451. Is Trump Destroying the UN?

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Donald Trump is deliberately trying to undermine the United Nations politically, financially, in every other way.

One of the problems for the UN at the moment, it obviously doesn't have any voice really, and Ukraine doesn't have any voice in Gaza.

On Gaza, the vote on the Security Council was 14 to 1, and the one was the United States.

Trump is so open about the fact that he rejects all of that.

No interest in international human rights, no interest in international law.

America first all the way.

Israel is never going to be secure unless Palestinians have freedom.

And Palestinians are never going to have freedom unless Israel is secure.

Is it just that because they have this seeming blank check from Donald Trump that they don't really care what the rest of the world thinks?

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Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart.

So, Rory, we're going to talk about United Nations because the United Nations General Assembly is on.

Donald Trump, amongst others, will be speaking there today.

We're going to talk about the recognition of the Palestinian state.

And then I think in the second half, go a bit more domestic because there's been the Lib Dem conference, Ed Davies speech today.

Hope it doesn't clash with Donald Trump Ed.

And we're going to talk about Nigel Farage's latest sortie into the issue of immigration.

He's going to basically, it seems to me, get rid of anybody who works in the health service or other public services, though he didn't quite frame it that way himself.

So where do you want to start with the UN?

Let's start with the fact that this is the 80th anniversary of the UN.

And it would have been set up in past times to be a big, big event.

Big anniversary, big celebration, jubilee celebration.

And it does not feel like that at all.

Quick reminder.

UN obviously set up 80 years ago, hosted for these meetings in New York.

And that's really important for the story of what's going on at the moment, because America controls a great deal, including whether or not you get a visa to come and speak at the UN.

A lot of the funding for the UN comes from the United States.

Although they're cutting it back.

Although they're cutting it back.

The UN, I think, and I love your view on this, had

two big themes since its formation.

The first was, broadly speaking, a theme about human rights, so Universal Declaration on Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt, and a sense of universal values.

And that was stuff which, particularly in the 90s, people like Clinton, Tony Blair, and others associated themselves with.

That was Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kosovo, Bosnia, later Sudan interventions in Cambodia.

So it was quite an idealistic vision that all these nation states would get together.

And broadly speaking, as Clinton said in his great speech to the UN, it was about a world that was heading towards human rights, democracy, and peace.

The second story of the UN is the story of the smaller countries.

And that's the story of often anti-colonial movements.

countries that had just gained independence, 77 smaller nations that saw the UN as a way of creating identities for themselves separate from the big players, and really symbolized, I suppose, above all, by Hutant, who was this amazing Burmese Secretary General who played a critical role in the 60s in the Cuban missile crisis, tried to mediate on Vietnam, and really gave a voice to those countries that have been marginalized.

And I think both those themes are now under huge strain today.

Anyway, over to you.

Yeah, and just so people understand how it works, so the United Nations, you say, formed in the aftermath of the Second World War.

So the five permanent members of the Security Council, US, UK, France, Russia, China, essentially, they were viewed as the five big post-war powers,

nuclear powers as well.

And in a sense, it was recognized by the world that they should be central to reshaping the world in the aftermath of the Second World War.

So, they have a permanent seat on the Security Council, and they all have the right to veto.

Security Council itself then has 10 others who come on and off.

And so, sometimes sometimes you will get a key country that will be a small country, but would actually,

for a year or so, will

have real power.

And what's happened in recent years is that the United States has become under Trump.

In the first term, Trump was pretty opposed to the United Nations, doesn't like international organizations.

And this time, the funding cuts have been huge.

I think to some extent, other countries are stepping up to fill the political gap, but they're not necessarily stepping up to fill the financial gap.

China doing the former, not the latter.

Just to flesh that out a little bit for listeners, for the key UN humanitarian agencies, things like the World Food Programme, but also UNICEF, UNHCR, the US, through USAID, its development programme, was providing in many cases 40 or 50% of the entire funding of these agencies.

So if you go to the front line in Somalia or Sudan and you go to an emergency feeding camp where they're giving plumpy nut to children, a lot of that is done through these UN agencies.

And the UN humanitarian appeals, when I was the development minister in the UK, led by the UN, and the US putting in a huge amount of money.

Now that is gone, obviously you lose 50% of your funding.

That isn't just all the UN staff losing their jobs.

And of course, most of those staff are not in New York.

They're the staff on the ground in Somalia or Sudan.

It's the recipients.

It's the people who would be receiving.

the tents, the emergency food, the shelter, the child protection.

I was talking to somebody at the UN the other day who was saying that the United States now vetoes anything which refers to the sustainable development goals.

So we have on leading this week as part of this sort of international podcast festival of hope, we're talking to Maru Itoji, the England rugby captain, but essentially we're trying to help the sustainable development goals stay on the map.

But that is what they're up against.

You've got China and Russia that for some time have been against anything that America wants to put forward.

You now have America not just against China, but also frankly against what the UN is trying to achieve.

And that is making it very, very difficult.

Guitaris, the Secretary General, is coming forward with pretty profound budget cuts that will affect some of the programs that they run.

And I think that you said that maybe

this one is not as relevant or doesn't feel as relevant as in the past.

I think maybe because of Palestine, it does.

I think what Macron, the Saudis, the UK, Canada, Australia, Portugal now as well.

I think what they've all reckoned is that the place to have this debate about the recognition of the state of Palestine is at the United Nations.

So there's been this steady build-up, and it feels to me that they've been actually quite strategic about that.

I imagine by the time this comes out, we'll know because Trump will have done his speech.

And if he's moved off his nonsense about autism, he may want to talk about the Palestine recognition of the speech.

Just to go and explain the autism point.

He did a big, I mean, at Charlie Kirk's funeral, about which we'll talk in ⁇ A, he actually made a speech.

It was one of his rambles, but one of the points he made is, you know, I think we found an answer to autism.

How about that?

Turns out the breakthrough on autism is yesterday with his mad anti-vaxxer, Bobby Kennedy, basically saying that if you take paracetamol when you're pregnant, you're more likely to

have autism and utter nonsense.

And there was this sort of extraordinary classic Trump moment where you have this elderly man telling pregnant women in the United States they're going to

have to tough it out.

Of course, the tunnel is the only thing that a pregnant woman can take for pain relief.

Yeah, and of course, 78-year-old men they know a lot about the pain of pregnancy, just like he knows a lot about the pain of going to war and being a veteran, which he never did because he got copped out of it.

So, he's going to go there.

Let's assume he does address the Palestine issue.

So, when he was with Keir Starmer in the UK on the state visit last week, he openly said that Palestine recognition was one of the, he said, one of the few issues on which he and Keir Starmer disagree.

And I think he might feel that he's being slightly ganged up on by the smaller, what he perceives as the smaller powers, France, UK, etc.

But what it does mean now, from the Palestinian recognition perspective, you now, of those five members of the Security Council, four, all of them apart from the United States, now formally recognise the state of Palestine.

The US response to that is twofold.

One is that they have refused to allow Mahmoud Abbas to get a visa or the Palestinian delegation to come into a country.

He's the leader of the Palestinian Authority.

And that's

really troubling, obviously, because the point is that the US is just hosting the UN, and the UN should be able to operate as an international organization.

It shouldn't be up to the United States to just decide on the basis of its own personal views whether or not to give a visa.

I mean, remember in the past, famously, Nikita Khrushchev would address them, Fidel Castro would address them.

Che Guevara addressed the UN and was almost assassinated by pro-Cuban activists in the General Assembly chamber.

Khrushchev, for our younger listeners, was famous for banging his shoe

on the lecton.

I could see our social media team getting very excited about it.

He banged his shoe

on an electron.

I noticed the economist in an article this week said allegedly, I didn't think it was anything alleged about it at all.

I thought he definitely banged his shoe.

We can get into that.

Second thing, though, that US has done is that...

Reuters has reported from five different sources within the administration that they're now looking at full entity sanctions against the International Criminal Court.

So the International Criminal Court, UN body that's been investigating allegations of crimes against humanity and genocide, they began by targeted sanctions against individuals on the court, and that's including making threats against people who advise the court, so people like Baroness Helena Kennedy and others who advise the court.

They're now looking at an entity sanction, which means sanctioning the entire organization.

Now, this raises the question for me, should we not begin to think about the UN moving out of the US?

If the US is no longer prepared to play its role role as a fair neutral arbiter hosting an international organization, why don't we take it somewhere else?

And of course, in the interview that we had with Mike Pompeo, which is coming out of Monday.

Coming out of Monday, so former US Secretary of State, former head of the CIA, it's a fascinating revelation of the way that somebody from not quite full-on Trump anymore, he's more the sort of right-wing the Republican Party views this conversation.

How aggressively they view it.

He was just like, well, you take the UN, except you're never going to

because you're all a bunch of wimps, right?

It's the basic thing.

It's an extraordinary kind of confrontational interview.

Really, really worthless.

He also, we should say, on this subject,

I noticed a cameraman is literally, his jaw dropped when Mike Pompeo basically said, as a matter of fact, get over it.

There is never going to be a Palestinian state.

Just absolutely straight out.

And of course, that is the American position right now.

But you see, even on that, you take something as simple as that.

Let's assume, as I do, that Donald Trump is deliberately trying to undermine the United Nations politically, financially, in every other way, because they have the power of veto.

How would it move?

Under the current institution, if the US said, no, no, it's staying in New York, yes, it's a pain in the neck, yes, the security is a nightmare, yes, we have to have these awful, terrible foreign countries.

And yes, we can suddenly veto people with visas.

Exactly.

So, why would they want it to move to Geneva or wherever it might be?

Yeah, well, Geneva is the obvious place, isn't it?

Although that's got slight sort of legacies to the League of Nations.

I sometimes wonder whether other countries, London, Canada, who knows where else could step up.

Qatar?

Well, I mean,

they've got a lot of space.

I'm campaigning Canada at the moment.

I'm going to Canada because I think...

Yep, there's no way the Americans will let her go to Canada, is there?

Rwanda?

Switzerland would be the easiest one.

Switzerland would definitely be the easiest.

What other countries have that sort of Swiss sort of reputation, though?

Brazil would hope to, but it's been going through a tough time, hasn't it?

God says, you've just got Brazil, this massive trade war.

You see, how did the Netherlands at one point?

Oslo?

Norway?

Yeah.

Anyway, it's not going to move.

A couple of things that I was wondering about, which is the future of the UN,

how it could be different.

Mark Mallet Brown, who's a friend of yours and mine, who was Labour Minister, but was also the Deputy Secretary General of the UN, has been talking about whether it couldn't change to reflect mini-multilateralism.

So the emergence of what kind of world would China imagine?

What kind of world, alternatively, it's a separate idea,

Brazil and India, these emerging powers, might imagine, and what sort of world, and we talked about this with Singapore, might smaller nations who suddenly don't want to be in a world in which might is right, who understand the value of an organization that could help smaller countries?

So that's the sort of Singaporean alliance, countries like Ghana stepping forward, Caribbean nations, Miamotli and others taking the lead.

Barbados, yeah.

And then the second question, I've been reading a...

an amazing book which I'd like to plug by Tant Mint Yu, who is the grandson of Utant, who I was praising as the UN Secretary General.

It's called Peacemaker.

And I was talking to him again yesterday, and he would say that one of the problems for the UN at the moment is it's got to get back into its traditional role of peacemaking, that it's become invisible in places like Myanmar.

It obviously doesn't have any voice really in Ukraine, doesn't have any voice in Gaza, and that one of the mistakes it made is under the last two Secretary Generals, under Ban Ki-moon and under Guterresh, to be too much of a humanitarian organization.

Humanitarian stuff can be done by our friend David Miliband and others.

The UN's unique role is the Secretary General often in the 60s and 70s on the ground chipping away at things.

You know, Hammersky being killed in the Congo, UN Secretary Generals spending three, four days quietly negotiating with leaders.

I think the problem with that, though, is goes back to the point I made that if the

UN essentially is a collection of the powers of the world and the major powers have more power than the smaller powers.

That's just the reality of it.

And it then depends, I think, upon the personality of the Secretary General, who never gets appointed without those major powers being happy, in particular the United States.

I think we underestimate just how hard it is for the UN to do what you say.

And I wonder where you're right, though.

I wonder if they've moved into this place of we're about humanitarian, we're about refugees, we're about climate, we're about the sustainable development goals,

because actually within the political context they don't have the leverage they don't get the traction and particularly with Trump but to be a little bit more optimistic it was remarkable what they were able to do even during the Cold War so in the Cold War actually the situation was a bit like this because Russia and America were vetoing each other all the time but what the UN was able to find is these niche moments sometimes actually it was Russia and America itself keeping missile sometimes it was areas which the rest of the world wasn't concentrating on so much

Doing very, very remarkable things in Sierra Leone or Liberia.

Or as, you know, one of the funny things that Mark Malc Brown was saying is he remembers your government, Tony Blair's government, with Sudan almost acting as the desk officers for Sudan with the UN, sending ministers out, getting involved in these kind of things.

So I think one of the visions could be to say, actually, if you do it quietly, if you do it behind the scenes, if you use the legitimacy of it, if you speak up for small nations if you really get the support of other players who aren't on security council there might be quite a number of conflicts around the world where the un could play a very very useful part yeah i'm sure you're right about that but i oh you know so we had a vote last week on gaza where the the vote on the security council was 14 to 1 and the one was the united states and i think that

that sense of the united states now seeing itself and acting as an obstacle to what the united Nations more broadly might be trying to do, I think that becomes an almost insurmountable problem.

And if it is, then I think all the stuff that you often talk about, about reform to the Security Council, we're getting there.

For someone like me, I really wanted to hold on to Britain's place on Security Council, but I was still stuck in a 1990s world where we were standing up for a liberal world order, a rules-based international order.

What Trump is now doing is making me think, okay, this thing really is broken.

And now suddenly people like me are much more more open to Brazil, India, joining the UN.

European Union.

European Union joining the UN.

And just rethinking it.

And maybe permanent representation for smaller countries,

reimagining the whole thing, because it was an American creation after the war.

It was created by the victors of the Second World War.

And it was because America believed, reluctantly, often, but in a liberal universal model.

And in global leadership.

Believed in universal human rights, talked about international law.

And we've now entered a world where Trump is so open about the fact that he rejects all of that.

No interest in international human rights.

No interest in international law.

America first all the way.

At that point, Britain and France trying to say, well, we can sit with the US and pursue that stuff doesn't work anymore.

The West has gone.

I did an event at the

Kenwood in Hampstead.

They had this How the Light Gets In festival, and I did an event with Curtis Yarvin.

Oh, my goodness.

Can we need to talk about that?

It was projected as the philosopher behind J.D.

Vance.

My sense of it is actually he's not as significant as the PR shtick.

I think his ideas do not stand up to much scrutiny at all.

However, what is clear is that I think we still kid ourselves that the United States is still intellectually and politically the same sort of country that it was, but just with a very different, very unique sort of leader.

But I think this change goes very, very deep.

And I don't know whether he was shocked or not.

And I did exactly the same with Mike Pompeo.

You know, I've got a new question to ask all audiences now, which is which is the greater threat to global stability, USA or China?

This audience, it was an international audience, mainly in the sports industry, and it was overwhelmingly the USA is a greater threat to global stability.

And I said to Pompeo, does that shock you?

And he said, they all watch the BBC and CNN.

That was his kind of pushback.

And with

Yarvin, it was exactly the same.

In fact, it was an even bigger majority said that America is now the bigger threat to global stability.

And his response was basically just say, well, you people don't know what you don't understand the world.

What struck me with the Pompeo interview, and I again would encourage people to listen to it, even if you dislike Pompeo.

So leading on...

Did you dislike him?

Leading him on a yay, I got very wound up actually in the end.

Because I thought he was basically saying, essentially, Europe doesn't matter.

You're not paying your way.

We slightly despise you.

And by the way, you're always going to come along with us and do what we say.

And it doesn't matter what we do to you.

You're always going to be our allies.

You're always going to support us.

You can rely on us.

He didn't exactly say that i'll tell you why i quite i didn't i i can't say i'd want to you know spend like that much time hanging out with him but i'll tell you what i quite liked about him is that because before we did the interview i had this hour with him in front of another audience and i quite liked the fact that he did not mind really being taken on and being challenged and at the end of it even though we had some pretty feisty uh discussions he was sort of you know

thoughtful and quite charming and and what have you.

And I also sensed with him, this is the power of Trump, I sensed with him that he wasn't being completely who he is because everybody in the right wing of the American politics at the moment has to shape themselves according to what they think is going to follow Trump because he wants to follow Trump.

So it's sort of distorting, I think, a lot of people's character and personality.

But the contempt for Europe is pretty strong.

It's extraordinary.

I mean, every time now I go to the United States, go to a big American conference, the story is always the same.

US top, China's the threat.

And by the way, I forgot to say Europe doesn't matter.

Oh, and the other thing about this guy, Yarvin, honestly,

he was doing the whole thing about, you know,

I decided not to take his ideas too seriously and take the piss a bit.

And I said,

you must be scared walking around London because I mean, all you MAGA people told me, this is the crime capital of the world and it's absolutely terrible.

And he actually said, so you feel safe in London, do you?

I said, well, I do.

Yeah, I've lived here a long time.

And you feel safe in every part of London?

Well, yeah, I do.

And I said, I was really pleased.

I hope Sadiq Khan's listening.

When I defended Sadiq Khan and said, we have a really good mayor in this city,

loud round of applause.

And he looked really shocked because they believe all this shit that they pump out about Britain.

It's extraordinary.

He did the whole Yuki thing.

If you know this UK thing here, you know, we don't call this the UK now, we're Yuki as in Yuck.

Anyway, on the recognition issue itself.

A lot of sort of commentary.

Oh, well, it won't make any difference.

Okay.

Nothing's going to change overnight, which is true.

But I think where I see it as

the right thing to do is I think it underlines this central point.

Israel is never going to be secure unless Palestinians have freedom.

And Palestinians are never going to have freedom unless Israel is secure.

If we have this forever war aimed with a, which is what a one-state solution will deliver, in my view, if the Israelis just think, you know, we go on until we've got the whole lot, I don't see how you don't have some sort of forever war, then we've got to hang on to those two things.

So even though it's not necessarily going to change things overnight, if and when this war does end, the recognition issue by some of the bigger powers, I think, really matters.

Yeah.

It's extraordinary, though, how explicit now Israel's become in its complete rejection of a two-state solution.

In Etanyah, who's now stated, there will be no Palestinian state west of the Jordan River, right?

Which is essentially there will be no Palestinian state all the way through to the sea.

You talked a few weeks ago about this E1, this area within the West Bank, which they're basically taking over through the expansion of settlements, which is which essentially is going to sort of separate the land that the Palestinians do have.

We talked about this the last time we talked about it, issue the things that you need to be called a state.

You need a permanent population, you need defined territorial boundaries, and you need a government, and you need an ability to conduct international affairs.

Now, they've got the ability to conduct international affairs.

I thought, I have to say, Hussam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador here, who we interviewed on leading a few months ago, I thought his speech yesterday was really really powerful when he was raising the flag outside the what will now be a palestinian embassy they sort of have a permanent population being moved about left right and center and what israel it seems to be doing is making sure they don't have defined territorial boundaries they're just creating these kind of grey spaces and as to what the government is you know labor rightly in my view labor government here kiristan when he made the announcement about the uk recognizing palestine saying hamas can have no part in its government but ultimately that's got to be down to elections at some point.

So I think it is symbolic, but I also think it will become significant if and when this war ends and we start to have proper discussions about how it gets resolved.

I think this is really interesting because your point about statehood and what it takes to recognize, just to make it deeper, Ramallah, which is the capital city of the Palestinian Authority, is...

being choked at the moment in terms of funds.

Israel, in ways that we haven't reported on the podcasts, has now said that Israeli banks can't correspond with Palestinian banks.

Palestinian migrant workers can't cross into Israel, so they can't bring any income in.

The customs revenue, which Israel used to share with the Palestinian Authority, has been cut.

So there's no revenue coming in.

And of course, most of the international donors who used to provide support to the Palestinian Authority, when I was at DFID, of course, we were giving an enormous amount of support we supported most of the Education Ministry.

Those donor funds have been cut as well.

So huge economic problems.

And Israeli lawyers, of course, are using this to argue that you cannot, in international law, recognize a state that's under occupation.

So it's a sort of kind of slightly cruel paradox that they're saying, because it's giving them, in a sense, an incentive to continue to weaken the state and occupy it on the grounds that you can't, under law, recognize a state that's being occupied.

Which is exactly what they're doing.

On the point about the UN, so Palestine has the observer status of the United Nations.

And again, because of America's position, it won't move beyond that just because these other countries have said that they recognize it.

But I think it does change.

I think it changes

the relations with Israel, both for good and for bad.

The Israelis are absolutely furious with the Brits.

You had David Menser, this guy who's the Brit who now

is a spokesman for Netanyahu.

He was on the media yesterday saying that the Jewish community will never forgive the Labour government for recognizing the state of Palestine.

This is a reward reward to Hamas, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so, you know, and likewise with the French, likewise with the Portuguese, with the Australians, with the Canadians, very, very angry.

And that, but that does mean a resetting and a recalibration of relations.

And I think the Israelis underestimate the extent to which I don't know if you've noticed how often this phrase pariah state keeps being sort of banded around by commentators, by people who are there, or what have you.

And it sort of feels that is where they're heading.

Now, do they care?

Is it just that because they have this seeming blank check from Donald Trump, that they don't really care what the rest of the world thinks?

But that will have consequences long term.

And I wonder with Netanyahu, as with Putin, whether occasionally they're not just doing very provocative, risky things because it reinforces their strongman image.

So I was sitting there thinking, why would Netanyahu attack Qatar in that way?

There was nothing really to gain.

It was a completely failed operation.

He didn't even kill the Hamas negotiators.

And even if he had, what advantage does he get given the massive disadvantage, which is international condemnation, UAE, Dubai, which had been getting close to Israel, then pushed away, massive Gulf solidarity.

And then I thought, well, isn't that a bit the same as Putin?

I mean, what does Putin have to gain from striking Kiev just as he's about to meet Donald Trump?

Why are these people taking these risks with Trump?

You would have thought in both cases, they might as well just sit back.

And the answer must be not just that they've got a blank check, not just that they sense they can do whatever they want and Trump will never go against them.

It actually must instinctively feel to them they benefit from challenging Trump, from provoking the world, from pushing the boundary.

And even if it doesn't make any strategic sense, and this is the standoff between Netanyahu and the Israeli military, the Israeli military is reported to be very angry about the Qatar attack.

and have thought it completely senseless.

The chief of the army staff was against the current operations in Gaza.

They say they've achieved their military objectives.

Going into Gaza is just going to increase international opposition.

It's not going to achieve anything strategic.

But Netanyahu keeps doing this stuff.

What is it?

I mean, is it coalition management?

Is it strongman status?

Is it polling?

I mean, why would you keep poking people

without much strategic gain?

Well, look,

it depends...

where you think Netanyahu is coming from, but I wouldn't rule out the fear that he has that if he eventually he gets forced into elections, that he loses those elections, that then justice, domestic justice, don't forget he's under all sorts of investigation for corruption and other things, and international justice, he's been indicted for war crimes, takes its course.

So he has to stay in power.

How does he stay in power?

He stays in power by holding this coalition, which is part propped up by these absolute out-and-out extremists, Ben Gavir and Smotric, who basically think that they have got the idea of the Palestinian state on the run, that they do have impunity, and while they've got that, they use it.

So I don't think it's much more complicated than that.

And of course, the consequences of the people who are there, both Israeli and Palestinian, by the way, is absolutely horrific.

And it's creating a dissonance.

I'm observing now

with many Israelis who are...

who were very, very supportive of the operations in Gaza, who are very focused on the hostages, very much committed to attacking Hamas, but are beginning to sound a bit uncertain when they're asked to defend what's being done in Qatar or the bombardments against Syria.

You can sense around the edges, not just from the Israeli military, that instinctively they want to defend Netanyahu, they want to say that he's doing the right thing, but the theories they're producing for why he's doing some of these more extreme things are getting less and less convincing.

Let's end this discussion on a

piece of a sliver of hope, and that is art.

You know, I told you last week I spent some time with the World Food Programme, and there's a Gazan artist called Ahmed Mouhana, and he has an exhibition.

He can't leave Gaza.

He's in Gaza.

He ran out of canvases.

So he's done these, he's been using used World Food Programme boxes on which to paint.

And the World Food Programme has brought 60 of them out, and they're now on tour in Euro.

I think they're in Malmo at the moment, but they're doing a tour of major European cities.

and it's just basically just capturing daily life in in Gaza but if people check out World Food Programme Instagram page they'll see these beautiful paintings on their boxes great let's take a break and then back from the break to talk about UK politics

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Welcome back to the Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

And me, Aztec Campbell.

It's the Lib Dem conference this week.

Now, who would have thought the Lib Dem conference was interesting?

There's a tradition, sadly, in British politics, which I am very guilty of, and I would like to try to apologise, which is that it's traditional within the major parties to be a bit mean about the Lib Dems.

In fact, I noticed when we interviewed Nicola Sturgeon on leading, she couldn't resist having a bit of a go at the Lib Dems as well.

And it would be interesting at some point to get into what it is psychologically that makes everybody slightly groan when they hear the Lib Dems.

Nevertheless, Ed Davy is trying to emerge as rather an interesting voice, standing up for values that you and I believe in, standing up for the centre ground, standing up against Trump, standing up against Farage,

and becoming one of the last champions for the kind of values that most of us took for granted in the 1990s.

The answer to your question, why is it always felt a bit like the Liber Lems don't really matter that much, I think it's because we've all of us grown up in a world where we only ever expect the Conservatives or Labour to be the government.

And that's why they've always been known as the third party.

At the moment, we still have a first past-the-post system, which is kind of designed for this idea that it's either going to be Labour or Tory, but we now have a multi-party politics.

And I think Ed Davy and the Lib Dems, they did pretty well at the last election.

They got 72 seats, but they're still struggling.

They're still struggling to be heard.

Ed Davy this week had a real old pop at the BBC about the way that they

frankly just anything that Nigel Farage says or does is deemed to be whoosh-breaking news.

Whereas the Lib Dems only get covered if he goes on a bungee jump.

Well,

let me agree with you and sympathize to Lib Dems in this.

I was yesterday reading the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper I imagine you never read.

But one of the there was a really interesting example of exactly what he's complaining about there.

Two stories right next to each other.

Ed Davies saying Elon Musk should be arrested in the United Kingdom for his offensive hate speech, right?

Which presumably the Lib Dems would have thought would be quite a big story.

And next to it, a bigger story with a photograph saying inside the reform headquarters, they now refer to Kemi Betenock, the leader of the Conservatives, as Santa Claus, with a picture of her generated by AI as a snoozing Santa Claus, because she always gives the Reform Party a present at Christmastime.

Now, what is this story?

How do you get that story in the Telegraph?

It isn't a story.

And there was nobody to quote.

It was sources inside the Reform Headquarters.

There wasn't even any individual quotes.

It's not even that interesting.

I don't get it.

Right.

So

I can see where the lib dems are coming from, which is that my assumption, right, is that some desperate reform PR person working with the Telegraph who want to promote reform have said, if you're looking for a story, how about this?

Why don't we say that we call Kemi Bade Knock Santa Claus because she gives us her present for Christmas?

Isn't yesterday the day that the Daily Telegraph led on notice?

Well, that was the front page.

And this was really dramatic, was this story that Farage and Zia yousuf and there was a there was an op-ed by zia yousuf in the telegraph as well were going to deport and revoke people in the united kingdom with indefinite leave to remain so as with many farage's policies uh the details of it are still not very clear but the core phrase is he's going to force all migrants with permanent residency to reapply, meaning that hundreds of thousands of people with legal permanent status in the United Kingdom would risk being thrown out of the United Kingdom and having their permanent status revoked.

These are people, I have friends, I'm thinking in particular of a couple that I know quite well who've been in the United Kingdom now for 25 years, who chose not to apply for a passport because they've got indefinite leave to remain.

Their children have got passports, their lives are in Britain, they live in Britain, and they are now facing the possibility of deportation.

Ditto, people who've got visas and established themselves, and those people that all of us encounter all the time within the NHS, within the care system, are now at risk of deportation.

These people with legal rights in the United Kingdom.

This is not reform going after people on boats or asylum seekers.

These are people who might have been in this country for a very, very long time.

I mean, I'm pleased to see.

I'll come back to Ed Davy in the BBC because I really do think he's got a point.

I'll come on to that.

But I'm pleased to see that at least some of our newspapers today have actually taken apart Farage's stuff with a little more rigor than they have historically.

The Daily Mirror, for example, is pointing out that if this policy were pursued, it would lead to the collapse of the National Health Service.

Now, as you know, I was in hospital yesterday and I had this sort of, you know, operation and I had a general anesthetic.

And

the main doctor was Spanish.

The anaesthetist was from the Middle East.

I had, during the course of the day, of course, I'm a bit mad.

Once I'd come round, I sort of asked them all where they were from.

I had probably about eight different nursing people through the day.

One was British, seven were from seven different foreign countries.

Now,

these are people that we need in this country to keep the health service going.

We need people in the care system to help people go.

So, what yesterday was about was Nigel Farage, he's on a bit of a roll, and he thinks he's on a bit of a role because of immigration.

He thinks, right, I'll continue the role by going even further.

And that way, I get on the front page of the Telegraph, and inevitably, because it's on the front page of the Telegraph, the BBC, ITV Skylar, oh, it must be news.

And I just think it's where Ed Davey absolutely has a point.

When Nigel Frye had his two-day conference, okay, a guy with four MPs at the time, he now has five because Danny Krueger, the Christian nationalist, has come over.

He got wall-to-wall coverage day and night.

The Lib Dems, the complaint they make, so you say about the Telegraph, Laura Koonsberg, BBC's main Sunday programme interviewer, she had a piece trailing her interview with Ed Davy.

She had this piece on the website, and the headline was something like, Is it time for Ed Davy to get serious?

Enough of the stunts, enough of the bungee jumping, etc.

So it's slightly my view.

Slightly your view, but actually, if you read, now, because we knew that Ed Davy's speech was today, and this we'll be recording before the speech, but going out afterwards, I sort of badgered them to send me his speech.

And I sent it to you last night.

And I actually think, I mean, there's a bit of conference knockabout about Bungie Tummy I think it's a serious speech I think he's got some very serious lines in it not least on Europe as you say I think he's got a very interesting and clever strategic line about 10 15 times he says that is Trump's America do not let it become Farage's Britain he really is pinning Farage and Trump it's quite a big thing to do so I actually I actually think Ed Davey's got a point so I thank you for sending me the speech and I read it and the structure of the speech if people listen, is he begins saying we've done unbelievably well in the parliamentary elections, we've done very well in the local elections.

There's a lot of emphasis on local campaigning.

One of the strategic decisions the Lib Dems made in the last election was to go hyper-local, campaign on clean water in constituencies, maternity wards in constituencies, things that really mattered to this particular group, as opposed to the big national international issues.

And then he shifts.

He goes goes after the Tories, congratulates the Lib Dems on getting rid of the Tories.

Then he goes after Labour and says that quite hard.

Yeah, says that Labour's basically Sunak's party.

Continuity Sunak.

I didn't quite think that line were, but his general attack was harder than he normally has attacked Labour.

And the story basically is their austerity lights, no difference between them and the Tories.

And it's interesting, just on this one,

Robert Colville writing an article again, I think, in the Telegraph, trying to say to Conservative voters, get behind Rachel Reeves.

She's our last hope for fiscal responsibility in Britain.

And this is now an argument coming from someone from the sort of centre-right.

If you let Farage get in, or you let the Greens get in, or you let Corbyn get in, or perhaps by implication, the Lib Dems,

you're back into a world of money trees and borrowing and taxing and spending, and goodness knows what.

And Rachel Reeves is the last champion of fiscal discipline and control.

I thought that was what was in the interview with Mauro Itoji on leading, and he basically said he was a Labour supporter, supported New Labour, wanted Keir Tharma to win.

And you said, yeah, what do you think of the government so far?

And he wasn't exactly saying it's been the best government of my lifetime, but he was making the point, I think, that and he remember he said he'd listened somewhere and somebody had said, and he couldn't remember where it was, that everybody from centre-left to centre-right should want this government to succeed.

It was Jeremy Hunt

on our podcast.

Right.

And because the point Marrow was making is if this Labour government doesn't succeed, then the alternative isn't going to be kind of, you know, a moderate Tory party.

It's going to be something much more extreme.

Well, so then the question, I guess, for the Lib Dems is, will they be able to build a real movement around this sort of passionate appeal against Farage, against...

as you say, the sort of vision of Trump's Britain.

It would be interesting to know what their polling people say, how it works as strategy.

I mean, you know, you and I agree completely with the philosophical things, but presumably there will be people within the party saying, okay, that's all very well, but that's quite high faluting.

In the end, what voters are going to vote on and how we're going to increase our vote share in the next election is by focusing on individual seats,

real bread and butter issues, cost of living, and we don't really need to get drawn into international human rights.

My sense of what he's trying to do with this very clear and

I literally lost count of how many times it says, you know, that is Trump's America.

Don't let it become Farage's Britain.

That is very clearly the line that he wants us to take out of this speech.

And that does take you to the bread and butter issues.

It does take you to what sort of economy you want, whether he believes in the health service, whether he actually will build it up.

And so I thought it was a pretty clever speech.

I think

the thing about the attack on Labour,

because, of course, if you think back to the last election, one of the reasons that...

that the Tories got wiped out is because the Labour and the Lib Dems, they had a kind of informal deal going on.

You know, where the Lib Dems could beat the Tories, Labour let them.

They didn't fight.

Where Labour were way ahead, they didn't fight.

It's now been complicated because we have kind of five parties, maybe even six, if Corbyn and Sultana sort themselves out, who are fighting for votes in every area.

So I think it'd be interesting how I still think come the election,

it may be, if this, what the BBC love to call the rise and rise of reform, if that continues, it may be that some kind of informal lib lab campaigning coalition as opposed to a sort of formal coalition.

And it was interesting how he really didn't want to answer the question about whether he would ever go into coalition with Keir Starmer.

A couple of brief things that come out of that.

One is that I think you and I should be leaning more into constitutional reform.

What you keep describing, which is a world that's gone from a two-party system to a five, six-party system, is not remotely reflected in the way that our country works.

And I'd like to see us get behind a constitutional convention and start thinking about all the things we talk about.

Australian-style compulsory voting, New Zealand-style balances of first past, the post and proportional, etc.

Second thing, this is very unfair to you, but I'm going to do it to you anyway.

Because I think it represents something interesting.

Of course, when we were covering the election, we knew exactly how many seats of the 122 seats the Conservatives took, reform came second in.

Without being unfair, just get a sense of it.

What would be your guess of how many seats reform came second to the Conservatives in out of the 122?

Do you know the answer?

I do, yeah, that's why I'm being unfair.

But I had to jump in.

And I got it wrong myself.

Okay, I know for Labour and the Lib Dems,

for Labour it's high.

Okay.

What do you think it is for the Tories?

I'm going.

I'm going third.

It's actually only nine seats.

So I got it wrong too.

I'm like you.

And everybody I know who studies politics.

Do you know what?

I thought it was going to be low, but then I thought it was a trick question.

So I'm thinking he's obviously not low.

Bugger.

No, no, but everybody I know who's been focusing on politics, and actually Ian Dale wrote quite a bit.

So what does that tell you?

Wrote a good article.

Well, what's really interesting is that the Tories are obsessed with reform, but out of 122 seats, only nine of them is reform second.

In 108 seats, Labour or Lib Dem are second to the Tories.

And in 64 of the 72 Lib Dem seats, the Tories are second.

So really what the Lib Dems are occupying is the sort of centre-right Tory voter, sort of people like me, right?

They're pulling over.

That's maybe why I'm being so so chippy about the Lib Dems and resisting it.

And by the way, Ed Davy says that in terms.

He actually says that in terms that, you know, the Tories are where we've targeted our fire and that's what's worked.

But it's also what's mad.

So, you know, we were talking about Danny Krueger last week, and I was looking again at some of the WhatsApp messages that he sent me when he...

When he fired you.

Yeah, exactly, when he fired me.

And, of course, what he was saying at the time was, oh, Rory, it's such a pity we've lost you from the Conservative Party.

We've got to keep the Conservative Party together.

And the irony is that the right of the Conservative Party that drove out me, David Gork, Ken Clark, Nicholas Soames, and then earlier lost Sam Jima, Philip Lee to the Lib Dems, at those days were saying, you know, we've got to keep the Conservative Party together and it's such a pity that we've lost the left of the party.

Those people are now leaving.

Adam Holloway, Danny Kruger, Maria Caulfield, Nadine Dorris are now gone off to reform.

So the Tories are in this extraordinary position where they shed the centre-left by kicking us out, saying how sad it is and the very same people that kicked us out are now high-tending it off to reform.

What does that leave the Tories with?

Well that's also why I think that Labour has not been making the right strategic choice in sort of focusing so much of its messaging kind of around what I would call reform light.

I think we underestimate how much desire there is for a bit of hope, a bit of optimism, a bit of kind of passion, a bit of a real sense of change.

And I'll tell you the other thing, you talk there about the constitutional stuff.

I was talking to a minister the other day who's got you know, a particular, really difficult problem to address, policy-wise.

And I know we're already more than a year into the parliament, but I actually think, and I've got no doubt Keir Star's speech is probably pretty much written by now, and maybe it's too late to do this, but I actually think taking three or four seemingly intractable policy issues,

and immigration might be one of them, and saying, okay, this is proving more difficult than we imagined.

This is really difficult.

We can only make the changes that we need to make if we actually bring the public with us.

Therefore, we are going to do citizens' assemblies.

That would feed your desire for some sort of constitutional change.

It would be honest with the public that we've got some really difficult choices to make.

Right now, this is why I felt Trump's autism thing was such a ridiculous thing to do.

At a time when people are trusting politicians and believing politicians less,

and therefore aren't necessarily buying into the tough choices we have to make.

You've got to bring the public in with you.

And for things like immigration, things like NHS reform, adult social care, which is this complete catastrophe.

People in Cumbria seen 15 minutes a day by carers, never really worked out how to fund that.

Citizens' Assembly, cross-party commissions, constitutional reform.

I mean, I'm still a little bit, and this is me being narcissistic, but I'm still a little bitter that I was never able to work with Labour on this stuff.

I was desperate before the election to say, can I help support a commission on AI, a commission on the NHS?

And I do think there's a real opportunity to reach out across party and create broader swathes of support for Labour.

And I'm sort of surprised that they're still thinking so tribally.

I think maybe partly because of the way that the Tories have conducted themselves since the election.

I mean,

I thought one of

David's strong sections in the speech where he basically talked about how the Conservatives have operated since the election.

No apology, no sense of anything we did was wrong.

And you saw that today.

I heard, I was on the Today programme this morning talking about podcast crowds and theatres, Rory, as you know.

And before that, Kevin Hollenrake, the Tory Party chairman, talking about immigration and all this stuff.

And it was sort of embarrassing because he was every single question virtually.

Nick Robinson was able to come back and say, but that was your policy, but that was on your watch.

And until I think they have some sort of strategic break and acceptance that part of the mess we're in is because of what they left, I don't think they're going to get heard.

So I think that may be one reason.

But I agree with you.

So, for example, I would say on something like, you know, welfare reform, which clearly was...

you know, a big part of what Labour's trying to do, got defeated by their own MPs.

That's going to make it difficult to sort of, you know, do the next stages of welfare reform, which has to happen.

Maybe there is a case for Pat McFadden sitting down with Ian Duncan Smith.

And that will give some Labour people the heebie-jeebies.

But Ian Duncan Smith at least did reform that kind of people understood.

And whether you agree with it or didn't, he knows the area really inside out.

So I agree with you.

I think that what our politics needs is

greater sense of we're facing really big challenges.

It's so difficult to be in government right now.

Okay, part of the job of the opposition is to make it even more difficult.

But actually, I think the Tories and other parties would do themselves a lot of good if they actually said, maybe we can help here.

Yeah, and they should be able to help.

And the advantage isn't just that you could get the legislation through, but if you make it genuinely cross-party on something like adult social care or welfare reform, you can begin to get long-term stuff.

I mean, remember, we're talking about a 10-year housing policy.

How do you get a 10-year housing policy?

Only if you get the other parties to sign up.

Otherwise, nobody believes in a 10-year investment horizon.

So it'd be brilliant for investment if we had a sense that there was a cross-party agreement on these things.

So let's wrap it up there and then question time tomorrow.

What we're going to talk about tomorrow, we're going to talk about

some very, very interesting things happening in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk.

We also have the Moldovan elections coming, which sounds a bit niche, but actually is really critical to European security and Russia.

I think we should also take a look at China and espionage because of this case that's been dropped, which Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker of the Commons, is very unhappy about.

So look at that.

And here's one for Roy:

let's try and pick our favorite ever advert on TV.

It's the 70th anniversary of TV advertising.

Very good.

See you tomorrow.

See you tomorrow.

Hey, it's Anthony Scaramucci, and I want to tell you about my podcast, Open Book, which just joined the Goal Hanger Network, which we're all very proud of.

In my latest episode, I interviewed Goal Hanger's very own James Holland.

We spoke about World War II and what World War II teaches us about today.

Here's a clip.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Well, I think he was a great man.

I think he was a man of vision.

He was a man of enormous geopolitical understanding.

And he was a man who offered possibilities.

When you're in a life and death struggle, you need people that can persuade you.

You need people that can bind you.

You need men of vision, of charisma.

That's the problem with the moment is we haven't got those guys.

I mean, he's flawed, of course.

All the great men are.

But thank goodness for the developed world and the democratic world that he was political leader of Great Britain in 1940 and throughout the whole of World War II.

He literally, in so many different ways, man of the century, I think, because Roosevelt was a charmer.

Roosevelt was a great strategist.

He pulled the Americans through the Depression and helped to manage the war.

But without Churchill holding ground in May and June of 1940, it would have been a much darker, much worse world.

And there would have been not a lot that the Americans could have done without Churchill's steadfastness and his inspiration to his fellow citizens.

If you want to hear the full episode, just search Open Book wherever you get your podcasts.