399. Trump vs. Putin, How to Stop Farage, and Kashmir Explained

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

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

He's going the distance.

He was the highest-paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was queer.

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

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

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

Welcome to The Rest of Politics with me, Alistair Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart.

So, Rory, I think we should kick off very briefly just recording the fact that we're very happy that Mark Carney has been re-elected as Prime Minister after his few weeks as Prime Minister.

I I mean obviously we're totally objective and neutral on the situation.

Very neutral, very objective, but very, very glad that he's won.

And also I think that although it's not clear yet whether he's going to get a majority, probably going to be a little bit short of it.

Interestingly, the two main parties have actually got a huge chunk of the vote, which are going against the trend.

But I think if he winning and if Albanese wins in Australia next week, I think that will settle down this sense that the world is all moving in one direction.

We'll talk a lot about this

when we get on to local elections.

But you're right.

Our story last week with Australia is about fragmentation.

The story in Britain is about fragmentation.

But sometimes there's a different thing that happens.

And it happened a bit when Theresa May went against Jeremy Corbyn.

These moments where things seem to be at such a crisis that everybody ends up returning almost to the 1960s, 70s pattern and voting for the two main parties and the small parties get driven out.

So we'll talk lots about Canada as the dust settles and it becomes clear.

But today we're going to focus on Kashmir, Ukraine, and as you say the local elections so why don't you start off with one of your famous explainers on kashmir don't do what donald trump did and say that this conflict goes back 1500 years

been going on a thousand years yeah exactly because i think we're really talking about 1947 aren't we i think yeah yeah yeah absolutely so kashmia uh incredibly beautiful uh highland area on the modern India-Pakistan border.

And as you say, we won't get into the deep history, but fundamentally, by 1947, the time partition, this was a place with a majority Muslim population, but with a ruler, a Maharaja, who was a Hindu.

And he was extremely indecisive and couldn't quite decide whether he was going to ally himself with India or Pakistan.

In fact, for a moment, it looked like he wanted to be independent.

And in the end, a third of Kashmir ended up going to Pakistan and two-thirds to India, leaving a large Muslim population in India who

frequently felt that they did not want to be part of India, and leading to border clashes and real tensions between India and Pakistan.

In the 1980s, there was a serious insurgency in Kashmir against the Union government.

In the 2000s, there were a lot of uprisings.

And then fast forward to the modern day, there was a big bomb attack in 2016 and there was a big bomb attack in 2019.

And then most recently, there's been this very, very nasty attack where Indian tourists, including a couple on their wedding, traveling up with ponies to see a beautiful mountain valley, were attacked by people with guns.

And this is happening at a very dangerous time because, although we haven't focused a lot on India-Pakistan rivalry, they are two nuclear-armed powers.

Modi will be under a lot of pressure to respond and link the attack to the Pakistan government.

Minute one.

So, 26 people people killed.

And also there's a third country to throw into the mix, both in terms, I think it's the only three-way nuclear junction on the planet, because you've got China there as well.

Part of Kashmir is China control.

And India and China have had little skirmishes, well, quite big skirmishes in the past.

And generally, Pakistan tends to get the support of China.

US tends to support India.

And you're right, Modi is under massive pressure and probably welcoming that pressure to some extent because, and his his language has been very very strong he sent up one of his real tough guys to take control and the the local politicians have essentially been excluded from some of those discussions the other thing that really fascinates me about this is this thing about water and the water treaty that was signed in 1960 I think it was and there was a quote I saw from the head of the one of the heads of the World Bank Ismail Sergelden who was an Egyptian World Bank vice president and he said the wars of the next century will be fought over over water so this deal was done at a time when Pakistan's population was 46 million and it's now 240 250 India's population was 436 million and it's now 1.4 billion and 300 million people rely on their water from this this flow of water, this Indus River basin.

And the other thing I hadn't quite realized, you know this area way better than I do, most of that is coming from glaciers that, thanks to climate change, are now melting away and they've lost something like 80 tons

of

water.

So, India threatening to stop the flow of water into Pakistan.

They've threatened it before, they've never done it.

But that could, if that did happen, that's going to be even more dangerous probably than the fighting that's going on now and the skirmishes on the line of control.

I think two other things to add in.

One is, I was very surprised looking at the figures how much the relationship between Pakistan and India's economy has changed so quickly.

So in 1989, the average person in Pakistan was twice as wealthy as the average person in India and twice as wealthy as the average person in China.

So about $600 a head when China and India were on about $300 a head.

So was that a numbers thing?

What was that?

Why were they doing better?

Pakistan is basically still agrarian, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

But India's economy in 1989 had been basically shackled since the war by some very, very poor economic policy and licensed raj and corruption.

And Pakistan had been more Washington consensus, more open to the world, more trade, more investment.

From 1989 onwards, things begin to change very quickly.

China ends up by 2004 going from being half as wealthy to twice as wealthy as Pakistan.

And India is beginning to catch up.

By 2014,

India is creeping ahead and China is by now streets ahead.

If you take it to the present day, so not very long after, today, Pakistan is on $1,500.

India is on nearly $3,000, so it's nearly twice as wealthy per capita.

And China is nine times as wealthy per capita, nearly $14,000.

So Pakistan is in this very odd position where it would have felt not very long ago, even as recently as 2004, that at least on a per capita basis, it was almost India's equal.

And really the story has been that Modi is increasingly not talking about Pakistan.

And that may be helpful because there's a sense in which this attack is not quite like the October 7th attack.

October 7th, Israel, Gaza.

Yes.

It's not experienced by Indians as an existential threat to their security in quite the same way.

It's inflamed people.

There's a lot of anti-Muslim sentiments, a lot of anti-Pakistan sentiment.

But because Modi's taken the focus off Pakistan so much over the last 10 years, I don't think he's under quite as much political pressure to restore.

That's interesting because you're seeing an awful lot of Kashmiri students in particular particular being physically attacked, being hounded out of their schools and universities.

So is that right that it doesn't have the same kind of effect?

Because I was watching one of those Indian,

I don't know if you ever watch, is it NDTV?

And oh my god, they love to shout at each other at any time, at the best of times.

But this was really, it felt like on the verge of violence.

So one way in which the comparison that you're making works is that, like in Gaza, there's been a period for some years now where people have thought of Kashmir as very peaceful.

Mahmodi's had a deliberate tourism strategy there.

Absolutely.

And the numbers are quite dramatic.

The numbers have really gone up.

So he did this thing which was very controversial, which is he took away the autonomy of Kashmir.

He made it a federally administered territory, which means it's run much more directly by Delhi.

Brought in all the tourists.

And so for many Indians, they've seen it as a particularly peaceful period and people stopped thinking really about Kashmir.

So in that sense, this has been a more kind of shocking and surprising event when Indians have been lulled into the sense.

They've also, I mean, the Indian Foreign Diplomatic Service has been calling in ambassadors, high commissioners, essentially giving them a long story of how they believe that Pakistan has always been behind these kinds of attacks in the past.

Now, whether that is true or not, it kind of in this context doesn't matter because that is the narrative that has already taken hold.

And that has led to borders being closed, diplomats being kicked out of each other's countries.

And so I sort of sense that this is really, really quite tense now.

And there will be a military strike of some sort,

because that's what he did the last two times around.

And they're both nuclear powers.

And they're both in question.

And they're next to China.

And they're next to China.

So we have to watch what the military strike is.

And there are basically two extremes.

The gentler extreme, which probably wouldn't create a big conflict, is an attack on a small terrorist camp somewhere within the Kashmir zone of Pakistan.

The other extreme would be an attack against a Pakistan military facility within Pakistan proper.

And again, a big difference between whether he does a drone strike, planes, or whether he fires missiles.

If he fires missiles, nobody knows what the warhead on the missile is.

So that's a really, really dangerous thing to do.

And then on the other hand, you've got this man called General Asim Munia, who's the Pakistan Chief of the Army Staff.

These guys says that Kashmir is juggular vein.

Absolutely.

Really incendiary.

So that speech you're talking about, he's talking to expatriate Pakistanis, really whipping up this Kashmir issue.

He's a man who, unusually for the head of the army staff, came from quite a conservative Islamic background.

His father's a mullah.

He memorized the Quran.

He went to a madrasa.

He very much is on the nationalist side.

He's very much been driving, because essentially Pakistan is still controlled by the military, as we've discussed, trying to get the economy off the ground.

But as the Pakistan economy's weakened, As Pakistan's feeling nationally humiliated, there is a real risk that he can use nationalism as a reason to generate a much bigger attack against India.

So I guess people worrying about this worry the worst case scenario is India strikes too hard and aggressively, Pakistan feels forced to respond and then it takes off.

It does feel to me that this maybe it's because the Middle East is going on, Ukraine is going on, and we're going to talk about that in a minute.

It feels to me though that this is getting disproportionately little debate and coverage.

And I think that will make India feel much more emboldened.

I don't feel they feel any sense of restraint.

I mean, the European Union put out a statement calling for restraint.

Trump did that ridiculous thing on the plane about this battle's been going on for 1,500 years.

In fact, it's since 1947, essentially, this battle.

I think it's one of the reasons why we wanted to talk about it is because it just feels like this is almost going under the radar.

And much less U.S.

influencing.

And that's dangerous.

Yeah.

And as you will remember from your time in office, the U.S.

had a huge focus on Pakistan when they were in Afghanistan.

So there was this AFPAC strategy.

Pakistan received billions of dollars of assistance right the way through to Hillary Clinton, Obama.

Everybody was thinking about Pakistan.

You know, it was considered almost more than Afghanistan as the biggest existential threat.

It was where people were worried about terrorism.

They were worried about governance.

They were worried about corruption, all sort of stuff.

That's all stopped.

Since the U.S.

withdrew from Afghanistan, there's been very little focus on Pakistan, very little funds going to Pakistan.

China's also withdrawn from Pakistan, partly because it's short of cash, its economy is struggling.

So they did have these kind of $41 billion Belt and Road initiatives.

They've slowed those down.

And Trump, as you say, clearly doesn't care.

He hasn't even appointed an ambassador to India yet.

Right.

Which he just thought if India was high up his priorities, he would have done.

Yeah, so even four months ago, the U.S.

administration would have seen this as one of the greatest threats in the world.

You know, right out there with the Middle East, with North Korea, India-Pakistan would have been there because they're two nuclear-armed powers.

But Trump doesn't look like he's going to get involved.

What do you know about this group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, L-E-T?

So

this group called the Resistance Front, which is part of a faction of the LET, have claimed responsibility.

And as I understand it, I mean, historically, they are thought to be very, very close to the Pakistani intelligence services.

Do you think that is what makes the Indians feel able to say this essentially is Pakistan state sponsored terrorism?

Yeah, so the core of this is the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, which is the most senior famous bit of Pakistan military intelligence, which was actually run by Aseminia, the current chief of the army staff.

And Lashkar Taiba, Jaish Mohammed, and actually the Afghan Taliban have all had very, very strong links to this.

And this is partly to do with Pakistan believing that it needs to support these groups to give itself defense in depth against India.

It's been part of Pakistan military doctrine for a long time.

Now, the nature of those links, very, very difficult to pin down.

And obviously, Pakistan denies these links.

Very difficult to trace the link of a particular Pakistan intelligence officer to a particular attack.

Is it the case that because they gave them funding in the past or trained someone in the past who then does an attack, they're responsible for that attack?

But yes, those links into the ISI, I'm afraid, are very deep and very strong.

And if India wants to emphasize that, they definitely can.

Okay, just want to do another

happy story, Ukraine.

Yep, I have to say, I thought the picture of Trump trump and zelensky inside the vatican at the pope's funeral was pretty remarkable you had trump on the plane over doing one of his very trumpian statements where he said he's got to go to the funeral because he won the catholic vote and then he sort of gave all these numbers about how he won the catholic vote and so i was just in my usual trump rage mode about that and then about the fact he was wearing a blue suit and he was sort of fiddling with his phone and milania was you know she looked a bit appalled at the whole thing.

And then this meeting emerged in this one of the most beautiful parts of the Vatican.

Two very ordinary-looking chairs, you know, those chairs you see at conferences and weddings.

Yeah.

Two chairs like that.

A little red chair with brass around it.

And they had this one of the Vatican guys in sort of, you know, the gear, the full gear, who was minding either Zelensky or Trump.

And you could see him getting a bit flustered as to to what was going on and suddenly somebody grabs two chairs and there's Trump and Zelensky sitting head to head.

They sit in this massive empty hall on these two little wedding chairs

with no aides or nobody there, no interpreter, no note-taker, nothing.

But a photographer gets it from a distance.

Great.

Well, no, I suspect it was their own photographer.

I think the pictures I saw came out through the Ukrainians.

Just tell us how do you think this might have happened?

I mean, in your time in government, something that dramatic, you know, the US president meeting the president of Ukraine in the middle of a war in this incredible room in the Vatican with photographers around.

It does happen.

Is it just they're chatting and they say, why don't we sit down?

Or do you think the AIDS have negotiated, was it planned in advance?

Do you think it's funny?

I don't know, but there's quite a famous picture in the build-up to the Iraq war at a European summit where there's a picture.

I'm sort of hovering in the background, but Tony and Shirak are having this very, very intense.

And we should try and dig it up.

Because you can see, if you didn't know what the issue was, you can tell these are two people who are not agreeing about it.

They don't look angry, but

that happened sort of organically.

So proper spontaneous organic thing.

Yeah, basically, you know, look, we're here in the same place.

Let's kind of have this out.

Okay.

But other times, particularly when you do have these, I mean, I think I've said to you before, the most amazing funeral I ever went to was the King of Jordan.

Yeah.

Because you had, we were all held in this kind of, I don't even know what it was, this sort of holding room.

And there were about 120 world leaders there.

All of whom are networked general rooms.

Just moving around the room.

And some of them, so like Clinton would just vanish off and on his own and start talking to people.

And he's people, and where's he gone now?

And you do get an awful lot of stuff done like that.

And what I thought was interesting about this, Trump's, look, you know, we both have very, very strong views about Trump and the way that he operates, but it made me wonder whether that showdown in the Oval Office where Zelensky was bullied and intimidated by Trump, by Vance, by the lot of them, whether actually Vance was the driver of that.

Because the sense you got looking at the body language of Trump and Zelensky was of a kind of genuine conversation going on.

And the rhetoric from Trump since then, this may not last, but it has been a bit softer in Ukraine and a bit harder on Putin.

And it came 24 hours or even less after Witkov, who I, you know, the special envoy for all the things that Rubio ought to be doing, had his fourth meeting with Putin, literally looking like a fanboy and all coming out and saying it was positive, it was constructive, and da-da-da-da.

So I think sometimes, maybe I'm just being too hopeful and optimistic, but I got the sense that Zelensky seemed to be able to get through to Trump in a way that he never had done before.

Although, of course...

And of course, people were saying this was the Pope.

This was the work of the Pope.

This was his final act.

But I guess the thing we never know about Trump is, and the fear is that it depends who the last person to talk to him is.

Totally.

So we've had that stuff in his first term where Cohen, who was his tariff and trade advisor, would think that he'd had a brilliant meeting and totally convinced him.

And then two days later, somebody else got to him.

And I guess the problem is that if I got you in a less good mood, your instinct would probably be in the long run forced to choose between a personality like Putin and a personality like Zelensky.

Trump's sympathy is with the kind of Putin type, isn't it?

Yeah, well, you were talking, you were going to be seeing Shanahill later, and she said that to us that, you know, whenever he's in the room with a strong man, he feels he has to identify with a strong man.

That being said, I think Zelensky comes over as a pretty strong guy.

Yeah.

And actually, Trump said in that first meeting, didn't didn't he you're a tough guy i know you're a tough guy behaving like a tough guy and i also felt sorry for zelensky in that first meeting i know he's been criticized a great deal including in ukraine for it but remember the advice that he would have received um both from canadian trade negotiators eu trade negotiators is that trump likes strength yeah he's a bully you've got to stand up to him yeah so zelensky presumably went into that first meeting in the white house thinking

got to be strong and also the other point i think it's worth making is remember we said at the time um i think we did a sort of emergency podcast didn't we on the back of the Zelensky thing, we said at the time that I think one of the worst things about the whole American diplomatic media operation is this thing where they get the cameras in before the meeting.

What was good about this meeting, even though it was only 15 minutes long, was that

there were no journalists there to sort of throw questions because you know that if a journalist is there and throws a question at Trump, he's going to, that's where his attention goes.

And presumably Zelensky could, I don't know what's written, but presumably Zelensky could have begun that little quiet meeting apologising if he felt that was going going to help him.

Possibly, but then I think Trump would have said, I had a great meeting, he apologised for his not wearing a suit.

I doubt he would have done that.

But I think what's happening in Ukraine, it still feels to me like the Ukrainians are under huge pressure to concede an awful lot of things that they don't want to do.

And to concede, Crimea seems to me to have, forget it, then the four provinces.

I think that the sense you get is that Zelensky is up for doing a deal, but he can't afford to do a deal that is seen as a victory for Putin.

And, you know, right now, I think what the Americans are asking him to do is way over what he can be expected to do.

Well, I think we've got to about the halfway point, so we take a quick break, and then I'd like to make a little last point on the Ukraine military, and then we'll get on to local elections.

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Welcome back to The Rest of this Politics with me, Roy Schuard.

And me, Alistair Campbell.

So, Alistair, I wanted to just update people a little bit on my sense of where we are with the military situation in Ukraine and what options, as you say, Zelensky's got.

And I spent fair time yesterday talking to a number of people, including somebody I'm a real admirer of called Jack Watling from Russi, who I keep praising, who spends a lot of time, about half his time, in Ukraine, a lot of time in the US.

He's also a very good writer.

He's good.

He's really good.

One of the things I think that we need to look at is that in predicting, and we're about to put out this leading interview with Sir Alex Younger.

And

it's going to be great and really encourage people to talk to him, former head of SIS.

MI6, I think most of our listeners are.

MI6.

Sir Alex, you'll find, is more on the optimistic side in a way about Ukraine, because he's saying that Russia has really been through the meat grinder, that it'll be very difficult for Russia to make advances, and that it will be four or five years before Russia will be in any position to threaten another European country.

And that means that if Europe gets its skates on and if Britain invests properly in defence and Germany invests properly in defence and we really sort ourselves out, we should be able to contain Putin without US.

Big ifs in there.

A lot of big ifs.

A lot of big ifs, which we'll get into a second.

So these are the big ifs I wanted to present you with.

Number one,

we can talk about the current military situation.

The current military situation is that Russia is losing a lot of troops, struggling to make much advance.

Ukraine is currently losing fewer troops per day, but

going into next year, the question is who's going to be better at recruiting?

Is Ukraine going to be able to mobilize soldiers recruiting or Russia?

And that gets the question of Putin's will and the Russian people's will, and the same with Ukraine.

Putin's will is more important in this than the Russian people's will.

Whereas I think Zelensky probably does have to take the people's will more into account.

And the question of Putin's will is going to be critical because the narrative that he'll be getting at the moment is, yep, you're suffering a lot of losses, but in the end, momentum's on your side.

Keep going, keep pushing, this will be fine.

So the message he'll be getting, Putin will be getting at the moment from his intelligence people is, yeah, okay, you're suffering a lot of losses.

It's costly, but don't worry, your leverage is increasing over time.

Now, there are a lot of unknowns here.

What happens if the oil price collapses, for example, which would have a real effect on the Russian economy?

What's Trump going to do, which is the stuff that you're going to talk about?

And I I think that's probably pretty central.

And then the final question is, in the situation in which Trump cuts off support, how much trouble is Ukraine in?

How much does Ukraine depend on US weapons?

How much does it depend on European security?

How much can it do on its own?

Can I start you, though, on your question of where you think, stepping aside from that moment in the Vatican, what's your general sense of the trend on Putin and Trump?

Well, it's very hard to read.

If I was just relying upon that meeting with Witkoff and what Trump said they're after and what Trump's people say they're after, I would have thought the dial has not moved at all and that he's very much in the pushing Zelensky into a deal that he knows Zelensky doesn't want to do, but in the end he thinks that between them they can sort of muscle him into doing it.

That's why I thought it was so interesting that he had this, I don't think I'd ever heard this phrase.

He said he was being, he was worried he was being tapped along, which was a kind of interesting...

choice of words, but I think what he meant was Putin's kind of maybe trying to take me for a bit of a fool.

And he hates being a sucker, doesn't he?

He hates people thinking that he's weak.

And I think that one of the attacks that's been landing through a lot of these Democrats, I mean, people say the Democrats haven't got their act together, and I agree with that.

But one of the lines of attack that keeps going in is that actually he's weak.

And he's weak to Putin and he's weak in the face of China and he's on the tariffs and so forth.

So my sense is that something did change.

But as you said earlier, he's so mercurial, it can just as quickly change back again.

The point I worry about in relation to, you said, you know, American, what happens without American support and what happens if Europe doesn't step up?

I think Europe, right through this whole thing, has

talked a better game than it's delivered.

I think Kierstarmer has done a very good job with Macron in lead, and I think Merz is going to be very important in this as well.

But I still, if I was Zelensky, I think I would be sitting there thinking, I'm not 100% convinced that if the Americans do pull the plug, that actually I will have the support that I need to keep this thing going, even though they have completely changed their defense industry and their manufacturing capacity and everything else.

When we discussed this issue a few weeks ago, we talked about a kind of different options for Ukraine.

And we had on the most optimistic side from the Ukrainian point of view, full US support, US security guarantees, US money, US kit.

And then on the most pessimistic side, we had US withdraws, no money, little US kit, and Europe doesn't really step out.

Ukraine's on its own.

Yeah, the coalition of the willing becomes a rhetorical device rather than something that really means something.

And situations changed in the last few weeks.

We can now see more clearly that obviously there's not going to be US money.

We know that for sure.

It's now clear that Zelensky is not going to get all the American kit, so America has now made it clear it's not going to supply any more Patriot missiles, which is a real problem for air defense, keeping back those Russian planes.

It's also becoming clear, we know now, that Macron was completely wrong.

There will be no US security guarantees for Ukraine.

So you remember when Macron went to the White House, he came out saying, you know, I've been talking to Trump.

Trump has made it absolutely clear again and again.

He may be mercurial, but one thing he's been clear about, there will be no U.S.

security guarantees for Ukraine.

So the best case scenario we're left with, I think, is that the U.S.

continues to provide security guarantees for NATO.

I mean, it's extraordinary that we're saying that's our best case scenario, right?

So that Europe is confident that mainland Europe would be protected by the United States, and therefore Europe can take some risk and move support forward to Ukraine.

If they don't get that, they're going to think, well, we can't actually move brigades, training, support, equipment forward to Ukraine because we're actually going to be vulnerable from a Russian attack on the rest of Europe.

So if the US will really guarantee NATO, Europe can move some support forward.

But there's still problems.

And

the biggest problem probably is in the missiles which are currently being fired.

And people like Jack Willing are really interesting in this because, of course, he has to be careful because he's having classified conversations.

So what he would keep saying is, Rory, honestly, you and Alistair cannot know exactly what's happening because we're not going to tell you exactly what's in the European logistical supply or what's in the Ukrainian stockpiles.

But at the middle of this is this thing called guided multiple launch rocket systems.

And these are things which are high mars, for example.

These are things manufactured in the US or with a lot lot of u.s ownership over them and they're governed by u.s on arms exports and there is a strong possibility that trump may stop supplying them either because he doesn't want the war to continue because he's got that gut instinct that you've talked about in the past which is he wants to lift sanctions on russia do business with russia and claim peace or because other people in his administration like Waltz, his national security advisor, are saying we need this kit in Asia Pacific to take on China.

And is this the stuff that the Germans have got?

Right, so German Taurus could do this.

Right.

But again, there's a lot of questions about will German give permission for it?

And how's the data link going to work?

Because some of this stuff is connected to American satellites.

And where is the logistics supply line and who's going to provide the training?

So there's a lot of questions about getting Taurus into the gap.

If you can't get these kinds of things operating, what they're currently doing is keeping Russia well back from the front line.

I mean, these missiles are making sure that Russia's logistics, supplies, planes are all...

And presumably Putin's waiting so that that protective shield, as it were, goes, and he thinks he's full on.

Because the one thing Alex Younger says is Putin has never ever changed his core objective, which is basically to wipe out Ukraine, to take the whole of Ukraine.

Absolutely.

So that will be the moment people really begin to worry.

And that's the moment at which I guess nobody can really predict because there are so many ifs.

Will Putin blink?

Probably not.

Will Trump let Russia off the hook?

My suspicion is he probably will in the end.

Certainly has the capacity to, yeah.

Will Europe step up?

Will Europe step up?

Now

to you on that to finish.

Well,

I think they want to, and I think they want to talk about doing so as part of the pressure that goes on Putin.

But I think if you think about some of the economic considerations of the sorts of sums that we're talking about, I think a lot will depend on Mertz once he comes in.

Interestingly, Schultz went to the funeral, the Vatican, sitting next to Prince William, not Mertz.

But I think a lot will depend on Mertz.

And Pistorius is a useful

keeping Pistorius as defence minister, definitely the right thing to do.

I think we said that a few weeks ago.

We hoped that he would do that.

So I think that that sort of starmer, macron, Mertz, Tusk alliance is going to decide and dictate along with...

Ursula von der Leyen who keeps plugging away with all the rest.

My final point, there was a fascinating revelation from Kim Jong-un.

It's amazing how news comes out.

North Korean state media reported that he's ordered the building of a monument for soldiers who have been killed fighting for Russia in the war against Ukraine.

And this is the first time they've actually admitted that there are North Korean troops there.

And it turns out that the estimate is that they've sent something like 14,000 troops there and 3,000 to 4,000 have been killed.

So that you presumably there we are literally talking about Callan Fodder.

Yeah.

That they're being put into what Alex called the meat grinder.

But it was, I mean, what a wavelet to come out.

I mean, I'm sure they've been denying that North Koreans are there and suddenly there's a monument

to it.

So shall we move to the UK?

So local elections coming.

And the big story seems to be that people are expecting Reform Nigel Farage's party to do very well, that the Tories are likely to have a pretty miserable time.

And Labour's likely also to be a bit disappointed.

Is that right?

I think so.

I think I was talking to people over the weekend who've been campaigning in some of the mayoral, we've got half a dozen mayoral contests going on, and the big winner seems to be a sort of disgruntled apathy.

And what the reform have done is really kind of, they really have gone out to a base and they've managed to mobilise probably more people than the other two part, the main parties will be able to do.

It's actually a very difficult picture to predict because it's relatively, some of the councils aren't, because of local government reorganisation, they're not having elections.

There's none in Scotland, there's none in Wales, none in London, none in most of the big cities.

So it's going to be, you're not going to get that big a picture.

But the picture that I think will emerge, one is of low turnout brackets, which is why we should have compulsory voting for local as well as national elections, in my view.

And David Gork, who I saw yesterday, was saying that he's seen very, very few posters around it.

So he lives in his old constitution.

I think posters used to do local elections a lot.

He's very struck there's so little visibility.

Yeah, but I think posters have sort of vanished because so much of this stuff is going on online and under the radar.

But I think a lot of the councils are going to end up as no overall control.

That is where you're going to have this tension at a local level as to whether the Tories go into coalition with reform.

Because a lot of these councils,

some Tory councils are going to go to no overall control.

Some of these mayoralties are going to be won by reform.

Got no doubt about that.

And that, you see, I felt at the last election, even though Farage only got five MPs, now four, there's no doubt that has helped reform.

And if they now get a couple of senior executive positions, one of which will be the ridiculous middle finger giving Andrea Jenkins, but that then gives them the next level of that platform.

But my big worry from Labour's perspective about these elections is how they react to them.

I really worry that they're going to misread what's going on here.

And I was talking to somebody the other day, I thought, put this really well, who shares my concern.

He said, the problem I get, the sense of Labour at the moment, is that we're trying to ape reform where they're strong and ignore them where they're weak.

So pick up the Daily Telegraph yesterday, and it was starma to crack down on migrants after the local elections.

That's the aping part.

Where I think reform are unbelievably weak is on the economy.

It's on Putin, it's on Trump, it's on Brexit, and these are places where Labour just aren't going for them.

You're completely right.

I want to get into the sort of bigger stuff for a second, but on your point there, the narrative that we've got coming out of Canada and Australia is that right-wing populists

do badly in an age of Trump because everybody's so embarrassed and appalled by Trump.

And of course, all these right-wing populists have expressed their adoration of Trump, and no one more than Nigel Farage, who, of course, was always taking cheesy photographs with him,

all that sort of stuff.

We owe this to Steve Bannon and all that stuff.

So what on earth is going on in Britain that in these other elections, Trump has been completely toxic for Polyev and Dutton, but in this Anglo country, Trump is not proving toxic for Farage.

Is it just that people have not been good enough at pinning it on him?

I don't think they've really tried to pin it on him.

I mean, look, the way you have to hand it to Farage as a communicator and as a campaigner, he bounces around from one issue to the next.

But here's another thing, right?

He's big on net zero.

Okay.

Now, I was sent this thing yesterday.

Not in the way that you're big on not in the way that you and I would be big on net nazero.

He he basically, and the telegraph today, the front page of the telegraph today, net zero blamed for Spain blackout.

Blamed by who?

The headline writer of the Daily Telegraph.

But so somebody, this group called Persuasion UK, they've been doing really deep polling on what they call reform-curious curious labor voters.

So these are people who've voted Labour, who are sort of vaguely thinking they might vote reform.

And they've talked to thousands of them, thousands, and got some really, really interesting findings.

And one of them is that it's basically a myth that we can call reforms voters Labour's lost voters.

Three quarters of them have never voted Labour ever.

in a single election ever.

Where Labour, I think, is at risk of making a terrible mistake on this.

So 11% of the 2024 Labour vote is reform curious, thinking, maybe reform.

The numbers for the Greens and Lib Dems, Green, 29%, Lib Dem, 41%.

In other words,

because Farage is so good at driving the media narrative, I think there's a real danger that Labour buy into that narrative and say, we have to be more like Farage.

No, we have to take Farage apart and be less like Farage and give the country a positive, forward-looking narrative that we can all buy into.

I also think that sort of partly answer my own question on Farage and Trump.

I don't think British voters see Farage as a pseudo-Trump in a way that they might Poly Airfront Dutton, because he actually hasn't been sort of fierce about departments of government efficiency.

And in part because he's seen as this kind of jovial joker.

He's able to avoid what Polyerford Dutton have, which is that slight sort of right-wing, aggressive, I'm going to rip the whole thing up.

Oh, I don't agree.

I absolutely think Farage has got so much on the record that you could absolutely do the same job.

Just take the thing about Putin, right?

I did that interview years and years and years ago for GQ with Farage, where he talked about he admired Putin, okay?

Now,

that should be hung round his neck everywhere he goes.

Brexit should be hung round his neck everywhere he goes.

He's never asked about Brexit.

Now, I could argue, and I do, that that's a failure of our media, but it's also a failure of campaigning.

Yeah, of the political parties.

And you're quite right, the Australians and Canadians very much played images of Trump against those right-wing opponents.

Let me pick up another point that you made, which I think is really interesting, which is fragmentation.

Because what these polls actually-yeah, we're in five-party politics.

Yeah, I mean, Sam Friedman, West of England, five parties were within a few percent of each other.

So I think it was Labour was at sort of 23%, Conservatives at 21%, all the others, Greens, high teens yeah and that means fragmentation that means small majorities that means coalitions as you say that means a much more volatile type of politics it means much less experience in local councils and parliaments because things flip over much more quickly yeah and also means that we may need to start thinking seriously about our electoral system so one of the sad things is that we used to have a situation for these mayoral votes in London, for example, where a parliamentary vote.

Yeah.

Labour could have changed that.

I know.

Johnson did that

to help himself.

Yeah.

And Labour could have changed it.

Very simply.

And they're going to lose one of these mayoral elections, they're going to lose because they didn't change it.

It was so weird.

It was so weird.

And of course, I could see the problem.

And the problem was that when I was running to be the London mayor, there was a moment where I could sense that Sadiq Khan thought, okay, there's a very narrow chance that Rory could do this because he could do a macron trick.

He could come second to me in the first round.

I don't make 50%, and then he could pick up the other votes to come through.

So, actually, Labour nodded through that Tory change.

And then, the second thing is: what's happening with local democracy?

Because, as an MP, so many of the issues that mattered to constituents are local.

Very local.

What do Cumbrians really care about?

They're really caring about local housing, local schools, local roads.

All this stuff is very, very local council based on the business.

This is why I think two things to watch on the vote.

One is this will probably be the first election where the two big parties are below a half.

Okay?

That's already happened in the polls and we're going to see that then in the turnout.

But the turnout is going to be incredibly low.

And I think, again, that is because

we haven't built enough of the argument, the connection between voting and delivery.

And that's what feeds this kind of populist message.

you know it's Farage's message he'd been going around the country basically saying he deletes the place and just says Oxfordshire is broken you know Staffordshire is broken you know Burnley is broken and he goes there he has no solutions whatsoever none yeah but I never see him properly taken apart by people over these arguments over the politicians and of course the other thing with Brexit and Trump yeah I understand why if you're the Labour government right now and you're trying to avoid having to choose between America and Europe, you're trying to get something out of Trump, you're trying to, so Kierstarmer's trying to sort of keep and maintain a relationship, you maybe think, well, I, Kierstarmer, I, David Lamy, don't want to have a Farage strategy that's about linking him to Trump being a negative.

But it doesn't mean you can't have campaigns doing that by other people.

And likewise with Brexit, if you don't want to talk about Brexit, then don't be surprised if people forget that Nigel Farage was a big architect of this disaster that's taken, 5% out of the economy.

So my final thought, we'll limp out of this election with a low turnout, a fragmented vote, far more votes going to almost unknown reformed candidates who are going to come into these quite responsible positions in local government, big budgets, some have got £750 million a year budgets, responsible for the things that really change individual lives.

And it'll just be seen as part of the national game.

Part of the national game.

And we see in France, France, you know, how a mayor of Bordeaux can really turn Bordeaux around.

In the United States, a great governor can transform a state.

Switzerland, where I've, you know, been a lot in the last few months, you can see local democracy really operating well.

When is Britain going to crack the fact that politics is local, our interests are local?

It doesn't mean it's one size fits all, but in Cumbria, for example, I saw again and again that if you were trying to sort out how to deliver housing or a renewable energy project, if you involved the community from the beginning, made them feel ownership, you'd actually get the stuff built.

It's actually worth speeding up infrastructure, not delaying it.

So where is the radical thinking about how to make democracy work?

I mean, one of the reasons why Britain feels broken is people are so distanced from it.

If the only thing they see is a tweet or a Facebook post, as opposed to what we got at our best in Cumbria, which is saying, okay, look, there's something you're really angry with, affordable housing.

We're sitting down in Crosby Ravensworth.

Here's a brownfield site.

Here's David, who's going to lead the plan.

This is where the money's coming from.

This is what our financial options are.

Suddenly, everybody has a much more positive view.

It's no longer, this is rubbish.

There's no housing for our kids.

There's no growth.

They see the houses going up and they're involved in designing it.

Well, the charity event we were at last night, Kim McGuinness, who's Labour mayor up in the Northeast, was there and she was saying, and I completely agree with this, you know, the answer should be more devolution.

Do you remember before the election, when we were looking at lots of different polling, the figures who were emerging as more popular than the national politicians were the people like Andy Burnham, Tracy Braben.

Andy Street, yeah.

Exactly.

Even though he lost.

So that sort of sense of giving people...

local regional leadership has to be part of this and look one of the things I've been disappointed about is there's not been that sense of kind of civic democratic renewal and I know even as I say that there'll be people in the kind of labor strategy side of things saying you know what do we want Civic, democratic, real Britain.

I get that, but it, but actually, fixing our politics has got to be part of taking on the populist virus.

Anyway, there we are.

I think the other thing to remember, of course, is a by-election as well, because of Mike Amesbury deciding to connect with the electorate in a very

good Prescott fashion, not at all, in a bad fashion, and going to jail.

So Labour were, I think, over half of the vote, and reform was second way, way, way, way back.

Now, I've been talking to people who've been up there.

They say that reform will only get in if the turnout is very, very low.

But again, we're talking about a time when people aren't turning out to vote.

And that is usually a sign of, rather than anger, it's a sort of sense of disgruntlement and disappointment.

And

I was saying last night at the event we did, I was saying that that, in the end, that can only be met by a real sense of purpose and mission about what the government is for, what the government is trying to do, and tying that together in a narrative that at the moment, I think, is very, very disparate.

And the one thing, talking to people who've been out on the, you know, knocking on the famous doorstep, the one thing that keeps coming up again and again and again and again is, have a guess, cost of living?

No, something more specific.

Winter fuel.

keeps coming up as and and if you go back that was the first big thing the government government did in a way and no party no party seems to be offering return of winter fuel allowance or none of the other

parties are basically just letting labor conservatives labor or reform reform will offer whatever they say to get them over the next 20 seconds in the conversation but then the other thing that is now coming through in a similar way is the the the welfare changes the benefit changes and the reason why reform are hammering the immigration asylum message so strongly isn't just because that's what they've always done it's because they can they feel they can make that link you know oh well you know the asylum seekers they're getting everything that they want which is not true but it's what they say and meanwhile you can't get your winter fuel payment and you and your your mum who's struggling to walk up the stairs anymore she can't get her pip

so that is and i and i think these things and i know how difficult it is and i know how hard the economic conditions are but at some stage i think they're going to have to look at that because the the the Winter Fuel payment, it's kind of gone off the agenda in terms of the media debate.

But you talk to anybody who's out there at the moment, that is coming through again and again and again and again.

And then final one, of course, is immigration, which is

where we're yet to see them learning the lessons from Denmark.

So Metter Fredriksen is a very interesting example of a left-wing politician who has done a very strident policy on control of immigration.

Netherlands is also interesting, trying to set targets on numbers.

Germany is in a really interesting conversation with Friedrich Metz.

And my sense is that Kier Stamer and Yvette Cooper haven't quite found their feet because they're still fighting the Rwanda battle of the past.

They need to be serious about

safe third country.

They need to be learning from what Denmark and the more thoughtful legal approaches that Germany is considering.

But this Persuasion UK argument, it's very, very long.

I haven't even got to the end of it yet.

It's about 75, 76 pages, really detailed stuff.

But they essentially are saying, for example, net zero.

These reform curious voters, they are not buying Farage's line on net zero.

They know that the planet is kind of burning and they want the government to do something about it.

Net zero actually emerges as one of the most popular,

the government's approach on net zero emerges as one of the most popular policies.

So I think that in a sense, we're back to the thing about, you know, social conservatism on some issues, you know, patriotism and the armed forces, and your friends, the monarchy, all that stuff, fine.

But then don't assume that just because the media narrative is driving this sort of conservatism

on some of the big culture issues,

don't assume that the country doesn't know what needs to be done and kind of wants it done.

And that goes as well for some of the taxation issues.

Good.

Thank you very much.

Speak tomorrow with question time.

See you tomorrow.