366. Question Time: Why do dictators bother with sham elections?
en
January 30, 2025
TLDR: Rory and Alastair discuss what prevents billionaires from spending money in their lifetime, staying politically involved without affecting mental health, and hidden actors in the Israel/Gaza conflict.

In episode 366 of The Rest Is Politics, hosts Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell tackle pressing questions about global politics, from sham elections in Belarus to the hidden actors in the Israel/Gaza conflict. They explore the implications of such topics and provide insightful analysis on the current political landscape.
Understanding Sham Elections: The Case of Belarus
Why Do Dictators Hold Elections?
- Belarusian Context: Alexander Lukashenko has won his seventh term in office, claiming an astonishing 87.6% of the vote. Despite the significant numbers, there is universal agreement from the EU and UK about the unfree and unfair nature of the election.
- International Perception: These sham elections serve a dual purpose. While they are orchestrated to portray legitimacy, they also gain international media coverage, providing dictators like Lukashenko international recognition.
The Role of Autocracy
- Putin's Influence: Lukashenko’s regime operates closely with Putin's Russia, further complicating global dynamics. The hosts draw parallels between Lukashenko’s tactics and those of other authoritarian leaders, suggesting a pattern of maintaining power through oppressive means.
- Opposition Suppression: Many of Lukashenko's real opponents are imprisoned or exiled, resulting in a muted opposition that highlights the state’s control.
The Disparity of Wealth
Billionaires and Social Responsibility
The episode also addresses the staggering disparity in wealth among billionaires and the impact on society:
- Economic Divide: Three of the richest Americans hold wealth equivalent to the bottom 50% of the population, highlighting severe economic inequality.
- Historical Context: Rory and Alastair reflect on quotes from Andrew Carnegie, who advocated for the responsible use of wealth, contrasting it with modern billionaires who seem disconnected from social responsibility.
- Navigating Public Perception: The episode questions why wealthy individuals tend to delay charitable actions, citing fears of losing social capital and influence.
The Israel/Gaza Conflict: Navigating Complexities
Hidden Actors and Their Influence
- Political Dynamics: The hosts discuss various political figures in the Israel-Palestine landscape, such as President Herzog and the Palestinian Authority, emphasizing their respective roles in the ongoing conflict and potential peace processes.
- Challenges in Negotiation: There are concerns regarding internal rivalries, particularly between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, complicating any efforts towards a coordinated response or resolution.
Staying Politically Engaged Without Losing Hope
Mental Health and Political Discourse
- Balancing Engagement: The discussion centers on how individuals can remain engaged with politics without sacrificing mental health, especially in an increasingly polarized environment.
- The Role of Hope: Rory shares insights on cultivating hope actively, emphasizing that engagement comes from believing in the possibility of positive change rather than succumbing to despair.
Conclusion
The Rest Is Politics episode 366 offers listeners a compelling mix of political analysis and a personal look at how society navigates complex issues like dictatorship, wealth inequality, and international relations. Through thoughtful inquiry and exploration of historical context, Rory and Alastair encourage a deeper understanding of these significant global issues, fostering informed discourse and optimism for the future.
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Welcome to the rest of this politics question time with me Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell and Gemma Brooks Rory wants to know what we think about Lukashenko winning a seventh term in Belarus when the EU and the UK both say it cannot have been
free or fair. Quick reminder just on Belarus and then tell us about the election. But so Belarus people not completely concentrating. It's a big chunk of territory just north of Ukraine, just west of Russia and just east of Poland. So it's like the yellow bit of a fried egg and the white around it would be Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia and Ukraine. And it's a bit of, I think I've said before in a podcast, I was angling to be the ambassador to Belarus and
2006 and then those glory days. I was being encouraged to do it on the grounds that this was going to be the last autocracy in Europe that was going to become a democracy and I'd be there at the moment of the transition when Belarus came into the European Union and this kind of stuff. Anyway, over to you on what's happened since.
Well, let's just congratulate Lukashenko. He won 87.6 of the vote. I mean, this is a compelling win, seven in a row, but it's remarkable. No, this is, I think it was Condi Rice who said that Lukashenko was the last European dictator. So he's been there now for 30 years. It is literally a sham election in that the four other candidates spend most of their time saying how well Lukashenko does.
There was one bit, there was one bit during the campaign when he was asked about how the election was going and Luke Sheikers said, oh, I'm not really following it very much.
But then of course, I said, I don't know if you saw, I sent you the video of the kind of celebrations this morning of this sort of, it was amazingly well produced thing. And there is a question, why do these dictatorships bother having these sham elections? And the fact is that because they do get written up around the world as, you know, Lukashenko wins seventh term. And we all know, but a lot of people don't necessarily know that the sort of deeper background
of what's going on. And of course, the reason he matters more than just being the leader of this very dictatorial, authoritarian leader of, as you say, quite a sizable country is because he is very, very close. Well, I mean, the Belarus opposition call him Putin's puppet. He is Putin's puppet. He does what Putin tells him. It's partly the Ukraine assault was launched with Belarusian help. So, but it's a kind of pretty, it's a pretty depressing state of affairs.
It's interesting also because a reminder of people of that age, so I guess he's 70. Yeah. And Donald Trump, I guess, is in his mid-70s now. 78. Right. So how these people, their careers, of course, stretch back into what feels like a very different world. Lukashenko was very much part of the old Soviet Union, served in, I think, the border troops in the late 1970s, and then
ran a proper collective communist state farm through the 1980s for Belarus, and then joined the supreme Soviet of Belarus as a member of parliament, established his reputation weirdly as an anti-corruption campaigner. So there was a brief moment for early 90s where people
Thought, well some people might have thought it was a bit of a glimpse of some other possibility with this guy which was just enough in that moment in the early 90s when obviously the Soviet Union was collapsing to leverage himself into position as the president and then as you say since then.
this autocracy. It's a country population just under 10 million people. So comparable, I suppose the population maybe of Israel about that population. It's got a GDP per capita, though, very, very low. I mean, so
About in real terms, maybe $6,000 a year, places like Lithuania now would be two or three times wealthier per capita in nominal terms, having started at the same level. What's really happened is it's a story of the way that I think Belarus wasn't a long way off places like Romania and Lithuania in the early 90s and the difference that's been made for those countries that
join the european union join the west in the development of the cenco sticking bellaries where it is there's a parallel with trump and what's happened with trump second i think we're talking about seven successive term but we talked when we did the live with scaramucci recently about how strangely.
not silent, but how strangely muted the feeling of resistance to Trump was compared to the first term. This time in Belarus, it feels strangely muted. Other than with the protests worldwide, there have been protests going on in different parts of the world because most of his real opponents are either in prison or they're in exile. But this is because the last time when he definitely lost the election, but claimed, I think he got 82% in the claim last time.
but they ended up arresting 65,000 people, thousands were sort of beaten up in jail. And so this time it feels that the opposition is abroad rather than there. We've got to give a shout out, by the way, to all Steve Rosenberg for the BBC. I watched parts of the press conference that Lukashenko did to celebrate this historic win. And Steve Rosenberg, you know, gave him some pretty direct questions about, you know,
Can you really say this is a lecture when most of your opponents are in prison or exiled and there's been no campaign as such at all. And Lukashenko clearly knew who Steve Rosenberg was and said, well, you have prisons in Britain.
uh... you know you put people in prison and uh... steve rosemos may be a bit not just for sort of opening their mouths and the election is a place for people who open their mouths too wide the other thing that he did was steve rosemberg asked him a question no just made an observations is a very strange election very strange kind of election
And Luca Shinko, as well as a nice new experience for you, Steve, and lots of the Bella Russian journalists and people then sort of laughing and applauding this great wit. So it's bloody depressing, but of course, you know, Putin will be happy with that one, just as he's been happy with other elections have happened recently.
Brits may also funny just before we leave Belarus, remember it a little bit, because in 2021 there was quite a famous case where people on a Ryan air flight from Athens to Lithuania, were cheerfully on their way back home, when suddenly the plane was diverted in Belarusian airspace and forced to do an emergency landing in the capital city of Belarus. And they did it because very unfortunate that Belarus had dissident journalists.
I think called Protas Sievich was on the plane, just trying to fly from Athens, Lithuania, and found himself, of course, abducted off the plane. And that's now been chucked and present. But in a terrifying these planes, it's a trick of autocratic regimes, which comes up occasionally, which is that people think they're safely.
flying not to that country and then suddenly find in this case a right at plane forcibly diverted and they get doctor peter judge distribution of wealth do you agree that the current distribution of power wealth and resources is gross unjustifiable and unimaginably damaging. If not what objectives would you use to describe the current distribution of power wealth resource quick start on that so the three wealthiest people in the United States.
who are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, I think. Their wealth is now the same as the entire bottom 50% of the United States. And their wealth is also astonishing amount of the entire global population. I mean, because they are in the many, many hundreds of billions of dollars. But there's also, I mean, there's so many ways of looking at this. There's the work that was done on equality.
It's our friend the mooch who points out that when mit romney's dad was the head of general motors as chief exactly this big company he lived in a relatively modest home in detroit. He drove a pretty ordinary car whereas by the time you get to his son mit romney.
You're in a completely different universe where Mitt Romney has multiple houses, private jets, and the multiple between a CEO and a worker, which was in Britain and the United States, sort of 30 fold is now well up above 200, 300 fold in many cases.
I don't know what adjective you would use, but it's appalling, it's horrific, it's getting worse. And I mentioned to you the other day that I'd been rereading to use that great Tory phrase. I'd been rereading The Gospel of Wealth by Carl Ege. And of course, Carl Ege was one of the richest people in the world at the time that he was alive, 18.
I think he wrote the Augusta of wealth in the late 1880s. And I'll just give you a couple of quotes from it. The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.
I've never seen that on Elon Musk's Twitter feed, that thought. And he then goes to say, there are about three modes in which surplus wealth can be disposed of. It can be left to the families of the deceased, it can be be squeezed for public purposes, or finally it can be administered during their lives by its possessors. And he goes on to display why in his view,
The third is the best. And he basically comes out for massive inheritance tax for those who don't use their wealth judiciously during the time that they're alive. And I just think we are now looking at people as I keep banging on about the sovereign individual. I think that is what we have now, people who feel they're above the law, above democracy, above politics, but also above really having to do things for their fellow man.
and woman. And I do think this is the single biggest political issue. And it is a big driver, I think, of this far-right stuff. Because the sovereign individuals somehow persuaded the common man that he, it's almost with the exception of Maloney, it's almost always a he, that he's on their side. But what's going to happen? We're seeing already with Trump in power, they are going to get wealthier and more powerful and care less, it seems to me, about the people they claimed to claim to before.
It's astonishing. I'm looking a little bit at this because I was in the Channel Islands, and I was talking to somebody who manages money for big Middle Eastern families in the Channel Islands. And I was trying to say, what do they do with this money? What's the point of being worth 100 million, 200 million, 300 million, you can't really spend it, can you?
And they said, what they're doing now is they're setting up trusts to try to make sure, if you're in the many billions, that you can provide for the seventh generation. So you're not just thinking about your grandchildren, you're trying to sort of create this insane structures. The other thing, I've often thought about this, that we've got this very odd thing that everybody in Parliament
says they believe in equality. Torries maybe talk about equality of opportunity, others might be brave enough to talk about equality of outcome, but in fact,
Before we even begin talking about equality, we are a million, million miles away from anything touching equality in any of the programs of any of these parties. The Labour Party is not going to get us anywhere close to equality, but we could be at least aiming to reduce inequality. We could be aiming to look more like Sweden, these kind of living countries where, again, the stuff from Piketty is very convincing that you have better mental health outcomes, you have better health outcomes, you have better education outcomes,
That having a society with less extreme inequality is good, but I don't know how you get that into the I mean you can have that conversation maybe in Europe, you can look at Scandinavia and talk about that. But even there are you finding a bit of a bad last turn and I think the peculiar British problem.
is this belief that we are entitled to low taxation and exceptional public services. The Scandinavians and the French actually kind of accept that if you want exceptional public services you're going to have to pay for them and the best form of payments through the taxation system. We don't necessarily at a deep level have that
And the article just to show you, though, how far these remember these are the people, the Carnegie's of this world who were called the robber barons. They had they had as bad a reputation in some ways as if I probably a worse reputation in many ways than the current tech robber barons. But just he says this, he's talking about inheritance tax men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives.
The proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community should be made to feel that the community in the form of the state cannot be deprived of its proper share. By taxing his states heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaires' unworthy life. Very good. Very good. Really, really interesting. So I was talking to some very wealthy people on the West Coast and trying to understand why they don't give away more money when they're
live, because many of them have signed up to this giving pledge, which Bill Gates, some more about it. And the weirdness is they've all signed up to it, but they're just not handing over the money. And initially, they say to you, well, it's just that we can't find projects good enough to absorb our money. So we're just thinking more. They can be thinking for 10, 12 years, trying to find the right kind of project to give their money to, right?
So then you come with real evidence. So, you know, obviously we've talked in the past about that's very good evidence that direct cash transfer makes difference to very poor people in, you know, sub-Saharan Africa.
And then they say, oh, well, you know, we're just waiting just in case there's a new tech innovation or innovation. One of them, they finally over drink said to me, what you don't understand is that the amount of money you're worth has an incredible impact on your influence at the very top level of American society. And if you give your money, that's part of inequality. If you measure, if you measure status by wealth, that is part of inequality. Exactly. So he was explaining that, let's say you're worth,
four billion, four thousand million. And some of these people, some of them live relatively modestly, right? They're only spending a tiny fraction there. But if they were to suddenly give away,
3.9 billion. Their fear is that suddenly nobody wants to talk to them. White House wouldn't invite them to staff. Their friends wouldn't care about them. They wouldn't appear in the right list. They wouldn't be getting their honorary degrees. They wouldn't be able to influence stuff. And of course, a lot of this is competition between them. And it's obviously this is going to upset listeners that getting into the mindset of these people is pretty unpleasant. But there's a very, very strong sense that they're all measuring. And of course, Musk is part of a movement that believes the richer you are.
It proves how clever you are and the people who aren't wealthy on clever i was talking to somebody who knows all of these people and who has worked with all of these people as well and listen to our podcast was it last week or two weeks ago and said i was one hundred percent right.
Zuckerberg was entirely driven by getting as far up Trump's backside as Musk had already got. Musk having already penetrated deep, deep, deep into the backside, which is right, by the way. Susie Wiles has said no office for Musk in the Westway. It's going to move across executive office, which is across three.
Did your friend confirm what I'd heard that Zuckerberg is genuinely worried that he might be put in prison? No, he didn't. No, asked about that and felt no, probably not, but is genuinely scared. Not necessarily going to jail, but I think more the commercial business stuff, that if he doesn't get in with the program, then there is an awful lot the government do can damage him. But you know, Trump, as you know, is on record as saying he would have gone to jail. So it's, you know, you can't not have that hovering in the back of your mind.
Now Rory, let's get on to one of my favourite subjects. Okay, good. Guess what it is. Could it be Brexit by any chance? Well, funny enough, somebody called Graham Merck starts his question with the word per civilians, which probably means he's asked it 20 times before. Why won't Labour face up to the fact that Brexit is a disaster and that addressing it would provide the instant growth they're looking for? Are they scared of Faraj and the mob? Mo, why is Labour so afraid to talk about Brexit?
despite the reach out from the EU, Labour only seemed to want security cooperation, then goes on to add, should Canada join the European Union, which is quite an interesting thought. But I don't know if you saw over the weekend, there was a poll, a Ugov poll, done for best of Britain, 15,000 people, one of these MRP polls.
And it's said that almost 46% say the European Union should be the government's top priority on trade, 22% the US, 4% China, 6% another country. And in every single constituency, including Clackton, including Boston and Skagnes, the places where reformers top the
there is overwhelming support for Britain prioritising trade relationship with the EU over the US. I think actually Trump's election is going to change things a lot because when people were voting in Brexit, they were voting in an environment in which the relationship with the US was very stable, seemed as though Britain had this special relationship.
And actually, the world was pretty stable. People were less worried about China, and therefore, for the Brexitiers who were saying, we can leave the European Union, look, there are these, and Europe's not growing very fast, it's economy's not very strong, so let's hitch ourselves to these big growing economies in China and the US. It almost seemed plausible, and two things happened. The first thing, of course, is that relationships with China collapsed.
And so suddenly it seems very dangerous to tie your economy too closely to China and China is not growing very fast. But now Trump's election, I think, whatever people feel in a day to day, they must in their back of the mind be beginning to pick up on the fact that this guy is not to be counted on, that in the end, Britain is not going to be able to rely on the way that it has for 70 or 80 years on a stable,
pretty predictable United States that's going to have its back. And when that happens, if the world's beginning to splinter into an American bloc, a Asian bloc, a European bloc, well, strategically. I'm not just economic, but strategically, where should the UK be? And I would argue with Europe. I'm going to give my friend Neil Kenneken on the name check, because we talked about it last week in relation to populism.
he had an interview in the eyepaper this week and i know you're very very well and i can i can read the words and the headline was something like you know can it calls for labor reset to start meaning something that was the sort of thing of it but i think
Beneath it, I could sense a real feeling that we're in danger of giving up a huge opportunity. You and I heard in Davos from the Europeans, they still have a lingering respect for the UK. They want the UK deeply involved, particularly on defence.
But I remember I was talking to one European, not a leader, but a minister who said that, you know, we're sort of sitting there thinking, well, we keep hearing about reset. What is it? When is it coming? What is this going to mean? And I think to go back to the questions on this, I think there is a sense of where there, there's still trapped in a debate that was a few years, a few years behind us. For I was kind of warm, but he's moved on to other things now.
So I think we are missing a trick and I think in relation to growth and lesson until we fix the damage of Brexit, the growth mission is going to be muted. Okay, let's take a quick break and I said come back for more questions.
The support for this episode comes from Channel 4 and their new two-part drama, Brian and Maggie, about the infamous grilling of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Brian, Brian Walden. Now, us, since this question time, what in your opinion are some of the most disastrous moments in political TV history and what happens behind the scenes? I've tried to think of Brian Walden interviews. I mean, younger listeners may not remember. Brian Walden was a terrific interviewer.
And he was really serious, really did his research. He was a former MP, a Labour MP. But he was a Labour MP that Tories didn't mind being interviewed by, because I think they felt he was fair. And Margaret Thatcher, what this programme, this two-part drama, Brian and Maggie, isn't just about the interviews and where they go. It's also about this sort of curious relationship that developed around it.
I'll be absolutely frank, Roy. I think the podcast is maybe filling a little bit of that space, but I wish we had more Brian Wardens around. I wish we had more viewers who would actually want to watch very long, very detailed TV interviews. And were there any interviews that really did bring down people? I mean, I suppose it was Frost Nixon. I mean, were you sometimes terrified with big, big infuse with Tony Blair that this could be the end of everything?
Not the end of everything, but I think that there were definitely interviews where you came out and thought, God, that didn't go so well.
But no, nothing that was absolutely destructive. I think I've told you before about the time when Ron Davis famously resigned after a moment of madness or clapping common. And I'd lined up for John Sargent to come and do this pooled interview. So John Sargent, chief correspondent at the BBC, and he sat down and I said, Ron, you've got to be apologetic. You've got to apologise for this.
because otherwise people won't understand. Anyway, and so he did. He duly apologized, but it was kind of undermined by the fact that Richard across his hand was the word sorry.
as a reminder that he should say, sorry. So that didn't go down terribly well. There was the famous interview. I'm going to be on the day this comes out, actually. I'll be playing the backpipes at John Prescott's funeral. And there was the famous time when John Prescott was doing an interview and said, he gave his answer and they said, oh, sorry, that was absolutely shit. Can we do it again? And the interview said, this is live as the Prescott.
So there was all sorts of things, but I think, do you know what I think about the way interviews have developed is that because we're into the sort of gotcha style journalism a lot of the time, the politicians have just got very, very good.
the best ones at working out where the balls are coming from, you know, how to play them. And they've become a bit sterile because I think that, and I do think that what Brian Walden did, he made the encounters interesting. He was, funny enough, his voice and his, because he had a Midlands accent,
wasn't sort of classic broadcast. And he was very, very thorough and very, very serious, respectful, but really, really steely. Lovely. Well, there we are. So we hope that answers the question. And you can stream both episodes of Brian and Maggie now on Channel 4.
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Welcome back to the rest of this policy. It's a question time with me, Alice Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. Now, Amy Taylor, or he wants to know, if I leave X, which a lot of people are doing, is there another way to submit questions? Well, the answer is there are many ways to ask questions. So we can get questions by emailing us, get questions on Instagram. You can also become a subscriber, which has a huge number of benefits. And one of them allows you to engage on our Discord platform.
and ask questions there as well as getting ad-free listening. Ian Barnard, why is Canada important? Rory recently mentioned that Canada is important. Why? And how should Canadians stave off the rise of populist politics than the single of the Western world?
I think we have very close historic ties to the UK with Canada, which are important to us, big player in the Commonwealth. But importantly, Canada is one of the G7 countries of the world. It's a major developed economy. Right now, Canada is important because of the way that this debate around Trump's relationship with Canada is going. We've got an election in the not too distant future where
that relationship with Trump is going to become central to it. And depending upon who leads liberals, and you and I both think that Mark Carney would be a good shot, both he and Polly Evra are already out there with some pretty strong language about the need to push back.
I also think Canada, whenever you look at the soft power of lead tables, Britain is always up there, America is always up there, but Canada is one of those countries that, it's alliances are pretty strong, it's got a lot of raw materials, it's a big deal. It's a very substantial, serious economy, serious part of our five-eyes relationship, which people will remember as this intelligence network that links the UK, Canada, US, Australia, and New Zealand.
It's also, I think, in a world in which is beginning to split apart, countries like that, which I guess are kind of upper-middle powers, are going to become more and more significant. Their money, their ability to get involved in helping crises, kind of has often really taken the lead on things like humanitarian crises around the world, I think will really matter. So we've got to keep watching that. How optimistic are you at the moment about the ability to defeat Poliev after you've said that he's such an impressive performer?
I think it's going to be very difficult. The Labour Party here was what 20 points ahead and for quite a long time and that sort of is what happened. That was the outcome. Now, I guess there was a possibility that the Tories could have changed the leader last minute, which is what the Liberals are doing.
There is some kind of suggestion in the polling that Trump's sort of arriving as this £300 guerrilla is having a detrimental effect on the populace. Right, because they've always been so pro-Trump as it were. But it's going to be a very, very, very tough fight for whoever gets there. There's a question here from Rob Steele, which allows us to talk about what I think has been really
fabulous interview on Leading This Week, which we've just posted. Rob Bask, we hear a lot about the role of Netanyahu and Hamas in the Palestine-Israel conflict. Can you talk about other political actors, e.g. Herzog, Israel's President and Palestine Authority, etc. What role will they play in negotiations? What power?
do they have? And before you answer that, let me just say a little bit about Uzi arad, former head of intelligence and Mossad, former foreign policy advisor to Netanyahu. When we announced that we had him on, we had lots of people say, this is an outrage. You're giving this guy a platform on Holocaust Memorial Day and blah, blah, blah. I thought, if ever there was emails or tweets coming in that underlined this idea that you really don't want to listen to anything, because for the start, what is wrong with speaking to
Jewish Israelis, who perhaps, he didn't actually talk much about the Holocaust, but maybe it's quite a good thing to do around that time. But also, the idea that this was some kind of Israeli government's dude, he had some very, very, very sharp criticisms.
of the current government, particularly Netanyahu and Ben Gevir, who he thinks is just an abomination. But also, I thought some very, very thoughtful analysis, which maybe was aimed at trying to get us to think a little bit differently about the Israeli perspective as well. I thought it was really interesting, and I thought it was interesting both in the ways that it will have provoked and angered some people, and also in the ways that it will have surprised people.
And I think as we move into territory where we are infusing people on the edge of conflict, we're going to find this more and more on we. Just quickly on the question from the subscriber, let me just lay out the problem. So the problem is that, of course, Gaza was run by Hamas. It was a disputed election back in the late 2000s. Then there was effectively a coup d'état.
and Hamas took over the territory and ran it for just under 20 years.
And then, of course, after October the 7th, huge response, enormous number of people killed, and the Hamas leadership killed. So you had not just the killing of the military leadership, but also the killing of the civilian leadership, the smalhaniya. So then the question is, if we think about reconstruction or trying to bring some normalcy back to Gaza, and it's a big if,
Who can play a role? Well, obviously, the most sensible thing has to be a Palestinian lead. Israel neither wants nor could, I think, try to run a full occupation in Gaza.
They've tried it before, they tried in Lebanon, but this is going to be the most horrendous, costly experience for Israel if they tried to run a permanent occupation of Gaza. Which Palestinians, though? Well, the problem is that smart rich and Ben Gavir, who are the far right of Netanyahu's government,
Hate the idea of doing anything that would strengthen the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, and they'd be very worried if the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank took over Gaza and was successful in Gaza, then you have more and more pressure for a two state solution.
In addition, of course, Hamas may well not want the Palestinian Authority coming in. I mean, they were at violent loggerheads. They fight each other and there could well be a civil war if the Palestinian Authority tried to set itself and Hamas resisted. Then you add to that possibly Egypt, which of course has a land border with Gaza, huge interest in what to do with
with the Palestinian community, Jordan, the majority of whose population were originally Palestinian refugees, maybe countries like Saudi. But all of that depends on the United States, because it was the US that was trying to bring together the deal. And Biden and Blinken had put this whole thing together with all these different moving parts. Israel, very, very reluctant to sign up, might just have got there if the US had really put the pressure on.
But the only way the Palestinian Authority would sign up, the only way the Saudis would sign up, is if there was a two-state solution at the end of the line, and Netanyahu doesn't want that, Smotchridge doesn't want that, Ben Gavir doesn't want that. And now it looks very much as though Donald Trump doesn't want it either, which basically means everything I've been saying for the last minute can be ignored, because Trump's destroying the whole thing. I know President Herzog quite well, because when he was leader of the Labour Party and when he was the Labour candidate in the 2015 election, I think it was,
And I went out there for quite a few visits to Israel and meetings with him and he wanted to pick my brains about this, that and the other. And I find it very likable. I didn't think at the time he was going to win. So it goes on to become the president. I mean, his politics are way away from Netanyahu. But as president in this current situation, he is absolutely full on
Essentially, part of the government communications machine in a way that I suspect is basic views that the heart of his policies haven't changed. How much power the Israeli president has in this situation? I think in terms of policy, it feels to me like he is quite
closely integrated, but whether that's power or just a reflection of the decisions that get taken by those who have the executive power, I don't know. And of course, the problem with the Palestinian leadership, the Palestinian Authority is partly its reputation down the years for corruption, for
kind of gerontocracy and people just sort of staying well past their sell-by dates. Including the leader Abu Mazan particularly. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. So I think until, unless and until it becomes a bit clearer what the structures are going to be, who the outside players are going to be.
I think it's a great question that I don't actually have the answer, and I think that it's going to evolve as the post-war Gaza situation develops. Well, we mentioned this in the main part, but of course, your 300-pound gorilla, I'm afraid, again, is the fact that Trump has said that he's called the Egyptians and the Jordanians and told the Egyptians to take a million people from Gaza and Jordan to take a million, which is the whole population Gaza.
Which is called ethnic cleansing and at the same time he's put out tweets saying he sees it's got great potential as a kind of morilago beach resort on the med.
Incredible, absolutely incredible. Now listen, I know you can say that I don't criticise the Labour government enough for anything like all my punches. Maybe I do. Lin Williams, why is the Labour government so intent on targeting and using damaging rhetoric about disabled people? Why do ministers keep conflating PIP with income support benefits? Both points are linked really. Now, whether it's targeting, I'm not sure I do accept.
using damaging rhetoric, I do. I think there is far too much, and I understand you've talked about this a lot on the podcast. The need, if our economy is going to recover, then we are going to have to get a grip of the scale of welfare spending, and we're going to have to make some pretty difficult choices. But the most important thing is actually, I think, to give people a positive sense of an economy that can work for them, jobs that can give them a good life, et cetera.
I think there has been too much of this sort of, you know, the sort of Osborne thing that labor aren't quite at the sort of, you know, people peeking out through the curtains to see if the bailiffs are coming around. But it's too much for me about, you know, they're there spongy off the state as opposed to being in genuine need, needing help. And I think you've got to do a bit of both.
I think the problem is real, the government is right to take it seriously, the government is right to try to get the budgets under control. But I think using the kind of language of sonnet tutorials is really not the way to remind me, just back in the day when Tony Blair's government came in.
How did you handle this? Because I guess this story around benefits, cheats, or people living off the states, been around for a long time. And there's a big chunk of the British public who want to hear politicians in their minds saying as it is and calling out people who they think are cheating on benefits. Were the moments where you did sound a little bit more daily mail-like?
Yes, there were, where there was a real plan and a real approach to try to deal with specific issues. So for example, benefit fraud is a massive thing. The scale of benefit fraud during COVID was another example of it. And that was something that we went after pretty aggressively. And I do understand why this government feels it has to get these budgets under control. But I've just felt watching some of the recent communications
And actually, we see it a little bit more broadly into the planning stuff recently. Now, we know that nimbism is a problem. We do know that nimbism is a problem. But we're not all nimbists. And I think what gets round that kind of thing is if you give people a bigger strategic argument about what you're trying to do as a country.
So with planning, it's about, you know, do we want to get building again or not? Do we want to get innovation? Do we want to get infrastructure on with and with the benefits system? I think it's the sense of giving people a vision of what the economy looks like if we can get people back into work. It's about saying we're going to do something that's going to be uncomfortable for a group of people. You know, maybe we're going to build some housing estates, which are going to affect the quality of life of people or we're going to reduce
benefits for people who are currently getting disability benefits without necessarily saying that you're doing it because those are bad people. I mean i felt that a little bit actually in the way that care summer communicated much better than british phillips and around the private school fees.
Richard Phillips and when I said, look, how about kids who are going to have to leave private schools and reenter the public sector said, I don't care about the top 7%, I'm here for 93%. Keir Starmer, by the time he was up against Rishi Sunat, had what I thought was the right answer, which is, of course, we care about everybody, and that will be difficult.
Unfortunately, we have to make difficult decisions. And this is the reason why we're doing it. And this is why it's going to make for a better education system. So I guess what you're saying, unless I'm missing something, is that you could say, we completely understand why people find it difficult to have development. We completely understand that there are people who really need disability benefits. Unfortunately, there are tough choices to be made. And here's the big picture of growth. And this is the way that kind of sort of addresses.
I think a lot of it is about tone and about communications. It's really odd the way that, you know, we talked on the main podcast about the press in relation to Prince Harry, but the fact is that for me, the problem with our press and its relation with politics has always been this sense that they have a power that is about setting the agenda. And I just feel at the moment a Labour government with a big, big, big majority that can get stuff done has them in their heads too much.
They're going to slag off the Labour government, whatever they do. I'm not saying you wouldn't find my better if they did, but they are. You could always imagine that Labour could have played it a different way. They could have come in.
Just sort of pretending, in a way, I'm pretending maybe it's an unfair way of putting, but really going hugely positive. We've won this enormous majority. We're turning the country around. We're going to be big and optimistic and cheerful. And we're not going to get too dragged down by the madness of Trump and Farage. And you know, they're in a very, very, if you step back and look at them objectively, Labour's in a very good position.
The conservatives are in trouble because for us is eating their lunch, they're strong literally they're strong in parliament, they should be able to be kind of breezier about things instead of which they seem a bit defensive. There's an article we should put in the newsletter by somebody called Anna will change is the director of the new Britain project think tank and.
I mean, the headline will probably alarm quite a lot of left-of-centre people. Starm must learn from Trump, act fast, prioritise visible change, keep showing voters here on their side. But if you take away that first, starm must learn from Trump. Actually, yes, because you come in. I was talking to somebody, a kind of shadow minister the other day.
She said, well, we do still have a bit of time. And I said, you haven't got long in a parliament. This four years goes really, really quickly. And obviously, the positions are different. Trump is a president. He can do all this executive orders. You regularly raise the issue of Gordon Brown
and Bank of England, independence. Why was that such a big thing? That was the equivalent of one of Trump's big executive orders. It said, this is going to be a government of big change. And then we had the New Deal, then we had the minimum wage, then we had the Scottish Parliament. Now Labour are doing lots of stuff.
but act fast, prioritise visible change and keep showing voters you're on their side. That is a communications thing. It's like we had a question this week which basically said the government's done lots of things but I can't remember many of them.
And what that means is if you do have a press that is concert, they certainly remember Winter Fuel because, you know, the press keep banging on about it. They certainly remember National Insurance because it's still on the front pages months after the event because now businesses are reacting to it. So when that is happening, you have to have a counter narrative that is even stronger. So this piece is actually quite interesting because, you know, it's not saying, oh, let's bow down before Trump. And I don't think we should, don't think anybody should bow down before Trump.
But it is saying he has shown way more than he did in the first time. The first days, the first weeks, the first months, they're really, really, really important about the direction you set. So there you go, Labour. Act fast. Prioritize visible change. Keep showing voters you're on their side. And I suppose one way of putting it is that every single time you do something, it should be easy for the voters. If someone said to them, why did they do it for them to be able to answer question? It doesn't matter what answers could be growth.
Oh yeah, they did that because their thing is gross, right? Whatever it is, right? Here's where it gets tricky on the strategic side, because let's say they've just recently, they haven't sort of confirmed, but it's sort of in the ether that they're going to be revisiting the idea of a third runway Heathrow. Now, there are very, very, very strong arguments for it. There are very, very, very strong arguments against it. Both will be met. Now, if you're
green growth, it's tricky. If you're growth, so yeah, we'll get that, we totally get that. So that's where you have to be absolutely clear. So when I heard that, I thought, oh, I wonder why I'd know about the things of that. I can guess what Rachel Riesma, I think about that, because that's growth, right? So that's where these have to be set within this bigger strategic framing. We should talk a little bit more about that, I think, in maybe next week, because it's also an example of something that is never going to be built within the lifetime of this Parliament.
ever. So it may or may not be a good thing to do, but of course it's an example a little bit like HS2.
of a very grand and doubtless unbelievably expensive project that will, knowing Britain, take 10, 15 years to come through. And by the time it's finished, the whole world of technology may well have changed and the whole thing may turn out to be useless. Yeah. Now Irene wants to know, Roy, this is my last question for today. How do we stay engaged with politics without sacrificing our mental health, given that everything feels so depressing at the moment. Irene and Agali, what advice would you give to young people like me, who are passionate about making a difference, but feel more disillusioned
than ever by how toxic and polarized the debate has become. How do you stay hopeful and push for something better in such a divisive climate? Let me just try a very quick one on that. I think one of the issues is developing.
Here is role models, ways of describing what good public life is like. I think we've become very, our cultures become a very private and domestic. When we think about morality, when we think about being a good person, we think about how you treat your family, your friends. And we tend to imagine that when you get into the bigger scale government, public life, they're all a bunch of shysters.
And we just don't really have a good way of describing what it would mean to be a practical and effective leader. And that's about accepting that leaders are not saints. They have to compromise. They have to do a lot of politics.
They have to do a lot of communications. They're going to do stuff you don't like, but that the still is objectively an enormous difference between Theresa May and Keir Starmer on the one side and Boris Johnson and Donald Trump on the other. And we need to get better at explaining.
what that difference is and kind of living it out. But also, I think, I know, conscious one, I said that to you, of course, that Theresa May and Kirstalma may be seen by some people being at the slightly boring end of things. What would it be to give a vision of somebody who is startling, exciting, lively, funny,
But also represented good values. Yeah, I think my role model is very, very interesting, like who do we admire? And of course, because at the moment, and listen, let's be frank, there are lots of people who admire some of the populist leaders. I think it's hard to sort of work out who the role models are. But as you were speaking, I always think, you remember last week, I told you in Davos that my favorite event was this be hope.
event for the Sustainable Development Goals and the highlight for me of that entire event. There were prime ministers there, there were presidents, there were Bill Gates, there were all sorts of huge names there. But the highlight for me, which I've written about, and we're actually going to reprint in the new European poem, and it was a poem delivered by a 19-year-old Nigerian American.
call salomi agbarogi if i've got that right and the poem is called hope and we'll actually we'll put it in the newsletter as well if she's happy with that because it was just fabulous to see a 19-year-old
who wrote and read from memory quite a long poem about why she stayed hopeful. And yeah, this wonderful line, we aren't crossing our fingers, we're crossing finish lines. In other words, hope is active. Hope isn't sort of, I am hopeful because that is passive. Hope is saying, this is what I want to do. Therefore, I'm going to find out how I can do it. And it was extraordinary. I've never seen a poem get such a big ovation
like life. It's such a great subject and such a great word hope. It's such a difficult word because people can always say it's kind of over optimistic or it's unrealistic. But in the end, it's the key to everything, even if we don't really know how to put our fingers on it. So you have this, you know, talked about how hope in the end is a hero in all of history's great battles. In the end, sort of, you know, hope wins through. And it was honestly, it was when you say, where do you get hope?
I'm always being asked where do I get home? And so are you. And it is hard. I've got to be honest, my mental health has not been good in the last few weeks because of lack of sleep, because of, you know, I woke up this morning and the first thing I did was reach my phone. I wanted to see
basically what's Trump done while I've been asleep. Well, that is not good for your mental health. It really isn't. And then if you add that to the sense that you and I both picked up in Davos, that Britain's really got to be watching itself. It's really got to be careful about where it fits in all this. And you sort of feel, well, you know, women to be political figures, we can get engaged, we can get involved, we can make change. But then some days I wake up and think, no, this is hopeless.
Now, once you've got that, once you've got that in your mind, it's very hard to shift. So actually, say this off, no, I don't give a shit what they say. I don't give a shit what my enemies say. Hope is about believing that it's still worth fighting for the things that you believe in. And believing in a sense that something can happen, that things do happen, that the world does suddenly get better in a miraculous way that you couldn't anticipate, that you look around you and it seems very bleak. And then suddenly the world surprises you.
Yeah, she had this great line, I just looked it up. Hope is not the way that we cope, but the way that we conquer. Well, un-solo me, I like that. So there you go, Irene and Harela. You just got to keep believing you've got to keep fighting. Thank you all in that word of hope. Bye-bye. See you soon.
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