politician i would definitely engage with him very good very good well anyway have a lovely time and i'll return to the jungle birds bye-bye excellent bye-bye