470. China vs Japan, the BBC at Breaking Point, and The Future of Satire (Question Time)

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Breast of Politics Politics Question Time with me, Anister Campbell.

Speaker 2 And with me, Rory Stewart.

Speaker 1 Now, the story that absolutely came at me like a bowl out of the blue and which doesn't seem to have had the debate I thought it would generate is China-Japan.

Speaker 1 Catherine in Edinburgh, is Japan's new Prime Minister deliberately provoking a crisis with China over Taiwan and the Senkaku Islands to shore up domestic support or responding to genuine threats?

Speaker 1 Can democracies maintain credible deterrence without succumbing to nationalism?

Speaker 1 We had a lot of questions about this, so so why do you kick off by telling us what's been happening between Japan and China?

Speaker 2 Well, so in a parliamentary address, Takaichi, who you've compared to a sort of Mrs. Thatcher figure.

Speaker 1 She's compared herself to Mrs. Thatcher.

Speaker 2 A bit like Liz Truss, there's occasional sort of hints of sort of cosplaying in her dress. Unusual figure.

Speaker 2 I mean, Japan is in many ways a very chauvinistic society, very dominated by men, and she's come through as the first female prime minister.

Speaker 2 But of course, a reminder that just because you are a diverse candidate doesn't necessarily mean you're left wing, as of course we found with Mr. Thatcher and Indeed List Trust.

Speaker 2 And she's also unusually not from an elite background. I've often joked before that, for somebody coming from a sort of more traditional background in Britain, Japan knocks us out of a cocked hat.

Speaker 2 Many of these prime ministers have ancestries going back to the samurai. Their fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers have been prime ministers, colonial governors, etc.
She's not like that.

Speaker 1 Although she was very close to Shinzo Abe, who came from one of those elite families.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and also she shared a lot of his politics, which is why maybe she's gotten this early spat with China, because he wasn't a great friend either.

Speaker 2 She comes from Nara, which is a city I know reasonably well, not very far outside Kyoto, and in fact got attention because she's also a great purveyor of fake news.

Speaker 2 She claimed that she'd seen the tourists assaulting the deer in the park at Nara, which is complete nonsense as far as the Japanese media could work out.

Speaker 2 What you actually see is a bit like, you know...

Speaker 2 that the deer wander across the road. It's a bit like Richmond Great Park, people taking photographs, they're not assaulting the deer.

Speaker 2 Anyway, she has taken over and in a statement to the Japanese parliament, she said that the so-called Taiwan contingency has become so serious that we have to anticipate a worst-case scenario.

Speaker 2 And she indicated Japan's self-defense forces could be deployed. if a China-Taiwan conflict posed an existential threat to Japan.

Speaker 2 Now, this all sounds very technical language, but if you are Chinese, this sets off massive alarm bells.

Speaker 2 Because this technical language around existential threat and worst-case scenarios is all about whether the Japanese defense forces can go on foreign operations and whether something is a threat to Japanese security.

Speaker 2 China says, wait a sec, Japan occupied and invaded Taiwan in 1897, was the colonial government of Taiwan for kind of 50 years through the end of the Second World War, committed unbelievable atrocities in Manchuria and northeast China.

Speaker 2 How dare

Speaker 2 this country challenge the legal status of Taiwan, which from the Chinese government's point of view, and actually from the point of view of many bits of international law, is part of China,

Speaker 2 and start saying they're going to deploy Japanese troops, Japanese military, to fight China for the independence of Taiwan, and this will encourage Taiwanese independence movements, which China's keen thinking.

Speaker 2 So this is massively escalating. The Chinese responded.
The Chinese Consul General made some terrifying comments, apparently threatening to cut her dirty head off.

Speaker 1 Well, basically said that saying this kind of thing means she should have had her head cut off. He was told to delete it, presumably by Beijing.

Speaker 1 But they've also been doing a few little military exercises around the place.

Speaker 1 I mean, I just can't work out whether she did this in full knowledge of what the likely response would be, or whether this is just her thinking that because she is projecting herself as this quite nationalist right-wing figure, that she can sort of say what she wants and get away with it.

Speaker 1 Because there's no doubt she is a much more nationalist figure than her predecessors. There is a lot of attempted rewriting of Japanese history goes on.

Speaker 1 And we shouldn't forget as well, a bit like with the Germans, is that post-war, the new constitutions that emerged, Japan is limited in what it can do militarily.

Speaker 1 And it was Shinzo Abe, I think, who argued for and won

Speaker 1 a change in their military posture, even though they're still one of the low defense spenders, but a change in their military posture where they see themselves threatened abroad, then they are able to defend themselves.

Speaker 1 And that's what the Chinese are saying. She is indicating on this, and they're very, very angry about it.

Speaker 2 I mean, Japan's way of dealing with its

Speaker 2 nationalist, fascist, authoritarian, imperialist past, that whole moment where Japan ended up effectively invading and conquering most of Asia, and all the atrocities and war crimes came coming out of that.

Speaker 2 After the Second World War was complicated by America, which initially wanted to purge and then decided that a lot of the former war criminals were useful allies for the US against communism, much more so than in Germany.

Speaker 2 Many old-fashioned Japanese continue to resent the attacks against their imperial past, the attacks against the emperor, the attacks against the Japanese army, the dismantling of all the things that many people in Europe still admire about Japan.

Speaker 2 You know, the samurai, samurai swords, they were, the making of samurai swords was banned in Japan after the Second World War. That whole culture was kind of crushed.

Speaker 2 And of course, if you're a liberal Japanese, you feel this is absolutely right, we need to move on, that's not the country we want to be. But she is tapping into a surge of nationalism.

Speaker 2 And I think maybe the answer to your question is she is being much more irresponsible than her predecessors, and maybe that's because Trump has introduced a form of politics where politicians feel that they don't need to watch their words so much, they can appeal to a domestic audience, they don't need to worry about what the international consequences are.

Speaker 1 Well, the consequences of this have been pretty instant. So first off, the Chinese military, they warned Japan that it would, quote, suffer crushing defeat if it dared to militarily intervene.

Speaker 1 They sent a Coast Guard ship through some of these Japanese islands, these islands that are administered by Japan in the Strait.

Speaker 2 And which China has claims to.

Speaker 1 Which they claim, which are Japanese territory.

Speaker 1 They flew in a few military drones into some of these islands.

Speaker 1 And the embassy, the Chinese embassy, they both summoned each other's ambassadors, which I know is sort of meaningless on one level, but it shows this is kind of really kicked off.

Speaker 1 The embassy in Japan posted, put on the post that any Japanese intervention would be an act of aggression, triggering a resolute counter-attack from China. So,

Speaker 1 given that she's just, she met Trump just before this, and the other thing I wondered was whether within that context, there was any sort of him kind of signaling that maybe she needed to be more aggressive towards China as part of her.

Speaker 2 I think Trump has completely betrayed her because

Speaker 2 what Trump has done to Japan and to Vietnam and to India is to weaken all America's allies against China through his tariff and trade policy.

Speaker 2 The Japanese economy has been hit very, very hard by American tariffs. It's likely to go into a recession this year.
This is a Japanese economy that's been pretty weak since 1989.

Speaker 2 Trump is making it weaker. So instead of what people assumed, which was that

Speaker 2 people like the Deputy Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, who was part of this champion of this whole vision of building a network of American alliances against China, which would have been Japan, Vietnam, Australia, India, is suddenly dealing with a White House, which has used tariff policy to put 50% tariffs up against India, crushing tariffs against Vietnam and against Japan.

Speaker 2 The Japanese economy is now in trouble. To make it worse, one of the big income earners for Japan recently has been Chinese tourism.

Speaker 2 And one of the elements of Chinese power now is to turn off its tourists. Chinese tourists are some of the highest spending, most traveling people in the world.

Speaker 1 And another of their responses was to put out a message saying that Japan's not safe.

Speaker 2 And they will do this again and again and again. They did it against Australia.
They'll do it against any country that challenges them. They'll stop the tourists coming.
And that has a massive effect.

Speaker 2 I was in Kyoto in June. Almost everybody I saw on the temples were visiting Chinese.
And a lot of the people in the airport were visiting Chinese because China is very interested in Japanese culture.

Speaker 2 So that'll have a big impact on the economy.

Speaker 2 But she's partly doing it, I guess, because, as you've pointed out in the past, she's dealing with a further right nationalist rise, which you were reporting on a few weeks ago. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Final point on on on this is just some really interesting stuff you know in the old days with well we do it now as well where they've just got one person who counts but in the old days of creminology you used to see these pictures of the military events and you had to work out who was being moved around and who'd been disappeared and what have you and there's been a real purge at the top of the chinese military as well so there was an event recently where suddenly some of the key figures just weren't there anymore.

Speaker 1 So there's something going on within the Chinese military at the moment.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so this has been a story that's been running now for three, four years. There's been big problems between the relationship between Xi Jinping and the army.

Speaker 2 Initially it was around corruption and a lot of senior figures were purged.

Speaker 2 And American defense analysts were saying one of the reasons that China is going to struggle to invade Taiwan is that the PLA is so corrupt and demoralized, it's just not ready for that kind of conflict.

Speaker 2 And people thought he'd sort of got through that and he was building up to a position where by 2027 the Chinese military would be in a much stronger position. He now seems to be doing it again.

Speaker 2 And nobody's quite clear what it's about

Speaker 2 And whether this is going to produce a Chinese army that's weaker, or whether, as some Taiwan analysts fear, it's going to produce a new officer corps that's more nationalistic, more willing to take risk, more likely to invade Taiwan.

Speaker 2 But, you know, from the distance of Britain, as you say, the newspapers are not covering this much. If you're in Japan or China, this is very raw.

Speaker 2 These are countries that were in the most bloody war that killed millions of people on each side. This is like Russia-Poland in terms of the emotional sentiments of people on both sides.

Speaker 2 And it's in many ways a tribute to American diplomacy and Japanese and Chinese restraint for the last 30-40 years that those countries haven't been in conflict.

Speaker 2 That's why we shouldn't underestimate what this means.

Speaker 1 Yeah, by the way, just on Russian Poland, the German Defence Minister Boris Bistorius said yesterday that he thinks we could be at war in Europe within a year.

Speaker 1 He was echoing completely what Sikorsky said.

Speaker 1 On the leading interview we did. On the leading interview, yeah, yeah.
So I think there's a we should come back back to Ukraine maybe next week.

Speaker 1 Now let's stick with another country beginning with CHI, Chile. James Robertson from Bristol.
Chile's presidential runoff. So we've had an election and there's now going to be a runoff between two.

Speaker 1 Jeannette Jara of the communists against far-right Jose Antonio Cast.

Speaker 1 And James Robertson of Bristol asked this, how did a country that elected progressive Gabriel Boric just three years ago after massive protests end up with this stark choice?

Speaker 1 Is this Latin America's inevitable pendulum swing or have progressive movements fundamentally failed to deliver? Are you a bit of a fan of Boric?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I am a fan of Boric. So Boric when he came in was seen as quite a radical left-wing figure.
He was very young. He's a guy who had a real student activist past.

Speaker 2 He had an unsuccessful attempt with the constitution. But in power, in many ways, Chile has performed well.

Speaker 2 He actually, despite being on the left and has, I think, done good progressive things, but he also reassured the business community and proved to be much more moderate in power than people expected.

Speaker 2 We're now back, as James Robertson's pointing out, with a choice between a communist and a far-right authoritarian.

Speaker 2 And this, you know, we talked about Japan, China raking over history, but this is the country of Pinochet.

Speaker 2 You start raking over far-right authoritarians, you're getting back to the era of military rule, which ran from the 70s, effectively through the early 90s. So we seem to be going back to...

Speaker 2 a much older story in Latin America. And it's a story that we don't talk about enough.
We often talk, I think, about Trump and fascism in terms of 1930s, Germany and Italy.

Speaker 2 I think actually a better analogy is your friend who talks about populism post-truth and polarization.

Speaker 2 Most naive, which is that really what the whole world is becoming is Latin America.

Speaker 2 And it's Latin America who really shows us what populism looks like, what the lurch between the far left and the far right looks like, how democracies fray and collapse into these positions.

Speaker 1 And also the role of corruption.

Speaker 2 And the role of corruption, again and again. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Anyway, I think very disappointing because Chile is in many ways one of Latin America's success stories over time, economically, in terms of the way it's thought about its mining industry, the way in which its economy is performing.

Speaker 2 And it will be very sad if nostalgia for Pinochet or enthusiasm for Bukele,

Speaker 2 this amazing rule of law flouting, gang locking up

Speaker 2 autocrat in El Salvador, or indeed Millet's performance in Argentina, leads to the return of increasingly authoritarian far-right governments, of course, with huge enthusiasm from Trump across Latin America.

Speaker 1 And you mentioned Pinochet. This guy cast is a bit of a fan of

Speaker 1 Pinochet. And it goes back to this point about, you know, rewriting, wanting to rewrite your own history.

Speaker 1 You, for example, and I were very interested in what was happening in Indonesia on this at the moment, where they're essentially, you know, a dictator and criminal is being projected as an act, literally, officially is now a national hero.

Speaker 2 Well, it was absolutely unbelievable. So you're completely right.

Speaker 2 So Suhato, who was in power in Indonesia for 32 years, General Suhato, who presided over this unbelievably nepotistic, corrupt regime, was toppled in 1998, finally with the democratic reform movement, where students were shot in the street, people were abducted.

Speaker 2 Fast forward to today,

Speaker 2 Suhato's son-in-law has now been elected as the president in Indonesia, partly through dad dancing. He's, of course, flirting with Trump.
He's putting the military back in a more central position.

Speaker 2 But he's now saying that the school curriculums need to rehabilitate Suhato, the dictator, the criminal, as a national hero. So again, this democratic backsliding is not just a Latin American story.

Speaker 1 And Pinochet, I mean, essentially, one of the things Boric tried and failed to do was to modernize the Constitution and had a referendum and lost it.

Speaker 1 So the Constitution is basically modelled on what was the case in Pinochet's time.

Speaker 1 And this is a guy who killed an awful lot of people, absolute out-and-out dictator, and is now this new guy coming in is a bit of a fan and of course i don't know what you think of these this is a very french style presidential system people stand so long as they can meet the threshold you have the first ballot then it goes into the top two but neither of them really did that well i mean you when you think of it um

Speaker 1 jara is actually in the lead uh the communist with with just over a quarter of the vote yeah okay but she's not going to win because essentially this it's it's that most of the the other candidates are on the right and they're recommending a vote for cast so he got 24%.

Speaker 1 So he's going to probably get a fairly sizable win in the second ballot. But that doesn't suggest that he's sort of, you know, a great popular figure in the way that perhaps Millais can claim to be.

Speaker 1 So anyway, interesting, quite alarming, quite worrying. And again, I think, as you say, will be welcomed in the White House, which is, in my view, never a good thing.

Speaker 2 And how quickly, final thought for me, how quickly the

Speaker 2 things that we took as red,

Speaker 2 which is that we had all agreed that the period of military rule, dictators, corruption in Indonesia, military dictatorship in Chile,

Speaker 2 Japanese war crimes during the Second World War was something we'd turned away from and we had a new liberal democratic identity.

Speaker 2 How quickly that gets reversed, how much kind of nostalgia still exists in these countries. And maybe we're seeing a bit of that in Austria and Germany.

Speaker 2 We're seeing that in France with the rehabilitation of the Vichy regime.

Speaker 2 How much there is this sort of sense amongst certain bits of the voting population that what we assumed was the story since 1945 and even more since 1989 isn't really the story for many people who want to return to a much darker past.

Speaker 1 Well, let's stay on the international front. Big news today in Israel.

Speaker 1 Nikaya from London, with settler violence in the West Bank reaching record levels, members of Israel's government openly calling for annexation.

Speaker 1 What realistic diplomatic options remain to prevent the complete collapse of any two-state solution? I mean, there's a lot going on in here.

Speaker 1 So, you've had a United Nations resolution essentially backing Trump's 20-point plan.

Speaker 1 You've got Itamir Ben-Gavir, the extremist in Netanyahu's cabinet, who has said in the last 24 hours the most extreme things imaginable, that there will never be a Palestinian state, that Mahmoud Abbas should be arrested, that leading figures in the Palestinian Authority should be executed.

Speaker 1 But meanwhile, Netanyahu has actually come out, for the first time that I can record in recent years and attacked some of the activities of the settlers who have been, who feel liberated at the moment.

Speaker 1 And we're in the olive season, so a lot of the Palestinian olive farmers are out there doing their work and being attacked. The numbers are going through the roof.
So

Speaker 1 it's not a good scene.

Speaker 2 It isn't.

Speaker 2 You've got Russia and China decided, interestingly, to abstain, not veto at the Security Council.

Speaker 2 But they've put out a statement saying they can't see in this agreement where is the UN participation, where's the real path to a two-state solution.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think we have to keep returning to this, that

Speaker 2 still at the moment, what it feels like is a plan for a ceasefire.

Speaker 2 and maybe for some investment and reconstruction in Gaza, but it doesn't address the fundamental political question of how the West Bank and Gaza functions, whether a Palestinian state will emerge, how Israel is going to treat this whole situation in the future.

Speaker 2 A little shout-out for Yuval Noharari, who wrote a very thoughtful piece in the Financial Times, which will put a link into the members' newsletter, who we've interviewed a couple of times on leading, and who again tried to explain, I thought, in a very balanced way, how Israelis see this, how Palestinians see this, and why these narratives are so completely incompatible and unforgiving and that until there's some degree sort of empathy and understanding on both sides it's very difficult to understand how we're going to get through this.

Speaker 1 It's also right now it's very hard. I mean I don't see how Netanyahu, I mean Netanyahu is a very right-wing guy.

Speaker 1 I don't see how he functions in the context of this plan if he's serious about trying to get it done with this voice on his shoulder the whole time of Smotrich and Bengavir saying ever more extreme things.

Speaker 1 Because they are sending a message to the settlers.

Speaker 2 You do what you want and you do it with impunity so we'll have to see whether what netanyahu is saying actually leads to any any change in the treatment of the settlers who are doing what they're doing absolutely will the idf actually intervene on behalf of palestinian communities if they're attacked by the settlers and generally the story is that the idf tends to take the settlers side yeah and that there's surprisingly little prosecution either of settlers or idf soldiers it does happen

Speaker 2 but generally speaking the idf seems to exist as a protection mechanism for the settlers rather than any form of neutral enforcement of disputes.

Speaker 1 Well let's take a break and then come back and talk about we had more questions on this than anything else I think this week, and that's the BBC, not least in relation to Carson.

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Speaker 2 As the year draws to a close, it's time for our annual reminder that even in an age of political noise and division, one national consensus still stands firm. Roast potatoes.

Speaker 1 Oh God, all this British stuff.

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Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Roy Stewart.

Speaker 1 And me, Alistair Kimball.

Speaker 2 And the next question is brought to you by Fuse Energy.

Speaker 1 So yeah, Fuse, while Europe wrestles with policies and paperwork, energy companies like Fuse are proving that clean, affordable energy doesn't have to wait for permission.

Speaker 2 You can tell a lot about the continent's ambition by how it builds its grid. And right now, Europe's lights are, as it were, flickering.
And on that, here's a question from Isaac Chapman.

Speaker 2 If electrification has stalled across the continent, could Britain actually be the leaders of the clean energy future?

Speaker 2 Just on this, this kind of sounds kind of nerdy, but electrification, i.e., getting more and more people to use electricity for their cars, for their heating, is going to be completely central because electricity is usually cleaner than burning gas in your home.

Speaker 2 But the problem is, as we shift more and more people into electrical vehicles, more and more heat pumps, you're putting more and more demand on the electricity system.

Speaker 2 And that then drives up the generation problems.

Speaker 1 Not to mention your friend AI and all these data centers.

Speaker 2 Not to mention AI and the data centers.

Speaker 2 So if a country wants to do that transition and it wants to build its data centers and it wants to have an industrial base and grow its economy, it's got to be generating more and more electricity.

Speaker 2 And I guess the problem we keep coming back to is Britain is an amazing leader, famously in offshore wind, does that very, very well. It's laying out more and more solar, more controversial.

Speaker 2 But all this generally needs to be backed up by gas because the sun's not always shining, the wind's not always blowing, and there's very complicated costs in building transmission and distribution lines.

Speaker 2 So there's a lot of network costs, which is one of the reasons why we keep having this debate about whether actually renewable energy is really cheaper than gas.

Speaker 2 Because if you're not just looking at the cost per megawatt hour, which is very low now, you know, I think some countries now are talking about about a cent per megawatt hour from solar, but you may not be taking into account how much more you have to pay on the distribution line and on the gas backup for that.

Speaker 1 But the costs have plummeted

Speaker 2 far more than people like me anticipate.

Speaker 1 But here's a question for you. What proportion of final energy use across Europe is accounted for by electrification?

Speaker 2 God, I don't know. What is the number?

Speaker 1 Well, it's bloody low. 22%.

Speaker 1 Wow. I think that's low.

Speaker 2 Well, it's very low because China, I think, is higher.

Speaker 1 They're at 30%.

Speaker 2 And even the US is higher. And we're always blaming the US for being filthy.
But actually, so that is a problem. And that's partly, I think, the cost of the electricity.
in Britain and Europe.

Speaker 2 One of the things that Europe's doing, which is really interesting, is this tax on carbon consumption.

Speaker 2 So the idea is that what we've actually done in Europe is we've de-industrialised, we've pushed all the factories to China, we're still buying just as much stuff, so we're still contributing through our consumer choices as much to global warming as we ever were.

Speaker 2 It's just the problems in China and it's hidden from us, but our consumer spending is still driving climate change.

Speaker 2 So Europe's tried to put in these taxes to say, we will say that if we're importing steel from China, we'll take in the full costs of that. We'll compare it to the costs of doing it cleanly in Europe.

Speaker 2 And Europe is the last holdout on this. Dieter Hellman and R Fuse said this is the only logical approach to climate change, is to actually tax embedded carbon.

Speaker 2 Europe's trying to do it, and you've got Brazil pushing back, Saudi pushing back, US pushing back, Russia pushing back, China pushing back. So this is something to really watch.

Speaker 2 Okay, so let's let's finish. This was a Fuse Energy sponsored segment.

Speaker 2 Fuse has just built Netly Central big generation, thirty percent below industry cost, they're very much emphasising smarter tech, local consultation, efficient build models.

Speaker 2 So while Europe's arguing over tax codes and targets, Fuse is very much arguing that they're getting on with it.

Speaker 2 They're proving that clean energy doesn't have to wait for policy, that affordable renewable power can be built here in Britain, not imported or imagined.

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Speaker 1 Loads of questions, as I said, on the on the BBC.

Speaker 2 Here we are. I'll read you one because you've been doing a lot of question reading.
Tim West Sussex, regarding all the discussion about the spliced video of Trump's speech, impartiality, etc.,

Speaker 2 isn't it the case that it was the BBC themselves who caused some clout on their own programme?

Speaker 2 Maybe I've misunderstood, but given the important severity of the claim, isn't that a massive supporting factor for the BBC in this argument? It doesn't seem to be pointed out, thanks to him.

Speaker 2 James New Zealand. What does it say about the state of modern media when we can't even trust that the BBC is unbiased? Who can we turn to now other than Trip, says James?

Speaker 2 Well, the answer is don't turn to Trip if what you're looking for is a massive news organisation with fully neutral, unbiased public service broadcasting.

Speaker 1 I think we try. We try our best.
No, we try in the main to separate fact and comment.

Speaker 2 We try our best, but

Speaker 1 we'd be long.

Speaker 1 If you said we weren't biased, there's a huge role for a public service broadcaster with massive investment in research and fact checking and all that and if i could just answer james the question of what does it say about the state of the modern media when we can't even trust that the bbc is unbiased what it says about the state of the modern media is most of that those parts of the british media that says the bbc is biased is itself way more biased so i think the bbc is still way more trustworthy than new these newspapers and gb news types tell us there's something you're often saying which is that the murdoch media is anti-bbc and it's something you touch on in your mini-series.

Speaker 2 But can you just explain for listeners, what is this whole story about Murdoch and the BBC, or indeed the public broadcaster in Australia? That's a long-running thing, right?

Speaker 2 Murdoch's had a beef with them forever.

Speaker 1 Well, if you think about it, the BBC, in its make-up,

Speaker 1 we all pay into it, right? If we have a television, we pay the licence fee. That's kind of quite a left-wing concept.
So for that reason, they've always, they think you should have choice.

Speaker 1 Then Murdoch, he's the driver of this model of television consumption that you pay for what you want.

Speaker 1 That's why, you know, he was so determined, even though he doesn't, he's not interested in sport, he doesn't particularly like sport, he's almost as bad as you on this, Rory.

Speaker 1 He knew that this is where millions of people are prepared to pay to watch it. So they've taken all these crown jewels from the BBC

Speaker 1 and they now make massive money for this right-wing media ecosystem.

Speaker 2 This is Sky Sport during Premier League.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Sky Sports, which is one of the biggest economic success stories in modern broadcasting. And it's the same with Fox in America.
Fox do a lot of the big sport stuff. So that's part of it.

Speaker 1 And then the other part of it is that generally,

Speaker 1 people on the right, Trump, Farage, Johnson, etc., they don't really want a full, frank, fair, free media.

Speaker 1 They want media that's supported because they're far better than the left at understanding and exploiting the media landscape.

Speaker 1 So I think, you know, last week when I did my speech in Edinburgh about the BBC,

Speaker 1 and we posted it on social media, lots of comments saying, oh, God, you know, you're lefty,

Speaker 1 you packed the BBC full of lefties. Greg Dyke, Gavin Davis.
I pointed out they both had to resign

Speaker 1 because of

Speaker 1 us calling the BBC out on their standards.

Speaker 2 Because they attacked the Labour government.

Speaker 1 Yeah, whereas what's happening at the moment with the BBC,

Speaker 1 and here I think the government needs to be far more robust in its defence of the BBC.

Speaker 1 What's happening at the moment is that when people like you and I are saying it's ridiculous that this Robbie Geb guy has so much power within the BBC, it is ridiculous that this MTBL memo to be leaked has led by Michael Prescott, a Murdoch hack of old.

Speaker 1 By the way, I think there's a possibility that Michael Prescott was more sinned against than sinning. I think actually he may be a victim in this.

Speaker 1 But somebody, very senior within the BBC, took it upon themselves to to say, we're going to put this out there to damage the BBC, up to and including getting rid of Tim David, the Director General.

Speaker 1 Now leaving this vacancy, which I'm glad to say, Rory,

Speaker 1 the people who came to our tour believe that I should fill rather than you.

Speaker 2 We should go to the general public on this and see how many people think

Speaker 1 that it's entirely unlikely.

Speaker 1 I'd be better than some of the names in the frame, that's for sure. Although I'm warming to your idea of Alan Rusbridger.

Speaker 2 So just to remind people who don't follow this, he was the editor of The Guardian, then ran an Oxford College, then was the editor of Prospect.

Speaker 2 I think he's a figure who, you know, you've had run-ins with in the past, right? So, you're not particularly saying it as a mate of his.

Speaker 2 But I think he's a serious big beast with a serious intellectual background. If you're looking for a kind of Wreathian figure.

Speaker 1 And also, anybody who saw The Hack, the TV series starring David Tenner and Toby Jones as Alan Ruspridger, he defends proper journalism, he fights for proper journalism, and he's not afraid of being attacked.

Speaker 1 And what I worry about, I think the current chairman of the BBC, Samishu, is very weak.

Speaker 1 And I think far too often, this is the point I made in my speech, the BBC panders too often to people who want to destroy it. You've got to have somebody who believes in it

Speaker 2 and fights for it. And you can see Russ Britcher already making,

Speaker 2 rehearsing again and again how you explain what news is, how you explain why what Panorama did was completely unacceptable.

Speaker 2 That was a lie, they should never aspire to Trump's speech like that, but how you can also defend the BBC while admitting you make mistakes. This little push for one of my other ideas at the moment.

Speaker 2 I think we should get rid of the way that the board is appointed.

Speaker 2 I think it's mad that you have direct political appointments to the board, where in effect the prime minister is appointing some of the key figures.

Speaker 2 I think this is a really good opportunity for a citizens' assembly.

Speaker 2 I think you have a citizens' assembly where you get citizens' jury of random citizens to spend a few days working, talking through the issues, and let them select it.

Speaker 2 I'd like to see that happen for the House of Lords, too, but it's a

Speaker 2 BBC could be a really good way of doing that.

Speaker 1 Who draws up a shortlist? The Citizens' Assembly?

Speaker 2 No, I think probably the Citizens' Assembly decides what the terms are, decides what the conditions are. They might even elect their own subcommittee to work with a headhunter to do it.

Speaker 2 But that way, you diffuse the whole argument. From right and left, who are these people on the board?

Speaker 2 Well, it was appointed by a citizens' jury, a jury of our peers democratically representative diverse people ordinary people they chose their committee and the committee chose the people and my guess is that you will end up with a much less lobbied much less party political much more acceptable group and a group that you can defend to toories and labour the citizens assembly did it let's let's start with the bbc and then we can move the citizens assembly model out to other people i like that a lot i like that a lot um

Speaker 1 yeah and do they vote in the end When we get down to the shortlist of Alan Rusbridger, Alastair Campbell, Roy Stewart,

Speaker 1 Andrew Neal, I see his debuts being punted out.

Speaker 2 I think what they do is they vote on the board. The board appoints the director general.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay.
Interesting. Good idea.
Hope you're listening. Lisa Nandi.

Speaker 2 Penultimate question for you. Maria Gonzalez from Manchester.

Speaker 2 Mexico's president Scheinbaum claims the massive youth protests against gang violence are orchestrated by outside right-wing forces, yet 30,000 people are murdered annually, and over 100,000 have disappeared.

Speaker 2 Just to put that in context, the UK, which has a population which I guess is just over half that of Mexico, 587 homicides were reported last year. This is 30,000.
That would

Speaker 2 be like 17,000 people being killed in the UK instead of 537. To get a sense of the scale of the horror of what's happening in Mexico.

Speaker 1 And I don't get any sense of Elon Musk and the MAGA crowd telling telling everybody not to go to Mexico. It's just don't go to London.
No, exactly.

Speaker 1 Don't die on the dangerous streets of Citizen Khan's London.

Speaker 2 It's true. Anyway, the question from Maria is: when does the government's dismissal of genuine grassroots anger as foreign manipulation become a dangerous reflux?

Speaker 1 I mean, both could be true, couldn't they?

Speaker 1 In fact, we talked about President Scheinbaum last week in the context of her being groped and the mikismo in Mexico. But this is a kind of this drug violence and the cartels is an underlying issue.

Speaker 1 And she did say this is where you've got to, you know, you've got to be held to account for what you promise you're going to do, that she was going to crack down.

Speaker 1 But without doing what the Bichales and these kind of, you know, right-wing authoritarians are doing, of just sort of throwing anybody and everybody into jail.

Speaker 1 I suspect that these protests are a mix of

Speaker 1 genuine grassroots anger.

Speaker 1 But I wouldn't be surprised if there is also the exploitation on top of that.

Speaker 2 Well, it's so difficult, isn't it? Because there's definitely a progressive case to be made against

Speaker 2 Scheinbaum, which is, although people are very excited by the fact that she's a woman and from the left, the fact is that she and her predecessor have a strong tradition of left-wing populism.

Speaker 2 There's been some very strange jiggery pokery around the courts in Mexico, where basically they're pushing political appointments to the judges.

Speaker 2 There's been a sort of proto-takeover of bits of the army and security forces.

Speaker 2 And so some of the people out there on the streets are centrist young progressives saying, oi, we don't want to be faced with a choice between a left-wing populace and a right-wing populace.

Speaker 2 And we certainly don't want to be told when we're protesting against a skyrocketing murder rate, disappearances, and creeping left-wing authoritarianism that that means we're friends of Bukhili.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I think the other thing that's happening not just in Mexico, but in various countries around the world in a really big way is this sense of the Gen Z protesters.

Speaker 1 It does seem to be a, we often say, or young people, they don't get, they're not active enough, et cetera. But I think you're seeing this in all sorts of places playing out.
Actually,

Speaker 1 I thought one of the other big stories this week that maybe, because of everything else going in here, didn't get quite as much play as I thought it would, would be this, was the sentencing of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh.

Speaker 2 That's extraordinary.

Speaker 2 And somebody that I knew and went to meet on state visits, sat with, talked to about her grandchildren, and who seemed to be a figure that was in a very, very powerful position, and then suddenly was toppled in a few days of rioting.

Speaker 2 And now been sentenced to death, largely not because of the corruption, but because of the violence that

Speaker 2 aggressive military response to that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so it'd be interesting now. I mean, she's currently living in exile in India.
I don't know what the arrangements are between the current Bangladeshi government and the Indian government,

Speaker 1 but she's sitting there now, presumably feeling protected but a court in bangladesh has sentenced her to death and of course this is somebody that um has a bit of resonance in the uk because she's her niece tulip sadiq was a labour minister

Speaker 1 okay rory finally this is a question that is coming in by sound and video and this guy genuinely did send this in we didn't ask him to as you know rory because you were there we started the show with a collection of videos of impersonators doing you and me especially you because you are so impersonatable um And this is from one said impersonator, John Tottill, and I haven't seen this, so let's have a look.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I mean, this is a question for Rory and Alistair, and it comes from Rory.

Speaker 2 Could you just give us a sense of how it feels as a politician to be impersonated, for someone to be doing your impression? Is it a flattering part of the job? Is it an annoying part of the job?

Speaker 2 And I guess more broadly, for international listeners, could you just give us a sense of your view of the role of satire in a modern society, in a world that perhaps increasingly conflates politics and entertainment, and is increasingly unserious?

Speaker 2 Anyway, I'm a huge, huge admirer of the show. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 Oh, he's good at you, isn't he? See, you didn't do me.

Speaker 1 It's like Davina Bentley, they just can't quite get my voice. I mean, she does me as this sort of, you know,

Speaker 1 northern type, you know, which I am a northern type in character, but my voice is a bit all over the place.

Speaker 1 Very good question. I love satire.
Absolutely love satire. I regularly get asked, do I feel hurt or flattered by the thick of it? I just love the thick of it.
I think it's really funny.

Speaker 1 When Rory Bremner and Andrew Dunn did me and Tony, one of my favourites ever was when Tony was seeing the queen and I had to hang around the garden in Buckingham Palace and I spent the time kicking the corgis.

Speaker 1 And I remember my daughter at the time, Grace was trying to persuade us to get her a dog and all her friends say, your dad really kicked dogs. No, he doesn't kick dogs.
It's an impersonator.

Speaker 1 And I I think that these, yeah,

Speaker 1 these guys are good. He's very good at you.
And he does listen, doesn't he? Get a sense of for our international listeners. He's got all your little verbal things.

Speaker 2 I was

Speaker 2 talking to Rory Bramler, this impersonator, great impersonator, who's a friend of yours as well.

Speaker 2 And he was saying that it is becoming more difficult to get space for impersonators because a lot of the joke of an impersonator of a politician is to exaggerate them and make them say preposterous things.

Speaker 2 But when you've got Marjorie Taylor Greene saying that the Rothschilds are firing space lasers, and that's why you've got California wildfires, or you've got almost anything that Trump produces, I mean, the problem for Rory Bremen, I think, is that if he does a Trump impersonation saying something preposterous, people literally will be like, well, did he say that or didn't he?

Speaker 2 Is this satire or not?

Speaker 1 It's true. When we're in one of the shows, I've been watching Kevin Bridges, the Scottish comedian, and

Speaker 1 he made a similar point. He said, How do you make anything funnier as a comedian than Donald Trump is the president of the United States?

Speaker 1 And he said, The Glasgow pubs is full of people like Donald Trump who just stand there and talk absolute nonsense. What you don't do is make the president.

Speaker 1 You put your hand on their shoulder, you say, Enjoy your night, pal, and then you leave them, you leave them at the bar. So, no, anyway, John, thank you for that question.

Speaker 1 I think you do a very, very good Rory Stewart.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I one of the things that

Speaker 2 I am noticing is that when I'm on X,

Speaker 2 because of this new

Speaker 2 fight around fake news and fake truth, it's difficult to know when you satirize.

Speaker 2 So, for example, I wanted to tweet out this picture from ancient Persia of all these tribute bearers coming to see the Persian king.

Speaker 2 Why did you want to do that? Well, because the Swiss were giving gold bars and gold Rolexes to Trump, and it's a whole pattern of basically people bringing tribute to him.

Speaker 2 So, I wanted to say, commission for the White House ballroom.

Speaker 2 But, of course, the question is, am I then, obviously, then going to be attacked by thousands of people saying fake news, how daring I'm suing Rory Stewart for a billion dollars because he suggested I've commissioned for the White House ballroom, a picture of the Persepolis tribute bearers bringing tribute to me.

Speaker 2 How do we now get this balance right on satire?

Speaker 2 And how do people know when you're on social media whether what you're doing is making a funny joke about an excess or whether you're actually smartering?

Speaker 1 Maybe we have to label it. I'm amazed at how often I will post something that is, to my mind, clearly ironic, and yet it gets taken completely at face value.

Speaker 1 Maybe that is mainly the bots, because maybe the bots can't read humour.

Speaker 2 They'll look very funny.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 This thing about Faye News, though, maybe my final point for the day is I want to plug something that's happening today, and that's the launch of something by the Young Citizens Charity called the Big Democracy Lesson, where they're really worried, and I'm worried.

Speaker 1 We talked about this in one of the shows. I was very, very keen to get the vote for 16 and 17-year-olds.

Speaker 1 But assuming that this parliament goes its full term, kids aged 13, 14 today are going to be voting, right? 13-year-old kids are going to be voting.

Speaker 2 I'm going to be blaming you.

Speaker 1 Well, but teachers are saying that they feel they have the responsibility to kind of educate these kids in two, three years about

Speaker 2 what was the reason why you couldn't just wait till people were 18. Why did you want people to vote at 16?

Speaker 1 Because I wanted it to be accompanied by proper political and civic education in schools.

Speaker 2 Why can't they wait till they're a bit older?

Speaker 1 Because they should have it anyway. Why? I'll tell you why.

Speaker 1 You mentioned fake news. 98% of 12-year-olds in Britain on a big testing operation that was done could not tell the difference between something that was true and something that wasn't.

Speaker 2 That doesn't exactly encourage me to think we should be giving votes to 16-year-olds to be able to do it.

Speaker 1 But what it should encourage you to do, instead of being so Tory and uncivilised, is encourage you to back what the Finns are doing, which is to educate kids from the age of five about these issues.

Speaker 1 You're putting on that, I'm not taking this seriously, face

Speaker 1 i'm going to start a campaign to increase the voting age to 21 oh so we can have all these older people uh i mean i always say to kids when i go into schools you know i do quite a lot and sometimes they say i don't feel qualified

Speaker 1 and i say well come on a walk with me down any street in britain and i will find you a lot of adults who talk complete crap, who know next to nothing.

Speaker 1 You need to know more, develop your own thoughts, don't listen to the media, develop your own critical thinking.

Speaker 2 And what was your statistic on the decile in all democracies?

Speaker 1 This is another reason why we have to do this.

Speaker 2 Come on, what's the static?

Speaker 1 The stat is that in every continent of the world, the decile of the population most attracted to authoritarianism is the young.

Speaker 1 18 to 30.

Speaker 2 So I've got to put the voting age up to 30.

Speaker 1 No, you don't.

Speaker 1 I would lower it even further. As long as it teaches, I would.
As long as we teach kids. Get it down with the kids.

Speaker 1 Honestly,

Speaker 1 you are exposing yourself as a total conservative.

Speaker 2 I think you just want to get down with the kids. You're just flattering themselves.

Speaker 1 I don't want to get down with the kids. But I tell you what, I have better debates in schools than I do with most adults.

Speaker 2 It's schizophrenic, though, because sometimes you say that, and sometimes you're like, oh my God, I've just come out of school. I'm completely terrified by how little they know about systems.

Speaker 1 No, it's not that I'm terrified by little they know. What I'm terrified about is how drawn they are because of TikTok to the extremes.
That's what I'm terrified of.

Speaker 1 And that's what I think we have to be aware of. And the politicians aren't dealing with this.

Speaker 1 You know, we promised we wouldn't mention Peter Hyman this week, but Peter Hyman's report, that's what this is about. Teenagers are really hungry for information about politics.

Speaker 1 They're getting it from TikTok. They're getting it from their parents.

Speaker 1 You know, let's be frank, a lot of them who aren't that interested in politics, or they spend their whole time saying, oh, they're all terrible. Nothing ever changes.
All that stuff.

Speaker 1 You've got to get them out of that. Otherwise, we're fucked, Rory.

Speaker 2 Well, listen, I'm really pleased that we managed to finish with a disagreement because people have been complaining that we don't disagree enough and look forward to speaking to you next week.

Speaker 1 Well, this is a profound disagreement. I'm very angry with you.

Speaker 2 No, nevertheless, it was an agreeable disagreement.

Speaker 1 There you are.

Speaker 1 You're bringing your bloody book about politics on the edge.

Speaker 1 I'll just leave it lying around.

Speaker 1 You ought to get a camera on your book. Don't buy his book because it tells you to be against politics.
But what can I do? And get engaged and get involved. And then the kids, you get my kids' books.

Speaker 2 And anybody under 30 should never vote for Rory Stewart ever again.

Speaker 1 No, you're definitely an an old man. You get the old vote.
I'll get the young vote. That's why they wanted to be the director general of the BBC.

Speaker 2 Very good. All right.
Thank you, Alistair. See you soon.
Bye-bye.