463. Question Time: How Truth Became Optional In Trump’s America

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to The Rest is Politics Plus to enjoy ad-free listening.

Speaker 1 Receive a weekly newsletter, join our members' chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to the RestisPolitics.com.
That's the RestisPolitics.com.

Speaker 1 This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. Now more and more drivers are moving to electric as the economic and environmental arguments get much harder to ignore.

Speaker 2 And the real benefit of an electric car comes when you can charge affordably at home. Saves time, saves money.

Speaker 2 Difference between a late-night queue on the motorway and stepping outside in the morning to a car that's already full.

Speaker 1 And Fuse makes that shift very, very simple. It's already the fastest growing energy provider in the UK.

Speaker 1 They go further, installing affordable smart EV chargers and linking them directly to their smart EV tariff.

Speaker 2 Which means the charger in your driveway is synced to the cheapest hours of the day, so every charge costs less. Think of it as having an economist in the garage, but one who finally earns their keep.

Speaker 1 Fuse is not just supplying power, they're setting you up properly, charger installed, tariff aligned, everything in place.

Speaker 2 Switch to Fuse today, make driving electric cheaper. Find out more at fuseenergy.com slash politics.

Speaker 3 This episode is brought to you by Spotify Portal for Backstage. But you're wondering, what's Portal?

Speaker 3 Well, it's an internal developer portal built to improve developer experience and boost productivity. All software components are centralized.
Documentation is automated and easy to maintain.

Speaker 3 New projects and components? Just a few clicks. With your best practices already built in.
Think less friction, more innovation. Ready to double your productivity?

Speaker 3 Try Spotify portal at backstage.spotify.com.

Speaker 3 This podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Carvana makes car selling fast and easy from start to finish.
Enter your license plate or VIN and get a real offer in seconds, down to the penny.

Speaker 3 If you accept, Carvana will come pick up your car from your driveway, or you can drop it off at one of our car vending machines. Either way, you get paid instantly.

Speaker 3 It's fast, transparent, and 100% online. Car selling that saves your time.
That's Carvana. Carvana.
Pickup fees may apply.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the Rest of Sports Question Time with me, Alistair Campbell.

Speaker 2 And with me, Rory Stewart. First question for you.
Mordecai Stones from London.

Speaker 2 I'm often amused and delighted, well, that's quite flattering, at your insightful commentary around Donald Trump's psychology and decision-making.

Speaker 2 Without lapsing into hysteria, considering the background of the January 6, 2021 capital attack, how closely do you feel that Trump's demolition of the East Wing speaks to the likelihood of him not leaving the White House come 2029?

Speaker 1 Well, he's already been musing. He was musing again on his plane to the Far East that he would love to have another term.

Speaker 1 He didn't like the idea of being the constitutional trick of being vice president for one term and then coming back or you know the the president vance presumably then sort of stepping aside and he would then constitutionally take over because that was too cute he said um but but i find this and bear in mind as well the demolition of the of the east wing um is another breach because he said he wasn't going to change the architecture of the of the white house i think what it all speaks to is the sense that he feels he can do whatever the hell he wants in whichever way he wants.

Speaker 1 More worryingly to my mind is the way that they're talking up the troubles that they expect around the midterms, more National Guards going to more cities.

Speaker 1 And, you know, Mordecai mentions January the 6th, 2021. I still can't for the life of me think why that wasn't a complete, you know, end of the road,

Speaker 1 career ending moment. But the fact that it isn't means that we should be very, very worried about some of these other things that he's doing, which I know you want to talk about.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I think the career ending, not just for him, it should have been career ending for all the senior Republicans that supported the big lie about his apparent election win and got behind him after January 6th.

Speaker 2 And yet they are now the dominant figures right across his entire administration. All of them have signed up to the story that he defeated Biden.
And of course, all the senior Republican leadership.

Speaker 2 We talk a lot about the international stuff, and we are struggling like the rest of the world, to get the right balance on how you describe this strange mixture that he does abroad of kind of gangster-like extortion.

Speaker 2 You know, I'll help you in Ukraine if you give me $500 billion worth of minerals, or let my friend Bolsonaro out of jail, or I'll hit you with 50% tariffs, and I'm going to bomb you, or I'm going to let someone else bomb you, and then I'm, oh, and by the way, give me this, I'll have a $400 million plane, thank you very much.

Speaker 2 But domestically, it's more difficult because it is about the erosion of constitutional protections and the rule of law and the way the Department of Justice works and the way the FBI works and what he's doing to universities and what he's doing to the media, what he's doing to law firms and what he's doing with ICE agents.

Speaker 2 And we're creating a culture which I think

Speaker 2 is fundamentally about Stephen Miller, particularly Trump's deputy chief of staff, but actually pretty much Vance and Trump too,

Speaker 2 believing in the end that what matters is power, force and violence not

Speaker 2 laws and process and that's the kind of big overall theme that we see again and again and a couple of examples and maybe sort of hand back to you

Speaker 2 one of them is of course what's happening in the Department of Justice so the Department of Justice

Speaker 2 since Watergate, since the 1970s, for the whole of my life, has operated with norms that basically say it's supposed not to be a political tool.

Speaker 2 It's supposed to look at cases on their merits and the prosecutors then pursue them and they don't do it with huge press conferences and they don't do it on a partisan basis and they don't use it to settle scores and they don't comment on the cases.

Speaker 2 Trump has ripped all that up.

Speaker 2 He

Speaker 2 stopped them pursuing the case against the mayor of New York, big corruption case involving the Turks, and he stopped it. because the mayor of New York was his ally.

Speaker 2 He's accelerated cases against his enemies, including the former director of the SBI, Comey,

Speaker 2 including now John Bolton. He regularly says, I'm going after this person.

Speaker 2 And then he, of course, being Trump, he then changes to, well, I'm not going after them, but I hear people are going after them.

Speaker 2 And probably if they're going after them, they're because they're very bad people.

Speaker 2 And in the center of this is this figure, Edward Martin, who is basically acting as the interim attack dog, who's out there all the time.

Speaker 2 He went after the interim New York Attorney General, basically turned up outside her house in a very threatening way with all the television cameras and then said, oh, I was just looking at some property around this area.

Speaker 2 And because of the lack of norms, because it's not like Britain where

Speaker 2 the Crown Prosecution Service is independent of the government, the Department of Justice is increasingly becoming a weaponized instrument of Trump's state. Over to you.

Speaker 1 Yeah. No,

Speaker 1 and the other thing, don't forget, while he's... talking about this sort of massively expensive ballroom, at a time when we're into the week of a government shutdown.

Speaker 1 We're only one week away from it becoming the longest shutdown in history.

Speaker 1 He was speaking to the troops in Japan, and they're having to get some sort of you know multi-billionaire business guy who's actually simultaneously involved in all sorts of legal things, which presumably will now get cleared up because of his generosity, who's helping to pay the military.

Speaker 1 So, this is kind of on the on the one hand, this, as you say, this global peacemaking

Speaker 1 spread the love, America will do this if you do this and all that.

Speaker 1 Back home, it's this policy of creating division, creating hate, building a sense that he might go for a third term, that the midterms may happen, may not happen, depending on the outcome, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 It's so sort of profoundly un-American, but it does say to me that,

Speaker 1 you know, when he says, does the demolition of the East Wing speak to the likelihood of him not leaving? He's creating not just a new Trump in the term two and a new White House and a new politics.

Speaker 1 He's kind of creating a new America and he's using it to try to create a whole new world. Now, maybe overreach will get him before too long,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 I find it very, very scary.

Speaker 2 There was a question from Christine Doyle, who's a Trip Plus member from Oxford,

Speaker 2 getting back to this question of whether America's headed for civil war.

Speaker 2 And one of the things I'd love to get your sense on is whether, oddly, having thought, you know, I thought maybe the real threat is civil war, in other words, all these American institutions would resist Trump and the country would be torn apart as people fought back.

Speaker 2 I'm now beginning to worry that actually these American elites are much less self-confident and much less good at standing up to him than people thought.

Speaker 2 The universities haven't really stood up, the media hasn't really stood up, the financial community hasn't really stood up.

Speaker 2 I mean, despite this crazy stuff he's doing with the American economy, with tariffs now at an average of 18%, with the employment figures looking dubious, with very strange moves affecting the international trade system.

Speaker 2 The markets are continuing to fly upwards. People are making a huge amount of money.
They're not pricing in the Trump risk.

Speaker 2 Almost nobody from finance to, or certainly Congress, seems to be fighting back. What's your sense of the fight back in the U.S.?

Speaker 1 Well, I think the thing to look forward to in the next few days, of course, is the election in New York.

Speaker 1 Zora Mamdani, who he had this extraordinary huge crowd, almost as big as our O2 crowd, Rory, turned up for a rally that he did with AOC and Bernie Sanders. Now, that's, if you like, the left, okay?

Speaker 1 I think we're the more maybe centrist and left voters. I think

Speaker 1 you're right that the institutions are not fighting back. But my God, those marches last weekend, the No Kings marches, they were big.
They were big.

Speaker 1 And a lot of them were happening in places that you would not expect people to be turning out against a Republican president.

Speaker 1 And of course, he then just comes out and says, well, Mamdani a communist and he's a loser and AOC

Speaker 1 has got a low IQ and all these usual insults. And he also says these marches, they were all losers, they were all, you know, and they weren't very big crowds.

Speaker 1 He just does the, he goes straight into the fake news. polarization stuff.
But I think the Mamdani election will be really interesting. And of course,

Speaker 1 it speaks to what we talked about on the main podcast. Why has he cut through in the way that he has?

Speaker 1 Now, they can try to identify him as a communist. I think by British standards, he'd sort of, you know,

Speaker 1 is he even as left-wing as Jeremy Corbyn. I'm not convinced.
But what's interesting about it is that he has cut through.

Speaker 1 Yes, he does all the attack stuff, but he doesn't go on about Donald Trump the whole time. He goes on about what he wants to do for New York.

Speaker 1 He's got a big, bold, positive agenda, and that's what seems to be getting people out in the streets for him.

Speaker 2 Can I just bring you to this amazing series that you've done on Rupert Murdoch, which is a members-only series, which I think we're now just getting into the fourth episode coming out on Friday.

Speaker 2 And the fourth episode focuses on this relationship between Murdoch and Trump, which I guess is sort of part of this story, because Murdoch, in my understanding, thought that with Fox News and with his amazing position in the media, he could almost decide whether Trump got through or not.

Speaker 2 And maybe we'll have thought at one stage in his life, he could kind of block Trump and thought Trump was a bit of a loser. And yet, somehow Murdoch lost to Trump.
Is that right?

Speaker 2 I mean, tell us about this episode and what you've found.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 we're getting very good feedback on the Murdoch series. And again, to those who want to listen to these members-only series, you just join up at rustispolitics.com.

Speaker 1 Michael Wolfe, with whom he's my sort of my Rory Stewart on this series,

Speaker 1 he is of the view that without Murdoch, there is no Fox News, and without Fox News, there is no Trump.

Speaker 1 And what I think Trump did, and this is where you have to understand how instinctively smart he is as a politician by his own lights, achieving what he sets out to achieve.

Speaker 1 He basically decided he had to become the most important person inside Fox, not Murdoch.

Speaker 1 So is that when Murdoch came along and said, I'm not backing that Trump guy, and he had a time when they were flirting with Ron DeSantis

Speaker 1 and the ratings just started to collapse. and you had people like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity saying, This is a fucking joke.

Speaker 1 You know, why are we allowing this senile old Australian guy to decide our strategy when it's clearly not failing? We've got to get Trump back on.

Speaker 1 And Trump, you know, how many other leaders can actually guarantee fawning coverage by picking up a phone on a dodgy mobile line from the back of a car and saying, put me on the Hannity Show?

Speaker 1 And so he became the bigger voice within Fox. And according to Michael, Murdoch despises Trump, thinks that he's basically stupid, thinks that he's very dangerous.
But

Speaker 1 the Fox became so important to his business empire that he had to go along with it. And so, yeah, it's very, very interesting.
And

Speaker 1 I think Michael's right. I'm not sure that without Trump, without Fox,

Speaker 1 not sure Trump wins. I hate to say that because I don't like giving power to these people, but I think it's true.

Speaker 1 So if you want to hear the episodes we've already done or the ones still to come, become a member. You do that by signing up at therestispolitics.com

Speaker 1 and you'll get a free trial. So if you decide at the end of the day, no, I don't want that, then no skin off your nose.
But we are getting a lot of really good feedback on the Murdoch series.

Speaker 1 We mentioned very briefly in the

Speaker 1 the main episode, we mentioned Millais. So Imogen Phillips, how much of Milley's midterm win can be credited to Trump's bailout?

Speaker 1 We talked about this a couple of weeks ago because Millet, Millais party did very badly in a local by-election.

Speaker 1 And we thought if that was if that was followed in these elections, then he'd be in real trouble. Trump comes up with his $20 billion bailout and he's had a bloody landslide.

Speaker 1 And that means, and bear in mind, this is a guy who had very little support inside the parliamentary bodies and he's now got a lot. So it changes things big time.

Speaker 2 It's amazing, isn't it? A couple of things. One is it's a reminder of how unreliable the polls are and how unreliable, consistently, experts are.

Speaker 2 I mean, all the authorities on Argentina, almost without exception, thought Millet was going to poll at about 30, 35, and he came in well above 40. And even Millet was astonished by it.

Speaker 2 So, and we're seeing this also. We saw this with Cofili where everybody thought reform would win and actually Plaid would win.
And we've seen it repeated again and again and again.

Speaker 2 In fact, almost the only predictable election that we've seen was Kier Stamers, where everyone thought he was going to defeat the Tories, and he certainly did.

Speaker 2 Second thing is this whole story which you were talking about yesterday with Ireland of independence suddenly being able to come through, or people like Mamdani, who were not part of the democratic establishment at all.

Speaker 2 I mean, Cuomo from this huge political family with tens of millions of dollars is suddenly defeated by Mamdani. And this, again, you know, keeps coming back to this question of social media.

Speaker 2 It's a very unstable world. There was another thing that was picked up in this wonderful Chris Clarke article that you raised yesterday.

Speaker 2 He refers to a piece of American research about the relationship between happiness and voting.

Speaker 2 And there's a graph that we can share, which actually our producer brought together, which shows that people voting Labour and Conservative in Britain, and indeed people voting Democrat in the US,

Speaker 2 disproportionately register as being happier than the people voting for the smaller parties.

Speaker 2 And in fact, in the US, this piece of research in 2024 said if you want the single biggest predictor on whether somebody will vote for Trump or Biden, it's not whether they have a university degree, how old they are, whether they're white or black, how many immigrants there are in the community.

Speaker 2 It's whether or not you reckon that you are, by and large, more happy than unhappy with your life. And if you are somebody who says that you are more unhappy than happy with your life,

Speaker 2 it's the most reliable predictor that you will vote for Trump, both as an individual and as a county.

Speaker 1 The other big demographic shift, of course, relates to,

Speaker 1 to some extent, to class and education. So some polling I saw last week,

Speaker 1 people with a university degree and indeed people who were educated at private school are now more likely to vote Labour than Tory.

Speaker 1 And what Johnson did through the Brexit thing and then in his own election is that quite a lot of working class people who would never have thought of voting Tory because their parents and grandparents would turn in their graves actually decided to vote Tory.

Speaker 1 And once you've made that

Speaker 1 shift,

Speaker 1 you're always in general, I think

Speaker 1 the human being in us tends to want to stay with it and find the reasons to stay with it. Once you've made the shift, it's very hard to peel

Speaker 1 people back. Okay, well, let's take a break and then we've got to come back and do some relentless plugging of your new book.

Speaker 2 Very good. Looking forward to it immensely.
See you after the break.

Speaker 2 This episode is brought to you by Revolute Business, the all-in-one account to manage your finances.

Speaker 1 Now, politics has its share of bad deals, trade summits, late-night negotiations. Often, somebody walks away with the short straw.

Speaker 2 And we've seen enough botched negotiations in Westminster to know what happens when numbers don't add up. Business is no different.
Nothing empties your pockets faster than hidden exchange rates.

Speaker 1 Revolute Business changes that. Over Over 25 currencies exchange at the same interbank rates that banks use during market hours within Plan Allowance.

Speaker 1 With automatic orders and price alerts, the guesswork disappears.

Speaker 2 Breaking into new markets feels possible, not perilous.

Speaker 2 Whether you're paying salaries in Dublin or supplies in Sydney, your money reaches over 150 global destinations fast without the fine print hangover.

Speaker 1 Business across borders kept simple.

Speaker 2 For all the entrepreneurs and business owners out there, if you're ready to simplify your business finances and exchange like like an expert, now is the time to open a Revolut business account.

Speaker 2 Plus, you'll unlock a £200 welcome bonus or the equivalent in your local currency if you sign up and add money to your account by the end of 2025. Just use the link in the description.

Speaker 2 Fees and terms and conditions apply.

Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you by our old friend NordVPN.

Speaker 2 November, the month of deals, discounts, digital danger. As you you hunt for bargains, someone else might be hunting your data.
And NordVPN keeps your browsing serene.

Speaker 2 As prices fall and firewalls fail, your data stays secure.

Speaker 1 One tap and everything is encrypted.

Speaker 1 Whether you're using public Wi-Fi with a password from the coalition years like CLEG 2010 or a cafe whose cybersecurity amounts to an illegible word on a blackboard, Nord's threat protection probe blocks malicious links and scans downloads.

Speaker 2 And it's not just privacy. Nord keeps things honest.

Speaker 2 Airliners and retailers quietly change costs based on your location, but with NordVPN, your shopping in the real world is not one shaped by algorithms.

Speaker 1 And one account protects up to 10 devices. That's your phones, your laptops, even your smart TV and your family thrown in.
Or install it on your router so the whole house is covered automatically.

Speaker 2 To get the best discount on your NordVPN plan, head to nordvpn.com/slash slash restispolitics. You'll also get four extra months free on the two-year plan plus a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Speaker 2 The links in the episode description.

Speaker 4 Black Friday savings are here at the Home Depot, which means it's time to add new cordless power to your collection.

Speaker 4 Right now when you buy a select battery kit from one of our top brands like Ryobi or Milwaukee, you'll get a select tool from that same brand for free.

Speaker 4 Click into one of our best deals of the season and stock up on tools for all your upcoming projects. Get Black Friday savings happening now at The Home Depot.
Limit one per transaction.

Speaker 4 Exclusions apply full, eligible tool list in-store and online.

Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

Speaker 1 And me, Alistair Campbell. Here we go.
Alana Phillips. Rory, do you now see yourself more as a writer than a politician? And does that allow you more scope for positivity?

Speaker 1 And the reason Alana sent that question is because we put out a plea to questions about Rory's new book, which is called Middleland,

Speaker 1 Dispatches from the Borders.

Speaker 1 Now, Rory, do you want to explain what your book is or do you want me to do it?

Speaker 2 I'll give you a chance and then maybe we can disagree agreeably about what it's about. What did you think it was about?

Speaker 1 It's Dispatches from the Borders. Rather grandly throughout, you describe these not as articles for the local newspaper, but as letters and essays.

Speaker 1 so you talked about you talked about Chris Clarke's article which in fact was a sort of I think a very considered thesis but you are letters dispatches and essays but I first of all to put your mind at ease I found it very very readable very enjoyable in in many respects very interesting and and what it is just to tell those who haven't heard about the book yet it's called middleland and Rory will explain why it's called Middleland and why that's so important in the context of a book about Cumbria But when Rory was an MP, he wrote a weekly article for his local newspaper.

Speaker 1 And this is about a third of the columns that he wrote with these quite short analytical pieces that sort of, you know, order them around

Speaker 1 certain themes.

Speaker 1 And it's interesting, Rory, your personality that has sort of come through the podcast over time. It comes through the book over time as well.

Speaker 1 There are certain themes and interests that you return to again and again and again. Landscape, farming,

Speaker 1 you know, history.

Speaker 1 There are touches of where you're sort of clearly in despair about your life as an MP.

Speaker 1 So you can see politics on the edge being born within these columns as they go. I hope you won't be hurt.

Speaker 1 to hear that my favorite bit in the entire book and there are many there are many okay but my favorite bit was not written by you it was written by your father um and i shouldn't laugh because it's actually a column that you wrote when your father died um

Speaker 1 but he left the funeral instructions and i've i've you've talked a lot about your dad in the podcast but i felt i i i feel i know him a lot better having read this so this is him on how he wants to be uh funeralized one i have no strong views on the subject but all things being equal and if legally possible i should prefer to be buried with my dogs at home.

Speaker 1 Two, if, however, Sally, your mum, and Rory and the other children would prefer something different, so be it. Three, I am disinterested in whether I'm created or not.

Speaker 1 Once again, the views of my family should prevail.

Speaker 1 If there is to be a formal farewell, I should like a piper to play a traditional lament, followed by a bugler to pay the last post in memory of my brother and all my friends who were killed in action at the war.

Speaker 1 And he goes on, he goes on, to sum up, gaiety, even perhaps song and dance should be the hallmark of the exercise.

Speaker 1 If the weather is fine, a farewell strip the willow ate some dashing white sergeant and gay gordons would not tax the young or the old.

Speaker 1 And also, I was thrilled, Rory, to learn that his favourite regimental marching song is Heidel and Laddie, which is the first march I ever learnt.

Speaker 2 Oh, and would your funeral instructions be very different?

Speaker 1 Oh, I write them all the time. I adapt them all the time.
I'm even wondering, Rory, whether I should do the eulogy as an AI version of B.

Speaker 1 No, I want

Speaker 1 very similar. I want lots of music.
It's interesting. He doesn't mention whether God should be involved.
I thought that was interesting.

Speaker 2 I asked him about God and he said, I'm not so sure about God, but I love church music.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he likes church music. And that was, my mum was a great church music fan.
But I would like lots of music. I've actually got this idea that a piper should pipe me in,

Speaker 1 which with my mate, Finley MacDonald from the National Piping Centre and my nephew John. And at the end, my favourite Scottish folk band, Skipinish.
I want them to play alive

Speaker 1 because I'll be dead, but everybody else will be alive.

Speaker 1 But yeah, loads and loads of music. No, but I thought that was wonderful.
And I do think, you know, joking aside, I think your stuff about Cumbria, I learned an awful lot.

Speaker 1 I didn't know why Cumbria was called middle. I didn't know the stuff about them being basically more Welsh than Scottish.

Speaker 1 And I love all the stuff about, there's a line in there that struck me about where,

Speaker 1 and it's true, because you know Longtown, this in you in your constituency, I spent 1966, the day the England won the World Cup, I was stuck in Longtown and I watched it there, but you made the point that the accent, literally 200 yards away in Scotland, it is a different accent to what you get in Longtown.

Speaker 1 Anyway, really enjoyed it. Really enjoyed it.

Speaker 2 Well, the thing that I was really happy about is the chance to tell a different story about British politics because, you know, obviously what we tend to do on the podcast is do what we did in the first half.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 Trump. You know, we could have gone on to Si Jing Ping Melee and a general sense of catastrophe and disaster.

Speaker 2 And even in yesterday's podcast, when we were talking about what's happening with Labour and the Conservatives and reform and stuff.

Speaker 2 But I found in Cumbria, it was a place where it was possible to sort of define what the good life might be like.

Speaker 2 What it might be like for farmers, what it might be like for people living in towns, what it might be like for the incredible number of young retired people who've moved to Cumbria, a lot of you know retired school teachers from Manchester who are volunteering for mountain rescue or supporting the Harth Marathon or working as environmental consultants.

Speaker 2 And I suppose it's about, as an MP, what a

Speaker 2 a relief it is to have an area of the country where you can really

Speaker 2 have a feeling that people are rooted somewhere, that the landscape matters. They're not all from Cumbria.
In fact,

Speaker 2 many, many people, probably half the population, moved there, but they have such a

Speaker 2 kind of attachment to it. And

Speaker 2 I sometimes worry that that's one of the challenges that we face in modern politics, especially in the social media age, that everything becomes virtual.

Speaker 2 It's all about someone looking at their TikTok about crime in London when they're not actually living in London.

Speaker 2 It's about talking about these very abstract words like growth or productivity, rather than getting it down to

Speaker 2 how many houses do we want on the edge of this village? Do we want a supermarket in Penrith? What kind of high street do we want to support?

Speaker 2 How can we support charities? How can we support hospice at home? How can we stop people dropping stuff on us from 300 miles away?

Speaker 1 Question Iroy from Bobby Bowers. Do you think Labour understands rural communities? As a young farmer, I don't think they get it.

Speaker 2 No, I'm afraid they don't. So I had about 2,000 farms in the constituency, and they're declaring average incomes at one point of £8,000 a year.
It's kind of completely staggering.

Speaker 2 Now, there's some complications around that, but basically, these are people who are living on very low incomes, but they're not victims.

Speaker 2 They are incredibly proud of what they're doing. These are often family farms.
Often their children want to take them over. They're small.

Speaker 2 So all the kind of jargon of economists that you might get from the Treasury in London about scale, growth, productivity doesn't really apply.

Speaker 2 If it did, you'd be going on a New Zealand system of many thousands of acres, very few people, huge numbers of sheep.

Speaker 2 And I think trying to communicate how much pride there is and how even though this was an area with low incomes, it was also an area that was consistently, and this is what the book is about, consistently appeared as one of the happiest parts of Britain with very high employment.

Speaker 2 But that employment was nothing to do with big industrial projects and industrial strategies. It was thousands of little businesses with people doing

Speaker 2 thousands of different things. It felt at its best, you know, maybe the best analogies of places like rural Austria.

Speaker 2 Did you feel when you were in government that people did talk enough about these sort of areas that you grew up in and the kind of people that your father worked with?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think we did because we had, you know, the scale of our majority was such that we'd had this, a a bit like kirstamer's government now a sudden influx of a lot of rural mps

Speaker 1 um i think actually one of the downsides of the the whole the way the fox hunting debate played out that came to dominate any debate about relationship between town and country urban and rural um

Speaker 1 and i don't think that was good for anybody to be absolutely frank um and i and i think the the extent to which that the countryside alliance weaponized that whole debate, we talked to Simon Hart about this when he was on leading, former Tory Chief Whip.

Speaker 1 I don't think that was good for the debate. And I do think there is a sort of taking for granted of the landscape.

Speaker 1 You know, we all drive, every time we drive to Scotland or, you know, and you go through Cumbria, you cannot but be struck by the, as you clearly are in the book.

Speaker 1 And it's interesting to sort of see you slowly, not slowly, actually quickly kind of really falling in love with this place and particularly the kind of the scenic part, the side of that, the landscapes.

Speaker 1 And it's impossible not to because it is so beautiful. I still think Scotland edges it, in fact, edges it considerably.
But as parts of England go, I think the lakes are and Cumbria right up there.

Speaker 1 It is the point about scale. You know, you've got,

Speaker 1 yes, you want to, any government has got to take account of people living in rural areas. Give me the question of scale.
How many electors did you have in what size of a constituency?

Speaker 1 And then compare compare that to Manchester, London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, whatever it might be.

Speaker 2 You're completely right. I had about 70,000 electors when other people had 100,000.
And I had the largest, most sparsely populated constituency in England. So it was.

Speaker 2 I had the most sparsely populated constituency. I had the most sparsely populated district.

Speaker 2 I had the most sparsely populated parish. I mean, we broke the record on everything.

Speaker 2 Final thing before we move back to questions, and thank you for being so generous, is also understanding how much policy and trade and Brexit affected these areas because in the end

Speaker 2 these small family farms of course they're driven by the incredible energy and resilience of the farmers but what really is wrecking them and taking them down now is Brexit took away the single farm payment that underpinned

Speaker 2 basically driven by French farmers because French farmers were the best allies because they are also small family farms secondly this Australia trade deal that Liz Trous and Boris Johnson made which is now going to let in cheap Australian meat, will wipe out these areas.

Speaker 2 And thirdly, sadly, the Labour government, its changes on inheritance tax and the fact that basically it ran out of money on its environmental schemes is the final blow.

Speaker 1 The inheritance tax won't touch these small farms, will it? Oh, it will.

Speaker 2 Very strangely it will. Yeah, yeah, because the land values are so weirdly inflated that even people on very, very low incomes have land that's worth a lot of money.
They're not trying to monetize it.

Speaker 2 They're not trying to sell it because they want to hold on to their farm. But the theoretical value of it, yes, would tip their successors into inheritance tax.

Speaker 2 And that would force them to sell when they don't want to sell. And the problem for Labour is that they inherited a system where the Tories had said, we're leaving the common agricultural policy.

Speaker 2 We'll keep the old budget and we'll just spend it. Michael Gove was the great one on this.
On public money for public goods. But of course, it wasn't properly ring-fenced so that...

Speaker 2 Understandably, when Rachel Rees ran out of money, she stopped those schemes. And largely, the big farms, the bigger states had got into those schemes.

Speaker 2 The small farmers hadn't had time to get into those schemes. So it's a whammy where they're being attacked from every direction, but at the root of it, I'm afraid, was Brexit.

Speaker 1 Do you have in in northern England the same issues that you've got in parts of Scotland where farms are being sold up and then bit by bit they're being taken over by big money, by hedge funders and the richest man in this country and the richest man in that country?

Speaker 1 Is that going on in Cumberland as well?

Speaker 2 Absolutely. And sometimes it's charities, sometimes it's big national charities pursuing rewilding projects.
Sometimes it's people farming carbon credits.

Speaker 2 Sometimes it's larger farms trying to achieve scale. But I couldn't, when I was the Minister for

Speaker 2 Environment in the Department of what used to be the Department of Agriculture, I couldn't even get people to measure the number of farms.

Speaker 2 They were very reluctant to even count what was happening to the number of farms.

Speaker 2 But when we got those data on things like dairy farms, we found the number of dairy farms had halved in something like 15 years. I mean, it's a catastrophic fall off a cliff happening.

Speaker 2 Final question for you, Alistair, from Rehema Figuerido. Thank you both for your thoughtful, in-depth discussion of the Charity Mind's recent report on the state of the nation's mental health.

Speaker 2 Raheema is then very, very positive about what you did and asks whether either of us are familiar with Marcus Skeet, a remarkable 17-year-old who overcame serious mental health challenges in childhood.

Speaker 2 but become one of the UK's most inspiring campaigners and was recognised for the Pride of Britain award.

Speaker 2 Do you think stories like his could help shift the narrative and bring mental health back into the political spotlight?

Speaker 1 I am very well aware of Marcus Skeet and I'm obviously very, very well of mind and we got a lot of good feedback last week for the discussion on their report which got next to no coverage in most of the media I noticed.

Speaker 1 I did a Google search on it the next day

Speaker 1 and it's so frustrating because I think this is such a big issue.

Speaker 1 But in the spirit of Rahima responding to our spirit of trying to be more positive at times, let me just tell you about Marcus because it's an incredible story. So this boy, he's 17.

Speaker 1 When he was 12, his dad was diagnosed with early onset dementia and Marcus became his carer.

Speaker 1 And as a result of which, his mental and physical health worsened, he developed type 2 diabetes, depression, anxiety, OCD,

Speaker 1 intrusive suicidal thoughts, became a school refuser

Speaker 1 and later attempted to take his own life.

Speaker 1 And then last April, a friend of his did take his own life.

Speaker 1 And something happened within Marcus that sort of changed him. And he decided to do this, what he called a mile-a-day challenge to raise money for mind.

Speaker 2 What was the challenge, Alistair?

Speaker 1 He ran a mile a day.

Speaker 1 But that evolved into ultra-marathon running from Landsend to John of Groats, which made him one of mind's best fundraisers. I think they're up to over 200,000.

Speaker 1 And he's kind of doing loads of stuff for mind going.

Speaker 1 And then, as well as winning the Pride of Britain Award, which is the Daily Mirror's attempt to be positive and celebrate heroes and all that stuff, he's now sort of decided to get global attention for what he's done.

Speaker 1 And he's been signed up by Apple

Speaker 1 to advertise their new watch.

Speaker 2 Gosh, how brilliant. Oh, well, well, that is amazing.

Speaker 1 If people want to check him out on social media,

Speaker 1 this will give you some idea of his background. He is at The Hull Boy.
The Hull Boy.

Speaker 1 So thank you for that question, Rahima. Thank you for all the work that mine do.

Speaker 1 Thank you for what I thought was a fascinating and insightful report, which I hope the government reads from start to finish. And well done, Marcus.

Speaker 2 Final one on me, which I wanted to ask last time we talked about, but we never really able to talk about it.

Speaker 2 This seems to be a story of real hope it's a story about people really turning around their mental health and we don't hear enough about that i think i mean you you understand this right you understand how both medicine and talking therapy and other things can really help but can you just give us a bit of a sense of

Speaker 2 whether actually we should be quite optimistic and hopeful hopefully if you're suffering from mental health issues or if you have a friend who's suffering mental health issues that actually something can be done that it's not and talk us through how things can be done and how improvements happen but i think you've alluded to them I mean look I

Speaker 1 in common with a lot of people who've struggled with in my case depression

Speaker 1 lived in denial of it for many many many many years. It's probably why I drank to excess

Speaker 1 it's probably why I became a workaholic.

Speaker 1 It's probably why I

Speaker 1 you know I've had intrusive suicidal thoughts and

Speaker 1 so the depression and it's because I wasn't confronting it it was only when I finally confronted when I was actually to some extent self-harming that I realized I had to see somebody saw somebody and saw him for many many years right up until his death fairly recently and

Speaker 1 that admission of I can't do this on my own was the first step.

Speaker 1 The other thing I think that's important is not to think there's any one person or any one treatment or any one drug that's necessarily going to change everything.

Speaker 1 You've got to kind of, it's a kind of active thing.

Speaker 1 And the reason why I find Marcus's story so inspiring is: I've got this,

Speaker 1 if I turn my laptop around, you'd see these post-its I have all around the office. And one of them is this one, G-G-O-O-B, get good out of bad.

Speaker 1 If anything bad happens, try to get something good out of it. I think that's what fuels a lot of people who work for charities.
And I try to do that in

Speaker 1 my own life. When stuff goes wrong, okay, it's gone wrong.
What can you learn from it? How could we have handled it better? But more importantly, what can we do now to take this forward?

Speaker 1 And so I think what works is, particularly, I think for anxiety, depression, these kinds of illness, I think schizophrenia and psychosis is maybe a lot harder. But even there, a lot can be done.

Speaker 1 A lot can be done. I saw that with my brother.

Speaker 1 But I think that, you know, when Theresa May, when your friend and hero Theresa May created the first minister for suicide prevention, I don't think it achieved much, but I actually do think it's the right mindset.

Speaker 1 I think virtually every suicidal so suicide is preventable if you have the right people to be in touch with if you have the right support um and so i think it's that's it's being open to the idea that you can get help i think that is the key to this and and you know when you see marcus if you check him out on social media and check out some of the films he's done and what have you

Speaker 1 you can I see in him this sense of, you know, I've been dealt a pretty shit hand by life

Speaker 1 and it's really given me a lot of problems along the way. But I'm kind of going to use them, I'm going to try and use them to put good, put them to good use.

Speaker 1 So, um, I think we should come back to this fairly regularly because I think it's it was interesting. Chris Clark's paper, God, he's had a lot of publicity from us this week, this week.

Speaker 1 But he mentioned that you know, one of the big things that the Labour government could do to show radical, exciting, bold things is

Speaker 1 really not just to say big mental health strategy, but then to show it and deliver it in a way that that people go, wow, that is what I wanted a Labour government to do.

Speaker 1 Anyway, well done, Marcus. You're a top bloke.

Speaker 2 Thank you. Thank you for that.
That's a good finish again on a whole second half of Optimism and Hope.

Speaker 1 So optimistic. We're so optimistic, Roy.
We're so optimistic. Those two million sheep in Cumbria.

Speaker 1 The other thing that leapt out to me that I didn't know, I learned a lot in this, but I never knew that Robert the Bruce had leprosy.

Speaker 2 Yes, that was a big, big deal. And that he and Edward I,

Speaker 2 basically, while fighting for Scottish and English English independence what really mattered them was getting to Jerusalem completely obsessed and Edward I

Speaker 2 managed to die in a place called Brough by Sands which is on the northern edge of Cumbridge just by the Solway Firth and he he thought that he'd been told in the dream that he was going to die in Jerusalem and then he realized that he'd misheard and actually he was dying in Brough by Sands.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, Robert the Bruce sent off his heart with his mate Douglas to take him to Jerusalem.

Speaker 2 And Douglas managed to get in a fight in Spain and end up chucking the heart into the midst of the enemy cavalry and charging to his death. So none of them actually made it.

Speaker 1 Nonetheless, I cannot let you go, Roy, without pointing out on page 139 a piece of the sort of hypocrisy in MPs that we really, really hate, don't we?

Speaker 1 Penris and the border, you wrote in the local paper, should be a wind turbine-free constituency. And you argued it would destroy tourism.

Speaker 3 Ha!

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Explain yourself.

Speaker 2 One of the things I like about the book is that I get a chance to reflect on this.

Speaker 2 So I've concluded I was right about some of the wind turbines, but I was wrong to say the whole constituency should have been turbine-free.

Speaker 2 And actually, I give an example of somewhere where I think we could have built turbines, which at the time I opposed.

Speaker 2 And other areas in the Central Lake District where I think it would be a catastrophe. I mean, these things are 400 feet high.
They're like three times the height of Nelson's column.

Speaker 2 And they diminish the district landscape. But you're right, we should find space for them.
So I try to be constructive and suggest where we could find space for them.

Speaker 2 Anyway, the book is published on Thursday, this Thursday, available from all good bookshops, and I think also available to members through our newsletter.

Speaker 2 And it's called The Middleland Dispatches from the Borders. And I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Speaker 1 Well done. All the best.

Speaker 2 Bye-bye.