The Rest Is Politics: France on fire, fake Korean cash, and a new Scottish nationalism
Goalhanger Podcasts 3/29/23 - Episode Page - 52m - PDF Transcript
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Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell.
And with me, Rory Stewart.
And we'll be talking about the new First Minister of Scotland. We'll also be talking about
Tory MPs getting caught up in rather silly stings. And we'll be talking about France
and the continuing protests over rather modest reform that Emmanuel Macron is trying to bring
forward. And we're also going to be talking about what Rory assesses as the appeal of
authoritarianism in the Middle East, although at the moment Mr Netanyahu is looking less
and less appealing all the time. But Rory, I think we've got to start with something
that didn't cross my mind when I was filming you dancing at the playdium. But that is the
many, many people who have suggested that this was your first step towards trying to
get an audition for Strictly Come Dancing. Is that right or wrong?
Well, it's of course completely wrong because I've been very, very heavily trained by my
co-podcast presenter, Alistair Campbell, that you and I should never be going on Celebrity
Jungle or Strictly Come Dancing. Given how rude we were about Matt Hancock, I think that
would be a very bad thing.
So what was it that made you want to dance on the stage?
I think a very similar thing to what drew you to want to play the bagpipes to the tune
of Match of the Day.
I've been playing the bagpipes all my life. Have you been dancing to Max Miller all your
life?
Have you?
No, no, but I dance. I do a lot of Scottish dancing.
Yeah, that came through.
But if you played a real, we could do an eightsome on the stage.
Okay. Well, you can't do an eightsome on your own. You'd have to get seven other people
up there.
A Harrogate could be our opportunity. This could be the big, big moment for us. But anyway,
at the moment, yeah, I'm very keen for people who want to see my ridiculous dancing to see
it free rather than being paid Alahancock to go on Strictly or even to dance for a Korean
consulting company.
Yeah. Well, we can put it in our excellent Rest is Politics newsletter. We should make
sure that people have the opportunity to see your dancing, both me filming from behind
you and from those members of the audience who filmed you in front. I've got to say,
I was moderately impressed.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Also, a bit of a plug for our newsletter. We've got a
chance. I do think it would be great if people wanted to sign up, totally free. But it is
a chance for us to put in some more thoughtful, long-form essays, pieces, videos. And I think
a lovely way to maybe stay on top with some of the details of politics that we don't manage
to cover in the show.
We'll treat the link. We'll put it in the episode notes and people can sign up. And
yeah, I think we should kick off with the SMP. I must read you a couple of things first.
So I was in Singapore airport this morning and I picked up a copy of...
You were in Singapore airport this morning. Is that why you're wearing a rather sort of
touching batik shirt? That's like your South East Asian look.
It's my attempt to sort of to merge in. Yeah. But listen, just listen to this. I picked
up a copy of The Times of India. Okay. And the headline is from Punjab to Scotland First
Minister, Humza Yousaf to be first Muslim to lead a country in Western Europe. And the
intro goes as follows.
Pakistani origin, Humza Yousaf is the new leader of the Scottish National Party, will
be the first Muslim to lead a country in Western Europe when he becomes Scotland's first ethnic
minority and Muslim first minister on Tuesday at a time when the UK as its first Hindu Indian
origin prime minister, which is pretty amazing, isn't it?
It is pretty amazing. And it's interesting that you're reading that from The Times of
India because you're absolutely right. Obviously, Humza Yousaf is completely Scottish. She was
born in 1985 in Scotland. He grew up completely in Glasgow, went to school in Glasgow, went
to Glasgow University.
I do want to point out, I thought it was good and positive that when he called out all the
different aspects of his identity, he did include European. And I think that that was
music to my ears. He was Punjabi, he was Scottish, he was British and he was European. And I'd
like to hear a bit more of that from our Labour friends.
The other thing which I think we should say is that he is in this position because of
you, Alastair, because it is the Iraq war that led him to join the SMP. He was Glasgow
University Muslim Student Leader working for Islamic Relief. And it was Alex Salmon's speeches
against the Iraq war that led him to join the SMP. And he said that he concluded that
he was a Scottish nationalist because independence was the only way to stop Scotland going to
war.
Yeah, I read that as well. But actually, somebody said to me today who'd sort of seen an interview
with him and said, I don't quite understand why this guy's not Labour. He seems very kind
of Labour in the way that he talks. And I don't know whether that's just the way he
comes across in his kind of public profile. But I didn't know that he's given that as
the reason. I think there's lots of reasons why people join parties.
Look, I think we said at the start that we thought he probably would win. I think we
said in the first time we discussed this that we thought on balance, Kate Forbes would damage
herself with some of her socially conservative views. But actually, it seems maybe that wasn't
quite as damaging as we thought. But it is interesting that Ash Regan, the third very
close to Alex Salmon disruption candidate, that in the end, he did need some of her votes
to be transferred to him to get him over the 50%.
Which was very surprising. He got a third of her votes. I mean, it's one of these systems
like the old London Merrill race or the French presidency where you have to clear 50%. And
if you don't, the votes reallocate it. So the hope was that although he was leading hard,
I think he got 48% in the first round. The hope was that he might be pipped in the second
round. But in fact, he got a third of Ash Regan's votes. He's somebody who has been
very, very impressive politician. I mean, he was the justice secretary. He was then the
health secretary during COVID, which of course meant that he would have had a lot of the
visibility that someone like Matt Hancock had in Britain. Obviously, his opponents lay
into his record as justice and health secretary as you would expect. But he was a parliamentary
assistant to Alex Salmon and Nicola Sturgeon and seems to have really won the affection
of both of them. Then he was a comms officer for the S&P before being elected to parliament.
Very, very young, became a junior minister in a year. So he's clearly seen by the, as
it were, the S&P establishment, which is now, I guess, defined by the group of loyalists
and Nicola Sturgeon as very much safe pair of hands, highly competent in their tradition
in a way that they saw the other candidates as being quite disruptive.
One thing I thought was really noteworthy was the turnout was just 70%, which I find
really, really odd. I mean, what is the point of joining a political party if you're not
even going to vote in the election to decide who's going to be your leader? And I did get
a sort of slight horrible feeling at the 52-48 because, of course, it was exactly the same
as the Brexit referendum. And that should be maybe a bit of a warning to him. 52-48
results tend not to go well for the project that got them there. But he is, you know,
he was run close. He did have the support of the establishment. Nicola Sturgeon didn't
formally come out for him, but everybody knew that she was supporting him.
And I think that, you know, it also shows that we've had that period where the S&P
has seemed very, very united and together under Salmond, and then that fell apart and
then very united and together under Nicola Sturgeon. It's really interesting given that
we talk so much about polarization. The debate in Scotland has become polarized to some extent
around this question of national identity as opposed to delivery. And in normal politics,
the delivery of a government and that's a government that's been there for some time
becomes the kind of defining issue. I just wonder if that will change now. It's obviously
in Labour's interest that it does change and that people start to focus much more on, you
know, whether the health services function as it should, whether the schools are as good
as they should be, whether they met their pledges on drugs and so forth. It'll be harder,
I think, for Humzi Yousuf to own that independence debate, not least because one of the divisions
that's emerged is this question about the extent to which the next election becomes
a de facto referendum on independence. And I see him walking away from that already.
His leadership campaign has at least in the short term seemed to be quite damaging because
of course, Kate Forbes really laid into his record in government. And there's certainly
Labour friends in mind in Scotland think that they may really benefit from this and that
they could pick up as many as 20 seats in a general election. To what extent do you think
that fights and leadership elections are damaging? It was a problem actually just before I sort
of come to you. It was a problem I found when I was running against Boris Johnson, which
is the Conservative Party's terrified about the ways in which these leadership elections,
which they call going blue on blue, discredit the brand of the party as you take bits out
of each other. And definitely the same was felt when Rishi Tsunak ran against Gaines
Les Trust. Do you think there is lasting damage done to Humzi Yousuf by the attacks of Kate
Forbes? I think there could be. I actually think that
Rishi Tsunak has managed to move on for the time being from a lot of those attacks that
were made upon him and by him during the Tory leadership election. I mean, before he actually
won the second time around, there was an awful lot of stuff circulating film on social media
and rather well put together packages, one of them by the Labour Party, I remember, that
was essentially just saying, if this is what they think of themselves, why on earth should
we think any better? And I think that does have some strength. And I think that it's
interesting how Kate Forbes pulled back a bit. She had one clip in, I think, the first
televised debate that was really, really strong. And I think it actually in the end went down
badly. I think it could have cost her votes within her own electorate. That may be part
of the reason for the 30% who didn't bother to vote. Some of them didn't particularly
want him, but didn't like the way that she conducted herself during the debate. I don't
know. But I think that it all depends on whether or not he can succeed in bringing people back
together afterwards. So for example, I think the fact that Boris Johnson and Les Trust
both voted against Rishi Sunak's Windsor framework, the legislation to try and clear
up the mess of the Northern Ireland protocol post Brexit, I think that is ongoing damaging
for Sunak. It reflects badly on Trust and Johnson, but I also think it gives the message
that Sunak can't quite hold things together.
And a lot of this has also got bound up with questions around Nicola Sturgeon's legacy,
the allegations against her husband and the finance, the SMP, the debates around transgender
recognition, which is another cleavage within the SMP, where you have big figures like Joanne
Cherry, who's a lawyer and somebody who I knew quite well in the House of Commons, taking
very, very strong positions, which also becomes strong anti-Nicola Sturgeon positions. So
well, I suppose the question is, what would you advise he does in the first 100 days?
What's the key if he really wants to make a success of this to overcome all of that?
Well, I think he has to decide whether the top line of his agenda is going to be about
the continuing battle for independence or actually about trying to, as he put it, represent
all Scots and to focus much more on public service delivery. Now, both of them carry
risks for him. I watched, I managed to watch one of his interviews after the announcement.
My sense was he was moving away a little bit from this, the election being de facto independence
referendum. I sensed that he was wanting to focus much more on the public service delivery,
but that again, then carries risks because frankly, the record isn't as good as they
would like it to be, isn't as good as it should be. And I think the other thing he's got to
be very wary of is you say, I think the Labour Party feels there are huge opportunities here.
So he needs to work out how he's going to tackle that because the driving narrative
in Scottish politics for some time now, from a period, as you've mentioned many times where
it felt like Labour was always going to, as it were, politically owned Scotland, that's
gone and a new narrative developed, which is frankly that Labour can never win back Scotland.
And while the Labour Party can never win back Scotland, it means that the Tories can never
lose in the UK. And I think this changes that dynamic. So the opportunity this represents
for the Labour is that they can win sufficient seats in Scotland to be able to say to the
Scottish people, look, we can get rid of the Tories in London. And that, I think, if they
can balance that right, the dynamic can change pretty quickly. It's not a guarantee though.
No, there are obviously quite a lot of voters in Scotland who would vote Labour if Labour
embraced independence. Do you think there's ever any temptations in internal discussions
to take the side of Scottish independence? Or do you think Labour will always remain
passionately unionist?
Well, certainly, it seems to me that Keir Starmer has, you know, closed a pretty firm
door on that. Now, I have said to you before, I get quite a lot of grief from Labour friends
in Scotland because they think sometimes I'm a bit too, you know, leave the door open,
as it were, at least to the possibility, some time down the track, that there's another
referendum. So I'm not conscious of those discussions going on. And if they are, it
seems to me that they've been pretty effectively shut down. So that is all saying that Labour
has to make, in a sense, remove the independence question from the centrality of Scottish debate
and make the Scottish debate much more for a general election about what kind of United
Kingdom we want.
Apologies. You're in Singapore and I am in Jordan and you can hear the call to prayer
in the background.
I'm loving it. I'm loving it.
Yeah, exactly. It's Ramadan at the moment and that means more volume coming in on the
call to prayer at the moment. Now, Alastair, you will, like the rest of the world, have
been watching this Led by Donkeys video. And just to quickly explain before I get your
reaction, Led by Donkeys set up a fake South Korean consultancy company and contacted a
number of Conservative MPs, I think something like 16 Conservative MPs, four Labour MPs,
a couple of Lib Dems and an Independent, and wrote to their parliamentary email addresses
asking whether they would be interested in a conversation about becoming a consultant
for this fictional South Korean company. And rather bizarrely, only five MPs seem to have
got back to them. And of those, one of them, Gavin Williamson, Sir Gavin Williamson, dropped
out of the running. I think he probably smelt a rat and decided to not continue.
I think we should make clear that all of them were Tories. None of the Labour people, none
of them were Tories. All of them were Tories. All of them were Hancock, who's the Independent.
I'm assuming Hancock is the Independent. I think Hancock is the Independent. And the
people that were caught on camera, certainly on the clips that I've seen, are Matt Hancock,
quasi-courting, Graham Brady, who's the chair of the 1922 committee. And Led by Donkeys
is a social media company, right? Campaigning social media company? I first got to know
Led by Donkeys during the People's Vote campaign, and they did some brilliant stuff. I remember
they came down to one of our big rallies, and they said, why don't you unfurl a flag
over the whole crowd? And I said, well, how the hell do you do that? And so we'll show
you, and they just did it. Absolutely brilliant. They're very innovative and very creative.
And this is the sort of thing. It's funny how journalism is changing, because this is
the sort of thing that you kind of expect Sunday Times insight teams to do or whatever.
But these are people who are not necessarily journalists, but they're exposing wrongdoing
in public life in a very dramatic way. I watched the clips of Hancock and Quarteng and Brady
in particular with a sort of sick feeling in my stomach. I mean, part of me wonders,
you've got to be pretty stupid, haven't you? You've got to be pretty stupid to not even
to sort of check whether this company is real, haven't you? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think particularly
when you should be aware that this is, regardless of your morality, I think you should probably
be aware that this is something that somebody might be tempted to do. If you've just been
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was alongside a short serving Prime Minister who crashed
the economy, or if you've just been the Secretary of State for Health who lost your job and
then lost a lot of credibility by running off to the jungle, you might think that therefore
you might just get somebody to check it out a bit more. Or is the desire for anything
that's offering you money just so big that you can't see beyond that?
Well, I think this is the basic insight, isn't it, of the Biden case, which is that people's
greed will often lead them in odd directions. Within the House of Commons, the rules are
still very, very strange. They emerge from a world in which originally MPs were not paid
and continued in a world in which traditionally, before I came into the House of Commons, we
changed the sitting hours when I came in in 2010, but before I came in, House of Commons
would generally not meet till 3.30 in the afternoon and often continue to sit till 1.00
in the morning, and that meant that many, many backbench MPs were able to do effectively
full-time jobs provided they got to the House of Commons by about 5.00 in the afternoon when
the voting started. Many of them were lawyers, many of them had businesses. That began changing
partly because MPs were pushing for more family-friendly hours instead of being in the House of Commons
from 3.00 until 1.00 in the morning. You could get back and see your family in the evening,
so it votes till 10 at night on a Monday, I think 7 on a Tuesday, 6 on a Wednesday, etc.
But as part of that, we're still left with this strange universe that MPs can still have
second jobs as well as being members of parliament. I'm not sure how long that's likely to last.
Do you think that's sustainable in the long run?
I can see the advantage of somebody who is a doctor, who carries on doing a bit of medicine.
I can see the advantage of a lawyer keeping their hand in. But I think if people use parliament
as the base for their own corporate financial interests, I do think people have a real problem
with that. No, they didn't in the old days. In the old days, of course, MPs didn't have
a salary and that was one of the arguments for changing. It was to make sure that people
who weren't wealthy could become representatives. But what the thing said to me, and I think
will say to most people, is that there's nothing wrong in talking to people who want
to try and pick your brains and why have you. But it struck me, unless led by donkeys have
sort of edited it very, very carefully, it struck me that the only thing that they seem
to be interested in was the question of money. And that bit where quasi-quarting, who obviously
we now know doesn't have much of a grip on the economy, but where he suddenly morphed
from dollars into pounds, because he worked out that the pound was still just about worth
a little bit more than the dollar. I mean, it was pretty cringe-making, wasn't it? And
Graham Brady, Graham Brady just looked so sort of stuffed up and puffed up with his own importance.
And also, he at least struck me as being a little bit embarrassed about asking for whatever
it was. And when he said 60,000, I think the woman he was talking to, the fake consultant,
was thinking, is he going to say an hour? Is he going to say a day? And eventually he
went last for a year. You could see him thinking in her reaction that she was a bit surprised
that it wasn't more than that.
I was struck by this, because remember, we had this with Owen Patterson and the lobbying
scandal and Owen Patterson's effective claim that he was being paid by this company not
really to do lobbying, but just for his advice. And there is a sense, I think sometimes when
I talk to MPs about this, that there's a sort of double contract going on. There's the question
of what you say to your constituents. There's also the slight suggestion that in some cases,
they are slightly taking advantage of these companies. It's not quite clear what benefit
really the South Korean consultancy company would get from having the geo-strategic advice
of quasi-cortain being shared with them.
So this is sort of odd. It's an odd business. And it's a business that many MPs, including
senior labour figures, have gone into, after they've left politics, the sort of generic
question of giving sort of consultancy advice to companies. And I often wonder whether it's
not a bit oversold anyway, whether these companies are really getting their monies worth.
Yeah. I mean, look, I do consultancy work, but I don't do lobbying. I advise on strategic
development and communications and crisis management and that sort of thing. And the
money can be very, very, very, very good. And I think actually even the former MPs,
I think you've got to be, I just think you've got to be a bit careful. And I have this golden
rule, if the choice is between cash or reputation, go for reputation every time. Now, it could
have been, let's imagine this was a real company. And let's imagine that Matt Hancock
had got his £10,000 a day, whatever it was, £1,500 an hour. And let's then imagine that
actually the company had decided that he really was being useful. He really was giving them
good ideas. He maybe was giving them access. I don't think it's that long before there's
a kind of, there's a potential for a scandal not far down the route. I think I just think
you've got to be a bit careful. Yeah, yeah. Shall we take a break? Yeah.
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slash insights. Welcome back to the Restless Politics, who's
me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And one of the things I think has been very
popular this week, which we'd like to encourage people to listen to is our interview with Gary
Lineker. It's the first interview with Gary Lineker after the great scandals around his
comments about the boats. And it's on our separate podcast, which is called Leading.
So if you haven't had a chance to listen to Leading, Leading is where, for example, we
did a big interview with Bernie Sanders. You'll be able to go through the back catalog. Very
interesting interview, which Alistair did with a leader of the Weeger campaign against Chinese
genocide in Northwest China and many, many other valuable infuse, but perhaps Gary Lineker
won a good one to start with.
Shall we have a quick, let's listen to a quick extract from the interview with Gary.
One of the things that you pointed out in terms of crisis management is knowing how
it's going to end. And what became clear as everybody began boycotting match the day
and nothing was going on that this was not going to end well, but it was funny. I was
in a restaurant in the back of the car. Firstly, when Ian Wright pulled out the show, and then
when Alan did as well, I must admit, I had a tear in my eye. Did they not tell you they
were going to do it?
Ian Wright, when it first happened, said, why is this an issue? If they do anything,
I'm, you know, I'm not going on. And, you know, it's one thing saying that in a moment.
But then actually to carry that through, they didn't need to do that.
And then Alex Scott and then Jermaine Junis and Micah and then and then all the commentators
and then the match reporters and then even the footballer said they weren't going to
do any and it was like, my goodness, this is this is kind of not doing it. I think they're
doing it for more for the cause, but they actually, you know, to get that kind of team
spirit, that kind of camaraderie and togetherness. I mean, it just moved me. It was just, it
was beautiful.
So that was a little clip from the interview with Gary Linnicka. It's about an hour long.
I hope you enjoy it and any other next up is David Bedeal. I can tell you that and we'll
keep ticking them out as well as doing the main podcast.
And there's a big scoop. There's an amazing bit of news on it, which hasn't yet really
broken over the papers the way I expected to do. But it's about just a clue. It's about
Alistair's education.
It's not a great scoop at all. It's just, it's given you
Don't spoil it for them. Let, don't spoil it for them.
Okay.
Let them listen to it.
I'm not going to spoil it. I'm not going to spoil it. Once they watch, they go to leading
wherever they get their podcast, they listen to it, they can come back to me and let me
just say this, Roy, without giving away this great scoop that you're so happy about, if
you or they think for one moment that it will stop me banging on about the iniquities of
private education and in particular the role of Eaton College in our society, you and they
are wrong. Now, shall we talk about France and what's happening there because it's pretty
amazing what's going on there. I mean, I go to France a lot, like France a lot, know
that the French have this habit from time to time of really rebelling and really protesting.
But given ultimately how pretty modest this reform is, it is pretty amazing that so many
people, they've got 13,000 police out today.
It's incredible. So between one and three million people have been protesting different
protests, depending on how you count it. And this is because Emmanuel Macron had proposed
that the retirement age in France be increased from 62 to 64. And the reason he's proposing
it is that France is spending an extraordinary amount on pensions, 13.6% of its gross domestic
product, which puts it just third after Italy and Greece and the OECD and the OECD average
is about 7.7%. Even Italy has raised the pension age, like I think it's even higher than ours
now. And the Italians have not really gone crazy.
No, no, no. And I mean, in the UK, when I come to retire, by 2037, the retirement age
will be 68, five years before I come to town. But in France, the fight is about whether
it should go above 62. So fifth of teachers been on strike, trains on strike, regional
flights cancelled. And it is incredibly popular these protests that the majority of the French
population want the protests to continue. 70%, according to an oxapole, say the government
provoked the violence. So what's going on here?
Well, I think there's a lot of things coming together. First of all, is the issue. The
issue where I think in particular, those people who are doing tough, manual jobs think actually
that 64 is too old and 62 is when they should be allowed to retire and get a decent pension.
The second thing that I think is going on is the Macron having been reelected for the
second time in part because he wasn't Marine Le Pen. I think there are elements of the French
population who think that they, I don't know what they expected to be different, but they
expected Macron term two to be very different to Macron term one. And I think it is worth
pointing out that he could not have been clearer during the re-election campaign that he was
determined to do this. And then I think the other thing that's happened is that trade
unions in France, they're pretty good at organizing demos and marches and so forth. And you know,
that's absolutely, they're entitled within their rights to do that and they're very good
at it and they have an important part in the French democratic debate. But there has been
a latching onto it of violent elements from both the extreme left and the extreme right.
And in fact, one of the protests at the weekend, the police said the most difficult thing they
had to deal with was the violence between the extreme left and the extreme right to
sort of, you know, kicked off at each other. But then Macron, because of, as you know,
I've never quite got this why he's so hated by so many people because I think he's got
something, you know, pretty impressive about him. But he has become a sort of a hate figure
in a way that I don't, even though Hollande had very, very low ratings at one point, I
don't think he was despised by so many people. And Macron's adversaries, I understand you're
a friend of Macron and so I understand you're quoting other people, but what is the most
negative account of Macron? How would they describe him when they're being negative?
Well, the basic, the thing that they try to pin to him all the time is that he's a friend
of the rich. He only cares about the rich. And which I don't think is true, but, you
know, that's the line that gets run. And of course, with the hard left in particular,
the fact that he worked for Rothschild and that all gets thrown in as part of the thing.
And then he did this broadcast. I mean, I thought it was absolutely incredible that,
you know, even on the BBC, the second story on the news the other day, was this story
about Macron's watch, that as he was doing an address to the nation, he removed this
watch and there was a whole debate about how expensive it was.
Well, there was all this fake news on Twitter, which was fascinating. People, you know, saying
it was an 80,000 euro watch. And of course, you see that on Twitter and it's such a funny
story and such a funny clip, the temptation to retweet it was enormous, right? Turns
out it wasn't an 80,000 euro watch. I mean, it turned out it was a 2,200 euro watch.
But the story ran around.
Which is still a lot for a watch. Yeah, exactly. Because that, but that's what happens when
you get these sort of, you know, these moments where somebody's seen in a certain way. Now,
the truth is, I think he took the watch off because it was clicking on the table as his
wrist was on, you know, he was doing his address to the nation. I think that's the reason. I've
got no idea. I don't know. But it's now got into a place where I don't think he can back
down now. But it's also leading to this new debate now about whether actually the structures
of the Fifth Republic have had their day. There should be a sixth republic. Because
the tipping point, the thing that took it from being very big and very difficult to manage
to huge and giving the sense of almost of ungovernability a few days ago, the thing
that tipped it was this thing of using this, you know, this presidential decree effectively,
that you don't need a vote of parliament to get your key legislation through. That's
what seems to have tipped it over. So whether that, you know, whether he has to sort of
have some kind of review longer term of the political process and so forth. I mean, when
we did the interview with Francois Hollande, I don't know if you remember, but I said,
you know, my sense of France is always that the French people keep electing presidents
who have very clear programs and they get elected and the minute they try to implement
the program, the French turn against them. And Hollande, he's just sort of, he's just
sort of shrugged as if to say, well, yeah, that's kind of what it's like. But that's,
you can't govern a country on that basis.
It's pretty amazing, isn't it? On the watches, there's an extraordinary blog post on IFL
watches called Watches of World Leaders, pointing out that the, the consen, the Prime Minister
of Cambodia wears a watch that may be worth over $3 million. That Vladimir Putin has been
seen with a watch that's worth at least $100,000 called a chronometer bleu. And that Joe Biden
has been pictured wearing his Rolex, his Omega Speedmaster Moon watch and various other things.
So in fact, according to this article, Macron is very much at the low end of world leaders
in their watches.
Well, can I just say, Rory, I, I have not worn a watch, any watch, since the advent of
mobile phones, because as far as I'm concerned, watches are there to tell you the time. And
I have the time here on my phone or on my laptop or on the clock on the wall. So I don't feel
the need for this incomprehensible challenge. I just bought a watch for the first time.
And I was like you until about four months ago. I agree with you. Basically, it's a bit
of jewelry now, isn't it? And I don't quite understand why have you bought a watch? Why
have you bought a watch?
Because I think it looks pretty. I mean, it's not to do with telling the time at all really.
I think the, and it's interesting whether watches can really continue. Yeah, my watch.
How much did it cost you?
Oh, I don't know. I'm not going to get into that. Thank you. It's at the lower end.
I think it should. Sorry, Rory, if you're going to read out the three billion...
I'm not a public figure. I'm not going to comment on the value of my watch. I'm happy
to speculate. But I do think there's an interesting question about whether this industry is really
going to be able to continue. I went through Switzerland. And as you can imagine, all the
posters in Geneva Airport are huge pictures of more and more complicated watches as they
try to make people spend a fortune. And they don't often have much of a resale value, I
believe, for many of these watches. You can't quite sell them for anything like what you
bought before. Anyway, off the question of watches, one of the things that Macron's tried
to do is, of course, try to comply with the EU rules around deficit. So to be serious,
remember, we talk a lot about austerity and talk a lot about the conservative's obsession
with the deficit and the debt. And of course, many people have blamed the European Union,
the Greeks in particular, when austerity was imposed on them have been very, very critical
of the EU targets on deficit and debt. So France is meant to be meeting a target of
only 3% GDP on its deficit. And it's currently at 5%. And it's looking for a way to reduce
its public expenditure. S&P, Standard & Poor, is threatening to downgrade them. Their interest
on the national debt in France is now the second highest expenditure item. And so he
was hoping by changing the retirement age up to 64 that he could save 17 billion euros
a year. Because even in the UK, pensions are half of our welfare spending. We spend 100
billion pounds a year on pensions. And one of the reasons this is a problem is, of course,
demography. Because when the old age pension was introduced in Britain by the Liberals
before the First World War, there was something like one person over a time of age for every
20 working members of the population. And it's now one person over a time of age for
every two and a half members of the working population. So it's a really big problem for
every government to manage. And of course, it gets more extreme when you get to Japan
or China now with its population shrinking by over 10 million a year.
No. And also, it's one of the reasons why governments, and this is very difficult in
the UK because of the debate that we've been having on asylum and immigration. But it's
very difficult in France as well because of the rise of the national front. But the truth
is, these economies are going to have to have more immigration, more people coming in so
that they can function, make that society and that economy function.
Well, except the challenges. And this is what slightly went wrong, I'm afraid, with the
levels that you were hitting in the late 90s, early 2000s, is that you can't continue to
bring in more and more and more and more every year. Otherwise, there's no stop to it. So
what you've got to do is try to work out how to do demographic planning where you have
a stable population rate. Because if you keep bringing in enormous numbers of young immigrants
in order to pay for the older population, those young immigrants eventually become themselves
older and then you have to bring in even more. So you can't keep running the thing like
a pyramid. You've got to try to get a stable population, which we are very, very much struggling
to do across the world. Either we have short-term expanding populations which deal with the
problem in the short term or cause the problem in the long term, or you end up in the Japan
situation where you simply can't pay for your state.
I looked at the International Monetary Fund's latest analysis of France and I think it's
already a little bit out of date. Well, it may be it's not. It said France is building
resilience through bold reforms and further measures to strengthen public finances could
curb the budget deficit and check rising debt. And of course, this is not remotely helping.
Should we put it that way?
No. And it's interesting. I mean, this is something for which George Osborne was very
strongly criticised, but it has been very, very important for the public finances in
Britain, which is the racing of the retirement age up to 68 by 2037. It means that the UK
is right down there with New Zealand and Canada spending only 5.6% of its GDP on pensions
compared to 13.6% in France. And we need to remember that because...
We're still paying a lot more in debt than George Osborne ever told us that we would.
100%.
So I don't think we should let George Osborne run away with the idea that he ran the public
finances well.
But there's often a debate going on, particularly in conservative circles, about are we being
too generous to pensioners at the expense of the young? As a percentage of our GDP, we're
right at the very bottom of the OECD on how much we spend on pensions.
Yet, one of the themes that I'm quite keen to promote is I do think the reason why more
and more young people need to vote, whatever they think of the politicians, is that politics,
I think, does skew itself towards thinking that pensioners can't really be touched.
So raising the pension age, we didn't have anything like the protests that you're having
in France because people felt, well, that's going to affect a future generation. It wasn't
sort of instant. And so I do think that the British public are much reddier to accept
change to something like pension age levels or even pension arrangements themselves.
But the politicians are less likely to want to do that because the truth is that older
people are more likely to vote. Now, that's a political fact that young people ought to
bear in mind when they decide to turn their back on politics.
Yeah. Well, of course, there was a big protest. You remember the Waspy movement? So the Conservative
government in 95 under John Major first put forward the idea of increasing women's state
pension age from 60 to 65. And Waspy have been really against this because women born
in the 1950s feel that they've been hit particularly hard because their retirement age suddenly
increased by four, five or six years. So the work protests and people have been, I think
Jeremy Corbyn has been out on some of those protests, but you're right, it's nothing
like what's happened in France.
We said last week when you look at the scale of the protest in Israel and the scale of
the protest in France, I don't think we've really seen anything with that mix of anger
and bordering on violence probably since the Poltex riots.
Yeah, Poltex and then there were big demonstrations obviously against the Iraq war and big demonstrations
on Brexit.
But they were demonstrations. They were broadly peaceful.
100%. Yeah.
And by the way, I know you want to talk about the Middle East. What do you make of the way
Netanyahu is handling the protests there because he sacked his defence minister for daring
to speak out against this policy of reform of judicial reform. And that led to a kind
of, because it was unexpected, it led to an instant and massive mobilisation of protest,
which does seem to have sort of clipped his wings a little bit. But my sense is he's just
going to kind of plow on and get through this because he sees it as his way of staying out
of jail.
That's extraordinary, isn't it? It's absolutely extraordinary. And it's not as if the man
that he sacked was exactly a sort of great sort of raging liberal. I mean, it's, no,
many Israeli friends working in the Israeli government say that it feels just like their
memory of when American colleagues of theirs were working for Trump, that a lot of civil
servants now feel that they've got a leadership that they find very difficult to relate to
and above all very difficult to predict. So when they talk to foreigners about the direction
of government policy, they no more know what to say than their American colleagues would
have known what to say about what Trump was going to do next.
Yeah. Yeah. And I see also one of the, was it the New York consul resigned in protest
at, so okay, it's maybe not the biggest member of the government, but there's obviously that
sense of civil servants starting to think I actually just can't support this anymore.
Yeah.
But he seems determined to plow on.
Seemed determined to plow on. Me, well, just to finish, so here I am in Amman, you're in
Singapore and that should be nice to hear a little bit about Singapore because it relates
to what I wanted to finish with, which is one of the stories over the last 17 years
that we often talk about is the drop in the number of democracies in the world, the drop
in human rights standards in the world, the shrinking space available for civil society
to operate and the rise in the prestige of authoritarianism. And that's partly driven
by the incredible economic success of authoritarian China that it has lifted hundreds of millions
of people out of poverty. It's creating an enormous middle class without democratizing.
It's partly to do with the appeal of the country you're in now, which is Singapore.
And it's extraordinary how so many of the leaders I knew in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere
had Lee Kuan Yew's book very prominently displayed on their bookshelves and looked to Singapore
as a model. But it's also now here in Jordan and the region here, the increasing reputation
of Saudi Arabia. So Mohammed bin Salman, who is often known in the West for, for example,
his association with the murder of Khashoggi associated with brutality, in this region
is often known in a much more positive light as somebody who's led an extraordinary social
revolution in Saudi Arabia, which has combined with very strong economic growth and a very
clear sense of direction. So, you'll be aware, Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince, pushed
ahead with extraordinary liberalization in terms of social attitudes towards women, not
just driving, but women's appearance. And in fact, you go to Riyadh at the moment, it
looks totally, totally different. Famously, small things like rock concerts are now happening
and they are incredibly successful. His support amongst young people is very, very strong.
And he was able to achieve it because there was such a conservative society, there was
such timidity around confronting the clerics. He did so and he's opened up this huge social
revolution. At the same time, the economy in Saudi grew by 8.7% this year. It's the
highest growth in the G20. It's extraordinary growth levels. I mean, that's above and beyond
places like China. Oil exports up 25%. And he has this thing called Vision 2030, which
is about renewables, industrial manufacturing, mining and tourism. And the idea is to move
away from being overly dependent on oil. And some of the figures are naturally extraordinary,
not just in Saudi, but in UAE. They're committed in Saudi 266 billion to renewables. UAE putting
in 340 billion into renewables. And all of this sadly means that people in other parts
of the Middle East are increasingly saying to me when I go out to meet people for dinner
or get in a cab are increasingly saying, isn't this great? You know, what countries need
is a very strong ruler like Mahmoud bin Salman with a clear vision who's knocking stuff
through. Give me a sense of Singapore. Give me a sense of how things feel in Singapore
and how it's changing.
Well, you mentioned Lee Kuan Yew. I'm going to say Lee Kuan Yew was, I met him with Tony
Blair in, I think first when we were in opposition and then when we were in government. He's
without doubt, one of the cleverest people I've ever met, just a breadth of wisdom and
information and analysis that was kind of extraordinary. When you think of what Singapore
came from to what it is now, it is one of the most remarkable development stories I
think of all time. And it's so interesting to hear you talk about them in the context
of this debate about authoritarianism, dictatorship and so forth.
Because what I sense happening here is actually you've got one of the most efficient governments
in the world, not corrupt. They pay their ministers very, very well.
They pay their ministers a million dollars, is that right?
Yeah, they pay them a lot. I don't know what the exact figure is, but the ministers get
paid and they go out and try to recruit the best and brightest people from business, from
the healthcare system, whatever it might be. And so the PAP, the ruling party, which has
been in power for a long time, but there is a pretty vibrant opposition and the government,
you see that opposition kind of grow election by election, still got a very large PAP majority.
And it's interesting when you talk to some of the people here about how they share some
of the concerns that you will not be hearing about in China, for example, they worry about
the spread of social media and the impact that it's having upon the democratic fabric
and this kind of thing and the sort of forces of misinformation from around the world that
try and infiltrate our debate. So I think they get a deservedly good reputation for
the scale of transformation. I think they get an unfair reputation because of the fact
that Lee Kuan Yew was without a very, very, very strong firm leader who did some pretty
difficult things, particularly when the country was being established.
It remains, though, still from the point of view, certainly from my point of view, a troubling
place. The way in which, for example, the rights of migrant workers are protected would
be deeply, deeply shocking to people in the United Kingdom. They are paid at very, very
low levels and Singapore is a very wealthy country, got one of the highest GDP per capita
in the world. And the salary of domestic workers is arranged according to which country they
come from at incredibly low levels. They have almost no rights at all. So I think also,
given that you've been very outspoken about the interests of migrants to the UK and are
actually towards asylum, that is not something that Singapore is remotely meeting global
standards on, nor is it really meeting global standards on freedom of the press.
No, but what they would say about that, particularly in relation to freedom of the press, is actually
if you do, when you are here, you don't get the sense of a press that's being repressed
in terms of what I can get access to, in terms of what I can see on social media and so forth.
So all I'm saying is I think they're developing into a place that doesn't really merit the
levels of criticism that it still gets in terms of its democratic development, and particularly
when you think where it sits in the world. Because the big thing that sort of I think
keeping them awake at night is the difficulty of feeling that they are a pretty small country,
a city-state who have got very, very strong close relations with the United States, that
are related to security and economy and so forth, also got very, very strong trade-in
relations with China. And politically, kind of sit somewhere between the two, and that
is a difficult place to be.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the stuff I mean, it's worth, we'll share some stuff on press
freedom in Singapore. There has been a lot of recent legislative action against press
freedom in Singapore. And there's a very, very, I mean, Human Rights Quarterly does
a very good article on this. The Singaporean leadership talks about straightforward reporting,
simple journalism and straightforward reporting that press must accept its subordinate role.
And it's introduced these fake news laws in 2020, it's got these internal security acts,
official security acts, the addition acts, which also used. I think you would find if
you were a journalist operating in Singapore, you, Alastair, would get yourself in a lot
of trouble pretty quickly.
Hmm. Hmm. Okay. Well, I'm here now. So, you're saying this.
Let's see how much trouble I get you in.
We'll not be stopped. We'll not be stopped.
Yeah, try to get... Anyway, just to finish on this, I think it is, it's very interesting.
The right saw wrongs a bit aside, and I, you know, obviously on record, I think the Saudi
regime has an enormous amount to answer for its curtailing of civil society and human
rights is deeply troubling. And one of the great sadnesses really since 2003-2005 is
the extent to which the Western democratic model and ideals of human rights and civil
society have been eroded all over the world, Hungary, Poland, et cetera.
Well, the Freedom House, the Freedom House report on the world this year said that there
had been a decline in freedom around the world. But I think a lot of that was related to China
and America, particularly during the Trumps last year. But I think that if you look at
Biden's State of the Union speech, where he made the point that, you know, he felt that
the dividing line in the world now was between democracy and dictatorship and authoritarianism
and autocracy. So, that is where the world is kind of on the axis at the moment.
Yeah. Okay. Good. Well, something to return to. And let's bring it to a close. Thank you
very much.
See you soon.
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