454. Starmer's Farage Fightback and Trump's Unworkable Gaza Plan

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Welcome to a live episode of The Rest is Politics.

We're going to talk about two things, and this is going, as well as going out live, this will be our main podcast this week.

We're going to talk about Kirstama's speech and the Labour Party conference.

And we're also going to talk about Donald Trump's Gaza plan that he unveiled yesterday with Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House.

But let's start with

Labour.

Keir Starmer has made his speech.

It was rapturously received in the hall in Liverpool.

Quite hard not to be rapturously received at a party conference these days, but I think it was, my sense it was pretty genuine.

I thought, and interestingly, the first comment I heard was from the normally fairly waspish

Sam Coates at Sky, who said he felt that Keir Starmer had, somewhat to his surprise, wowed them.

Did you get a chance to watch it live, Rory?

No, I read the speech, so I've seen the whole text and I caught a little bit of him speaking.

Just one thing, though, to begin with, is that

some journalists were sort of predicting that this would happen, that the narrative would be scandal, all this stuff going wrong, resignations,

Andy Burnham coming up.

And then the speech would turn it around and everyone would be very excited about the speech.

And then a month later, everything would collapse again.

And that's what everyone was saying a week ago and it seems to be what's happened.

Can you just,

I don't want to sound too postmodern, but any sense of why that often is the way of things?

No, because the way that hype works is that you go through a

build-up to a big event and the build-up tends to focus on all the things that could go either right or wrong.

And then, so I think what happened this time is that part of the build-up was about Andy Burnham.

There was a lot of talk about Andy Burnham thinking about making a challenge, thinking about getting a seat, getting back into Parliament.

And then kind of day one, that sort of faded away.

I think that what's happened in the last, I was up there last night, and I think what's happened is that there's I think they've shown a bit of fight and a bit of passion.

And I think that's what the Labour Party's been wanting to see for some time.

And I thought that what was it, what was interesting, you can always often tell, obviously, you've got to be careful not to think that the hall reacting is the public, but it's always interesting to see which bits really do sort of fire up the audience.

And there was one bit,

I think Kirstan was probably quite startled by it.

You know, subtitles, but it's usually a sort of Barraco Barber

style oratory, does it?

Where you get rolling applause, where people start to clap, and then you carry on speaking.

And he had a couple of sections like that, where essentially were about either things that the Labour government has done, or I think where he got really started to connect with the audience was when he was really going for a Farage, really going for reform, really sort of hitting the values piece.

Um, so I think it was, I think you'll be pretty happy that the talk at the start has kind of faded.

And then, as you say, we'll have to see where this

feels in a month, two months, three months' time.

And of course, we, you know, the big event coming up now in November is the budget, and that's when we're going to see.

I noticed one line, he said, you know, the tough choices will keep on coming.

I think that was as close as we got to an indication of the budget.

VAT rises.

Well,

the narrative of the speech was, I think, really interesting.

And I think, as usual, I think, and this will be true for Carney or Albanese or anybody from the Progressive Centre taking on the populace, they've got to do something quite tough, which is they've got to acknowledge that a lot of the public share the grumbles of the populace, share the sense that things are broken, things aren't working, they think their children's lives are going to be worse off than they are, cost of living isn't going right.

So immigration is too high.

You've got to acknowledge that.

But you've then got to do something quite difficult, which is then work out how you make yourself different from the populace.

You do that either by saying, I guess the reasons for this problem are different from what Farage says, or I have a different solution.

And it's at that bit that I guess he skates through in the speech quite elegantly.

And it's a difficult balance because he's saying, basically, one moment he's saying everything's really crap and the Tories screwed it all up and everything's rubbish.

But on the other hand, he's saying Farage is too negative and Britain's great and terrific and it's all going to be terrific and I believe in it.

But the thing that I think will still be the big problem is what's the big idea of the solution?

And there still, there seem to be two stories going on.

One of them is the Rachel Reeves story, which is we need to be sensible, careful with our money.

You know, don't tax too much, don't spend too much, don't borrow too much, control public spending.

Relatively kind of traditional free market view on how you get the economy growing.

And then there was another story that Starmer was pushing, which was more popular with the audience, I guess, which was a more sort of let's be more Swedish social democratic.

So let's spend more on skills, on investment, on industrial policy, let's get growth from the bottom up, let's have a really different type of economic model.

And the problem with that, of course, is they can't, like Biden, borrow.

And they don't have, as Germany or the Netherlands do, quite a lot of fiscal headroom with their deficit.

So they're tied of cash.

So it's very difficult to work out how you can be a kind of Bidenomic social democrat when you don't have any extra money, unless you're prepared to cut welfare, which he can't do.

On which there was, if I'm right, no mention at all.

I think that the he was at pains to point out that growth remains the number one mission and talking about that.

Where I think you're right in terms of the sort of leaning into a more kind of social democrat approach, I was the one big surprise in the speech, I think, was this moving away from

the goal of getting 50% of young people into university.

and changing that to two-thirds of people going to university or having a gold standard apprenticeship.

That went down unbelievably well.

And I think that was about trying to fit into this message.

The message he kept repeating was a Britain built for all.

And that was essentially saying about

the idea of proper respect for working people, proper respect for apprenticeships.

He rather amusingly, although I don't know whether he was surprised that he got as many laughs as he did, he revisited the occupation of his father.

Yeah, that was a good moment, wasn't it?

Yeah.

The tool maker.

But he did so in this context of respect and dignity.

He kept talking about respect and dignity.

And I think that what was interesting, I think the Labour Party, I think, feels a little bit liberated.

He only mentioned the Tories once, and it was as a joke.

The Tories, remember them, in terms of the sort of the politics of this.

I think they feel a bit liberated to think, right, we've stopped sort of thinking, can we ignore Farage?

Do we have to just sort of hope he goes away like a bad smell?

They've now absolutely set out, he is the enemy.

He is the person they've got to take down.

And I think it's that that's put a bit of fire in their belly.

And i thought it was i thought you know the fact that literally the whole of the cabinet sitting there waving union flags and flags of st george and saltires and red dragons and wife you so they reclaiming the flag was a big part of this but i think i think it was about saying ultimately we have values that they don't agree with and and he and he and he he addressed those within this context of the concept of patriotic renewal.

What does patriotism really mean in the modern age?

And he's very, very aware, isn't he, of the success of Albanese and Mark Carney against the odds.

You know, progressive centre-left parties that were behind in the polls went into the elections against Trumpian populists or people who were definitely portrayed as Trumpian populists, and then beat all the odds to win, largely because Trump had discredited that whole thing.

So it feels like it's a great gift to centre-left progressive parties to be able to say this other lot is like Trump.

I mean, it raises one question though, which is the more he lays into his values problem with Farage, the more people are going to say, well, okay, so what do you think about Trump, who's much worse on almost all these indicators, and where Starmer doesn't actually ever speak out against him.

Yeah,

and for reasons which I think we all understand, it's because he's sort of so reliant on foreign and defense policy and trade

on a very volatile, unpredictable Trump.

I guess of the two, he's probably more minded to think about Albanese as the comeback guy, because Carney's comeback was predicated upon the incumbent being booted out at the last minute.

But I think it was

the one thing I would like to have seen more of that was,

and I know I've been involved in many, many, many conference speeches.

You can't address every policy.

It's best to have one big argument driving through.

And I think his argument was patriotic renewal, a Britain built for all, etc.

But I'd like to have seen the politics of this with Farage,

maybe

in a bigger context, the context that we were talking about on the podcast last week with Gerald Knaus.

Why this, so there was a very brief mention of Ukraine.

There was a very brief mention within the context of the defense industry of Putin's aggression.

But I actually think that the other place where he could have found a real voice and real leadership is in this sense of this is happening all over Europe, and we are part of this battle all over Europe.

You know, it's the AFD, it's Le Pen and Bardella, it's Vilders in Holland, and it's Farage here.

And set it in that context.

I think that would have given it a kind of bigger picture.

But look, I think he and his team will be pretty happy with how it's gone.

Just on that one, two things there.

One is

I completely agree because it would resonate very well with who he is.

You know, he's got a pass as a human rights lawyer.

And in fact, his attorney general has been quite strong on this, come out, done some quite strong stuff in the ECHR recently.

sort of echoing what you were saying last week.

But it's also true that I think it would appeal to labor because it gives the moral purpose.

I mean, this famous cliché about you being a moral crusade, well, you're nothing.

This is a really great crusade because this is a crusade about peace above all.

I mean, I think that's probably the most powerful thing, which is if you can make the link not just between human rights and morality, but human rights and peace.

I mean, explain how what these guys are doing is leading to a world of more conflict and more danger for our children and grandchildren.

But it's also something I think that would unite people on the left of the MPs on the left of the party, the kind of people I talk to quite a lot, who are a bit uncertain about where he's going on Gaza, a bit uncertain about where he's going on two child benefit, to hear him really make the big progressive international

argument.

And I'm surprised he ducked that.

Yeah, I guess it is just in the end, you know, you start feeling you've got to cover too much, pack too much into the argument.

But I think as this goes on, what I sort of sense of this is that hopefully, from the Labour Party's perspective,

they've sort of got over the wobble of the last few weeks.

The mood last night when I was there and this morning felt a lot better than I'd been hearing and reading on the media.

But I think that the other thing that that does is it gives him this sense of the international leader as well, which I know is not, we often say, well, that's got a no-votes TV.

But I actually think that his leadership related to his values within some of these bigger battles.

He can't take on Trump in the way that Mark Carney and Albanese did because it's just gonna,

it will it will upset too many apple carts.

What he can do though is say that you know we in Europe, the progressives in Europe are in the fight of our life and it's a fight for what sort of future we believe in based on values, based on

a strong sense of patriotism.

And I thought his stuff on immigration

was interesting.

I thought he did that quite well well, actually.

He told this story about sitting down with a woman who was showing off pictures of her being with her best friend who was Asian.

And then they were, but they actually, she didn't, it was the Eastern Europeans who'd come in and

change the sort of nature of the street that they lived in.

And I think he was essentially, because the audience in the hall loved it when he took on Farage over racism, absolutely went for that in a big way.

But he was just as determined to make sure they heard the message that it is not racist to say that you've got to control immigration.

It is reasonable to say we have to control and we have to know who's coming in the country.

To move away from the speech onto the kind of policy problem,

I still think the biggest view for Labour is, are they going to be able to prove to people that they're serious about economic growth, or at least the kind of economic growth that Rachel Reeves and the Treasury believe in.

And I think Rachel Reeves, broadly speaking, and contradict me if I'm wrong, is actually relatively mainstream on this.

I think she thinks that the way to get growth is to stop taxes getting too high, keep investment going, try to keep it good for business, and ideally try to cut some of the welfare budget so you can free up so that the money that you're putting into infrastructure or AI or whatever is not coming, is not extra money, but it's capital investment coming out.

But can they do that when he's carrying with him a Labour Party that basically wants to spend on welfare, wants to spend on wages and finds it very, very difficult to accept cuts there and begins to think what's the point of Labour if we're doing that because it sounds too much like austerity.

When you arrive in Liverpool at the moment you get off the train and the first thing you see is this gigantic, gigantic poster across from Liverpool Lime Street and it's from Save the Children.

Was it the point of winning to lift kids out of poverty?

Scrap the two-child limit.

Now,

there was a lot of talk that that was going to be trailed and mentioned in the speech.

It wasn't.

So look, I think you're right about the sort of central tension.

And of course,

that vote on welfare reform having been lost.

They are going to have to revisit it at some point.

They're obviously going to have to revisit it in a different way.

But I think one of the reasons why Pat McFadden has been moved into work and pensions is to go and, you know, once this there's this Stephen Timms review that is the product of the welfare rebellion that he's doing with the disability groups.

But they are going to have to revisit welfare.

There's no doubt about that.

And so I think that's what he was alluding to when he talked about tough choices are still going to keep coming.

What I think they're trying to do, though, is give themselves a sense of the long term.

I mean, they you still hear they don't really have a sense of what the big growth plan is.

Okay.

They think that there are too many levers that they've either cut off or they haven't adopted.

Now,

it's never too late to do these things.

But they have got the economy has got to start growing by the second half of this parliament.

Otherwise, some of these other things that he was talking about today are not going to be possible.

Again, the audience loved it when he talked about lifting children out of poverty and every child getting a good start in life and all that stuff.

But as I heard those, I was thinking, right, well, he's saying the right things.

But they're all dependent then upon the plan that follows.

One other thing I was surprised about on the policy front, Rory, is that just a few days ago, they made a big thing of launching this digital ID

plan.

There's no mention of it.

You know, sometimes you've got to, you know, the only way to win an argument, particularly in the modern age, is you've got to keep remaking it.

So I was surprised by that.

I thought that was a.

Yeah, it's a bit strange.

Once you've taken the risk of doing that, and it's a risk, you should make it your thing.

Yeah.

I mean,

you make a virtue of it and say, this is part of our immigration plan.

And, yeah, sounds quite right-wing, but this is what we're doing.

And, you know, people remember it, won't they?

I mean, you know, find, you know, take on because you'll get presumably quite a lot of the left attacking you about it.

You'll have bits of the right attacking you about it.

So it can be quite a good wedge-is you to for voters to think, okay, we know what they're doing.

What did you think?

I was doing an event last night with Nick Thomas Simmons, who's a very thoughtful member of the government.

And it was very interesting.

One of the questioners that was at this event, we were just in conversation together.

And she said that she didn't yet have a sense of what the Labour Party had decided the attack on Nigel Farage was.

And I just wonder what you thought today

of the way that Keir Starmer went for Farage and whether you thought it was effective.

I think it's good.

I think it's good.

I think it's quite complicated, is the problem.

I mean, really appealing to me, which is to say Farage actually isn't proud of Britain.

He doesn't believe in Britain.

But it's quite a complicated thought because, of course, most reform voters will be like, well, hold a second.

Of course he believes in Britain.

Of course he's proud of Britain.

That's why I support reform.

So it's a little bit, the jiu-jitsu may be a little bit too clever.

I mean, I sort of prefer your line, which is this is a fight for values.

This is a fight for the Britain we care about.

This is...

fight for Europe.

This is a fight for peace.

This is a fight for dignity and equality.

And this guy's a rogue.

Both he and West Streeting earlier really went for Farage on the sort of, you know, snake oil salesman type of thing.

The other thing,

he did mention the B word three times.

Very good.

So

that's slow progress, progress.

I mean, this is too

self-centered, but I think if I think about my own attempts to do this kind of thing, when I was trying to get involved in the referendum campaign in Scotland, I tried to make an argument which was really appealing to some people, which is that the Scottish nationalists are about division, they're about believing that if you just get rid of London, all your problems will be solved.

They're about putting up borders.

And actually, we should be thinking about expanding into Europe and a bigger global world and not getting smaller.

But my conclusion in the end is it was too complicated.

That most curious SNP voters, that wasn't how they saw their party.

And that's what slightly worries me here.

That if you're a reform voter, are you really going to believe that the basic problem with Farage is that he's not proud of Britain?

No, not really.

Yeah, the only thing, the other thing that I thought where they might have gone on this,

we haven't spoken yet about this guy, Nathan Gill, the leader of reform in Wales, who's now admitted these charges of bribery by the Russians.

I mean, it's like,

and you've had, you've had Richard Ty saying that, you know, he never met him.

And of course, all these pictures come out of them together and endless pictures.

But I sort of think that there is something on the patriotic front about Russia.

And of course, this then also, I think, takes you back to Brexit as well.

So

I think you could make the case.

I thought it was a very powerful line when he said, Have you ever, when was the last time you heard Nigel Farage say anything positive about Britain?

And I liked the section at the end of the speech where he was hitting back at broken Britain, telling these stories of individuals who'd done things.

You know, the girl who built a started a football team, the boy who cleared off race's graffiti, whatever.

And so I think you could build that ghost the point this question was making at my event with nick thomas simmons last night is that they're kind of trying a few scattergun approaches it's the nhs it's he doesn't understand the economy he's a one-man band it's russia whatever i think they need to sit down now that they've decided farage is the main opposition they really need to sit down and have a proper strategic audit on how they're going to actually attack him over time.

Another person there last night who's from the Life Sciences made another interesting observation.

He said, You know, we all know what Farage thinks about immigration because we hear him talk about it all the time.

When are they going to be put under proper pressure to start to explain what they think about things like life sciences, things like the future of the health system, whatever?

So I think that's a job

both for Labour and the Tories and the Lib Dems, etc., but also for the media as well.

If this guy is now being talked about as the next Prime Minister, he has to be put under proper scrutiny.

And that can't just be left to the parties.

The media's got to be part of that as well.

Final one from me.

I think this shift to go after reform just underscores what existential trouble the Tories are in.

I mean, listeners will probably have picked up, not maybe all international listeners, that there are now opinion polls out suggesting that reform is going to get well over three hundred seats, you know, could even get a full majority in Parliament and that the Tories will drop down to the sort of thirty or forty seats, and Labour could be down below one hundred.

So I think he's right that his route, Keir Starmer's route back, is by focusing on reform.

But presumably that will make the job for Conservatives even more difficult.

If the BBC believes that the two main parties are reform and the government,

if Kierstama believes the two main parties are reform and the government, how on earth are the Conservatives supposed to find space?

Because their economic policy is not very different from Rachel Reeves.

They're carrying all the blame for the last 14, 15 years, and all the energy on the right is seeping towards reform.

I mean, can you see this a bit ridiculous, two and a half years out of election, but can you see a route back for the Conservatives?

Look, I think Kemmi Badenox is in a lot of trouble.

And of course,

she's got Robert Jenrick, who's basically kind of, you know, trying to be a kind of mini Farage.

Clearly thinks the Conservatives have to absolutely fight the Tories on that territory.

I think they

I thought one of the points Davey made in his speech about the Conservatives, it seems to me they have had no real analysis as to why they lost.

A bit like the Democrats in America, but even worse.

They still talk and act as though everything they did was fine.

All the problems that Labour are now doing difficult things to try and sort out are bad for Labour, but they never kind of own their own responsibility.

I think until they do that, nobody's going to listen to them.

Just on this MRP poll, I think we've got to be very, very, very careful.

I mean, these polls always start with, if there was an election tomorrow, how would you vote?

We're several years away.

And as David Lamy rightly pointed out, Norway, Australia, Canada, lots can happen.

And the other thing, the one interesting thing I did think in the, I read the poll and I read the notes.

When you look at the seats that reform are taking from Labour, according to this MRP poll,

82 of them,

they are winning with less than 5%.

So those are all eminently losable.

When you look at Lib Dem seats that Lib Dems might be taking off the Tories, they have an average lead almost four times that, an average lead of 18 points.

So,

what you're looking at with a lot of these seats that this

MRP poll is suggesting

might lead to Farage getting some sort of majority or certainly minority government, a lot of them are still very, very winnable back

for Labour, for Tories, whoever it might be that they're taking them from.

Okay, I mean, I think let's maybe take a break and then come back and do Gaza.

But any last points that looking at this that you thought about conference that we should before we move on to Gaza?

I think the leadership thing settled for a while.

I thought that as so, I think the conference itself as a whole has gone pretty well for Labour.

It's kind of been solid.

I think I'm sure the right-wing papers will find something to sort of, you know, say it was a terrible speech.

But watching it and then seeing some of the reaction not just from the audience but also from outsiders I think it was a very very good speech by certainly by Keir Starmer standards which you know he's not he's not a great orator but I think there was an argument there about renewal there was a fight there and there was a sense of him

and so I think he will have felt he's tick he's ticked the boxes but ultimately

the if the you know he said growth is the big mission if the economy doesn't pick up he had a lot to point to there were a lot of things they pointed to.

I wish to hell that

they spent more time actually communicating some of this stuff.

I even felt the Labour Party audience were cheering things about some of the big investments that have happened.

There was one that they mentioned in Hartlepool in Wales, and they loved the thing about the Glasgow and the Clyde getting the big shipbuilding thing.

But I felt even the Labour Party wasn't aware of some of these things that had happened.

You know, what if the Labour Party members who go to conferences aren't aware, what chance does the bloody public have but anyway I thought it I thought it was interesting I think that the the Tories will be worried I mean I don't know what the Tory strategy will be for their conference next week we've had we've had Farage who got a sort of you know two days mega publicity we've had Ed Davy who author did pretty well Labour's done pretty well

and then we're we're into the Tories who as you say I think are are facing and something of an existential threat so it all basically says that politics is very very interesting which is why we keep doing podcasts to talk about it we're gonna have a quick break and then we're going to come back and talk about Donald Trump bringing eternal peace to the Middle East.

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So yesterday, what do you make of it?

So there's Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office.

They set out a 20-point plan for peace in the Middle East.

My old friend Tony Blair, as we had previously suggested might happen, is named as being on this board of peace that will be chaired by Donald J.

Trump if it comes to fruition.

I mean, I think if is a big word in this.

I sort of felt reading, I've read the, we'll put in the newsletter the the full

20 points.

I couldn't help reading it with

a kind of Northern Ireland history kind of in my head.

And

virtually every point that is made, you keep thinking of

who will have a problem with it, how difficult that might be.

So look at, listen,

it was a big moment and fair play, you know, keep trying, but it's hard to be very, very optimistic.

Well, let's start with the Northern Ireland thing, because that's the first thing that's so startling about it.

It must have surprised you reading it.

So the first thing that's astonishing compared to Northern Ireland is that the Palestinians are not part of the negotiation.

This is a peace deal that's been put together between Israel and the US.

So imagine putting together a Good Friday Agreement, which the Republicans didn't get involved in negotiating, like the IRA were not involved, Sinn Feim were not involved.

But it's requiring Hamas to do all these things, in particular, disarm, get rid of weapons.

Now, think about your Nornan experience again.

What did it require to get the IRA to agree to decommission weapons?

Well, they had to feel that they had made a huge advance in terms of their political objectives.

to get rid of them.

And there were still factions within them that didn't want to get rid of weapons.

And there was a very, very difficult, long decommissioning and inspection process.

Hamas is apparently supposed to get rid of all their weapons in 72 hours, having achieved what exactly?

And that's the next thing.

Because this feels like a,

or will feel, I'm going to play a devil's advocate here, to certainly somebody on the Hamas side, as a surrender document.

A lot of the concessions that the press are claiming Israel is making will not feel like concessions at all.

For example, Israel agrees to let in humanitarian aid, or Israel gives up on the idea of ethnic cleansing and expelling all the Palestinian population from Gaza.

Well, many people, not just Hamas, many people in the world of even nine months ago would say, hey, hold a second.

Those are just norms of international law, right?

Getting food into people and not ethnically expelling them, that's not a concession, right?

That's the bare minimum that you should have been doing anyway in terms of your legal obligations.

Now, what are the concessions that Netanyahu made?

Well, he will make a lot of the the fact that he had to apologize to Qatar for striking them, and he doesn't usually apologize.

But again, what's that got to do with Palestine?

Not much, really.

It's about Qatar.

Secondly, he's had to accept that if Hamas fighters lay down their arms,

there could be an amnesty and some of them can leave.

That might be unpopular with some people.

And then there's some reference to a path towards a state.

But I don't think anybody, even on the right of Israeli politics, is going to believe that any of this is a guarantee.

And the the final thing back to you is if you think about the good friday agreement how long it took and how many details there were it wasn't a 20-point plan where are the guarantees right this was the key point with the north your good friday agreement if people didn't do things what are the consequences who's following up what are the guarantees if it's let's say hamas releases all the hostages

And Israel then decides not to release the prisoners.

You know, Netanyahu says for whatever reason, well, anyway, Hamas are a bunch of terrorists.

They don't deserve to get themselves back.

We've got our hostages back.

They can go screw themselves.

What are the consequences?

What are the guarantees?

That's what I meant by if you go through every single section of the plan of all 20, in every one of them you can see what-ifs that could lead to it being tipped up.

So, for example, you mentioned

Palestinian state.

And just going back to Kira Starma's speech, that was one of the standing evasions during the speech when he simply stated that, you know, we now recognise a Palestinian state.

But Netanyahu, who has since done an interview since being in the Oval Office and since doing the thing with Trump, where he's basically said there's no way there's going to be a Palestinian state.

And the other point that you make about the complication of this, so

I can't pretend to know as much about Hammas as I maybe do about the Irish Republicans and the IRA.

But the process by which the IRA took step by step to eventually saying, okay, we'll put arms beyond use, and then the the decommissioning process.

That was painful and it was slow and it was grinding.

And Donald Trump

did one of his little doorsteps just before Kirstalma's speech.

And he was asked by an American journalist, TV journalist, whether there was any room for negotiation or whether this was just take it or leave it for Hamas.

And he said, well, there's not much room.

It's pretty much take it or leave it.

And of course, and the other thing that's happening now, so CBS ran a report.

It was, I don't know who the source was, but it said a source involved in the negotiations.

And I'm just thinking, well, CBS, maybe it's an American, says Hamas is leaning towards acceptance.

And I thought, oh, really?

So I then sort of, you know,

called around a bit and spoke to a few people and read a few things.

And I mean,

and the one that really leapt out at me was Hamas, a Hamas source, speaking to Reuters.

And that, to my mind, usually means that it's somebody who knows somebody at Reuters and Reuters trusts that person and they've phoned them up.

And they said this plan is completely biased towards Israel.

It's imposed impossible conditions aimed at eliminating Hamas and went on to say that all the Israeli demands have been met.

There is no granting of legitimate rights to Gazans or Palestinians.

And that may be a kind of exaggerated view, but you can see

why they say that.

And so

this feels...

I hate to say this because, you know, I think people both think that we're just, we can't see any good in Trump.

I'm glad that he's still engaged.

I'm glad that he still thinks he can get people together and try and knock heads together and get it moving.

But it feels like something that has given him the opportunity to say, I'm still working on this and here's a real thought-through plan, and then to be able to blame Hamas when

if they come back and say, look, this is unacceptable.

Well, exactly.

And

so

that is going to be right at the heart of the story.

So if Hamas rejects this, very, very, very quickly, the narrative coming out of Israel, the Israeli government certainly, will be, well, we offered them, you know, we offered them peace and they rejected it.

So now we can continue doing whatever we're doing in Gaza and it's Hamas's fault because we offer them a peace deal.

And nobody will read the small print.

Nobody will be interested in the discussions about whether what they offered was reasonable.

Nobody will be interested in the point that it wasn't actually negotiated with Hamas at all.

The second question, though, which I think you pointed to when you talked about Netanyahu rejecting a two-state solution, is let's say in a sense that's actually quite convenient for Netanyahu, Hamas rejecting this, because it might help him with his own coalition partners who are a bit iffy about some of this stuff.

Just on that Roy, Bezalel Smutrich, who's one of the two big hardliners, he and Ben Gavir, who really

just don't want any truck with any talk of sort of even sort of being nice to the Palestinians, let alone giving them a state.

And he has called this deal a tragedy of leadership that lacks true vision.

So that's kind of where that side of the politics is coming at, Netanyahu.

And meanwhile, on the other side, of course,

he's getting it from people trying to push him towards accepting the deal.

So let me just develop this.

So there's meant to be 72 hours for Hamas to sign up.

And if Netanyahu doesn't want them to sign up, all he has to do is keep making statements.

in that 72-hour period, saying things like there's never going to be a two-state solution, leaning into an Israeli interpretation of this document, making it seem more and more pro-Israeli and unattractive.

And the result will be that he can force Hamas to reject it and then say, well, Hamas rejected it and we can continue.

So one question will be, does Netanyahu want this to happen or not?

Because if he doesn't want it to happen, there's an enormous amount that he can do to make it less likely that Hamas will sign up to it in terms of what he says.

between now and when they sign up.

Now, let's just jump forward, though.

Let's be optimistic for a second and assume that

some agreement is reached.

The next thing that I think we need to think about is your friend Tony Blair's vision.

And a lot of this comes from work that he was doing that was leaked and that the Financial Times replied to.

A lot of this plan comes from his work.

He basically is envisaging a technocratic Palestinian government, which oddly, or administration which is not Hamas, but is also not the Palestinian authority, which incidentally we all just recognized.

So this hasn't been negotiated with the Palestinian state that France and Canada and Britain recognize and the Palestinian state that France and Britain and Canada recognize not going to be running this thing.

It's this debt great thing.

And then there's going to be an international supervision council.

You talked about that, Trump and Blair.

How much time are they going to spend on this?

And what does it really mean that Trump's chairing this thing?

Is he running Gaza?

How much time is he going to put into that?

Then there's an international security force, which looks like it's supposed to be Middle Eastern countries providing security.

So So it is, as we were discussing this a couple of days ago, has

elements of the sort of things that happened in the 90s.

So it feels a bit like the kind of projects that people were trying to do in East Timor, Timor-Leste, or Kosovo,

Bosnia, or Cambodia.

But

the problem here...

is that in those situations, there wasn't Israel.

This all stands or falls on Israel.

You've got a massive military power right on your border who controls all the borders.

So this document doesn't tell you, is the airport going to be opened?

Is the port going to be opened?

When is the Rafah border with Egypt going to be opened?

At the moment, all access to Gaza will come through Israel.

Israel retains the right at any moment if they think the Arab security force is not doing a good job to intervene.

presumably bomb, send in special forces.

They will say very quickly, you said you'd disarm Hamas, you haven't.

You said you'd get rid of the tunnels, you haven't.

We can come in again, right?

So imagine you're that administration.

Pretty quickly, you're dealing with a place that's taken billions upon billions of dollars worth of damage.

You have a very angry, traumatized population.

They will be demonstrating the streets.

I saw this in Iraq, right?

When we took over in Iraq, almost immediately, we couldn't get petrol to people.

We couldn't get the schools up and running quickly enough.

The electricity lines were coming down.

I had thousands of people demonstrating outside my office.

But I didn't have the added problem of people saying, and by the way, you're a puppet of an Israeli government.

You're the puppet of what are basically our enemies next door.

And the reason you're not doing these things for us is that you're working for their agenda.

I mean, it answered your question, how much time will Donald Trump put into it?

I mean, you know, he's a busy guy and he's the president of the United States.

But I think one of the things that...

came across really strongly yesterday was the extent to which he wants to be seen to be the only person who can really really sort this and if you go through the paper i mean

as you say these are really really really difficult complicated questions that are going to require some of the best brains in the world to try and actually get them to work gaza will be governed under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic apolitical Palestinian committee responsible for delivering the day-to-day running of public services and municipalities for the people in Gaza.

Can we do one at a time?

Can I just say

one?

Let's do one at a time.

I think it's really interesting.

Okay, so a couple of questions on that.

Who chooses these people?

In other words, do they have legitimacy?

Will the people of Gaza see these people as legitimate representatives?

Number two, how do they deliver those services, get the schools up and running, get the hospitals up and running?

What kind of civil service do they have?

It was a Hammer civil service.

So, two questions for you.

How are they chosen and how do they get anything done?

Well, the one I would add to that is in the context of where we are now,

the concept of apolitical Palestinians is, I think,

quite hard to get my head around that one.

I mean, the answer to your question is that those questions have not been answered.

Goes on.

The committee will be made up, of this partly answers your question, but it doesn't answer it fully, of qualified Palestinians and international experts with oversight and supervision by a new international

transitional body.

That's the body of peace, Trump, Blair, etc.

The body will set the framework.

This body, and I think that means the international body, will set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program as outlined in various proposals.

So that is basically saying that the Palestinian Authority, which Israel thinks is just a complete sort of bunch of

corrupt gerontocracy, which America has refused to give visas, is it the same Palestinian Authority?

Are we talking about a completely different Palestinian Authority?

So, two more questions, I guess, that come out of that.

Number one, what's the legal status of this body?

I mean, if we were doing this in the 90s, there would be a lot of international lawyers thinking about international law.

Is this a UN body?

No, because Trump and Israel don't like the UN.

That would be the normal way to do it, right?

It'd be UN body.

Although the UN are specifically named in relation to the distribution of aid.

Yep, very good.

They're doing their humanitarian stuff.

But what's the legal status of this organization?

In Iraq, remember,

Bremer, the American representative, had to set it all up under Jay Ghana and then Bremer, under occupation law.

So they were formerly the occupying power under international law with all the responsibilities that go with being the occupying power.

Is this the occupying power?

Or is Israel the occupying power that is granting power to this transitional authority to act on behalf of Israel?

Next question.

They say that they're going to have all the money.

Where's the money coming from?

Well, one thing we know about Donald Trump is he's not providing any money.

One thing we know about Israel, they're not providing any money.

They've made it completely clear that despite the fact that the reconstruction of Gaza is reconstruction against the bombing that Israel has done, there is nobody in the entire Israeli political spectrum that is suggesting we reconstruct.

Now, remember, that's another thing.

I was reading quite good Times of Israel piece about this.

When many people, if you, you know, David Menser, for example, will say, well, we're not doing anything different in Gaza from what the Americans and British did in Germany during the war.

The difference is the British and Americans were committed to reconstructing Germany after the war.

But Israel is not committed to reconstructing Gaza.

So presumably the answer is they're hoping the money is going to come from the Gulf Arabs.

Well, hold on.

The next paragraph.

A Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza will be created by convening a panel of experts who've helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East.

I'm assuming this is the sort of stuff, the work that Jared has been doing.

Many thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas have been crafted by well-meaning international groups.

It's becoming a bit of a word seller, this, and will be considered to synthesize the security and government's frameworks to attract and facilitate these investments that will create jobs, opportunity, and hope for future Gaza.

On that one, here are the questions then.

What's the miracle?

Well, the miracle presumably is Dubai.

What is Dubai?

Dubai is above all about security.

It's about international capital and visas, huge numbers of expatriates, and it's about very, very open trade and borders.

Emirates Airline, huge international port.

But the problem for Gaza is there's no security.

The borders are controlled by Israel.

There's no suggestion that they're going to allow airports or ports to open.

So how do you pull off the economic miracle?

You put it off, Rory, by having a Trump economic development plan.

It then says a special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff.

Tariffs get in here, preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.

No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return.

Now, where it gets then, I think, really, really, really tricky.

Okay, as if it isn't tricky already.

Hamas and other factions, not named, agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza directly, indirectly, or in any form.

Now, just imagine the discussion that that set off

in Gaza and the West Bank and in Qatar now.

Just imagine that.

Hamas and other factions agree not to have any role in the government's directly, indirectly, any form.

Any military terror and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt.

There will be a process of demilitarisation of Gaza under the supervision of independent monitors, where do they come from?

Which will include placing weapons permanently beyond use, that's the phrase that we used in Northern Ireland, through an agreed process of decommissioning, supported by an internationally funded buyback and reintegration program, verified by independent monitors.

New Gaza will be fully committed to building a prosperous economy and to peaceful coexistence with their neighbours.

I mean, it's putting an awful lot on a lot of people to say, yeah, I'm going to go along with all of this.

Demobilisation

and disarming was done, obviously.

You very much were involved in that in Northern Ireland.

But it's something that requires security forces, requires police, requires armies.

In the Balkans it was done, you know, the army was demobilized.

But that had tens of thousands of international troops on the ground and a huge mandate mission around that.

You controlled the borders in the case of the Balkans and in the case of Northern Ireland.

And there was political will in the general population to drive ahead with that.

So

who is doing it?

I mean, let's say a sort of provisional Hamas emerges, like a provisional IRA and says, well, wait a second, we don't like this deal.

We're not disarming.

Who's got the job of taking their arms away?

Who's got the job of blowing up the tunnels?

Now,

ideally, from Trump and Netanyahu's point of view, they hope this is going to be the Arab security force.

But that puts the Arab Security Force in an impossible situation because you're asking them to basically fight Palestinians, Arabs fighting Palestinians, and it will be presented as Arabs fighting Palestinians on behalf of Israel.

So it'll be almost impossible for them to do that.

Well, again,

this goes on to say: the United States will work with Arab and international partners to develop a temporary, temporary, international

stabilization force to immediately deploy in Gaza.

The ISF will train and provide support to vetted Palestinian police forces in Gaza and will consult with Jordan and Egypt, who have extensive experience in this field.

This force will be the long-term internal security solution.

The ISF will work with Israel and Egypt to help secure border areas along with newly trained Palestinian police forces.

I mean, again, if I go back to the Northern Ireland,

the concept of policing and who polices and where they come from and how they're trained.

This is not going to get put together in a few days.

Just quickly on that one, I mean, I think you've made this point really powerfully, which is that we forget that the government in Gaza for the last 20 years has been Hamas.

And Hamas is everywhere.

I mean, people working in education departments, in municipalities, are Hamas people.

They

defeated Fatah in an election, defeated the guys who are running the Palestinian Authority in the election.

And there was a civil war where Fatah and Hamas were killing each other.

So your point

has knobs on, right?

Who are the new civil servants?

And who are these police and who are they associated with?

And who supports them when they get into a fight?

And how do you win the battle for hearts and minds?

Because this is also a counterinsurgency campaign.

It's a starved, traumatized population with huge resentments towards Israel and the international community.

So how do you deliver development quickly enough to win them over?

And that's what we failed to do.

in Iraq and Afghanistan.

You know, very quickly, people say, where are the jobs?

And where will the jobs come from?

Right?

There will be, I don't know, there will be youth unemployment rates.

It's 30, 40% in Gaza.

Who's going to create those jobs?

Doing what?

And this is, look, let's say you and I suddenly got idealistic and wanted to move to Gaza and help with this project.

Very quickly, you would realize that almost every conversation goes back to Israel.

Let's say you got tariff-free agreements to, I don't know,

manufacture textiles in Gaza, or you were trying to run IT companies in Gaza, or you were trying to do trans-shipment trades of chips from China into Europe, and everything is stopped because the airports don't function, the borders don't function, or let's say you've got migrant labourers trying to bring salaries in.

It's all controlled by Israel, and Israel won't give up that control because, if you hear it from their point of view, they see it as vital to their security that they don't give up that control.

Right, so it goes on.

Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza.

As the ISF establishes control and stability, easier said than done, the IDF, the Israeli Defence Forces, will will withdraw based on standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization that will be agreed upon between the IDF, the ISF, the Guarantors, and the United States with the objective of a secure Gaza that no longer poses a threat to Israel, Egypt, or its citizens.

And just on that, the standards, milestones, and timeframes, I mean, what are they?

How do you negotiate each one?

There were some maps produced

with the paper, and it showed a sort of plan for how the Israelis might start to pull back.

But what happens when there's a fight between some of the Israelis and some of the Palestinians?

What's going to happen when

the unexpected takes place, which it's bound to do?

So I think in all of this, it's all,

this written for a perfect world.

This is a good plan, okay?

But it is so not a perfect world.

And I think that there's, I just, I'd love to think that the work has been done that answers these questions, but I haven't seen it yet.

Yeah, I guess we've probably driven our audience mad with our detailed questions.

But if we just go back to the big picture, two quick observations.

One of them is, remember there were January and March ceasefire deals.

And they basically said two things which have gone from this deal.

In some ways, the deals got worse.

In the earlier versions, Hamas were going to release their hostages at the same time as the Israelis released the prisoners.

This requires Hamas to release its hostages before Israel released the prisoners, requires an element of trust, which wasn't in the earlier deals.

Secondly, in those earlier deals, the answer to your question on when Israel withdrew, well, that was tied to the hostage release.

Israel was going to get its troops out at the same time as the hostages were released.

In fact, Hamas wasn't going to do any of these things until Israel withdrew.

Now we've got a situation where Israel basically says we're going to be there and we won't tell you how long.

Final thing is at the root of the problem is that the Palestinians are not in the negotiation.

I mean,

you don't have to be like a sort of super politically correct theorist of peace building to understand that the idea that you can negotiate a peace deal without having one side involved is kind of madness.

And

there's none of the international legal or UN structures around this.

It's a real sign of how much the world has changed in the last nine months, that this is even even conceivable as a deal.

I mean, it's very, very weird that we're in a world now where we're sort of respectfully talking about something which I think even 12 months ago, the whole world would have been like, this is not the way you do peace deals.

Yeah.

And of course what happened on the back of it, I mean,

they put a lot of work into this.

I mean, the positive reactions sort of came out, flooding out straight away.

But just because people react positively in the moment doesn't necessarily mean that these things are going to happen.

And my final point, where I don't know if you had time to read it, but I sent you

an analysis piece from the Times of Israel.

And it was clearly, I think, spun from the kind of, you know, the Israeli government perspective.

And the headline was, Netanyahu secures key edits to Trump plan to slow and limit Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.

It says Netanyahu was bullish as he left the White House and then goes through these areas.

He's seen drafts that have then been slightly watered down.

And Netanyahu did a video.

Now the whole world, including the Arab and Muslim world, is pressuring Hamas to accept the terms that we created together with Trump to bring back all the hostages, the living and the dead, while the IDF stays in the majority of the strip.

And then he said in Hebrew, who would have believed it?

In other words, trying to give the sense to the Bengavis and the Smotric, I've got everything that you guys wanted me to get.

Just on the comments, just to bring in the live audience a little bit, Ronnie Fahy has written in just a minute ago saying, it's pretty sick how your hatred for Trump overpowers your basic humanity.

It's progress.

And the international community on both sides back, but you cannot for a second give some kudos.

And then Vasilis Antonopoulos, if you think nothing will work, what do you propose?

Okay, my answer to that is we do know how these things are done.

And the answer is you have a proper process in which you involve the Palestinians.

It's not rocket science.

The idea that you can get a peace deal, basically taking the demands only from one side is completely mad.

It would be like making a Northern Ireland peace deal which was written by the British and

the Unionists.

It would be like, I don't know, a Balkans peace deal just written by the Bosnian Muslims.

Secondly, you get the international legal structures and the UN involved.

You don't hatch it up as a deal between Netanyahu and Trump and then give all the cards to Netanyahu to determine whether or not it's accepted.

So the fact that it's pushing for peace is not enough for us to say

this is a good deal.

There are many alternatives.

No, and also, I mean, I sort of acknowledged the first point.

I actually said that I think a lot of our listeners probably do think that we're so sort of biased against Trump that we can't see any good in him, which is why two or three times I've said actually I think it is a good thing that they keep trying, that they keep going.

But I think it is when you are talking about something as important as this, on a day, by the way, that the numbers of people who have died of malnutrition in Gaza has now reached 453, 150 of them children, 70,000 deaths,

then I think we're entitled to probe and press the detail of something, which I do welcome.

I do welcome the fact that they've set out this plan.

I think it is not unreasonable then to say, okay,

these are the questions that flow from it.

And therefore, I think that in terms of, you know,

what would we do,

I think you would try to build proper international support for the sorts of things that are in this plan.

What you can't do is just say, this is what we think should happen, and therefore it will happen.

Life doesn't work like that.

And politics, I mean, we are the rest of politics, are at the core of this, which is it can't just be technocratic.

There needs to be a Palestinian authority with legitimacy that Palestinians can get behind.

Right now, obviously, that's not going to be a Hamas government, but it's at the very least, we've recognized the Palestinian state should be the Palestinian Authority.

Saying there's not going to be a Palestinian Authority until the Palestinian Authority reforms, and saying that allowing food in is something that they will allow as a sort of condition if they sign up for the peace deal, is complete sign of how far backwards we've gone.

No.

That food, that humanitarian support, should be there today, should have been there three months ago, and

it is the most disgusting moral blackmail to be saying we're going to continue to starve you unless you sign up to this plan.

Oh, final one, sorry, just to quote Maxine Thompson who came in, like Trump and Putin regarding Ukraine, or Matt Lang, just like Russia and the US deciding federal Ukraine, we were very, very clear that the problem with Trump sitting down with Putin is that Zelensky wasn't in the room.

The problem with Trump sitting down with Netanyahu is the Palestinians are not in the room.

But you weren't very happy about Tony Blair's role in all this, were you?

Be honest.

No,

I thought it was extraordinary that he would do this.

I think it goes against what he learned in Northern Ireland, goes against what he would have learnt painfully in Iraq.

I guess will go against the instincts of Jonathan Powell, National Security Advisor.

And I think it's a very strange thing for him to do.

It puts him in a very exposed position, taking res I mean, the basic way I'd frame it is this, that if he does this, Tony Blair will have responsibility without power.

The power will remain with Israel, and he'll be carrying the can for things that he can't implement.

Yeah.

Well, I I just think it shows his continuing commitment to public service, home and abroad.

What a fine man.

Anyway, listen, thank you, everybody, for joining us.

I hope we've

informed, elucidated, and I don't know, provoked a bit of thought.

Well, you certainly will have provoked everybody with your final praise of Tony Blair, who I fear is not quite as popular as he is with you.

Right.

Okay, thank you, Alistair, very much.

Bye-bye.

See you soon.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

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