413. Question Time: How to solve Britain’s immigration question

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Welcome to the Rest of this Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart, and with me, Alistair Campbell.

And Rory,

you've insisted that we start with this question.

I assume it's because you're brimming with ideas.

Adam Hensall, as professional armchair critics, I might rebut that actually.

Well we do have arms on our chair.

We do have arms, but are we armchair critics?

Anyway, offer us some potential solutions to the UK migration issue.

At least Adam doesn't call it a crisis, he calls it an issue.

Like that's going to be unfair, but let's imagine that I was stereotyping you.

I would say you're somebody who is very comfortable with multicultural Britain, probably feels the anxieties about immigration are overdone, certainly has said on the podcasts in the past that talking about it too much hands stuff to Nigel Farage,

and that

you don't really want to be associated with Rwanda-style politics, stop the vote, stop immigration.

In fact, you used to wear a t-shirt saying something like open minds, open borders, didn't you?

That was the slogan of the new European, now the new world.

Yeah.

I also wear a t-shirt sometimes that says, refugees welcome.

Look, I honestly do think the first thing we have to do is to change the tone and the nature of the debate.

Because the reason why we have an issue and why we do get a lot of questions about this and why it is so salient in our politics is that I think a lot of the fears may be genuine, okay,

but I think a lot of the facts in quotes around which the debate is based are not.

And so, for example, you mentioned the stop the boats.

I completely agree with the importance of quotes stopping the boats you do agree with that totally and by the way this is what so riles me up about farage

the situation has got a lot worse since brexit the numbers have got a lot worse since brexit because the systems that we depended on have eroded so i'm all in favor of them trying to stop the boats not least because it stops people dying needlessly so so you're not you're not on the side of the argument that these are incredibly vulnerable needy people who are just trying to get a better life and fleeing persecution getting on rubber boats and that's why we should welcome them what i'm against is is them being in the position where they've either i'm in favor of quote smash the gangs yeah because it's become a big thing for organized crime but i'll give you one idea yeah which i think might be worth thinking about

so as i understand it you can no longer just turn up at a British embassy anywhere in the world and say,

I'm fleeing persecution.

Which was true.

When I was in the embassy in Indonesia, we had somebody hopped over the wall.

In fact, we built these big walls to try to stop it happening.

But when they hopped over the wall, they were taking refuge in our embassy, a bit like a Sancho.

So let's just say you went back.

Now, I know the numbers are large, okay?

And we don't have big embassies in a lot of the countries from which these people are fleeing.

But if you were able to have your case assessed at a local level by a local diplomat.

Let me say I like that idea.

Not quite that idea to lean into my slight disagreement, agreeable disagreement.

I think we've taken another level.

it's actually the idea that david cameron uh started to pioneer and theresa made it a lot on which is that you rely on unhcr un agency to screen uh genuine cases in country we did it first uh in lebanon jordan on the borders of syria with refugees did pakistan with afghan refugees the idea is that you

give a quota to UNHCR.

So let's say Britain's going to take 25,000 asylum seekers a year, but they're going to be processed outside the United Kingdom, and then they're brought in.

But what's the problem?

The problem is that actually the tradition of international law.

All of the question of madam is solutions, Rory.

Yeah.

Okay.

So don't give us the problems.

Yeah.

You want the solution.

Okay.

I've given you a small solution.

Yeah.

A small part of a solution.

Yeah.

Which is the processing in third countries.

Yeah.

And by the way, you could take that into a third-party organization.

And that's why, for example, I know you're in favor of the whole Rwanda thing.

Now, I thought the Rwanda thing in the last government was a complete gimmick and a total waste of money.

And I recently met somebody who works for the Rwandan government who literally said the words we so saw them coming so we wasted a lot of time a lot of effort but I'm not against I'm not against some sort of processing and some sort of assessment taking place in different countries okay so so as usual with disagree of agreement that's not quite my position I absolutely think that Rwanda was the wrong choice done in the wrong way incredibly expensive and was never going to work.

But the principle behind it, which is that you look for safe third countries and you say that anyone arriving on your shores, they're coming after all from a safe country, right?

They're coming from France, which is safe to Britain.

You can say, look, we don't have a responsibility to put you off in Britain.

What we have a responsibility to is to make sure that you're safe.

And the EU did a deal exactly like this with Turkey, and it had an incredible impact.

They did it in the midst of the migrant crisis.

The EU-Turkey deal involved the European Union providing a lot of support for Turkey and Turkey in response agreeing that they would keep people in Turkey rather than facilitating them getting on boats to Greece.

It cut the numbers down in a couple of months from tens of thousands down to a few hundred.

And it only broke apart because the EU-Turkey relationship broke apart.

So actually the answer to this in Britain and across Europe is partly about agreements with Turkey, North Africa and other safe third countries to take asylum seekers.

But you think the whole problem of this entire debate is that it's happening at a time when nationalism

is,

in a lot of our politics, more powerful than internationalism.

So I would argue this thing, a bit like climate, a bit like some of the environmental challenges, is not going to be solved country by country.

This is where I think we're in agreement, but I think it's how you then do it.

So you've talked before about maybe every country agreeing to take a number of what you're doing.

Yeah,

let me explain that quickly.

So this is my idea that you set up, actually it's an idea that I developed with my friend Gerald Knaus, that you develop a global refugee coalition where every country agrees to take 0.05%

of its population annually, right?

So there's maybe five families for a town of 10,000 people on average spread across the country every year.

But are you talking there about asylum seekers?

Asylum seekers.

Right.

So not the economic immigration.

So we're going to need more of that as well.

Exactly.

So asylum seekers only, we're talking about here.

And let's say the UK would take 40,000 every year.

So over 10 years, there's 400,000 people, a lot of people.

But at the same time, Canada's taking 20,000, the United States taking 120,000.

Of course, easier before.

So Trump, is one person a person or is it a family?

One person's a person.

And the idea here is that if the whole world shares the burden and sets up good criteria and you're targeting not, and this is another thing that's going to annoy some people listening to this.

I'm afraid it is true that a lot of the people crossing those boats are young men who were not necessarily in lethal danger of their lives.

The problems they were in might have been bad, but it's nothing like

what a female judge faced under the Taliban in Afghanistan, right?

So you want to target the female judges from Afghanistan, not a 16-year-old kid who's come over from Kurdistan, who's paid a lot of money to a people smuggler, and who's hoping to bring their family over after them, because that's just nonsense, right?

I'm not saying that those people are not great in many ways.

I'm not buying into this idea which the far right's trying to sell, which is that

they have made London unrecognizable and unsafe and that they're all creating criminal gangs.

That isn't true at all.

My experience with an enormous number of young Afghans that I meet in London is that they're working incredibly hard.

They're doing well in school.

They're doing well in businesses.

They're making a real contribution.

But we do not have a moral obligation to take people from France.

They're not persecuted and reciprocal.

So hold on.

So just on that, on the France there, so sort the boat's problem out.

And the only way of sorting the boats problem out is if the French government wants to sort it out.

And the only way in which the French government will want to sort it out is if the government's brave and returns to what Yvette Cooper was talking about and then dropped, which is we'll say to France, okay, we will take our share of your genuine asylum seekers and in return any single person who lands on British shores, we're pushing back to France.

The only thing that Yvette Cooper could do, and I don't know whether this is on the agenda at all, but actually is to revisit the idea of identity cards.

Of course, we should have identity cards.

Now, that's going to involve a big, big fight,

unfortunately, unfortunately, with actually international law and UNHCR, because UNHCR inherited a system set up after the Second World War where people were horrified by the fact that Jews crossing from Germany into Switzerland were pushed back by the Swiss into Germany and then killed.

So the system basically is set up to say if you can land in someone else's country, you claim asylum there.

And UNHCR has a lot of people in it.

who talk as though they believe in open borders.

And

when I'm teasing you about your t-shirt, I I think that's part of the problem.

People shouldn't be wearing t-shirts saying open borders.

You obviously don't believe in open borders.

And it's a real gift to...

Are you sure you said open borders?

Yeah, it said open minds, open borders.

Yeah.

So the second thing, though, that we need to talk about is legal migration, because it would be a big mistake for any government today, anywhere in Europe or the West, to go into an election thinking that it's enough just to have an answer to illegal migrants or asylum seekers if you don't have an answer to the much bigger numbers, which is coming to Britain in a single year, 750,000 people coming in,

hundreds of thousands of them on student visas, hundreds of thousands on family visas, and a few hundred thousand coming into work.

But the reason why I talk about the way the debate is conducted, so

I don't have the data in front of me, but the numbers involved in the small boats.

Tiny.

Tiny.

Tens of thousands.

That's what you were talking about.

You mentioned there the universities.

One of the outcomes, I fear, of the spending review is that a lot of universities are going to really, really struggle.

One of the reasons, now we could argue, well, you got into the mess because of fees and then you need to get more money from overseas students, etc.

But the debate about immigration means that I think at a time when our top universities should be doing everything to get the brightest and the best from around the world to come and study here, we're putting up barriers instead.

Okay, but no, let me again disagree.

I think we're confusing two different things.

There was, I think, quite a smart policy which was put in place by Rishi Sunak to say the very top students in the world should be fast-tracked.

So it's very easy to get a visa to come to the United Kingdom, what was under him if you've been to Harvard, whatever.

That isn't quite the same as what I see, unfortunately, when I go often to graduation ceremonies for some British universities that are not in the top tier.

Often they are actually universities that have been really struggling in terms of student numbers financial viability and are bringing in a very very large number of not particularly top-notch students from

china no no i mean an enormous number the last graduation i went to had actually come from nigeria and as far as i could tell they actually only

uh did a few weeks of study in the united kingdom they were an incredibly important revenue stream they got to go back and say that they had a degree from this university I was not certain that they were top fight students.

I was not certain they were making a huge contribution to the British economy.

And I was a bit worried that actually what we've got here is a system where we're not funding our universities properly.

So we're forcing them

to bring in people who may not actually be making huge contributions.

I've said a few weeks ago.

And we said yesterday on the main episode that we thought there wasn't this sort of national story.

Part of the national story for Britain, I think, is that this is a place to welcome the brightest and the best brains around the world.

And at a time, for example, when Donald Trump is whacking the intellectual elite and the arts and humanities and top universities and undermining their reputation, we should be trying to get those people to come here.

But how do we do it?

And Labour's not really helping itself.

One way in which you'd help it is if you produce tax breaks for them.

So traditionally, the way in which people did it is they got a lot of foreign capital into the country, a lot of investment into the country, by providing tax breaks for non-doms.

That's been taken away.

I mean,

the question, if you are a very talented person who's very busy-oriented and really wants to make money, does the UK strike you as a place where you're going to want to come in and invest, where you're going to be able to make money, which is going to be low tax, competitive, good capital markets, innovative?

Probably not.

The reality is at the moment that all the signals coming from the Labour government don't really feel as though Britain is welcoming in the market.

But I think you're confusing their wealth with

talent.

I'm not talking about getting people in because they've got loads of money.

I'm talking about people getting in because they've got really good brains.

But the two things are connected.

So if you're a really ambitious software engineer, and you could be coming from Kenya, you could be coming from China, you could be coming from India, you're...

coming in to live the dream of creating your amazing tech startup in AI or quantum and your models are the great heroes of Silicon Valley.

You go to Silicon Valley in the US.

There's an incredible amount of venture funds that will put money into your startup business.

There's a culture that celebrates hard work.

There's an incredible ecosystem of other people working in software.

Come to the United Kingdom.

You could be just a very bright Estonian coder.

You set up your fintech business.

Pretty soon you're moving to Realist in the United States.

And part of the problem is that there's a connection between being the great innovator in the most productive part of the economy, which is tech, and then what happens in terms of your taxes and money at the end of it.

My final point on this actually restates what I said earlier about the tone and nature of the debate.

While the debate is dominated by this sense of nationalism screaming front pages day after day in the Express and the Mail and The Sun, BBC tending to follow that agenda on the debate, government tending to follow that side of the debate rather than sort of stand up for why we need

in a vibrant, dynamic modern economy, we need to keep our eye on the people that we need to come in and we need need to go out and get the best.

Until we change that frame, I don't think we're going to crack this problem.

So although Adam calls it being an armchair critic, what I think I'm trying to do is to say to people that we have got ourselves into a place where we seem to define anyone who is not of us, not British, coming into this country as somehow a burden.

We're not going to be able to run hospitals and care homes and schools and prisons and all the other public services unless we understand we've got to go and get people from outside.

100%.

But if you look at the numbers of the hundreds of thousands who are coming in, only a couple of hundred thousand of them are coming in to do those jobs.

Yeah.

The majority are coming in on very different types of visas.

As I say, student visas, which are not often for great universities, family reunification visas, and the talent bit, you know, really getting that talent bit right.

It's about more than immigration.

It's about much more than immigration.

That is where the national story comes in.

Anyway, I don't know if we disagreed or agreed there in the end, but thank you, Adam, for calling as armchair critics

now here is a question hannah collies asked whether i'm as outraged as i'm sure alistair is by the bbc's obsessive coverage of reform it completely outweighs coverage of any other party please talk to us about the knock-on effectiveness well first alistair over to you tell us about bbc's coverage reform what you actually thought about and why you were cross i don't know whether it's cross i just think that the

I mean, they've got, what, five MPs?

Yeah, this is something you've teased me about in the past, which is that, to be honest, I'd struggle often to name the chairman of any of the political parties, including Labour and Conservative, but the one chairman of a political party I really can name is Zia Yousaf.

Labour Ellie Reeves, Conservative Nigel Huddleston.

Good man, Nigel Huddleston.

Greens John Knott.

Lib Dem's Baroness Caroline Pidgeon.

Now, why can you name Zia Youssef?

Because I know that the BBC and all the other media outlets, they have to compete.

They have to try and get our attention.

But honestly, to get a breaking news alert

zia yousaf has resigned as chairman of reform and then chris mason writing this essay like it was the biggest thing in the world

why this matters why you should think this matters and then two days later zia yousaf unresigns and it leaves the news at a time when gaza is kicking off la is kicking off it leaves the news and and the reason it was a great story though it's a bit like trump musk wasn't it no fuck it was kind of weird, wasn't it?

Zia Youssef comes

attacks Raj and then suddenly he's back again.

What's he doing going back again?

I mean, it's fascinating, isn't it?

Well, hold on, hold on.

Yeah.

And I did actually have some spirited, polite but spirited exchanges with Nick Robinson at the BBC Today programme because they did Zia Youssef.

at the start of the week as the main and as you know from your politics day 810 is the big interview that's where the bb says says this is the most important thing happening in the world yeah

i think i only got about four of those interviews, and it was a big deal in my political career.

Right, okay.

So 8-10 has sort of got this mythical status.

And there's Nick Robinson.

Now, I'm not saying it wouldn't get listened to.

And because, you know, people are thinking, well, who is this guy?

Because he's just been leaving the news for the last three days.

No, who is this guy?

We all know who he is.

It's the channel of reform.

So the questions were all about,

so why did you leave?

And he sort of said, well, I felt a bit tired.

I found it very exhausting.

I hadn't had a holiday.

And this was not.

And then Nick Robinson.

And clearly that wasn't the reason he left, right?

He must have left with a massive following out of the refarge.

Part of the reason he left was because the new MP had this thing, stood up at Prime Minister's questions and said, Would Keir Starmer agree with me that we should ban the burqa?

And Kirstama said no.

And then Zia Youssef put out a statement saying that it was a really dumb question because that's not even our party policy, which suggested things were already frayed.

Zia Yousuf is a Muslim who's trying to.

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

He may be a Muslim.

Yeah.

They've got five MPs.

One of them has already, Rupert Lowe's already legged it.

Okay.

They've got the woman who came in at the by-election.

We've all heard of him too, haven't we?

Rupert Lowe.

Exactly.

We've all heard of Sarah Pochin.

We've all heard of Lee Anderson.

Yeah, Lee Anderson.

The only one we forget from time to time is the guy who beats women up, right?

So my point is the Lib Dems.

And Nick Robinson, to be fair, he said in his response to me, where I think you've got a point is we don't maybe give space to the Lib Dems and the Greens, right?

But you can do that.

Right.

So I just think that this is, and I heard, right, somebody very, how can I say this without dropping a friend in it?

Somebody very, very, very, very, very, very senior in the BBC management structure, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very dropping a minute.

Yeah.

You could almost say right at the top almost of the organization

goes around saying to people that the BBC

has to get in touch with this angry zeitgeist and this populist anger and we've got to shed our woke image.

The woke image of the BBC has been created by the people they're pandering to.

The Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Sun and now reform.

Where Nick Robinson's got a point is that it would be completely mad for the BBC to ignore the rise of reform.

I think there is a decent chance now that something that hasn't happened in 100 years will happen in British politics, which is that reform will replace the Conservatives as the major party.

I think populism is the big story of our decade, from Trump to Millet to Melonial.

I think the media is...

The question is whether they're covering it or driving it.

And I fear at the moment that, look, it's my old point I make all the time.

Too many people within the broadcasting organisations, not just the BBC, but the BBC is more important than the others.

That's the fact.

Too many of them, they decide their agenda for the day by taking in the papers to the morning meetings and sitting around saying, oh, well, the mail have splashed on it.

We've got to cover it.

Oh, the Times have led on this today.

Oh, the Telegraph's got this piece by Robert Jenrick talking about his latest sort of stunt.

We've got to cover it.

Whereas actually, I think their job is to stand back.

and say what is actually happening.

Now, the other point Nick made to me, and it's a fair point.

He said, look, if Kier Starmer's making a speech saying reform is now the threat.

Yeah.

That's a very good point.

That is a foreign point.

The prime minister himself is saying that reform is the big story.

That is a fair point.

However,

that doesn't mean to me that you then say when some guy that most of your viewers and listeners have literally never heard of.

No, we all heard of him.

Ziya Yusuf.

That's the point.

Most of the viewers and listeners had not heard of him until the BBC actually started to think this guy's a story.

Now, where, again, I'm trying to be fair and reasonable here.

What?

Yeah.

So

when I had a long chat with Farage in the green room in in wherever it was where we did question time, he actually, I remember it's the first time I really clocked onto this.

He said, oh, we've got this guy, you know, Zia Yousuf, who's our, he's our, he's, he's

shit.

In the absolute palace for truth, Alistair, was there not a microsecond of a moment after Zia Yousaf's resignation where you thought, let's get him on the restless politics leading an interview market.

I'd still like to do that.

I would still like to do that because we're a different sort of medium.

I'm talking about the news, the news medium.

Okay.

So I think it's fair.

They're a story.

They're doing well in the polls.

But let's talk about the Scottish by-election.

Tell us about the Scottish by-election.

So the Scottish by-election up in Hamilton last week, okay?

So the whole build-up was part of this, as you say, the rise and rise of reform.

Now, it is newsworthy, I accept, that reform did better in that by-election than they normally do in Scotland.

And the Conservatives basically completely disappeared.

It's unbelievable, right?

Correct.

That's part of the story.

On the morning, let me tell you this, Rory.

This will interest you.

Let me just get you the betting odds on the day.

day.

So, Rory, the by-election in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse.

Now, normally, a Scottish Parliament election would not be that big a story across the entire news.

No, correct.

We barely know what's going on.

The reason why there was such a build-up to it.

Yeah.

And why when the day it happened, it was live coverage was because they thought reform might win.

And is that because Farage was selling that story to the news?

No, Farage actually was saying if we won this, it would be an absolute miracle.

He's trying to downplay.

He was doing the famous Ken Baker Westminster strategy.

He knew that he was doing quite well, so he's trying to downplay.

Let me tell you what the odds

at the bookmakers were the day before the by-election.

Yeah, these bookies, they're always right.

SNP, 20 to 1 on.

So if you bet £20, you'd make one pound.

Correct.

Oh, that's rubbish.

Exactly.

So in other words, we, the bookies, think it's all over, the SNP have won.

Reform, nine to one.

Second favourite.

Good bet.

Okay.

Labour, 12 to 1.

So if you bet pound, you get 12 pounds.

Why were the bookies saying that?

Because the media was building up the story that reform might win this.

And that's a better story.

Well, where would it say?

The bookies were saying SNP were going to win.

The bookies were saying the SNP because they couldn't believe that reform could do it.

Nobody saw Labour coming.

If they're the odds, and that's the conventional wisdom, why is the story not

Labour have done rather well here?

Yeah.

Taking a seat.

That's the story you'd do, wouldn't it?

What was the BBC headline?

Is reform the real winner?

When the story should have been miraculous labor victory.

I don't care what the headlines are, Rory, but as you know, I don't care about headlines.

I care about deep arguments.

But I just think it was a very interesting example of where the whole thing was framed within this context of the rise and rise of reform.

Now, it was a good result for reform.

Yeah.

To get 7,000 in a Scottish by-election was a good result.

And a terrible result for the Tories.

What are they getting there?

Unbelievable.

Wiped out.

Yeah.

So that's the story.

Don't make the story about reform, could Nigel Farage be the next Prime Minister?

The story is is reform destroying the conservative party yeah who got tanked at the last election oh actually there's one other point i've got to make what go on then the highlight of the by-election campaign i've got to say to you rory yeah now this is going to be a no answer do you know who graeme soonas is yes who's graham soonas a footballer ex-footballer yeah and scottish manager and football manager yeah so graeme soonas who i know a bit and i've always i've never really discussed politics with him because i always he always gave me the vibe of being a bit of a tory oh okay well okay so he's never bothered with it and and i thought you know unless you're going to volunteer your politics, don't push too much.

Anyway, he came out for the Labour candidate.

And I think that might have had a bit of an impact because I don't think people knew he had a political view.

But do you know what his big argument was?

The reason why he said he wanted to get involved.

He said, that Nigel Farage, I've seen people like him through my life.

He is a total chancer.

Good word.

Good word.

Good word.

I think that had a bit of an impact.

Very good.

Well, let's take a break and back for questions.

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We have just released a series on the decades-long battle between the CIA and Osama bin Laden, and this week we are stepping into the devastation of the 9-11 terror attacks to understand how Osama bin Laden was able to carry out such a plot right under the nose of the CIA.

It was a moment that changed global politics forever, shifting the focus of spy agencies away from nation states towards hunting for terrorists and understanding the extremist ideology that drove them.

We will then go into the decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden, which culminated in a dramatic raid at his compound in Pakistan in 2011, which killed the world's most wanted terrorist.

So if all of this sounds good, we've got a clip waiting for you at the end of the episode.

Welcome back to the Rest of Politics Question Time with me, Royce Steward.

And with me, Alastair Campbell.

And slight irony alert, which is that, of course, having said that we should have been concentrating on what was happening in Gaza and the BBC kept talking about reform, we've just spent the last 15 minutes talking about reform.

So let's get on to what you said we should have been talking about.

Brian Gorch, surely you have to agree the picture of Greta Thunberg smiling sheepishly as the IDF offers her a sandwich exposes the hollowness of lefty activism.

What was the real point of this stunt?

Who did it help?

And similar question from Charlotte Lees and Madeline.

What do you think of Greta being captured?

So what did you make of that moment?

And just explainer, as far as as I remember, this story of flotillas goes back a long way.

2010, when I was newly elected as an MP, one of the first big issues that,

it was the first issue, I think, that David Cameron answered in his very first Prime Minister's questions was about the fact that the Israelis had boarded a flotilla on its way to Gaza from Turkey.

Nine people had been killed because the Israelis had rappelled onto the ship and then they'd shot people who they said had been threatening them.

And it was one of those moments, 2010, where David Cameron said, you know, as a friend of Israel, and I've always called myself a friend of Israel, and then the butt comes right.

There was another flotilla that was coming to pick up Greta Thornberg, I think from Cyprus or Malta, which mysteriously exploded or had some malfunction on its way.

This one, she boarded.

She boarded with a member of the European Parliament.

They were carrying nappies, baby milk, food, small amounts, to relieve the Gaza blockade.

Definitely not carrying weapons.

I mean, it genuinely was carrying humanitarian supplies, into Gaza.

And Katz, the Israeli security minister, authorized the arrest and the stopping of the boat, calling Greta Thunberg a pro-Hamas, anti-Semite, and saying Israel would not accept this form of interference.

What do you make of it all?

And they're being deported.

And they're being deported.

Well, look, I am an unashamed fan of Greta Thunberg.

And I know that's a very unusual position for a middle-aged, aging white man.

Who writes books about how young people can change the world.

Correct.

And actually, who in that book, But What Canada had a profile of Greta Thunberg is a very good example of somebody who decided as a teenager, I am going to make a difference.

And I think she's made a massive difference in the

environmental debate, albeit that it's going backwards.

But I think she's a big part of that story.

Is she not, I don't know how old she is now, but early 20s?

Is it not quite a sort of, in a sense, a slightly tragic story that she was an icon of a moment where we really thought that people like she were the future and now she feels oddly kind of outdated like a kind of boy band that faded no i'm not sure about that because it's it was interesting to me at the swimming this morning a couple of the kind of my generation bit younger saying that their kids had raised her one in the context of why has nobody been talking about this flotilla until the israelis got arrested her

But also,

I think you underestimate how she still does have a very powerful in with a lot of people around the world.

I mean, certainly for somebody of her age and her background, it's pretty extraordinary.

And I think that there is something really weird.

When you get Piers Morgan, for example, saying, showing this shows that she's a sort of, you know, entitled, self-obsessed narcissist.

I mean, look in the mirror, mate.

Why does she wind them up so much?

It's interesting, isn't it?

She's an activist.

She's trying to make a the thing about gaza roy yeah is why have the israel we talked about this last week why have the israelis been so adamant that journalists can't go into gaza because they understand that in war the battle of the narrative is hugely important i think the reason why they were so angry with her and this boat is that just for a day or two she sort of punctured the narrative and the purpose of it was to say here we are obviously not bringing weapons bringing humanitarian assistance and they don't want it why can't we bring it in and the reason they don't want it is because they actually don't want to give this stuff to the to the people of gaza They've got this humanitarian fund going and they're pretending that this is not a kind of...

And here's...

Well,

the whole story is they are blocking UN aid and relief and humanitarian operations because they want to control who gets the aid, where they get the aid.

There's been a massive uptick, though.

I've noticed on social media, a very, very strong Israeli narrative re-emerging again.

that this is all about anti-Semitism.

This is all about pro-Hamas.

There was the post yesterday that I was reading about saying that many Jews in Britain are fleeing Britain to move to Israel because they can't bear the environment that's created here.

I've noticed, actually, there was quite an interesting article which people might enjoy reading by Hadley Freeman, talking about how conflicted it feels to be Jewish in Britain at the moment.

And it's an article which basically says on the one hand, on the other.

So on the one hand, Hamas wants to kill all Jews.

On the other hand, tens of thousands of people are being killed in Gaza.

On the one hand, these stories are coming from the Hamas health authority, on the other hand, etc.

But what was interesting about it as a revelation of the fact that there still isn't a completely open debate on this is that the fundamental question that isn't asked in that whole article is why is the killing still going on?

You can see a year ago that there was a story about Hamas, Hamas wanting to kill Jews, Israel's right of self-defense going after Hamas.

But now, as we're moving up towards the two-year anniversary, the question of why it's still going on, what the strategic objective is, whether any of this stuff around humanitarian aid could be justified, why is that not being asked?

We partly discussed this answer last week.

You know, that it is ultimately, there's a lot of this is bound up with Netanyahu's survival, a lot of it's bound up with the hard right and the cabinet who are open about wanting to sort of drive Gazans and drive Palestinians out of the West Bank as well.

But I was with a very senior, very, very, to take your words for them, very, very, very senior Israeli opposition finger 10 days ago.

And they were saying in a speech, you know, this is very polarized.

And they said, on the one hand, you have Hamas and people talking about from the river to the sea.

And I was expecting them to say on the other hand you have Smotrich and Bengavir talking about Greater Israel and expelling all Palestinians.

That second bit never came.

This was an opposition figure who's absolutely not part of that coalition

still not quite prepared to call out Smotric and Bengavir.

And I thought that was very...

A lot of people are, there was a big march again yesterday.

But this thing about if you are remotely critical of anything that the Israelis do, you are pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic.

I mean,

it's so offensive.

But they know that that's the narrative that they're trying to shape because they want to stop people criticizing them, stop people calling this stuff out.

That's why they hate the Gretchen Thunberg stuff, because for a day or two, it did get an awful lot of traction.

We talked about it last week, and

literally within half an hour of the podcast being out, I was getting messages from people in Netanyahu's office.

One of them just said, I'm very disappointed in you.

Well, I'm very disappointed in you because you're justifying, you're now justifying things that cannot be justified.

And i keep going back to the point they keep saying that they're you know when you see these kids who are starving you see you know civilians being killed you see

you know there's barely a hospital left and they always say we were targeting a hamas cell a hamas this a hamas that

you know sorry but give us the names who have you killed who have you killed to justify all of the people who are not terrorists, who are not Hamas?

Or are you now saying, because I'm sure this is what some of them, some of the people in that Louis Theroux settlers film think, they're all terrorists because they're garzans.

That's the sort of mindset that some of them have now got.

Okay.

This one for you, Rui, because you really want to talk about this.

Jacob Donnelly, how could a global trade war affect our access to hardware and software needed to secure organizations from cyber threats?

How is policy evolving within the UK and EU to help us defend ourselves?

Well, that's one for you because you all I've got to go on here is this brilliant article by Misha Gleni in the Financial Times, which was pretty scary.

Tell us a bit about that.

Well, he starts off with this thing about, you know, that there's lots of focus on the fact that Marks and Spencer got hit and it led to empty shelves and this, and it's going to cost them like hundreds of millions.

But he starts off the piece with one about a company called Synovis, which provides blood testing and transfusions to the NHS.

And I wonder whether this is related, even though it wasn't said, but a lot of our papers the other day were leading on the story that there's a shortage of blood.

But basically, he said said that two patients suffered serious long-term harm, and this was deemed to be a two on the matrix of six for cyber incidents.

And he says, We're not far off from having a one.

Right.

I don't, I think, I think Mars and Spencer may be in a two as well.

I don't know.

Well, let's get back to the whole story.

So, the normal story that we celebrate is a story where we all seem to like the 90s and the early 2000s as being an age of new labor, new labor, and optimism, what I want want to call a rules,

rules-based international order.

Effective government.

Yeah.

But the weird exception to this story is in the world of the internet and cyber.

So whereas in much of the rest of the world, you know, those eras, the 1990s, early 2000s, was about creating international agreements, international criminal court, for example, World Trade Organization, single market, NAFTA.

There was a deliberate decision basically to leave the Internet as a kind of wild west.

And I don't know whether you were conscious this at the time.

Were you sort of conscious of the fact that there wasn't actually much effort made to do international regulation on cyber security, cyber threats, cyber attacks?

I'll be honest, I don't think we, I don't know what we thought.

I think we saw it as being bound up in the whole excitement about globalization and

prosperity.

I can remember, I think I may have told you before that once when I was doing a briefing, and it was about the genome project, about which I knew next to nothing.

And I was asked a question.

And instead of saying,

I know I should know about this, but I don't.

I'm a bit thick when it comes to sort of, you know, science and technology.

I said what I thought was a completely bland, neutral parking question.

By the time I got back to Dowdy Street, shares were plunging of all these sort of biotech companies because I'd said something that

Bill Clinton phoned Tony Blair and said, what the fuck's going on?

So I don't think we were.

And I can remember Liz Lloyd, who's now back in government working for Geostama, who was then working for us, and she was very much on the kind of environmental side.

Remember her sometimes talking about you know, this tech stuff is going to be so important.

We did, you know, I've said before, we did get onto the old information superhighway, but I'd be lying if I said that we thought this was going to become quite the phenomenon it has.

Tony Blair's catching up now, by the way, he's utterly obsessed with it.

He's talking about almost everything else, anyway.

One of the reasons why the US and the UK didn't police it is that it suited us because Five Eyes,

and this has become, you know, I'm not revealing secrets here because unfortunately it's become clear through WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, basically

thought it rather suited us not to regulate it because we were from the National Security Agency GCHQ

hacking into absolutely everything.

And we thought in a slightly smug way in those days that the US, the UK and others had such a massive superiority over Russia, China or any adversary when it came to penetrating this stuff, getting into this stuff, manning attacks, that it wasn't in our interests to regulate it or control it.

Things then began to change because from two big changes thing.

One of them is more and more of the world went online.

So from 2005 onwards, you begin to see suddenly, you know, Gmail puts all your emails and data out there.

online shopping becomes absolutely enormous.

So huge opportunities for criminals.

And the second thing is then states beginning to do it.

So Russia mounts a big attack on Estonia in 2008.

And then you get the fake news stuff happening.

So you get the Syrian cyber army putting out a fake tweet from the Associated Press saying the White House is on fire, which tumbles the US stock market back in 2014.

And then you get this agreement between the criminal gangs and the governments, which you see particularly in Russia.

Essentially, Putin lets the hackers get on with it, and a lot of them are mafia groups, provided when he rings them up and says, could you help me out here on a cyber attack, they get him behind him.

There was a big attack against Ukraine, which wasn't actually as effective as it might have been if it had been mounted against the UK or the US, because a lot of Ukraine wasn't connected as much as would be the case of the UK.

Where are you getting all this from?

Well, so I've read a couple of books, read a couple of great books.

Scott Shapiro, Fancy Bear Goes Fishing with a PH.

There's another book which I like less, actually, but Nicole Peloth, because it's slightly

sensational, called This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends.

Fancy Gear Goes Fishing is actually written by a colleague of mine at Yale Law School, really good at explaining clearly the computer science behind the attacks.

Anyway, the reason why I want to raise it, though, just to finish, is that your old friend Donald Trump is now featuring in this because the Biden administration tried at the end to pass emergency legislation to make sure that the future generation of the internet had built into it from the beginning proper protection against cyber attacks and particularly quantum attacks.

And Donald Trump announced two days ago, and again, this is probably one of the biggest things he's done that nobody's noticed, that he's dismantling all of Biden's protections in the name of deregulation, free trade, and essentially allowing a free-for-all.

And so things that people were less worried about, I did a big cyber conference, one of these big events at the Excel Center 10 days ago.

And what was clear there is that people were beginning to worry about how AI can mount attacks, but they were less worried about quantum computing.

They thought they were ready to deal with the quantum threats.

Now I'm getting messages from those same people saying, oh my goodness, what Trump's done has suddenly made all of that much, much more dangerous.

He's also gone on a bit of a similar journey on Bitcoin, hasn't he?

He was always, you had a sense he was sort of alarmed and worried about that.

But now that that it's sort of you know flowing into his coffers he's he's

and the two things connect because of course cryptocurrency is the main way that cyber criminals make money that's the great untraceable way that when they attack your company and say you know give us fifty million dollars or we're going to dismantle your entire system that's how they collect their money well why are governments not more worked up about that why are they the story used to be i get the russian point but why are the americans

used to be that it rather suited our agencies and the five eyes to be able to stick our fingers into this.

The second part of the story is a lot of these companies are secretive about it.

So well done, Michigan Lenny, for getting stories out.

But a lot of these companies are being attacked with cyber attacks and are paying the ransom and are not revealing it because they don't want to admit paying the ransom.

Our banks are losing incredible amounts of money.

I don't know whether you've ever been the victim of a bank fraud.

But the fact that our banks are able to cover these frauds shows how much they must be ripping us off as customers if they're absolutely absorbed.

Well Michigan Lenny's book is called dark market how hackers became the new mafia yeah i i find this stuff a bit scary i've got to be honest and let's go on to this related question from dawn reef i've just watched sam coates sky news get gaslit by chat gpt

i'm now more terrified of ai than ever please convince me not to be or at the very least explain that what happens in the video shouldn't be a surprise did you see it you did i did i did see it i did see it i did see it yeah so um you thought he was a bit yeah silly i thought it was weird actually Because?

Because I thought Sam should have known this.

It was as though he didn't really understand what an AI system is.

So the story,

how did the story strike you?

Because you sent me the tweet.

What was it for you as a kind of non-massive AI person watching it?

What was the story you took from the story?

The story I took from it was that he discovered that if somebody asked AI to tell

him what he had just recorded, even though the podcast he'd recorded had not been uploaded, that it gave him the answer.

And it made it up, didn't it?

And it made it up.

And then when he went to the camera,

it invented a Sam Coates podcast complete with jokes and exchanges, which hadn't happened yet.

And then, when he said, hold on a minute, I didn't actually say that.

Have you just made this up?

No.

It said, no, no, no, I didn't make it up.

No, I really had not going to.

No, that's exactly right.

You're completely right.

So this is actually.

The reason why I was a bit surprised that Sam Coates made such a big deal with it, and he dragged it out over a lot of minutes.

Listen, it's a 24-duce channel, Rory.

They've got a lot of.

They're not like us with very, very limited time.

Is the droll on for the second hour?

No, is that AI has been doing this since the very beginning.

I mean, this is the story of hallucination.

It goes back to the very early ChatGPT.

And actually, it changes over time as they begin to,

as the models retrain and retrain on their own stuff, the amount they hallucinate go up and down, which is why I would encourage you, if you're doing this, I at the moment run four models at one time on my phone.

So I'm running ChatGPT and I'm using the 03 model, but I'm also running DeepSeek, which is the Chinese model.

I'm running Grok, which is Elon Musk's model.

And I'm running Claude, which is...

What do you mean by rerunning them?

Oh, well, they're apps on my phone.

Okay, okay.

So if you see my phone.

Obviously, you still write things.

Yeah, but there's Claude, there's Grok, there's DeepSeek, there's Chinese.

Do you use them different things for different things?

Absolutely.

Yeah, Grok's very good on things like clean economic analysis.

ChatGBT 03 was pretty good until something's going a bit weird with it over the last week.

I mean, they aren't very odd.

Well, over the last week, it's begun to produce less and less detailed answers.

And when you challenge it,

fewer and fewer detailed answers.

And when you challenge it in the way, and this is, I think, what Sam was experiencing.

You know, for example, I said to it,

what was the date when Henry VIII

abolished the laws of the forest in Britain?

And it produced...

Why did you want to know that at that time?

Because I've been writing about Cumbria and the abolition of forest laws in Cumbria.

As part of the mayoral bid, yeah.

As part of my non-mayoral bid for Cumbria, yep.

And then it gave me three paragraphs on Henry VIII abolishing the laws without a date.

So I said, now what's the date?

And it did again the three paragraphs.

And then I said, date exclamation mark.

And it just did the three paragraphs again.

So there's something going wrong.

That wouldn't have been true 10 days ago.

10 days ago, 03 had a good logical method for checking itself and it would have got its way to the date.

So it's getting itself into a model.

What's the best?

I've used Chat GPT very, very, very rarely.

So for simple economic analysis, Grok,

for general stuff until this week, 03.

For political analysis,

except when you're talking about China, DeepSeek, and for literary writing, for literary writing, Claude.

Seriously, for DeepSeek, you would go for America, you'd go to DeepSeek.

Really good.

But surely they're just as biased against America as they are for China.

No, no, it's not.

DeepSeek isn't biased.

What it does is

when you ask it a question that triggers some alert put up by the Chinese communist, but it just shuts down and won't answer.

It says, I'm sorry, I can't help you with that answer.

It doesn't produce like if you said she's something corrupt, what would happen?

It'll be say, I'm sorry, I can't help you with that.

Please ask me another question.

Right.

But if you said that.

But if you said, is Donald Trump corrupt?

I don't really ask it that kind of question.

I mean, that's the other point.

But if you did.

Okay,

I'll tell you what happens.

Let's do it.

Let's do it.

Because it'll do it immediately.

The other thing about DeepSeeks is very, very quick.

Okay.

So is Donald Trump corrupt?

Now thinking, hmm, the user is asking whether Donald Trump is corrupt.

This is a complex question that requires careful analysis based on the search results.

Let me review the key evidence.

Extensive allegations, footnote 2 and 10.

Lavish gifts like a $400 million gift from CADAS 3, 4-11.

Is executive orders boosting their value?

Footnote 10.

Based on comprehensive review of the provided courses, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that Donald Trump is engaged in systematic corruption during his presidency, particularly since resuming office in January 2025.

Below is the detailed analysis of the key findings.

Now, the reason I'm reading it to you like that is it's quite possible before it gets to the end of its answer, this Chinese model will say something that suddenly triggers an alert and it will wipe everything.

So I'm still wondering whether it's going to end the answer.

Often it's halfway through its answer where it suddenly says, sorry, I can't answer that question.

Please go.

And I'm screenshotting its partial answers.

So put in, is Xi Jinping correct?

Okay, very good.

Is Xi Jinping corrupt?

Server busy.

Please try again later.

Excellent.

Excellent.

So listen, talk about AI.

You know, Rankin, the photographer.

Yeah.

Very fine man.

A big fan of the podcast.

Anyway, I saw him yesterday about something completely different, but he gave me this book, and I've got one for you as well.

So this is a, it's called Fake.

Play on Words.

Yeah.

Fake F-A-K-E Fay-F-A-I-K.

Oh, A-I-O-I-C-T AI.

Because the whole thing, apart from one interview with him,

has been done by AI.

Oh, I see.

And part of his point presumably is that as an incredible photographer it's really disturbing that ai is generating incredibly high quality photographs i mean and they really are photographs they really are they're amazing and i don't think you can tell and part of the problem presumably then is what happens to that industry there was something sort of i don't want to be cheeky but one question around sam when he was showing this what exactly was he doing asking chat gbt to write a podcast for him that he'd recorded well it sort of sounds like

no it slightly sounded as though every week week he was actually using ChatGPT to help compose his podcast.

But maybe I'm...

This is a bit dangerous because the answer is you can already, Gemini does this.

You can already...

Gemini is actually getting better and better.

I'm sorry I didn't praise them.

That's the fifth model that's getting better and better.

But Gemini is the Google product.

The people who have really been slow were Google and now Apple, which just don't know what they're doing when it comes to AI.

Well, look at this, right?

So this is a whole section here about Glasgow.

Yeah, and it's called Rainer's Glasgow.

Poverty in the old days, as it were.

And I mean, so these are entirely fake.

Figuru looks a bit like I do when I wake up in the morning walking around.

No, I don't.

I'm not sure.

I really don't look that bad as that.

There's lots of politics in here as well.

But it just sort of makes you wonder, well, why are photographers going to exist?

Why are designers going to exist?

Why are...

Yeah, well, more than that.

I was talking to the head of one of the biggest telecoms companies in the world.

It's laid off 85% of its people in its call centers, and it's closing its stores using AI to do this from I think 15,000 down to 6,000.

They're the first to move but as that's the model you're looking at major companies laying off the majority of their stuff.

And this is the big story because within five years we could end up with 40% of the jobs in the United Kingdom disappearing.

But the main thing to take away from the sound thing before we move on final question is you've got to use these things all the time and learn their personalities.

They're like bright graduate students who make mistakes, make stuff up, bluff.

But you have to learn what they're likely to bluff on, what they're not likely to bluff on, and how to check them.

And what you must never do is what Sam's doing, which is checking them against themselves.

If you say to them, you lied, didn't you?

They either sometimes say, oh, so sorry, and then make up another lie, or they say, no, I didn't lie, right?

So you really have to check it against an external source.

Here's a question that's coming, quite good timing, coming from Jason, which is, what on earth has happened to the new European and why has it changed its name?

And are you suddenly ashamed of Europe

no the new European was started as an emotional spasm something must be done I think what it does it accepts that Brexit's happened yeah we we will continue as the new world to be very anti-Brexit calling out the lies calling out the economics you've accepted it there's no more rage rage against the dying of the light no we are raging against the dying of the light but it's a fact brexit has happened okay and added to which i think we've discovered that quite a lot of people who like the look of the new European

don't pick it up on the newsstands because they think it's just about Europe.

And in fact, it's about, we've got, you know, we write a lot about China, about, well, we cover the world.

So what's the new name of it?

The New World.

The New World.

And this is amazing.

Do you know?

It's never, ever been copyrighted.

The New World.

The New World has never been copyrighted.

Norvaya Zemlya.

Yeah.

No, Le Monde, Die Veldt.

Right.

Okay.

So

it's still going to be there.

Final question coming off Brave New World: is why do politicians always have people standing behind them in important speeches?

Is this a recent thing?

Surely it's a pretty risky strategy.

Tell us about what happened with Rachel Reed's speech.

You were trying to act it out for me just before we came on.

Well, she was making a speech in what I think was a factory, and

the backdrop was these workers.

They were all male.

Right.

But the guy immediately behind her right shoulder

sort of went viral because he was basically pulling his face a lot, not in a kind of rude way,

but just a sort of oh no,

rolling his eyes and all this.

And Keir Starmer had done one a week earlier.

He did the defense show up in Glasgow with the defense workers.

Yeah.

And there was one guy there, very tall, who noticeably, when Keir took the stage, did not clap.

Right.

Okay.

So I became rather obsessed with watching this non-clapping guy.

And then, of course, when you saw the wider shot, the other thing is that if you were behind them, both of these speeches were delivered by auto-cue.

Right.

So the other thing that happens is the people behind can see the auto-cue.

Weird.

So it sort of gets rid of the magic.

Wait, wait, Rachel Reeves's great oratory is actually written out in an auto-cue.

Wow.

Maury, when you say great oratory.

I assume she was just repeating lines she'd memorized six months ago.

I don't know if she, it's actually somebody's written a speech that she's reading.

It's incredible.

But anyway,

so in front of the Keir Starmer thing, right?

So you've got the people in the background.

And then when you had a shot from behind the whole thing, he was basically delivering the speech to like Chris Basin, Beth Rigby.

Right.

There were like three people.

There wasn't much of an audience there.

And I think that, look, the idea of having people behind you is to show you've got solidarity.

Northern Irish politicians always have a chunk of people.

But they're usually your party supporters, right?

They're your hippies.

You've got to be a bit careful.

Well, I remember Boris Johnson.

You remember he launched his 2019 election campaign at a police academy with police officers behind him one of them fainted i do remember that faded behind him so generally it doesn't go well no i thought that was bad as well using a police academy as backdrop tony once did it i remember once in um iraq in fact it was the day the andrew gilligan report on the bbc and tony was making a speech in basra

and the troops were all around him so they were behind him in front of him to the side and he did this sort of big speech thanking them and you know and it was quite quite a good speech and at the end of it there was silence and we discovered later that they'd been told yeah not to applaud right not as an insult right but as so is it not to be felt like when trump does a speech to the troops and they're all throwing their hats in the air and all that yeah you don't want to be pushed you don't get dragged into politics so we sort of totally understood that yeah i i think

maybe a real backdrop's better sometimes yeah yeah than the ship workers yeah you should check out this guy though he had such a The Rachel Reeves guy had a really expressive face.

The non-clapping guy in Govern had a very quizzical, not impressed kind of look.

I guess the anxiety is that if you don't have the people behind you, you look like a bit like you've got no mates and that you don't have anything.

I think if you'd have had a...

If you'd have had a kind of, if it's a shipyard, you know, get the shipyard in the background, get a ship in the background.

Yeah.

Backdrops don't get a lot of people.

They do look beyond the politics.

As long as it's not the Titanic, which is what the Tories tend to put behind them.

Right, well on the Titanic, I think we should call it a day.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McClarski.

Together we're the co-hosts of another Gohanger show called The Rest is Classified.

Here's that clip we mentioned earlier on.

When I look back on it now, you still see that, you know, there's plans, there's memoranda, there's notifications, there's all these things,

but they're never actually executed.

They never actually kind of pull the trigger on anything, do they?

I'm a little bit of two minds on this because I agree with you that the theme of this episode really is a series of missed opportunities to get Osama bin Laden prior to 9-11.

Yeah.

But we should also note that once Tennet and the CIA

understand that Osama bin Laden is

coming for us, in particular after the East Africa bombings, there is a push to improve our collection and our understanding of al-Qaeda pretty significantly.

I mean, there's a bunch of human sources who get recruited in this period.

There's a lot more technical collection.

Alex Station is beefed up to more than 40 people.

There's a bunch of connections with foreign partners on Al-Qaeda that hadn't existed before.

I mean, interestingly, there's a PDB, President's Daily Brief, in December, December the 4th of 1998, which is titled, quote, Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack U.S.

Aircraft and Other Attacks.

And so there's a lot of strategic warning, I think you could say, about what al-Qaeda is up to.

And yet, there's an inability, I think, to translate that into

practical efforts and operations to stop these attacks and to stop Al-Qaeda from ultimately carrying out 9-11.

If you want to hear the full episode, listen to the rest is classified wherever you get your podcasts.