The Rest Is Politics - 535. The Ebola Outbreak and the British Far-Right’s Next Move

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Are Xi and Putin playing Trump? How serious is the new Ebola outbreak, especially after Trump's and Britain's severe cuts to international aid? With Tommy Robinson explicitly telling his supporters to support Reform UK, the Conservative Party, and other right-wing parties ahead of 2029, is this a deliberate strategy to infiltrate mainstream politics and normalise far-right extremism? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in this week's edition of Question Time. __________ The National Survey: To have your say on the country you want to see, just head to thenationalconversation.org.uk. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [e-mail] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Vasco Andrade Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to the rest is politics.com. That's the rest is politics.com. How serious is the new Ebola outbreak? The answer is very, and the cuts to the U.S. global health funding are probably part of the reason why this is happening now. Elon Musk is worth hundreds of minutes. I mean, he could feed all the hungry people in the world. Especially as he was the one who cut USAID.

in the first place. One of my favourite quotes of the whole thing. He's trying to flatter him but he's basically just abusing the country. Trump said he's very, very tall, especially for this country because they tend to be a little shorter. As we speak, Putin is on his way to Beijing. But his 40th meeting.

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Learn more at www.f35.com slash Canada. Welcome to rest of politics question time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alast Campbell. Now, Rory, we managed to get through the whole of the main episode without mentioning DJ Trump. But we're not going to succeed this time. No, we're not. So we're going to do, we're going to do U.S. China to follow up on the episode we did. What actually happened in that summit?

What came out of it? What does it mean about the new world? We're going to look at the Ebola outbreak and what that means. the world. We're going to look at the question of the far right in Britain, and we've got a rather interesting question about communities. So a lot of things to get through. So, Alice, starting on this, and it'd be also interesting whether you think we got what we got right, what we got wrong, but Evie's asked, R.C. and Putin playing Trump, and Roy, not Rory, has said, has Trump's visit to China, shown that China has trumped the USA, and that USA is now subordinate to China on the world stage.

It's interesting how those questions, I think, reflect most of the questions that came in about this, which suggests that most of our listeners and viewers do think that if there was a winner or loser, then Xi was the winner and Trump was the loser. Look, I thought it was fascinating to watch. I really did. And I've got to obviously try to park my Trump Drainment Syndrome. And before the TDS, give us the sense what it looked like and felt like. What stood out to me was to go to Evie's point, I did feel that he was being.

played because he loves all that stuff. He loves all the children waving their flags as he came off the plane. The MAGA crowd was saying this is a bigger reception than Obama got when he went there. I'll tell you what I found the most interesting thing was that right at the top, President Xi said something really tough about Taiwan. He basically said, if we get this right, that would be great for relations. If we mishandled this issue, it will affect American-Chinese. relations at every level. And then the other thing I thought was stunning was when he basically said, it was this one phrase. I mean, in English, on the translation, it came over in five words, and it said, century-long transformation is accelerating. And what that said to me,

I'm not a China expert, but what it said to me was this was him to Donald Trump's face saying, we are overtaking you. It's an amazing moment. I was struck by the fact that it's this famous story and detective stories to remember the dog that didn't bark. So the coverage has been about what didn't happen. But I think that's very significant. So we go back. The last 20 years has really been about America and China pumping up for a new Cold War. Started with Obama, talking about pivot towards Asia. During Trump one, we had his sexual estate who we've interviewed, Mike Pompeo, lacerating China as a dictatorship.

And then actually even... Marco Rubio does the same. Mark Rubio did the same. Yep. And even Biden, you'll remember when we were recording podcasts some of the very tense meetings that Jake Sullivan was holding with his Chinese counterpart and Biden not visiting China and skirting around the edge of each other at Bali and trying to read this.

So you would have expected until this year one of two things, right? Either that narrative, which is the narrative that Ruby, was pushing, Elbridge Colby was pushing, who's the deputy of Secretary of Defense, and he's written a whole book about this, which is how is this used to really put China back in its box? So their dream would be, number one, you reinforce deterrence on Taiwan. You really signal to China. We've got Taiwan's back. We've got the back of Japan and South Korea.

And all of the U.S. military is concentrating there, not in the Gulf, not in the Middle East, not in Europe. It's all there. Second thing, you'd probably lean very, very hard into unequal balance on trade. So let's say you really felt as many, many people do, and particularly Republican voters, China's hollowed out American industry, cost millions of American jobs because they've unfairly manipulated their currency, subsidized their industries, stolen our intellectual property. This is a summit in which you really stick it to China on that.

Or you do something else, which is you do the G2 model. The G2 model says the rest of the world doesn't really matter now. We're 50% of the world economy. China, which was smaller, small in the British economy in 2004, right? So, seven times larger than us. So it is a G2 set up in this world. So you might say, okay, let's sort out the world's issues. We're going to sort out AI safety.

We're going to come up with agreements on global development, global trade. That's all the stuff we said they might. Environment, climate, whatever. whatever you might do. None of that happened. But what's interesting for me is that it could have been worse, right? Trump, I mean, I don't know whether he gets a cookie for this, but he didn't really say very much about Taiwan, which was a turn-up for the books, because pretty much anything he said about Taiwan would have gone wrong. And the summit ended, really, with these two big superpowers circling around each other a bit suspicious, but they haven't up the anti, either

in trade wars or Cold War. Yeah. You should tell listeners, we've interviewed this week, Rahm Emanuel, who was Barack Obama's chief of staff, and he's now putting his toe pretty deep into the water to try and become the next American president. He's still very hard over on China. We've also had quite a lot of feedback that we weren't hard over enough. Very, very interesting how we sort of quite liked him, but our team really, really didn't.

So I'd be fascinated with what listeners and viewers think. They're two, when you said what was he like to sort of watch them, they're two such different people. but actually they've got similarities. One of my favorite quotes of the whole thing was Trump said this as Xi said, he's very, very tall, especially for this country. He's standing there by the way.

He's very, very tall, especially for this country because they tend to be a little shorter, which is a kind of, he's trying to flatter him, but he's basically just abusing the country in his own sort of, his own pre-racist way. Do you know that the height of Chinese teenagers has increased something like five inches? And a lot of this is to do.

I don't want to turn this even more into a health podcast, but it's almost entirely about protein. The same happened in Japan after the war. Incredible expansion height. I was born in Hong Kong. Yep. And my parents lived in Hong Kong until 1997. And when my mother started teaching at Hong Kong University, my mother's very short. She was tall in a lot of her students.

By the time she left, she was dwarfed by her students. Incredible what protein does. Well, he, anyway, so he's very, very tall. I was also struck by how absolutely. exquisite President's G's suits were. Is that what he noticed? Oh, I mean, they cost a

fortune. They were really, really smart. Trump's, because their styles are so different, Trump goes in, if you remember the last summit when they first met, he said, I give the meeting 12 out of 10.

We know he struggles in the maths, right, but 12 out of 10 isn't a thing, really. This one, he went in saying, the first thing that's going to happen, he's going to give me a big hug. Well, he didn't give him, it was pretty cold.

And so you had the situation, particularly as after the summit ended, Trump gets on the house. You remember that famous fraternal embrace that Brezhnev used to give the East German leaders, yeah, where they'd kiss them on the lips and there's nothing like that. There was nothing like that. But Trump kept saying the whole time, he's a great friend, he's become a great friend, I get a lot of trouble for saying he's a great friend. He said all this stuff. He was really trying to lay it on.

And Xi was having none of it. And then when they got to the briefings after the whole thing, one of the Chinese foreign ministry guy was asked whether they were friends, as Trump kept saying. And his reply was, the two sides exchanged views of major issues. So Trump gets on the plane and they were all saying, well, that was a little bit disappointed, wasn't it, Mr. President? He was amazing. We did the deals and this and Boeing. Boeing shares fell, by the way, because the expectations were not going. Incidentally, just sort of footnote here, Trump has just disclosed his financial investments. Oh, I know. He's a big investor in Boeing. You hear people.

in the newspapers speaking on behalf of Boeing saying, if you want to make President Trump happy, buy Boeing. He's a big shareholder in Boeing. He goes around the world selling Boeing airplanes, and he's a big shareholder in Boeing. He's also done more trades since becoming president than every president in history. Anyway, so he went off, bought lots of Boeing shares.

I'm going to sell lots of Boeing's, and the Boeing share price will go up and I'll make lots of money. Well, in fact, it went down because he oversold how many he was going to sell, and they didn't buy quite as many. He gets on the plane and says there's all these amazing deals. So then Wang Yi, the Chinese Foreign Minister, is asked about all these amazing deals. And his answer is this.

We're continuing to implement all the consensus reached in earlier consultations, agreeing to establish a board of trade and a board of investment, addressing each other's concerns over market access and advancing the expansion of two-way trade under reciprocal tariff reduction framework. Blimey, so in an age of kind of authenticity,

populism and soundbites, basically every quote you're giving me from the Chinese government sounds like some 1990s policy paper. Yeah, but they're both. saying no. Bullshit. Yeah.

And here's the other thing. Eve's question, are Xi and Putin playing Trump? As we speak, Putin is on his way to Beijing. Yeah. But his 40th meeting. And that'll be very interesting. 40th meeting.

40th meeting. Very interesting watching that. I thought the other really interesting thing about, and it was so deliberate, he was doing it so deliberately, was when he talked about all the differences between them. But he then said, you know, the key question is, can we, China and US, can we overcome the so-called Thucydides trap? And this, again, I think, was a way of saying, we're overtaking you.

Because the Thucydides trap, which was made famous by a book by a guy called Graham Allison, whose book was called Destined for War. And his thesis is that whenever there has been a rising power, approaching an established power, a hegemony, that inevitably ends in war. He studied 16 situations like that, 12 of them ended in war. So Graham Allison actually was a colleague of mine at Harvard. I know him quite well. And he is pretty amazing because he defines these ideas.

And one of the great tricks actually in being somebody working on government is he came up with a phrase, he said at his trap. And now you can see Xi Jinping using it. And his great friend and colleague Joe Nye came up with a phrase soft power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a great trick. And you've got to get there with percivillians. It's not getting there very quickly, is it? It's now three years old.

I'm banging about Persevon. And Siegeng Ping hasn't done it yet. I mean, he's Jijing Ping. He is Percivillian. I mean, he just, he's just, you keep going. So I think that was him saying, as he was saying with the transformation, by the way, which the first time he said that concept of the acceleration was in a meeting in Moscow two years ago with Putin.

So I think what he's saying, and I actually think the timing of Putin's visits deliberate, it's basically saying the state media today in China. China is saying this shows that we are now the central global power. We had Trump last week. We've got Putin this week. We've had all those leaders that I mentioned last week ago. So I think they will have felt they got a lot more out of this. Than America. Okay. Well, look, we talked about the fact that they didn't talk about the big global issues, global development, Africa, climate, AI safety. And one issue they didn't talk about was global public health. So we've had a question from Ezra Helen. And this

relates exactly to this. How serious is the new Ebola outbreak? Should we be worried about it spreading beyond Africa, especially with the cuts to US global health funding? Very good question. The answer is very and yes, and the cuts to US global health funding are probably part of the reason why this is happening now. Big plug, as always for leading and people who aren't listening to the back catalogue of leading, Aswell Gawande has done some wonderful stuff on this recently. He was the USAID deputy administrator who led on global health. This is something that means a lot to me because I was the minister

during the last big Ebola outbreak about 10 years ago. Divid. Divid. Yeah. And when that happened 10 years ago, I got together in Paris immediately with Mark Green, who was the head of USAID. We went for a walk over that bridge

with all the padlocks on it in the margins of a, I think it was a G7 development ministers meeting. And we worked out funding and I think we put in an extra 100 million, USAID put in an extra 100 million. Why does it matter? It matters because that allowed us to fund protective equipment, getting the nurses to the front line, doing the testing, developing the vaccination. I then went out to Eastern DRC. I went into these Ebola centers. I sat with a nurse who very sadly contracted Ebola and was

dying in front of me. I saw children whose parents from the center dying. We were washing ourselves in this very, very intense way to try to. make sure there was no fluids of any sort. Is it through fluid that you get it? Yeah. And once you've contracted it, your mortality rate at the moment is about 50%. Half a child's. Very different to COVID.

So when you were with the nurse who had it, what was the... There was a plastic sheet between me and him. Right. We were talking through a plastic sheet. He was very, very courageously talking to me and he probably had two days to live. So it's something where, and people will hear this paradoxically, because it's so lethal, it doesn't spread quite as easily as things like COVID, because so many of the carriers are killed before they can pass it on. But the bigger issue is that global pandemics are, along with AI, probably the biggest threat for the next 20, 30 years that we need to worry about,

and dismantling all the money in the global health architecture that stops, not just this outbreak of Ebola, but other forms of pandemic coming out of poor developing countries, overwhelming their health systems, overwhelming their borders, and ultimately getting to Britain. But if you go back to our previous discussion about the summit, Trump and Xi, given that it's not that long ago since COVID, and given Trump at the time was obsessed with the, you know, the China element of COVID, you'd have thought that might have been part of the discussion. What have you learned? Have you studied it? What more can we say? But they're just, because it's not serious. It's so weird. Because even for Britain or Germany, If you're looking for a type of investment in international development where you can prove that there's a national interest, you're not just in inverted commerce, wasting money giving to people in another country, but you're actually protecting yourself. Global health is the key example.

You spend on the border between Uganda and Eastern DRC and you are less likely to end up with a voter in Britain. I don't understand why people are not making these arguments. I don't understand why we're cutting our global health funding. I had a meeting this morning with a Swedish guy called Carl Skow, who is the C-O-O of the World Food Program. And this doesn't relate specifically to Ebola, but he was explaining what he has already seen about the consequences of USAID, UK DFID, German, other countries that have cut their defence spending. He literally got back to yesterday from Afghanistan. He was saying they've had an earthquake, they've had two floods. They've got 2.5 million refugees that have come back from Pakistan and Iran. USAAD has cut all, every single penny of funding to Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

Okay. He was talking about Gaza. He said basically in Gaza, they are now managing, World Food Programme, is managing to get food in, but that is all that's going in. Okay. Can I just interrupt something? Because just to make the problem worse, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Gaza, when USAID and Diffid took its money out, the only people really who stepped up in significant amounts for that were the Gulf, Qatar, Saudi,

UAE. And their economies are now being crippled by the Iran blockade and this war that Trump and Israel have launched on Iran. and Iran's response, which has been attacking them and closing their exports and destroying their economy. So the backup, the plan B, which was to get wealthy Gulf countries to step up and handle these problems, that's foreign side because those wealthy Gulf countries are now freezing their funding and are struggling to make their payments because they're not getting the income in. That's absolutely right. He said there are four key areas, themes that are directly related to making their life much more difficult as a result specifically.

We'll come back to the cuts, but the Iran war. The first is they're having to step up their operations in Lebanon and to some extent Gaza as well. The second is the cost of operations have gone up 25% because of the rise in the oil price. There are currently 300 million acutely hungry in the world. And he said if the oil price stays above $100, for any considerable period of time,

they've calculated another 45 million will be pushed into acute hunger, and his final point is fertilizer. All of Africa's fertilizer comes through this trace of all mus. So that's going to put prices up and supply down. I think huge credit to the people who are desperately trying to fill some of these gaps when these governments are falling aside

and when this chaos is happening. Huge credit to governments like Qatar, which is still trying to support communities in these places. Huge credit also to the private philanthropists. I mean, I think it's wonderful that you do have private individuals being unbelievably generous, stepping in where governments are falling inside, but it's not, it can't carry it. You can't deal with Ebola on this basis. You can't deal with vaccinating people.

You can't deal with malaria bed nets. You can't deal with a really big, multi-billion dollar things. Well, hold on. Some of these guys, the guys you talk about in your AI series, they could. I mean, this, Carl said it would take $13 billion to feed the hungry of the world today. And the war in Iran is costing $2 billion a day. So stop the war in Iran and Elon Musk is worth hundreds of billions. I mean, he could feed all the hungry people in the world and it would be a rounding error.

And it would be nice to see him do it. So, Elon, if you're listening. Especially as he was the one who cut USAID in the first place. Absolutely. If you're listening, step up. I know you're very, very anxious about global population collapse. Fantastic opportunities support some of the countries in the world that I have the strongest population growth and maybe invite them to the United States where they can provide that labor that you're so worried about.

I can see the sincerity with which you're putting that. Final word from me on card, he said this thing which really kind of hit him to me. He said, we have been cut. And by the way, UK hasn't got a great story to tell here. The funding from the UK to the World Food Program has been cut from 600 million to 200 million. that's two-thirds gone. And he said he put together all the big countries that have pulled back. We've been cut to the bone.

And he said this, we are taking from the hungry to feed only the starving. Okay, let's take a break. I'm back for the break. This episode is sponsored by Starling, the bank that helps you organize your money, build great habits, and stay in control of your spending. Plenty of us have strong opinions on how to run the country, but knowing how to manage your own day to day can be more. of a challenge, especially when it comes to being good with money. That kind of self-assured self-governance

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Actually, a lot less. Visit staples.ca slash preferred. That was easy. Welcome back to the rest of politics. Question time with me, Alecester Campbell. I'm with me, Rory Stewart. Rory, somebody here with a wonderful name, Josh Prose, as opposed to Josh poetry. At the Unite the Kingdom rally over the weekend, Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Zyaxley-Lennon,

explicitly told his supporters to join right-wing political parties ahead of the 2020-9 election. Given recent revelations about Nigel Farage's funding and reform UK's growing profile, how concern should mainstream politics be about far-right street movements transitioning into the ballot box? Well, I think the first thing is that one should be disturbed, and disturbed by the number of people that were supporting them. I mean, I was out, as many other people will have been in London, and I saw the edge of both marches, and I saw a really impressive police deployment.

That was not an easy thing, right? You've got a Knack Bar March happening on one side. You've got Tommy Robinson's march happening on the other. That could have been really horrible. How close were they? Well, one lot were mostly around, when I saw them around the edge of high part, the other were around Trafalgar Square, so I suppose the police were keeping a distance between the two.

But anyway, it was impressive, impressive policing. But it's pretty scary. I mean, it's, yes, the numbers were down, but there was all this business, which I guess you wouldn't find. I'd actually, sorry, correct me if I'm wrong. One of the things that kept happening is people kept picking up wooden crosses, and Tommy Robinson sent out a tweet with the Lord's Prayer in it. So there's all this kind of leaning into Christian nationalism. Would Lepens Party of the AFD be going so strong on Christian symbolism? I've not seen it.

I think I expect some of it will. I mean, in France, it's a laistee, right? Yeah, exactly. They wouldn't be going to... You'd have thought not, but they might do it in terms of, because, I mean, there is a sort of a streak of anti-Islam in all of them. Yeah. Well, more than a streak of anti-Islam.

Yeah. And so it was very, very deliberate. I mean, I didn't go to the march, but I was watching some of the coverage. There were these piles. You know how when you go to stop the war marches on either piles of placards. There were piles of crosses. Yeah, yeah. Now, I don't see Tom.

Robinson as being a very Christian person in terms of the way he looks at other people and the way he conducts himself. One of the things is so interesting is, of course, all the leaders of the church are expressing serious concern. I mean, the Pope expressing concern. But you also, most of the church being in the closure, you're horrified by this idea that you're sort of using Christianity to chases. I also, again, talk to people who had relatives on the march.

And again, the narrative was, so it's all very friendly, they're very normal people. Well, maybe. But the people who were speaking on the stage are far from normal. Some people were banned from coming in. But the kind of people he's trying to get speaking are people who claim that Islam is a supremacist religion trying to wipe us all out. There's a particular guy, in fact, wasn't on this much, but who they love retweeting, who's a great inspiration to Elon Musk, who claims that of the two billion Muslims, the world, hundreds of millions of them were engaged in a genocidal attempt to try to wipe him. out the rest of us. Many of them talking about expelling Muslims, many of them talking about banning non-Christian places of worship. A lot of this story, which we hear again and again on Twitter, Elon Musk's civil war in Britain is inevitable, right? And when he said that, it got literally millions of retweets and likes. And here's my final point. 26% of UK voters have a positive view of that much. And 50% of men aged 25 to 34 have a positive view of what's going on. I was very troubled. I do not like the vision of a bunch of people marching with crosses, swaggering

around in the central London, going to hear speakers who want to expel all the Muslims. The reason why Elon Musk is so important is because his whole platform that he's turned into what he's done with X is the weaponization of hatred and division. and you see a lot of that. And of course you will get people saying, well, it's because I'm worried about this, worried about that. This is where I kind of have to have a bit of difficulty

with the Gary Stevenson point that we talked about on the main podcast is that you can't not confront this. You can't just pretend that it's part of a, well, the country's not really working very well. This goes way beyond that. People like Yaksin-Lenin, they go way beyond that. And of course, the whole kind of infrastructure that's developing on the right of British policy is so interesting because he didn't just say, you know, get involved with restore or advance Rupert Lowe and Ben Nabeeb's parties.

He said, think about joining reform or the Conservative Party. So they're lumping it all in together on the right as you have to hate everybody else on the left of you. And one of the very disturbing things for me as somebody who comes from the Conservative Party and are now seeing a lot of course. conservative voters becoming reform voters. I was talking to a former colleague of mine this morning on the phone who is a former MP saying on no account I might have quote him, but he would be tempted to vote for reform if he thought it would keep labour out. Two-thirds of reform voters have a positive view of Rupert Lowe, 61% of reform voters like Tommy Robinson, like Tommy Robinson, and 54% of them think non-white British citizens born abroad should be forced to leave

the UK. That's more than half of reform voters. So this story that we're getting out of moderate remain voting Tories, that this is just the Tory party, it's all fine, there's no problem, they can just go across to reform. They're joining a party where more than half the members think Tommy Robinson's a good thing and think that non-white British people should be made to leave the UK, who are not born in the UK. Anyway, so a huge thank you to Evan, who did a lot of research on it, but also hope not hate, which has done quite an interesting report on the British far right, from which quite a lot of these figures have been extracted.

Now, final question maybe from me or find a serious question, which comes from Brendan Cox. Brennan Cox was married to Joe Cox, my colleague in Parliament, who was horribly murdered, just in the lead-up to the Brexit referendum and whose sister Kim Ledbetter is now in Parliament has been leading all the stuff and a sister dying. Brennan Cox is running an initiative with Oxford University where he's

asking people to record 60 seconds on what they think about community, which is then going to be fed into a large AI model, that which more later. And he's asked us to do it. So it's a bit unfetched you because you've had no prep, but gone give us 60 seconds on what you think about community.

I've got my time. Time, right. I've got, I've got, ready, ready, right. As you know, Rory, I am a, for an old man, 69 next week, I am a great believer in young people in this country. So I want to live in a country where we respect young people and where young people respect each other. And I think that starts by teaching values in schools, by teaching history in the context of how we have become the country that we are. and being proud of that without feeling that we have to own every mistake in our past as well. So I want to live in a community where everybody is well educated,

where everybody is taught values of tolerance and respect, and where everybody feels that there is a possibility of them making the most of every ounce of talent they've got. So just on your minute, Alistair, here's my 58 seconds. So, firstly, I think we need to start with a sense of anger and shame at how bad things have gotten Britain. We need to accept that we have levels of poverty, which are completely unjustifiable in the country as wealthy as this, that the situation in our prisons and with the homeless is solvable by any government that wanted to do it, that our retreat from international development assistance is a complete betrayal of the world. we need to deliver decent functioning services

and that also involves radicalism. That will mean cuts to welfare. That will mean, unfortunately, some civil servants having to lose their jobs. That will mean very radical reforms. It will mean localism, driven by figures like Andy Burnham, and it's going to build towards a positive vision

where we know each other, we share values, and we have a positive sense of national pride. Okay, okay. Was that bang on a minute? That was bang on a minute. Yeah, it got a bit rushed at the end. Yeah, well, okay, so to the history point, I thought was interesting.

I mean, one of the things that I think reform voters sense is they worry that, I don't know, Labor, elite living in London doesn't really resonate with the kind of history that they care about. And, I mean, it's going to strike. David Cameron when asked what his favorite movie was, said it was Zulu. And clearly quite a lot of people who are watching. who are conservative reform voters love watching where eagles dare

or the Battle of Britain and this kind of stuff. What was yours? I love really cheesy action films. I love things like Gladiator. I think it's really cool. Yeah, I think it's really cool. Gladiator, that's really cool.

Why those ladies singes the blues? Lady sings the blues, yeah. I thought he was going to say some weird Japanese black and white 1950s thing. Do you think there is a question around how you tell a positive sense of history? you know, what replaces, if you're Andy Byrne, you're going to be like quietly patriotic appealing to working class vote.

What do you do with stories about Second World War, which actually, after all, not pretty recent, you know, our parents, you know, our fathers were alive as adults during that time. Do you have to abandon that entirely? Can you talk about that then? Definitely not. No, one of the things I loat about the right is the way that they've, they think that they own all of that sense of, you know, the military and, you know, the military and, you know, war and fighting and fighting for values. What I don't like about the debate about history is this sense that, you know, we have to, as the statues thing sort of brought this home, you know, we have to, we have to apologize. We shouldn't necessarily apologize, but nor should we pretend

that everything's been perfect, that we've always been this perfect country. And this thing about make Britain great again is all about going back to something that we've allegedly lost. why do I, would I define myself as progressive rather than conservative? Because you want to progress, you want to improve from everything that's gone before. So, no, I think history is incredibly important. So I don't know really why. I mean, you sort of threw the question out of me. I had no idea it was coming.

So I thought I did quite well for my 60 minutes. If I had a few minutes, Roy, I'd have made it much much much more than. You would have done better, yeah. It was 66. I thought you were just a bit policy heavy. It was a bit policy heavy. So what's happening? Sadja Javid explained it really well.

this morning, he's been involved in this with Brendan Cox, is that you record a 60-second voice note saying what you want your community to feel like to be, etc. Hopefully with a bit more preparation than you and me. With more preparation. You can even write it. And it then goes into some sort of amazing AI thing, and out of that will come a kind of assessment of what people mean by community. And if you want to take part, which we encourage you all to do, then just go to the link in the episode. description. And it's really interesting. Again, I keep plugging back leading, but Audrey Tang,

who was the AI minister in Taiwan, used a lot of AI to do government and consultations. And it's been done to a local level at American towns by Mears. I think we may find that actually it produces surprisingly interesting things, not boiled down platitudes, but actually I'm quite confident that these models will produce things which might be quite powerful for politicians. Okay, good. And by the way, we're coming up to the... 10th anniversary. 10th anniversary, because we're also coming up to the 10th anniversary of the referendum, which is why, sorry to sort of keep poking Nigel Farage,

I thought it was disgusting when he was arguing that he's 5 million pounds was given free security, when he said he's been the most attacked politician in the UK, right? Joe Cox was attacked to the point of death. David Amos was attacked to the point of death. So I'll just leave that there. But what Joe Cox's politics is all about and what Kim is trying to do and what Brendan is trying to do is this sense that there's more that unites us. So I think I guess that's the big point. Where do we find the things that unite us? So on the radio this morning when I was heading into the studio, they were interviewing people somewhere about, you know, whether we can unite, whether we feel more divided.

I can't believe that every single person they spoke to said yes to that question. But every single person that was on said yes to that. So we're more united? We're more divided. We're more divided. We're more divided. There's more hate. Well, it is, it's sad.

But part of it is social media. So we should lean into this bit more. So question from Jenny, which I'm going to use for a massive tilt to link what you just said to what I want to talk about. She said, why don't you talk more about demography and birth rates? There was an amazing article by John Burns Murdoch and the FT who does this stuff on data. And he was looking at the collapse and birth rates. So I was teasing Elon Musk about this before the break.

But one of the big questions is why are birth rates collapsing all over the world, right? You know, often in some countries, we're down to children having on average a quarter of a child, right? Whole populations are vanishing South Korea, Japan's collapsing, right? And there are big ideas, you know, is it affordability? people can't afford to set up a home. And of course, what he points out is that can't really explain it because it's happened so quickly. So here's the key data point.

If you compare how quickly you get 4G and then 5G coverage and the internet and connects it to falling birth rates, there is a direct correlation. As soon as people get on the internet and on their phone, they stop dating, stop going out, meeting anyone, and stop having kids. I thought the whole thing about it. I thought people were dating all the time by using that. No, all the data suggests that actually,

what you're doing is you're sitting on your phone scrolling around when you could be going out, socializing, going on dates, meeting new people and getting new friends. And it's really interesting because it's too sudden the collapse in childbearing to have anything to do with long-term socioeconomic causes. It's one of the other things for which this machine should be blamed. And polarization, obviously, which is where you began, is the most dramatic example of talk because these are algorithms of division. they get us all going by winding subs.

So we're all seeing images of people picking up crosses, marching on Trafalgar Square, and we're either picking it up because we love it or we hate it. But it's polarising us. And the division between young women and young men, which is exploding around the world. Another reason, apparently, where they're not dating, is young women are increasingly left wing.

Young men are increasingly right wing, and it's driven by what they see on their friends. A lot of these sort of masculine influences so-called, they are driving men to hate women. You know, misogynies on the rise, in part because that thing. You're absolutely right, by the way. We're going to look back on this as one of the worst social experiments of all time.

I'll just explain to you. The AFD in Germany, they say that the low birth rate has been caused by sexual deviation and non-reproductive lifestyles. That is why they intend to ban gay pride flags. So there you go. Well. Yeah. Well, that tells you a lot about the AFD.

There is incidentally no empirical. data whatsoever to pack that up in any way. China, China's birth rate is a real problem. Famously they had the one child policy and then they realized the birth rate was a problem so they then said you can have more children, but it's not happening. And 32% of Chinese people aged 18 to 24, that's one in three, say they have no desire to have children. In 2012, it was 5%.

So there we are. Okay, that's it, right? So when was the iPhone? Well, exactly. What's changed from 2012 to 2026? It's not. That's a very short period of time historically. Yes, there are big socioeconomic things. But a change that rapid has to be about social media and technology. Well, Alison, listen, we've covered a lot today, as usual. We've done China and see, we didn't get on to Russia, Ukraine, which I think we should talk about next week. But we've done the China, Xi Jinping, Trump visit. We've done Ebola. World Health Organization funding. We've done community, we've done social media and demographic birth rates. Thank you very much indeed.

Can I just read out, though, the question that I've only just noticed, but maybe we can come to next week when we talk about Russia or Ukraine. Matthew, Tripp Plus member from Billingham. I recently watched a documentary that Alistair featured in. It was a clip of Tony Blair and Alistair meeting Putin, and I saw that Alistair shook his hand. Question both to Rory the Tory and to Alistair. who is the most evil person you've shook hands with. So we'll both think about that. We'll both think about that. Well, thank you very much.

See you soon. Bye-bye.