TRIGGERnometry - Rory Stewart: “We’re Living in a World of Fairy Tales”

Episode Date: July 7, 2024

Rory Stewart is a British academic, broadcaster, and former diplomat and politician. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament for Penrith and The Border from 2010 to 2019 and was a junior minister in four government departments from 2015 to 2019, holding the posts of Minister for the Environment, Minister of State for International Development, Minister of State for Africa, and Minister of State for Prisons. He ultimately joined the Cabinet and National Security Council as Secretary of State for International Development. He resigned from the Conservative Party in October 2019. His memoir Politics on the Edge (published in the US as How Not to Be a Politician) was a best-seller. In March 2022, Stewart and Alastair Campbell launched The Rest Is Politics podcast, which tops politics podcast ratings in the UK most weeks. Rory’s memoir: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1529922860/ The Rest is Politics on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1Ysx8g1Iw42gESAtegrFaH SPONSOR: Shopify - sign up for a £1 per month trial at https://www.shopify.co.uk/trigger/ Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I wrote a little song to remind you, choice hotels, get you more of the experiences you value. The can be a hotel's got it all. A rooftop bar, have a ball. Bring a date your squad or even your mom. Book direct at choiceotails.com. The problem is that democracy partly depends on fairy stories. The trick of populism is that of course there's always a kernel of truth in this. The point is not is Farage right in his criticisms. The point is what would he represent and what would he do if he was in government? As with most of these things, when you try to do it, you run into a lot of complications. At the point where you go, well, I don't want to leave the ECHR because it's in,

that's when the person says, well, in that case, F you, I'm voting for Farage. And that's how you create populism. When it works, you know, you're the great reformer, you're Margaret Thatcher. When it doesn't work, you'll list trust. You're an effectless, imprudent, foolish person who didn't bother to take decent advice. Rossiore, welcome to Trigonometry. It's great to finally have you on. I'm really looking forward to speaking with you.

The first thing we wanted to talk to you about is, obviously, this is going out after the election, but you've made it clear that you are not supporting the conservatives in this one, and perhaps maybe even going as far left as the Greens. So what does conservatives mean to you? What is it conservative in your definition? It means that famously the problem with conservative politics is that it's very difficult to define.

But I suppose this left-right division exists in every country. And one way of framing it is that the left tends to have a very optimistic, progressive vision of the future, and conservatives tend to be more respectful of the way things are tradition in the past. In a UK context, that means having a different relationship to history, to landscape, to architecture, to the constitution, and it's supposed a different sense of what identity is. I mean, the question is for any politician in any country has to be, to some extent, a nationalist, I mean, moderate nationalist, you can be an extreme nationalist, but you are representing

this country. And what is this? that thing that you're representing? Is there an identity to that place that makes it distinct from other places that's been inherited from the past? Is it just the group of people who are alive today or is it also the people who lived and died, the people who are yet to be born? What kind of obligations do we have to the past and the future? What are our ideas of values? truth, beauty. And these aren't things which are very difficult, which are easy to articulate,

because generally speaking, contemporary politics gets very quickly into a conversation about money. So that being the case, I guess what I'm getting at is, what are your disagreements and frustrations with the state of the conservative family in the UK more broadly

that have caused you to move so far away from it, still calling yourself a conservative, because you're not saying, I've become a green, are you? You still claim to be conservative. Yeah. So what is that dissonance? So I think it's largely about moral values. So for me, Boris Johnson was a ludicrous dishonest buffoon who should never have been allowed to be prime minister, and he was facilitated by my colleagues in the Conservative Party.

Liz Truss was a reckless, risk-taking glib prime minister who did huge damage to our economy and should never have been enabled by the Conservative Party. The hard version of Brexit that was pursued was divisive and damaging when the Conservative Party had an opportunity to bring the country together and try to find a compromise. And so I think in terms of ethical standards, they let themselves down with Boris Johnson, in terms of thoughtful policy, they let themselves down with Listrace. And in terms of an idea of politics as finding compromise in the central ground, they let themselves down with a hard Brexit. So it's a sense that they betrayed important values much more than the question of right or left.

Rory, as well, there's a competency crisis, I would argue, in the Conservative Party. You look at the country they inherited in 2010, and you look at the country that they're handing over to the Labour Party. I mean, let's be fair, the Labour Party are going to win. We all know it. I would argue the country is in a worse state after a 14-year conservative term than it was before. Yeah, yeah, sure.

And how does that make you feel as a conservative that this was the party that you believed in that you were part of and seeing the way that the country has been handled? Well, I think how I feel is not not not a does doesn't interest me very much. I think what I think is interesting is is is the way that you friend that. So I think you've got two things going there. Countries in a worst state. I agree. But you ascribe it to a competency crisis. So you have some idea on your head that somehow if there had been some other group of people,

these kind of super competent people, the country wouldn't be in the mess that it's in. And that depends how much you think that the problems that we face in this country are actually quite structural, quite deep, quite difficult, and how much you think it's just down to the fact that Rishi Suna is no good at his job. My guess is that these problems that we face are very similar to the problems that people are facing in France, that they're facing in Germany, that they'll eventually face the United States. They are much more to do with a population's aging. So what's the single biggest fact that explains the problems the NHS is that we have twice

as many people aged over 85 compared to where we were in 1979. one of those people, cost 10 times as much as somebody aged between 18 and 25 to deal with. Second problem, COVID. For better or for worse, this government, but with the agreement of Labor and Lib Dem, there's a huge consensus around this, decided to lock the country down, took the biggest recession that the country had experienced in 300 years and spent 400 billion pounds, that's 400,000 million pounds in payouts and support for people during COVID, which have now left us with this enormous debt.

These are the real fundamentals. And there are other things that we don't quite understand around the fringes. There are 800,000 people economically inactive, which isn't happening in other countries, but nobody really understands why that's happening. We are an economy and a structure that's incredibly dependent on immigration. So the government's taken in about 1.4 million people net over the last two years. Why? Well, because if you go to a hospital or you go to care, and you discover that all the people

with the skills and nursing, care, and medicine are not from Britain. They're from other countries. And the country can only run on that basis. On the other hand, we have a population that doesn't want more immigration. And it has a point because we're also shorter houses. You bring in 1.4 million more people, where are they going to live? Where's the road infrastructure? Where are the schools to support them?

And if you're creating a pyramid where you're always supporting your older people by bringing in more and more young people, well, that logically is just going to keep expanding until you'd end up with a population of 150 million people in what's already the most populated country in Earth. So I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I fear you will find that things are not much better after five years the Labour government. And then you will be tempted to say, look at these bunch of incompetence,

because we're not prepared to step back enough and see that fundamentally the problems are not about whether or not Rishi Sunak's bright or does his job well. Fundamentally, the problems are that we haven't managed to face these structural issues as a country. I agree with you, but my argument is not particularly with Rishi Sunak, it's a conservative party as a whole.

When they came in in 20, They knew that there was a housing crisis. They have done little or nothing to solve that problem and we're talking about we have a population crisis not enough babies are being born Well if you don't allow young people to get on the housing ladder to actually be to buy a place so that they can settle down get married have children then isn't that the natural reaction to your own inability or unwillingness to deal with this one thing? So first thing is that there's been a terrible failure on housing, you're right, but maybe the thing you're not acknowledging is that this was one of their number one priorities. So they set building 300,000 houses a year as being top priority. They put a lot of the most talented, competent people in the government behind trying to build those houses. People like Michael Gove, Oliver Letwin, Greg Clark were given these portfolios, and they failed.

So why did they fail? And that's what I'm going to flip around to you, because you seem to imagine that that failure is somehow a failure of what? Well, what are you hinting at, Rory? Because you've talked in the past, and we've had people on the show, some of whom you've just criticized. By the way, like Liz Truss, Searle Abram and others, Steve Hilton, David Cameron's former advisor, who all made the same point that you've made in the past, which is it's actually very, very hard to get anything done when you're elected because the civil service won't let you essentially. It's kind of fairly simple as that.

Is that what you're hinting at, or is there something else going on that you think is causing us to not be able to solve our problems? I think the structure is immobilizing people everywhere. So that's why I'm doubtful that labor will be able to address these issues.

We're equally doubtful, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. So what are the problems? Well, look, I've written a book called Politics on the Edge, which is trying to talk in detail about some of the issues of getting anything down as a minister, and some of that is about the civil service. But there's a broader question about the public.

I mean, why is it that these houses are not being built? The way in which planning works are concerns about biodiversity and climate. are concerns about landscape, are concerns about rural communities, the way in which ownership structures work in development companies, the way in which land income operates. So the minister trying to say, a government build houses, is looking at 15 different factors, all of which needs to be his on the head separately. So biodiversity, right? One of the things that stops building is that for very good reasons, we care about species, nature, biodiversity, water, and that rules out quite a lot of sites quite quickly.

We care about archaeology, and if you find a sense of archaeological site, that also has an impact on planning. We care about democracy, we care about local consultation, right? We want to feel that a local town or village can say, we object, we think this could be built in a better way, right? Why do they get stuff built in China very quickly? They don't care and drive it through. But we have to be a bit more honest about what the trade-offs are here. We have a dream that this kind of competent, technocratic government's going to come in.

But usually our dream is based on a culture or a society very unlike our own, in which the Chinese government will literally move an entire community to drive a train line through. They will ultimately imprison people if they object. I mean, I've been through this in my neighborhood here in South Ken. They've been trying since, before I was born, since 1972, to build something on top of the tube station. And it's been blocked again and again for 51 years. And finally, they've managed to get it through. And we're all outraged. Why are we outraged? We're outraged because it's not delivering affordable housing, because the architect is ugly, because it's bringing in a supermarket

that's going to destroy the local shops. And we're all saying, you know, we're in favor of development, but we want development that is beautiful, delivers affordable housing and dozens of Australia local shops and transport for London is saying we've got to generate money here, we've got to get a lift into South Kent tube station and the way to do it is to build this rather ugly,

large structure and bring in a supermarket. And that's the kind of microcosm of what's happening in every community around this country that all of us want more housing, in theory, all of us want more development, but in practice, we're all very bright, educated, well-informed people who care passionately about our error. And as soon as you propose anything, that's not quite that we're Mimbi's.

It's that we've all able to come up with 50 arguments for why they shouldn't be doing it in quite the way they're doing it. So that to me seems like an area where leadership is required, because leadership is about selling people on the idea that you and I have to sacrifice a little. little bit because you and I are going to have grandchildren one day and we want them to be able to buy a flat before they're 40. Right, right. But so if I take the example of South Kent Ship Station, right, I turn around to you say the leader, you know, my grandchildren, I turn around and say, no, no, no, my proposal has more affordable housing than your proposal. Okay. And to which transport for London says the economics don't work. Okay. We can't generate the money delivering the affordable housing.

Then that seems like a fair trade off to me. The Transport for London building its ugly stuff. Yeah. Okay. But if we look at London, this philosophy of building has resulted in nine elms, has resulted in 50, 60,000 unaffordable apartment blocks going up because the developers are trying to build as quickly as possible and generate as much money as possible. And it's not resulting in affordable housing.

What I think we need is millions more council houses. But to build council houses on Transport for London or Mayor of London land, would involve totally changing our financial model. We'd have to accept much lower returns. You could do it financially. I mean, you could borrow the money, you could invest, and you could get income back, but it would be a much lower return than we're used to getting. And I don't see anybody yet prepared to say, we're not going to finance transport for London

off property development. We're going to make these plots of land not lose money. but we're not going to try to generate big bucks off them. Why not? Why won't anyone say that? Because that would require the taxpayer putting more of their taxes into running Transport for London.

So if Transport for London doesn't finance the signaling on the Piccadilly line or the new lift off cheap property development that doesn't deliver affordable housing, somebody else has got to pay for it. And that will mean not the property developers paying for it, it means the rest of us paying for it either through higher tube fares or paying bigger taxes. So the whole of the British government is kind of is often different versions of Ponzi schemes where in order to avoid charging people taxes, which seem to be unpopular, we end up doing these weird financing initiatives, a lot of which is trying to crowd in money from the private sector. by offering them profit in return for money being subsidising the government.

So that being the case, Rory, looking at the Conservative Party, does it actually have a future in its current state? Well, I'm worried about the Conservative Party. I mean, I'm very worried that they are going to be tempted to lurch towards a kind of Nigel Farage reform wing, and that the reason why they'll probably lurch towards that wing is that Kirstama has now occupied the center ground, and the risk is that over the next five years

for a lot of the problems we've talked about in this show, they're not going to be able to deliver. Kirstehmel will not be able to do stuff in the next five years, and that will provide more opportunity for populists. Because, I mean, we can see it. We can see it in Canada, where Trudeau is not performing, we can see it in Germany, where Schultz is not performing.

We can see it in France, where Macron's not performing. In all these cases, you have... people who are broadly speaking center-left, moderate fiscally conservative politicians just not delivering. And the reason they're not delivering is because of the kind of big structures of the way we're aging, the way our economies work, the way our welfare states are financed. And we want, of course, in the way that you're doing now to say, well, so, you know, what does that mean for the Tory party?

What does that mean for the Labor Party? And we want to find villains. We want to say these guys aren't competent, these guys are terrible, because it's quite cheering up. I mean, if that's the case, then our life's about to get much better. It'd be lovely if we lived in a world. Right, let me retry. Nobody in this room is under the illusion that life's about to get much better.

Nobody, honestly, I'm not thinking there's Dawn Butler coming to the rescue. Right. But the problem is that democracy partly depends on fairy stories, depends on an idea you vote out one party, vote in another, stuff's going to change, get better. That if things are bad, it's because there are a bunch of idiots in power. If we look at someone like Rishi Sunak, who is he? He's a, you know, he's a bright, hardworking, diligent guy. I mean, I've got big problems with him.

I've got problems with his sense of vision, his leadership. Why? Why have I got problems with him? When we've got Rishu Sunaat? I've got problems with him because he's not able to step back and see the bigger picture. But it's not that I think his problem is that he's, the normal way he's criticizes, you know, he's kind of privileged, he's out of touch, it's entitled, he's corrupt, he's, you know, his wife's making money, he's incompetent, he's cruel. I don't think any of that's true. I think the guys are, you know, brighter than us.

He's more hardworking than us. He's more, you know, he would be a successful banker, a successful lawyer, you know, be successful in almost any business. He's just no good as Prime Minister. And that's because the qualities you require are very unusual. They require an incredible extent of courage, vision, values, moral integrity, which is extremely improbable for any of us to generate. To do what, Rory? you keep hinting at these big structural problems or even explicitly describing them and no one I think would disagree with your analysis. But the question is, if somebody came along who was this perfect

Prime Minister, Alaroree Stewart, what would they then go and do? What do you think actually needs doing? Reform of the NHS dramatically. I mean, it's now chewing up four out of every 10 pounds of our current expenditure, we're spending four times as much on the NHS as we were in 1979 in real terms, twice as much in terms of our economy. And it's not delivery. When you say reform, how? Because your argument is we've got way more older people who need way more expensive care. How do you reform that? We would have to stop doing. And reform always is the same thing. It's about prioritization. And prioritization means you stop doing some things. So it's very, it's very, it's very

Very, very tough. Oh, I can see that. Yeah. Yeah. And so basically what you're saying to people is that there is nowhere in the world, nowhere, except for Britain now, which is trying to maintain a system that doesn't have a co-pay or insurance model as part of it. Okay. So reformed the NHS make it part co-pay. What else?

What else does a bright, visionary, courageous, principal leader need to do? Planning reform is central. I mean, if we're going to build infrastructure, we need to do that. I think you probably, not probably, definitely from my point of view, you'd want to rejoin the European Union customs union at least. Why is that so important? Because we need to have very close economic and political relationships with our nearest neighbour. And that's because trade partly works through proximity.

That's because small and medium-sized enterprise are desperately dependent on being able to do that kind of trade and being within a customs area allows you to do it. But it's also a symbol to investors around the world that instead of Britain retreating, it's expanding back into larger areas. And that's also necessary because there are no trade deals coming from China, into or the US, because we're in a world of protectionism now, not in a world of free trade. Okay. So rejoin the customs union.

What else? AI. So AI is the only thing that one can imagine, transform. performing productivity. But to get there, you would have to challenge unions. You would have to take some risk on regulation. You'd have to take quite a lot of risk on results. You would have a lot of people terrified about AI taking over functions that humans are currently doing. But productivity gains basically means fewer humans doing the same thing. And AI is one of the ways of delivering that. Anything else?

Probably my main ones. So, sorry, the final one, sorry, which is maybe more fundamental than any of them, is that Britain isn't really run by politicians, it's run by our civil service, our civil service is enormous. How's the NHS run? It's not run by a Secretary of State for Health. It consists of 1.1 million people. There are 350 million GP appointments a year.

The numbers are kind of staggering. So the only way of running a good country is by improving the quality of those people, how they are recruited, how they are promoted, how they are trained. And that is a 20-year process of investment of really thinking about how you create a really elite professional civil service. And that also requires some very tough conversations because a lot of the things, that I found as a minister that were getting in the way. I'll give you an example that I don't think I put in my book, but mattered to me and sort of illustrate some of the paradoxes.

So when I was the minister responsible for part of our effort during the Syrian war, I discovered that my Syrian team was moved from London to East Kilbride near Glasgow, 400 miles away. Why? Why? Because somebody thought it would be great for the economy of this depressed area near Glasgow to have these civil servants moved up there. So I say, well, wait a second, we're fighting a war, right?

Who's going to be in the meetings with the Minister of Defense? Who's going to be in the meetings with the Foreign Office? All these meetings are happening in London. Oh, don't worry, Minister. People will always be able to fly down. Sorry, first they say they can do it on Zoom, then I say, no, but that's not the point, right? a lot of this stuff is happening in the margins of meetings. It's not just happening on the Zoom call.

Don't worry, they'll be able to fly down. Then I notice they're not flying down. So then I go up to Glasgow. I'm like, what's happening? And they say, oh, Minister, we've just done a carbon audit. And we've discovered that all these people were taking these flights. So we banned anybody from taking flights down from Glasgow to London. Instead, people can do all this stuff virtually.

Now, there are two very valuable things happening here, right? regeneration, revitalization, employment near Glasgow and climate policy. But what's lacking is what is the point of what they're doing. The point of what they're doing is they're trying to get involved in our biggest national security priority, which is fighting a war in Syria, and they're not there, and they're not helping. If the number one question you're asking yourself, which is what is the most effective practical way to make a difference in Syria, it is not to move these people up to Glasgow. But our civil service machine is brilliant at prioritising secondary issues and taking away

from the fundamental question, which is what is the most effective way of delivering what matters to the country. Rory, what it seems to be, and there's a brilliant answer, thank you, is that underneath everything that you're saying is an unwillingness to have uncomfortable conversations. Sure. Do you think that's one of the real issue actually? is the inability by politicians and every other person to confront uncomfortable facts,

whether it's about housing, whether it's about the NHS, whether it's about geopolitics, et cetera, et cetera. I think that's right. I think we live in a world of fairy stories. That's one of the reasons why populists do well, but all the main parties also exist in a world of fairy stories. And one of the most dominant fairy stories in our culture is that you don't need to...

to choose, that you can always have the best of all things and the best of all possible world. So that story I've just told about Syria, many people were listening from the civil service will be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you don't need to choose. You know, you can have regeneration and you can have good climate policy and you can have a great situation in Syria, right? Or if I complain about the fact that my Yemen team, my head of my Yemen team, was working working a job share. So I had one head of the Eamon team for two days and another for three

days in a week. And when I challenged it, everyone's like, well, this is necessary for diversity. It's necessary to provide maternity cover. It's necessary for a good work-life balance that people are able to work half the week, right? And I say that's fine, but the fact is this is very inefficient because the person I'm talking to in the first two days doesn't know anything about what I'm talking to in the last. Oh, no, no, minister, that's not true. They can do a very, very good handover in the middle of the week. There's no way that it's going to have any impact on efficiency. So we don't like challenging, right?

We'll have something in our head, which is a good thing. So I'm not saying some good thing. And I personally feel in my own life, the lack of work-life balance. I can see why, you know, from my... life, from my wife's life, why being able to work a three-day week can be incredibly important for a family, for your own mental health, for the development of your children, for a healthy society, particularly in a world where people can't afford childcare. All that stuff is true.

And I can completely understand why, from a diversity point of view, if you want to keep women in the workplace and have senior women in the workplace, you need to provide structures to allow them to do that. But let's at least accept that sometimes you're making a choice and that there are downsides as well as upsides. I mean, that's in a way what makes me a conservative, that every bit of progress comes with a sacrifice. It's a great Thomas Soul line.

There are no solutions, only trade-offs. And what you're really saying to translate it into simple language and you used to be a soldier is we're doing things for good reasons, but they're detrimental to the mission. Yeah. That's what we're doing. Yeah, our whole society is a massive example of lots of things being done for good reasons, which are detrimental to an effective, growing, productive, efficient public services, economy and society. Now, that may be fine if we acknowledge that, but of course we don't like it.

We don't like the result. If we were like, okay, you know, we've got nice democratic planning process. We support biodiversity. We support climate. We do good maternity cover. We're doing nice regeneration projects. We're saving on climate. And the impact is our economy is not going to grow so much.

There are going to be big waiting lists at the NHS. Our impact on the ground in Syria is going to be pretty minimal and inefficient. But that's okay. Because we've got maternity cover. Because we've got all that stuff. Yeah, there's many stuff that in many ways are, you know, our values are better. We're living out our values. We just accept that we're not going to, but of course we're not like that.

We want to have our cake and eat it all the time and this is one of the things. I'm not, I mean, maybe obviously there's a risk as a conservative. It sounds like I'm just beating up on left-wing issues like maternity cover and climate. I see similar things going on on the conservative side. So let me now have a go at the right. Lightless trust will have in their heads the answer that, the answer to things is privatization getting in the market. And that also results in catastrophic consequences.

So when I was prison minister, Chris Grayling, one of my colleagues, managed to privatize the probation surface. On the basis of something that looked really beautiful on a bit of paper, all the incentives were going to work out, the private sector was going to deliver. Private prisons is another example. It's going to be cheaper, private maintenance. It all turned out not to work at all. Would have been much better if the government had been doing it because of the risk profile,

because the way these private sector companies are financed, because of the way in which they go bankrupt and let you down, because the way in which they keep the government over a barrel. Let's get an example. We've just been through, you know, Fujitsu bids on the post office contracts. They get themselves stuck in. They're making billions of pounds because the government can't extract and stuff. Two, a different form of ideology is leading to bad results. In that case, the ideology is we believe in the market, private sector companies are much

more efficient than government, when actually it turns out that often the private sector is even more inefficient than the government, even more wasteful than the government, and has the government over a barrel. So it doesn't matter whether you're on right or left. We're suffering from a similar problem, which is the way in which instead of really asking yourself, what am I trying to do here, what's the most efficient way of getting there? We, of course, as humans, put incredible ideological blinders, preferences and things in, which really stop us. Stop us, yeah, getting results.

And I think one of the ideologies you're going to be particularly critical of, and I'd love to get your view on this, is populism and what is happening. With looking across Europe, we can say that it's a populist revolution. Reform, although they may not get a huge number of seats, they're certainly going to be. going to do a lot of damage to the Conservative Party in particular. So what do you make of all of that, Rory? So populism is something that's really exploded since 2014 and done so in India, Brazil, the US, Europe. We'll see it again in the French elections now. We saw it in European elections. We'll see it in British elections. What's it really about? It's about a style of saying the problem is that you've been betrayed by the elite and that there are these real people.

who I'm speaking for, I'm speaking for the people, I'm speaking for the nation. If we just get rid of this horrible elite, you know, we can bring kind of authentic stuff that reflects our values and we're going to challenge, you know, wokeery, we're going to challenge sloppy thinking and we're going to sort it out. The trick of populism is that, of course, there's always a kernel of truth in this, right? Because some of the criticisms I've just made of, you know, the stuff I'm talking about with Syria and my civil, we could be made by Nigel Farage. Of course, when he says this government said they were going to cut immigration, but they've actually just brought him 1.2 million more people, he's right.

When Donald Trump says this brilliant elite humiliated itself in America, in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and these things were completely catastrophic, disastrous, $3 trillion wars that killed a lot of people in the Chinese. He's right. The problem, though, is that the solution that they pose does not respect the root of law. does not respect our institutions, does not respect minority rights, it's not about compromise, it's not about working together, it is polarizing, it's deceptive, it's aggressive, and it's generally incompetent. Let's take some of those. You mentioned that it's not respecting the rule of law and it's not respecting the rights of minorities. Can you give some examples of those two things in a Western

context? I'm sure we could find stuff in Brazil or wherever, but... Yeah, so a very simple way. examples, Boris Johnson, who's a kind of muted populist, but you can see the first settlements there, he comes in. First thing he tries to do is try to lock the doors on Parliament to get his Brexit deal through, tries to paroch parliament. In the end, and to do it, he lies to the Queen, he tries to use these kind of medieval laws to try to drive it through. He's overruled by the Supreme Court. Now, traditionally, all Prime Minister in Britain would say huge respect for the Supreme Court, huge respect for the root of law, we're backing off from this. He goes straight

out there and says the Supreme Court basically are betraying the people. I know whose side I'm on. I'm speaking for the people, right? Hold on, Roy. Sorry, I don't want to go into the weeds of these, but on that, first of all, I don't think anyone in the populist movements will identify Boris Johnson as one of their own. I think he's just, we can agree he's a duplicitous person, politician, and we absolutely do on that. Also, the Supreme Court is actually a very new thing in this country. So the idea that it's an ancient institution to which everybody would bow down seems to me inaccurate. Well, let's take the two things. You're right, Supreme Court's a new institution. Its predecessors, though, played the same role, so the privy council and the House

of Lords played the same role. Fundamentally, though, the question is, when Johnson faces an obstacle, does he respect the sovereignty of Parliament? Does he respect the rule of law? Or does he do what he actually did in Parliament on that day, which is say, I'm speaking for the people. And what does he mean by I'm speaking for people? He means he's speaking for people who voted for Brexit and probably not everybody who voted for Brexit.

So it's probably not even a majority of the people, but he says these are the real people. And that the people who oppose him are enemies of the people. Now, maybe you're right that Farage wouldn't recognize him as a populace, but that is for me the essence of populace. I guess the counter argument that I can conjure fairly easily in my head to what you're saying, and I'd be curious to get your take on it, is I think if we look at across Europe, and this is also increasingly true in the United States, even though their attitude to immigration is very different to the European attitude, actually.

I find that Americans are much more pro, almost. limited legal immigration for historical, geographical reasons, etc. But in Europe, what I think a lot of people would quite reasonably say is not only have we had very high levels of legal immigration, which was not democratically, there was no mandate for the levels of immigration we saw. More people came into this country under the Blair government than came into this country between 1066, the Battle of Hastings and 1950. The Conservatives come in and they basically double down and have more immigration again. I take your point and you're smiling because your argument might well be, well, that's what our economy needs. We can park that for

one second. In addition to that, we have increasingly high levels of illegal immigration, for which there is no economic rationale. There is no reason that should be happening. I'm a first generation meeting where into this country. I don't understand why it's happening. I don't understand why tens of thousands of people come into this country on small boats every year. And so the counter argument to what you're saying might be, well, if the elite are not doing the things that they're either elected to do or the things which have any rationale for being done, well, why wouldn't we vote for Nigel Farage? Yeah, well, that's exactly why he's...

But why is that wrong to do? That's what I'm... Because, as I was trying to say, the point is not is Farage right in his criticisms, the point is what would he represent and what would he do if he was in government? As I say, a lot of Donald Trump's criticisms are perfectly valid. But I hope you don't like the idea of Donald Trump becoming precedent just because what he says about Iraq or Afghanistan happens to be true. I don't think that's why people are voting for Donald Trump. I think the reason people are voting for Donald Trump is they hope someone can deal with the problem of mass illegal immigration in America. Yeah.

And they believe that he's much more likely to do that than Joe Biden, and he has. So I personally believe that the immigration problem is the thing that is undermining centrist governments almost more than anything else. Right, what it is. And that it is ridiculous of Britain and other European countries not to put the arrangements in place with third-party countries and not to challenge the completely broken concept of asylum, which we inherited from the end of the United States. the Second World War. Much more sensible way of doing it would be to say we will accept a certain

number of people as asylum seekers every year and we'll define that number. So I would say 0.5% of your population a year you can take. And we will do it in a way that prioritizes female judges from Afghanistan, people who are at direct risk of war in Somalia. And we will do it as a target that we sign up to, along with Europe and the United States and Canada, we'll all sign up to this, would be a great help if places like Japan and China signed up as well, because they aren't taking anybody. You know, Luxembourg is taking more people every year than Japan. But at least the G7 could sign up to this.

And if we manage to get that through, then I think the corollary of that is, and we're not going to accept people who just... happen to get on a boat because the people who get on a boat are predominantly young men from lower middle class families who've managed to put together 10 or 20,000 euros in order to pay a people smother. And there's absolutely no reason to be taking them for France. France is a safe country. Nobody has any reason to say, I'm at stress in France and I'm going to be safer in the United Kingdom. It's not a kind of definitional that whatever is driving them across the channel, it's not persecution. And so I think liberal

of that sort who seem to fantasize about open borders and think that anyway are going down a very, very dangerous and misleading path. Well, it sounds to me like we agree entirely on all of that. That's what I would advocate for. And all I'm saying is I think the reason that you are seeing people vote for people like Nigel Farage and populist parties around Europe is no mainstream politician that I have heard has been willing to make that argument and then deliver on it. We haven't had that position be articulated in public and then be delivered on it.

And we know over the next five years it's not going to happen either. Well, so to be fair to Rishi Sinek and the Conservative government, I think that broadly is their position. And they would like to get to that position. But when they try to do it, what do you have? You have one solution, Rwanda and move people to Rwanda. Seems fair enough. We can debate about whether Rwanda is the right place.

but the basic idea that you could move people to a safe country, if the problem is they're being persecuted. That isn't the United Kingdom. Seems fine. There's an idea that Labour tried to have with France, which is, okay, France stop these people getting on boats. In return, we will take genuine asylum seekers. We will share the burden with you of genuine asylum seekers turning up in France, but we won't have these boats coming illegally. Where are they getting in trouble? They're getting in trouble because they appear to be completely unable to coordinate over the French. French police.

I mean, why these 40,000 people coming, it's because of French police. We've never been able to work out how to change the legal system. So at the moment, unless there's legal change, you arrive and you can claim asylum. And because we don't know what to do about claims against, in the European Court of Human Rights. And of course, people like me then, and this is the problem. On the one hand, I absolutely think this is ridiculous. These people shouldn't be coming here.

They have no right to be here. But if you then say to me, would you want to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights? I think, well, for a second, this is a really important institution that was set up in the 1950s by conservative government. It's done an enormous amount to help rights around Europe. So how do I balance that against this? So I don't think it is that Rishi Tunax disagrees with you or me on this. I think it's that as with most of these things, when you try to do it, you run into a lot of

competition. I think we've just got to the core of our disagreement, which it, or the, the, the, the, you the disagreement that a populist might have with your position, let's say, which is that at the point where you go, well, I don't want to leave the ECHR because it's in, that's when the person says, well, in that case, F you, I'm voting for Farage. And that's how you create populism. Sure, absolutely, absolutely. And of course, the question with any radical politician, you're called populists, revolutionaries,

progressives, radicals, maybe Jeremy Corby. could be Nigel Farage, is sometimes it's true, sometimes it's true that the whole system is so broken that things that we venerate our constitution, the European Court and Human Rights, may have become such incredible obstacles to change that they need to be shattered. But of course, as a conservative, I would say, be very careful doing that. Because this thing, the European Court and Human Rights, you're focused on because it's stopping you dealing with people arriving on boats, but you may not understand all the other things that it does and all the other things that you lose when you shatter it.

And that's the problem that the fundamental argument against any populace of revolutionary is an argument of prudence. It's an argument to be thoughtful, be careful, think this thing through, what are the unintended consequences, what you're doing, where does this go? And that has to be balanced against perfectly valid human instinct, which is... We need to get on with things. We need to sort things out, screw that, going to move fast.

We're going to break things, which is a listrust view of the world. And of course, when it works, you're the great reformer, you're Margaret Thatcher. When it doesn't work, you're Liz trust. You're a effectless, imprudent, foolish person who didn't bother to take decent advice or you're quasi-courtying,

and you'll glib, and you do stuff without understanding the consequences. Rory, what argument? I would love to see what you think about this, about populism is very necessary, a lot of people would argue, because it holds a major parties to account. And the only way really to hold a major party like the Conservatives to account

is to hit them where it hurts, which is them not getting re-elected, them losing seats in Parliament. And reform, UKIP is the most effective way of doing that democratically. So what is populism and why is it a problem? One problem with it is that it is essentially isolation. All these populist movements involve retreating from the world.

And this is really the story that we've seen since 2014, and this is the story we'll see more of with Trump, with Farage, that's... Populism has redefined the way the mainstream parties operate. So basically, Biden's foreign policy is inherited from Trump. And to some extent, Obama's late policy was shaped by this kind of complaint. So what does it mean? It means that America's put first and we don't get involved in the world. We don't want to be a global policeman anymore.

So that means Putin invades Crimea, nobody responds. Obama draws a red line in Syria, but Shah and Assad breaks it. He doesn't want to get involved. Biden withdraws all his troops from Afghanistan. The whole thing collapses like a pack of cards. Trump threatens to withdraw from NATO and almost certainly if he's elected will allow a pro-Putin puppet government to be in Kiev. And what's the result of that?

Since 2014, every single year we have seen more refugees, more eternally displaced people, more civilians killed in conflict. Second thing about populism. Populism is basically very, very well disposed towards strong men, authoritarian government. Their model of government is the macho person, that sorts it out. They look enviously at Singapore, Saudi Arabia, UAE. Sometimes although they don't admit it, they're technically. tempted to think, oh, look at China, it's amazing.

They build all these trains and roads, it's wonderful. And that's why often populism is associated with what we call democratic backsliding. So in Hungary, in Poland, in India, in Bangladesh, you begin, tamping shutting down opposition in media, shutting down the universities that criticize you, pursuing the alternative political parties, taking them into the courts, using the civil service against your opponents, search yourself against your opposition. And what's the result of that? Well, since 2014, the number of democracies in the world has begun to fall dramatically.

You know, we just had an attempted coup yesterday. Six elected governments in Africa that were pro-West and have now fallen to military governments that are pro-Moscow. That also is a consequence of populism. And the final thing, right? So isolation in foreign policy, authoritarianism in domestic, politics. And the final thing is economic. Basically, these populists are protectionists. You know, Trump has driven a move to put up massive tariff barriers around the United States.

Biden has responded by 105% tariffs on imported Chinese vehicles. They're all pushing for industrial strategies. They're taking us back to the economics in 1970s. They're illiberal in every way. They're illiberal socially. They're also illiberal economically. all the normal logic of economics that suggests that actually markets work better than strong men picking winners, that global free trade works better than protectionism is going out the window. So this is a, it's a, this closing in economically, politically, internationally, is a very dangerous for the world that will make the world more dangerous, less free and poorer. So I guess my question is, what should some people? do who's going to vote when they look at the options that are available to them,

which it doesn't matter which country you're in, they all seem weak to put it mildly. Well, I think one thing which is uncomfortable is we need to be better at analyzing what the problem is. I mean, I'm often criticized because this book, Politics on the Edge provides a very negative picture of politics. And, you know, my friend Alistair will say, how are you going to encourage anyone to vote, or get involved in politics if you make it out as being so grim. I think you've got to explain how grim it is. The only way to reform politics or the NHS is to explain how screwed the systems. The only way that we will generate reform and better politicians is by really explaining

this uncomfortable stuff. By doing so, you begin to give a bit of space, I hope, for the chance of changing our electoral system, which I think would make a huge difference, changing the way that ministers operate, changing the way the House of Lords operate, changing the way the media is owned and managed, the structural changes which will make a healthier system where you're more likely to get people that you'd want to vote for. I know exactly what you're saying, but that is a very long, long, long term project. And I know we've talked about the competency thing.

I just look at people like Kirstama, and it goes back to our... earlier conversation, the unwillingness to have uncomfortable conversations. And I look at Stama, for example, and I do not see that. He can't even say what a woman is, Rory. How is he going to have another type of uncomfortable conversation? That shouldn't even be uncomfortable. Do you see why I'm despairing? I can totally see why despairing, but Stama, why is he like that? Presumably not because he's really like that. He's like that because that's the incentives that have been set up in the system. He's always certainly going to win a majority of of 300 seats on the back of what we call a Ming Baas strategy, which is not answering any

uncomfortable question, not having any policy. He's going to win a record-breaking, probably the largest majority ever achieved in British history by saying nothing. So if that's the case, the question is, what's going on here? Is it that he's a particularly incompetent weak individual? Or is it that he just understands how our culture works, how our media works? how our media works, how our voters work, how we think, and it's worked out that we don't like uncomfortable conversations.

Well, we like them on the show, which is why it's been great having you on, Rory. We're going to go to questions from our audience in a second, but as you know, before we let you go, the thing that we always ask at the end is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Before Rory answers a final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our locals. is in the description where you'll be able to see this. Does Rory see conservatism in the current

Tory party? I spent 15 years working on the Middle East and Asia, wrote three books on Asia, spoke three Asian languages. I made the Africa minister. I don't know anything about Africa. Rory, what haven't we asked you that we should have done? We're not talking about knowledge and ignorance. We're not talking about the fact that a lot of the, at the heart of many of these conversations, is the fact that we are drowned in information, that we can't begin to make sense of things. I gave the tiny example of, you know, what would happen if you were made Secretary of State for health tomorrow and you suddenly had to get your head around 1.1 million staff, 335 million GP appointments, goodness knows how much

many, I mean, we pretend that we're in a world of knowledge management. We pretend that the difference between good and bad results is how much you know. In truth, we live in a world so overwhelmed by knowledge that, in fact, we're in the dark, that a lot of what we're talking about is risk, uncertainty, hunches, nobody really knows what's going on. And one of the reasons why markets work is that they don't depend on people in the centre knowing stuff. They're about the way in which prices communicate tacit information, tacit preferences, allow a complicated society to operate without having to rely on the notion of the Superman. And I think this notion of the superman, this notion of the kind of all-knowing, all-powerful leader,

is at the heart of most of our province because such people don't exist and those people who claim to be such are frauds. Roy Stewart, thank you very much. Head on over to locals where we answer your questions, Roy. As a former serviceman, former soldier, what was your response to Sunax behavior during the D-Day celebration?