453. Trump’s Far Right Allies in Germany: Is History Repeating Itself?

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Welcome to the Rest of This Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

And me, Alistair Campbell.

And now we're doing a special bonus episode where we are talking to Gerald Knaus.

Really keen listeners will have noticed that I spend a lot of time praising Gerald Knaus and quoting him.

So it's actually rather nice to hear from the man himself.

He's a very unusual individual.

He's somebody who has been right at the heart of thinking about policy, particularly European politics, for well over 30 years, right out on the front line, living in Turkey, living in Bulgaria, living in the Balkans.

And today we're talking to him about the rise of the far-right in Europe.

And the reason for that is that he came into the studio to talk to us about immigration, on which he is something of an expert, not least because

he was one of the architects of the EU-Turkey deal.

And we were talking to him as part of a members-only episode that we're doing on immigration, which we talked to Gerald, and we also talked to Zoe Gardner, who is a British campaigner on human rights and immigration.

That will be coming out to members next Friday.

But while he was here, it was clear to both Rory and me that he's Austrian, but he lives in Berlin, and he has some very, very interesting ideas and interesting insights about why the AFD has been on the rise in Germany and why it's so dangerous, not just to Germany, but to the rest of Europe.

He's a fascinating guy.

He's also,

he's also, he is, get this, he's written a Spiegel bestseller on immigration policy.

Now, that takes some doing, I've got to say.

And I've read it and it is very, very good.

So he's an interesting guy.

And I hope you enjoy listening to him.

To sign up for the members' package, our deep dive on immigration, or indeed for Alistair's forthcoming mini-series on Rupert Murder, called a catch-up on the mini-series we just did on JD Vance, go to theresterspolitics.com and you can sign up for a free trial as a member.

And meanwhile, here's Garold Knauss.

Can we just begin, please, with a little account of the AFD in Germany, who they are, where they come from, and why we should be interested in them?

Yes, well, thanks for the invitation and for these kind words.

I'm based in Berlin at the moment.

We are as a think tank working on a lot of countries in Europe and we follow, of course, what happened in the US.

And what we see, and I think people still underestimate it, is probably the most dangerous moment for the Western European order, not just because of the threats from Putin, but because of the political developments in our democracies since 1949.

I mean, 1949 institutions were created, Germany was part of them, West Germany then, under Konrad Adenauer, NATO, European integration, the first European Community, the Council of Europe, European Convention on Human Rights.

The IFD, as a party created only in 2013,

and since 2015, a party captured by the most extreme far-right elements, is promising to undo that whole order.

It's the anti-Adenauer party.

It's the anti-Germany integrated into the Democratic Liberal West Party.

And to understand them, perhaps it's useful to go back to basically one person who symbolizes this, but it's not just a symbol.

He has been electorally the most successful IFD politician at the local level in the Land of Thuringia, Turingen,

Björn Hoeke,

who's really been an extremist, far-right, his whole life.

He's from Hessen and he went to East Germany, to Thuringia.

And he and the thinkers around him have discovered since 2013 on that there is this new intellectual universe of the identitarians.

The people who say and remember the identitarian movement in France, Génération Identitaire in 2012, started on a mosque in Poitiers.

It was a construction of a mosque in the center of France with a banner and with a war declaration saying we want to expel Muslims.

People tiptoe around this.

You know, the far right is extremist and xenophobic, anti-liberal.

At the core of their emotional appeal is the promise to expel Muslims from Europe.

And Poitiers was chosen because Charlemagne fought his battle against the Moors.

in the 8th century.

And Hoke

and the people around him then started in 2013 with a little institute in Saxon-Anheit.

All of them have been found to be extremists by the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution since, and seminars and workshops with identitarians from Austria and Germany, sort of an NGO, to develop a program how these ideas could become a platform for a national party.

And Hoeke won the elections last year in Thuringia.

He is now in the opinion polls in the national, not opinion polls, election, national elections in Germany this year in February

he won IFD won 39% in Turing here in the latest opinion polls in Sachsen Anhalt another state where they will have local elections next year Land elections they are also at 39% you know they might if this continues have an absolute majority they are number one in each of the five lenders of East Germany and in some national polls they are head to head or slightly ahead of the Christian Democrats in number one so I think when we talk about the the far right we get sometimes get complaints from our listeners that we sort of lump anybody who's sort of to the right of Rory Stewart conservatism.

We're talking far right.

On a scale,

let's take Trump,

Maloney,

Orban, AFD,

Le Pen, Farage.

Where are they on a scale?

I think they will be closest to Trump.

I mean, Hoke.

I mean, he's written a book.

Let me just say that his own party tried twice to expel him when there was still this battle over what direction the party should go.

Recently, the party leader, Alice Weidel, said that in an IFD government, she would make him a minister.

You know, it's now Herke's AFD.

I don't think it's useful to talk about the IFD anymore in abstract because it's now Hercues AFD.

That's an identitarian party.

And he wrote a book where he said Germany could afford to lose 20 million people.

You know, the concept of emigration in the election campaigns last year, the poster said, let's get rid of 1.4 million people.

That obviously signaled it's not about rejected asylum seekers.

You don't have that number.

It's about people who have a legal status.

Herke even talks about citizens who haven't integrated.

There are thinkers of the identitarians who organize seminars with national figures of the party, the IFD, where they discuss a proposal in a book that was published, which says we need to have an institute that measures how much people are

attuned to the national culture and then makes the calculation that in Germany there are 400,000 people of Afghan origin, some of them now citizens of Germany, and Germany really should only have a few thousand.

The others need to be made to leave.

And when I hear people, parties say we will make a certain group leave, I'm always reminded of Szechel and the far right in former Yugoslavia having all these ideas before the war.

saying we should just peacefully separate the groups.

Szeschel then led a paramilitary force and we saw ethnic cleansing.

So what is clear to me is not the voters of the IFD, they are not all in favor of ethnic cleansing, you know, just like not all the Nazis were in favor when they voted for them of, you know, concentration camps.

But what they are supporting is a party with a leadership that openly talks about, and Herke spells it out, millions of people being made so uncomfortable, which means violating their human rights, that they will leave or be expelled.

And in addition, that's why I talked about the

anti-Adenauer bit, Herke also says this new Germany should, its closest ally should be Putin.

It should get out of the EU.

It's a Dexit party.

He says for Europe to live, the EU has to die.

You can't be any more clear.

No human rights treaties.

Of course, Germany should be a fortress.

And this Germany would be a threat to every neighbor.

You know, if I'm a Dane or if I'm in Luxembourg, invaded two times in the history of the 20th century by the Germans, the great thing, the fantastic thing about European integration is Luxembourg stopped fearing Germany, and Poland stopped fearing Germany and Denmark stopped fearing Germany for good reason.

Everybody's happy Germany is rearming.

Everybody's happy that the biggest economy, the biggest military.

But if you see the RFD come close to power, the neighbors have reason to fear it.

That's the problem.

We're talking not long after Tommy Robinson held a demonstration of 130,000 people in Trafalgar Square, which brought in other voices.

Brought in Erg Zemour was speaking, Elon Musk was speaking.

Give us a sense of the international coalition around this, because the IFD is not just a sort of solitary party in one country, this is a bigger global issue.

Well, listen, Germany, because it's the biggest economy, because it's the biggest military in Europe now, and will be even bigger because it's going to spend huge amounts on its military, because it's the most populous country, is the pillar today of the post nineteen forty nine European order.

You can't imagine Schengen, the Euro, the EU, the Council of Europe, and even European NATO without Germany.

The Russians know that.

So, they are supporting parties in Germany that will break this up.

MAGA knows that.

So, you have Elon Musk openly call on people to vote for the IFD.

And J.D.

Vance?

J.D.

Vance came to Munich.

Well, not just the FAD.

I mean, he came to Munich.

He met Metz.

It was not a warm meeting.

And then he met the leader of the IFD for longer in Munich.

Having told the Munich's Eurosur Conference that the biggest threat to Europe was not Putin, it was free speech.

Yes, and by free speech what he meant is the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution monitoring the IFD and saying that by promising that certain groups should be put under pressure to leave, remigration, that concept, it is violating the Constitution.

This is also often misunderstood abroad.

And what J.D.

Vance has been saying and others, even the attempts to look at the IFD as a threat are a violation of their right.

Tell us about the connection between Orban, the people around Trump, the IFD, Tommy Robinson.

I mean, what is this whole world?

The starting point, really, intellectual starting point, on the one hand is the very radicalism of the identitarians, the Génération Identitaire and their books.

These publishers, which are close to Hoke, started translating French extremist literature into German.

They take the battle of ideas seriously, and the liberals don't.

The liberals are not telling good stories the last 10 years.

They are going back to the past.

They are telling stories.

They translate novels.

Novels in which the French president has to reflect on whether he should kill a million people who come with boats from India.

You know, that kind of outrageous extremist literature is being translated there seminars.

In addition to the battle of ideas, there is Viktor Orban who made a speech in September 2015.

I mean, he's the longest-serving prime minister of an EU member state today.

He's been very successful electorally.

And Hungary is still a country where you can hope that the opposition wins the next election.

You know, there are no political prisoners in Hungary.

It's very important to be very concrete and realistic.

He's not fully.

He's not Putin.

He's not Lukashenko.

You know, he's not Georgia.

Because, of course, he knows Hungary gets a huge amount of money from the EU.

Its economy depends a lot on German investment, in the car industry.

It's a small country in the middle of Europe.

But where he's been extremely radical is in the speeches he makes and in creating an infrastructure of ideas, institutes, congresses.

And already in 2015, he gave a speech on the 4th of September 2015 where he said that the fear of refugees will expose the hypocrisy of liberals.

By liberals, he means Christian Democrats, conservatives, centrists, anyone, social democrats, of course.

The fear of migrants and Muslim migrants.

I mean, he's explicit.

He says he doesn't want a Muslim community in Hungary.

And most publics, he predicted, will follow him.

And governments which don't will be voted out of power.

So in 2015 he expected within three or four years, because of the huge number of refugees then crossing Europe, going to Germany and Austria and Sweden, within three or four years there'd be far-right governments everywhere, in France, in Germany.

He was wrong then.

Angela Merkel reduced the number of refugees in 2016 with the agreement with Turkey.

She won elections.

Macron won elections.

We didn't see the sweeping of the far-right.

But he might be right now.

Because the last few years we had a new massive arrival of refugees, a second wave putin is trying everything he managed to get four and a half million ukrainians who came legally into the eu but who get refugee status he wants 10 million to come to europe to overwhelm our systems Ukrainians resist.

You know, every Ukrainian could come to Germany.

There's no, it's open.

They don't need a visa.

They don't.

They stay in their cities.

They fight for their cities.

But Putin tries to destroy the infrastructure because he knows, and when I was in Moscow as a fellow at the Karning Institute in 2015, I saw these people close to the Kremlin, their eyes gleaming at the idea, we create refugee crises in Aleppo, or now in Ukraine, they come to Germany, Austria, and then our friends benefit politically.

So Orban then said this refugee crisis will create an opportunity, a cultural revolution was the word he used, an illiberal cultural revolution.

And our friends will win power.

And that is, unfortunately, while he might lose elections next year in Hungary, because he's mismanaged Hungary badly and there's a lot of corruption, allegations, I say, I have to say.

While he might lose power, his ideas and his vision of Germany, France, the UK and Austria and other countries, the far at winning elections is now more realistic than ever.

And it's a real threat.

We should say to listeners and viewers, by the way, that we're going to be putting out for members a longer interview that we've done with Gerald and also another immigration expert and campaigner, Zoe Garden.

We're going to be putting that out shortly.

You obviously think that the AFD could win overall power in Germany.

You presumably think that it's entirely possible that the Rassemblement Nationale could win in France.

We have a situation in the UK where a year ago the Labour government was elected with a three-figure landslide.

And I was at a dinner last night where I asked the audience who they thought was going to win the next election.

And a good 40%,

said Nigel Farage, who currently has one of five MPs in the parliament.

How realistic would you take that from your sort of studying of the way the far-right operates and the way that our democracies are weakening?

My great inspiration as a European hero of the last few decades is Jean-Monnet.

And he always used to say, I'm not an optimist, but I'm determined.

I think that's what our leaders and liberals in society need to be.

Not optimistic, but also not give in to this culture pessimismus, this cultural pessimism that sees the far-right winning by default.

We need to be determined.

We need to see the threat.

We've had an unusual run in Western Europe since 1950 because of the institutions we put in place then.

NATO, so we were not attacked.

It deterred attacks on the members.

The European Integration and the Council of Europe, because it laid a basis with human rights as a common foundation we share.

And a big market, which Britain did a lot after it joined the European Economic Community to expand, that created a basis for not just prosperity, but also trust.

So Luxembourg and Belgium no longer fear Germany.

Poland no longer fears Germany because they are in these institutions, they work together, and this creates trust.

This was the vision of Germany.

And he fought for this, having seen two world wars.

So we don't need facile optimism, but we need to recognize what we are about to lose, because these institutions are now at risk.

If Britain leaves the European Convention of Human Rights and the Council of Europe, I think the Council of Europe will collapse.

I mean, it was the founding member.

It wrote the convention.

Others will leave too.

So we will lose the idea of a common basis with a court and the statutes that tie European democracies together.

America is already threatening the survival of NATO.

So Europeans in NATO need to now mobilize their own ability to deter Russia not attacking the Baltic states, for example.

The European integration project, which is actually, if you ask people, it's more popular now than 25 years ago.

But the popularity

is very passive.

It's lukewarm.

You know, you're in favor of it, because it's a good thing.

but if the IFT wins, if anti-EU parties win power, they can very quickly sabotage and destroy it from within, because the EU is relying on governments voluntarily, because there's no force in Brussels that can go into Hungary and force Hungary to implement the law, or of course nobody can force Germany, it's governments allowing their own courts to apply EU law, it's governments

themselves voluntarily abiding by the rules they make together.

And so if a big country like Germany suddenly has a government that says, like Orban has said in Hungary, I will no longer implement EU law, sue me, it breaks down.

So the three institutions, the pillars of our post-war order, Council of Europe, NATO, and European integration, are all at risk.

And I think we've forgotten what happened, really happened after the end of the Cold War.

In 1990, Great moment of enthusiasm, famously in Paris, everybody meets, Charter of Paris, from now on it will be peace and everybody will agree on the basis of human rights.

And

the reality was from 1990 to the beginning of the big war in Ukraine now, the attack on Kiev, 2022, we've had 10 million displaced Europeans in wars in Europe.

We've had 300,000 Europeans killed in wars.

Every country which was not in the EU or in NATO has had in those periods since 1990, war, civil war, or massive repression.

Caucasus, the Balkans, Ukraine, massive repression in Belarus, collapse of the state in Albania in the 90s, now it's in NATO.

If you're not in the EU and in NATO, Europe looks like it looked in its most darkest past.

If the EU and NATO collapse or are eroded from within, there's nothing in human nature that says Europeans will not fall back to where they were in the past.

So, what we need to defend, and this is where I think we need more than lukewarm support for these institutions.

We need to defend the idea that what Churchill and Adenauer and Monnet and Schumann and Bevin, what they created in the late 40s, early 50s, as a result of lessons learned in two terrible wars, it worked.

It worked for a reason.

People need to understand how it worked and we need to defend it against threats from within and threats from outside.

And the RFD, because everybody sees those who want to destroy this system, who want Europe weak, like Trump, who says the European Union is nasty and is because it's a powerful force for negotiation with the US when it comes to trade, He would like to see it divided.

Those who want to see Europe divided focus on Germany.

And in Germany, their instrument is the IFT.

So, Gerard, I want to bring you right into the middle of one of the central British debates, the question of whether Trump is actually dangerous or not.

You and I have a friend who often says to us, nah, you know, American institutions are very strong.

Trump's bark is more than his bite.

You know, we shouldn't overdo the threat posed by Trump.

Everything will be fine.

And my sense is your instinct is actually we need to be more worried and we need to be more serious about Trump.

Yes, perhaps one thought first.

I have a good friend who was born in Austria, 1929.

He was five when Austrian democracy suddenly, or four, actually disappeared.

You know, you had a very well-written constitution after World War I.

It was a democracy.

You had a president, you had a constitutional court, you had a parliament.

In the last elections, the social democrats won.

The city of Vienna, the social democrats had an absolute majority.

And yet in 1933,

this democracy disappeared because the far right, which had a majority of one seat in the parliament, managed to get the police to close off parliament.

People couldn't enter.

And then by decrees, not laws, because there was no parliament, they abolished the rights one after the other.

It took a year.

There was no fighting.

And in 1934, in February, there was a short civil war by which time democracy was lost.

And you think that actually it's worth thinking about that even in the United States?

And I think that that kind of model should be a warning because that can happen anywhere.

And here's the thing.

We should believe when people announce things.

We should take them seriously.

We should have taken Putin seriously 20 years ago because he talked about many of the things he later did.

We should take seriously Trump.

He talks about the opposition being illegitimate.

He talks about dictatorial governments.

He praised them for years.

He's said that the U.S.

might benefit from this as well.

He's attacked courts.

I mean, he's attacked the division of power.

He rules by decree.

The most important signal, of course, was that he presents the people who attacked Congress as heroes.

And what more signs do we need of his intention?

But what we see now in his second term is a very strategic approach to take over

the military, to fire generals, to fire the lawyers, you know, all the people inside a proud institution really devoted to the rule of law, and this is how people have been trained, to put it under the control of loyalists, to get Americans used to see the military in their cities, to build up a massive operation through the ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in the name of fighting irregular migration.

I mean, ICE will have a budget bigger than the Swedish military every year.

and directly under the control of some of the hardliners in

the White House.

Now, he creates the position where he could be in a position to just block off Congress in Washington.

Now, is this a worst case scenario?

Yes, but it is not unrealistic.

And to go back to my friend, four years later, of course, Austria was annexed by the Nazis.

He had to flee.

He was Jewish.

He managed after the pogroms in 1938 to come to the United Kingdom.

And he became a professor of government later in Oxford, Peter Pulter.

one of the biggest theorists on democracy in Britain.

But the first book he wrote was on political anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria before World War I, because what he was interested in is how can a civilized city like Vienna, a democracy like Austria, succumb first to authoritarianism and then to the Nazi totalitarian regime?

How was this possible?

And his question, his answer was, look at the ideas developed in the decades before, the authoritarian ideas, the anti-Semitic ideas, where he saw anti-Semitism really being targeted against liberalism.

You know, Jews were seen as symbols of a rule of law and liberalism.

And cultural pessimism, the intellectuals who said everything is doomed, you know, we're in decline, this requires radical measures, all of which we've seen in the U.S.

in recent decades.

We're doing this interview just after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

And Stephen Miller, who is Trump's deputy chief of staff for policy, is now making statements saying that

there is an existential threat posed by by what he calls radical leftists and Islamist terrorists.

And he's now extended this to saying, and this is embedded in the Democratic Party.

Is this also part of the issue you're talking about?

Yeah, of course.

What we've seen is a discrediting of the ideas of a loyal opposition that you have vicious disagreements with politically, but then the next moment, you know, McCain and Obama, Romney and Obama, even the very hotly fought campaigns between George W.

Bush and the Democrats in the two elections.

Afterwards, you know, people accepted that there was a common framework, the Constitution, that this was a system that had survived for centuries, with, importantly, a big civil war in the middle, right?

But it had regular elections because people accepted results of elections.

I don't think we've taken seriously enough that Trump made the loyalty test.

for his new administration, buying into the big lie that he won in 2020.

And when you start by saying you can only join my administration if you say two plus two is five, famously the test that in George Orwell's 1984, you know, the torturer explains to Winston, the hero, that if the party makes you say two plus two is five, you have to say it.

When this is a test to join a democratic government, then you expect this government to have no problem lying about anything.

And that's what we see now, lying about the facts of political crime.

There is political crime, there are assassinations, but more of them in the US, as the Cato Institute has recently again shown, comes from far-right extremists.

So to say that the threat is from this conspiracy linked to the Democrats, or that the Democrats welcome the assassination of Charlie Kirk, when every single Democratic politician, you know, from the governor of California to Kamala Harris, has of course condemned the assassination of somebody who they disagreed with, but who was still a debater in the end, with ideas I would challenge.

But he was not a violent person.

He didn't call on people to be attacked, and he was viciously killed.

But all the Democrats condemned this.

To then say two plus two is five, they are somehow part of this conspiracy, shows us...

that there's nothing you can rely on with this administration.

It's like when Trump says Ukraine shouldn't have attacked Russia.

It's the end of any respect for what in any democracy, which is government by opinion, you know, we discuss.

If we lose respect for any facts, you can't have democracy.

Aaron Powell, there seems something very, very odd in J.D.

Vance saying, on the one hand, I want European countries to re-arm, spend 5% of their GDP on defense, goodness knows, get their own nuclear terror.

And also, I really want to support far-right nationalists in these countries.

I mean, it seems to me that things could go wrong with the idea that you create these heavily armed countries and then hand them over to far-right nationalists.

If your vision is like that of some of the far-right thinkers, alt-right thinkers,

Curtis Yarwin, people like that, that are close to the vice president, J.D.

Vance,

who say that the goal of the MAGA movement should be to destroy liberalism and that

the core of what is today's Europe is based on the very liberal ideas that MAGA wants to destroy in America and globally.

The idea that Germany is is part of a community of 27, they make joint laws and then they submit to a European court, that you have an international criminal court, that you have European Conventions on Human Rights, that you have something above the absolute sovereignty of nation states, because this makes all of them safer and more prosperous.

The European integration project for Curtis Jarin and others in MA, it's the materialization of this liberal international system.

And although it now exists largely in Europe, because globally it is being attacked by MAGA and by the Americans, who've been the big supporter of this, if you want to destroy it, Curtis Jarvin says, you need to attack the European Union.

And you need to help those parties in Germany, whatever the costs for Europe, European stability, German stability,

help those parties that promise to do away with all of this, which is why...

What we see in Germany and some other countries, these anti-EU, anti-system parties, are really

radically new.

They go against the consensus forged in 1949 to 1957.

European response on Gaza.

You talk a lot about international rule, rules-based international order.

Yes.

Well, I mean, look, if we believe in international law, then the very thing with all the differences, and there are in Germany in particular, a lot of debates on how to respond.

to Israel and to Hamas and to the horrific situation in Gaza.

The one thing on which we shouldn't budge is support for institutions like the International Criminal Court.

And I'm shocked how little European governments that have created this court based on the lessons of the 90s.

You know, yes, Nuremberg was a lesson, but then for decades nothing happened.

But then the International Court, Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, was incredibly successful.

and brought decades of peace to follow in the Balkans by ruling that certain actions carried out by specific individuals, like ethnic cleansing, were war crimes against humanity.

After this experience, an ICC was created in the late 90s, and Germany and Britain, and France, and the other Europeans were strongly in favor.

And now we are watching as the United States is putting sanctions on individual judges, prose staff in the ICC doing their work.

A Slovenian judge is suddenly on the US sanctions list.

And we are not doing enough to defend the principle.

So if you ask me about Gaza, I mean, there's always this debate, you know, how do we qualify crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide?

In the end, it has to be courts that will determine this.

But if the courts are destroyed, if international law is destroyed, we basically lose the categories.

And so, I'm shocked that Germany too, Britain, other countries should be more like Norway and support international law on principle

also in Gaza.

Because the big lesson from European integration, one last point, is that when we had the the European Convention on Human Rights, wonderful, signed in Rome in 1950,

and then France and Britain decided not to ratify it for a few years because they had fought nasty colonial wars where they didn't want these rights to be applied, right?

So France in Algeria was torturing, was expelling people, was carrying out crimes against humanity.

So it didn't actually ratify the European Convention until the 1970s.

It should have ratified them.

It should have abided by this because in the end it lost in Algeria after eight years and one million were expelled.

So human rights compliant actions aren't just naive idealism.

They are the basis for better policy.

And the world in which we are moving, which Maga wants us to move into, where Curtis Arwin says states that are not strong enough should just disappear, you know, it's the world of Putin.

is a world very different from the last 70 years we had in Western Europe.

And it's not a world I want my daughter and my children and grandchildren to grow up in.

Thank you very much indeed.

That's the conversation with Gerald.

And if you found that exciting and interesting, as I hope you did, members will be able to get into more of a deep dive on immigration that we did with Gerald again and with Zoe Gardner, where the four of us get into some of the difficult debates around immigration in the United Kingdom and Europe more generally.

I think this is the theme we're just going to keep coming back to.

We're at a moment where it really does feel as though we're catching up with the collapse of an old world and the birth of a new.

And a huge amount of that is about the emergence of populism in Europe and the way that immigration in particular is driving that and the way that Trump's America is beginning to shape the way that the far right in Germany, Netherlands, France and increasingly Britain are speaking and behaving.

Do you think we're concentrating on this enough in Britain?

Are we paying enough attention to what's happening in Europe and how we're echoing what's happening in Europe?

Part of me says no and a part of me says yes.

The part that says no is I think that we have allowed this debate to get get ahead of the facts.

I think one thing is so interesting both talking to Gerald Knaus and to Zoe Gardner is that they want people to know what the facts are about immigration and they're so lost.

It's like I said on the podcast recently, the British public think that 50%

of immigrants come here on small boats.

It's less than 4%.

That is the drowning out of fact and you need fact on which to base sensible debate and sensible policy.

So part of me says we talk about it too much.

The part of me that thinks we don't talk about it sufficiently is the part that, if you like, has seen that debate slip away.

Maybe because for too long we were too worried to engage in it in a way that would keep people broadly on track to understand the facts and to want to have the facts.

It's now got to a point where people, frankly, just, you know, they just want it dealt with and they have, I think, a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the debate and some of the policy choices that we face.

There's also a big bit of British exceptionism or British complacency, which is a story emerged that we like to tell ourselves, that during the Second World War, other countries had established fascist or occupation governments, and we hadn't.

And a story that we were a very moderate country and that the far right was really a phenomenon that emerged in Europe, you know, Marine Le Pen's father and others, and that in Britain we didn't really get into this flag stuff, we didn't really get into into extreme nationalism.

The BNP and others rose and were defeated.

And now, suddenly, we're having to deal with the fact that we don't study European politics very much.

I'm not sure people are paying much attention to het wilders, I'm not sure they're paying much attention to who the AFD are or what exactly is happening in Hungary, for example.

And now we're seeing it in Britain, but maybe we're still clinging on to this idea that it's nothing really to do with us, that's a European problem.

Yeah, I think the other part of the exceptionalism, and this is what skewed the debate, is this this sense that this is really only happening to Britain.

Whereas, in fact, what's really interesting if you read Gerald's book is that far bigger asylum seeker crises have hit other parts of Europe.

As I say, he was one of the architects of this EU-Turkey deal.

I mean, the numbers involved in the immigration to Greece from

across the Mediterranean were absolutely enormous.

They dwarfed anything that we've seen here.

And yet, the debate here is all about here.

So what I think we what's interesting in talking to both of them is actually there are trends at play here that require us to focus on what's happening in the rest of the world.

And begin to think more imaginatively about working with Europe, a sort of UK-Europe solution to a lot of these things.

It doesn't matter whether it's defence and security, it doesn't matter whether it's immigration, that it's really calling for Macron to be more open to deals with Britain, Starma being more imaginative about thinking about UK European structures, maybe Friedrich Maertz really leaning into this idea.

And we've talked about it a lot, you know, could Britain have a slightly more formal role associated with, but not in, the European Union?

How would you think about bringing in Norway or Turkey or Ukraine or the Western Balkans into this whole thing?

But it really feels like a moment where imagination, courage, clarity is needed at exactly the time when a lot of the political pressures are saying, let's not concentrate on what's happening abroad, let's just go domestically.

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