Hungary and Lessons for Labour

Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts, and get early access to episodes and live show tickets. Go to the rest ispolitics.com. That's the rest is politics.com . At the moment, smart money is on Keir Starmer not being Prime Minister by the end of the year. It's very hard to see how Kirstama gets through this. We have West Streeting resigning, one of the big contenders against Starmer, and then Andy Burnham, the very popular mayor of Gre ater Manchester, now trying to re-enter Parliament to run against Starmer. If you're Kirstarmer at the moment, you must be going absolutely nuts. It's very hard to govern in these circumstances. We see the two halves of the Labour Party revealed the kind of contradiction the Labour Party's dealing with. My plea to all of them, please don't turn this into a soap opera. Well, fat chance of that . This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. 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You wanted me to report back on my trip to Germany. And I'd also like to give a little shout out to Mr. Majjar for the way he is handling his early days in power in Hungary. Brilliant. Let me start though with my like big tabloid headline and the thing that really excited me about this race. So people who glanced at the Sunday Times yesterday, we're recording this on Monday, would have seen it leading with West Streeting says that if he becomes Labour leader, he will lead the country back into Europe. So he's somebody who's on record saying that he was pro-customs union and he,'s now saying that if he becomes a labor leader, he will put into the party manifesto for the next election, rejoining the European Union. So now for the first time , we have somebody with an outside chance of becoming Prime Minister saying if he becomes Prime Minister, we're gonna rejoin the European Union. Now lots of ifs. Is he gonna make it? Is Andy Burnham gonna make it? Is this gonna make Andy Burnham have to sound more Eurosceptic? But just on the surface, that's really big news. It is. And because it's in the context of West Street having resigned from the cabinet last week and said that he doesn't want Keir Starm to carry on being Prime Minister. Andy Burnham, having put his name in the frame to be the candidate in the Makerfield by-election, which has been created by a former minister Josh Simons stepping down, also saying he thinks Gear Star mer shouldn't carry on. The context is more complicated even than just a leading Labour figure says let,'s rejoin the European Union. And I'm going to do this very boring thing for international listeners again. And maybe to bring up-to-date British listeners who aren't following this minute by minute. So to remind people: Keir Star mer has got a pretty bad popular ity in Britain, but he was elected with a big majority in Parliament, big majority, and could have sat there for five years, and everyone assumed that he was going to sit there for five years. But a very bad showing in the local elections where reform did well, that's the Nigel Farage right wing party, and Labour did badly, suddenly led to a situation where we have West Streeting resigning, who, as you say, is one of the big contenders against Starmer, he's the guy I'm talking about with the European Union, and Andy Burnham, the very popular mayor of Greater Manchester, now trying to re-enter Parliament to run against Starmer. And as we recorded, if people want to get into the depths of this, please listen to our last podcast where we get into this in depth. But essentially we're in a situation where it looks likely that if, and it's a big if, Andy Burnham manages to get into Parliament in this by election, he will then run and have a chance of being Prime Minister by the autumn and Keir Starmer will cease to be Prime Minister. So this morning I was listening to David Lamy , Deputy Prime Minister. And listen I could feel his kind of exasperation because he's speaking on behalf of the government. He is also a leading figure in the Labour Party, explaining that he obviously wants Labour to win this upcoming by-election, but can't answer for obvious reasons, very simple questions about whether he agrees with something that Andy Burlum, who may be the candidate, was saying at the weekend. So you've put your finger on one big paradox which I think is worth leaning into a little bit more, which is yes, of course, Kiya Sama and David Lamy would like Labour to win the by election, but Labour winning the by election means bringing in Keir Starmer's biggest rival and almost certainly leads to Kirstama stepping down as Prime Minister and and this man Adi Bernard taking over.. Yeah So it's sort of crazy. And and in addition to West Streeting, who let's not remember just a week ago was part of the team that put together the King's Speech, came out and didn't just call for Britain going back into the European Union, a position which, by the way, I have long supported, but you have to kind of always focus on context. And the context here is very, very complicated because on the one hand, he's basically saying, Keir Starmer's been too timid, there's been drift, there's been a lack of embracing big arguments. So he made it part of a much bigger attack. Andy Burnham, meanwhile, does an interview. I thought a very interesting choice of interviewer , which was Dan Hewitt of ITV, whose actually whose expertise is housing. And and it's ITV. He's not gone for BBC, he's not gone for Sky, he's not doing the Today programme, it's a long interview with Dan Hewitt. Explain a little bit what that means. What what what might ITV mean if you were putting something together? What why would ITV be a bit different to those others? Well, because the normal you know, the normal thing you probably expect is let's do the first interview. You'd probably do and it was it was at the weekend, you'd probably say, W,ell let's sit down with the Sunday morning show with Laura Goonsburg. And is that because that has more listeners or has more Westminster listeners? What's the normal logic for why you do that? The normal logic for that, I think, is just historically everybody always used to do David David Frost.. Okay I actually think but I thought it was interesting to do it with Dan Hewitt, who has got this kind of reputation. I mean most of our listeners won't necessarily know this, but he's got a reputation really serious about housing, realisti sercious, really about inequality. And Andy in this interview talks about one of his big policy ideas. He leans very heavily into electoral reform. Another thing which isn't in the Labour Party manifesto. So he's basically saying, I want to stand for this. And his big message was Westminster and Whitehall have failed. I've shown there's a different way of doing things in Manchester. I'm coming in to try to do the same in Westminster. Dan Hewitt kept pressing him on whether that meant he was going to challenge Kirstarmer and he's just found a form of words to sort of go round that. So it's why is he going round that sort of 'cause he's obviously trying to challenge Kirstarma. Because he doesn't he wants to keep saying I am just for the moment standing to be the MP. Nobody believes that at all, do they? I mean literally nobody and nothing. Nobody on the planet believes that No. And including and especially Keir Starmer. Right. So on the one hand, he's sort of saying very different sort of politics, very this, very that, new politics. But it's quite old politics. Not to answer a straight question. Not to admit that this is why you're doing it. So he's he then found this other formulation. I want to take the arguments that I've made as high as I can. As high as I can go. So what you have now just sorry I'm just saying because what you're saying is so Which by the way is what we're streeting was trying to do. Right. So why can't Burnham say, Obviously, I'm trying to get elected 'cause I want to run to be Prime Minister because I think the problems that Manchester faces and the country faces are best dealt with by my becoming Prime Minister, and I think I'd be a good Prime Minister. Yeah, I think but then we're back to the point that I made when Andy Burnham first tried to get uh selected in Gordon and Denton, where I think if you were to say it as bluntly as that, people will think Keir Starmer's taking leave of his senses if he says, Well, come on in then. So I look, this is what I mean, this is what I kept saying last week. Let's just step back a bit. Because this is going to create for the next week. What do you remember my final words on the podcast last week? My plea to all of them, please don't turn this into a soap opera. Well, fat chance of that, when you have literally no we've just about just about finished the the the podcast last week when I was in Germany and you were here. And West reating comes out with a big attack on Keirstarmer and a big policy announcement on the European Union. Followed by same day, Andy Burnham, doing a very different style, not going for Keir Starmer personally. I think that's what answers your question. Not going for Nigel Farage personally, not going for reform. Right. And why that? This is why some of Andy Burnham's people and I say, Well, West Streeting is a absolute bloody snake, he's done this deliberately. Yeah, yeah. Because he knows that in the by election, you know, in a constituency that voted very heavily leave. Sixty four per cent leave, actually. Sixty four percent leave and fifty percent of whose residents who voted voted fifty percent reform in the recent elections. He doesn't necessarily want to go in all guns blazing and say, let's get back in the European Union. So in a very interesting way, we see the two halves of the Labour Party revealed and the the kind of contradiction the Labour Party is dealing with. We're streeting making the big ideas rejoining the European Union, which will be hugely appealing to many, many , I suppose one bit of Labour vote. People like you, educated, city dwelling, professional, more liberal, really want to join the European Union. And then you've got another chunk of voters who I suppose we might think of as the traditional red war voter, more of Labour's traditional patriotic working class base, particularly in the north of England, who went over to Boris Johnson in 2019 because they liked Brexit, they wanted to get Brexit done. And so we're in the situation in which Andy Burnham is saying, vote for me because I'm a figure from the North, I can re -win those reform voters, I can win the seat that voted over 60% to leave the European Union. And we've got West Streeting saying the problems that Britain faces, all the problems that Britain faces almost, are to do with much bigger things than Britain. You're not going to be able to actually fix Britain's productivity or our cost of energy or our security or any of these things without rejoining the European Union. And Andy Burnham is saying, hyperlocal, hyperlocal, I'm the guy who's going to get your buses running, I'm going to get the police back on the streets, I'm going to improve things. And Streeting's saying, you've got to lift your head and look at the bigger global policy issues. You're not going to be able to fix any of those things. Yeah, and that is showing the tension between the two very different contests that they're engaged in. Because Andy Byrne's fighting a by-election in a northern working class constituency that was when Tony Blair was around, massive m we used to get huge majorities in Cartoners R M C over sixty percent of the vote, sixty three percent of the three. I think 90%. 70% at one point. And so he's fighting that contest. And West reating, even though he's not yet d you know, there's no there's not yet a contest formally, he's fighting the leadership election ahead of Andy Burnham being able to get there. Now, I've got to say, if you're Keir Star mer at the moment, you must be going absolutely nuts. Because how it's very hard to govern in these circumstan ces. He's the Prime Minister, he's still the Prime Minister, and he's watching this without any real control over it. And so when I mentioned David Lamy's interview, you just feel his exasperation. Well, how are we meant to deal with this situation? One of the problems is that the tradition in government is that you shouldn't do anything too radical if you're just about a step down. So the civil servants quite rightly, are extremely reluctant. And you would have found this when you took over in ninety seven. In the last months, the major government, they don't really want them launching huge new things that the new government might undo. And a classic example here is John Healy was trying to announce an enormous new investment in British defence. And it's probably one of the most important issues in Britain. It'll be a huge amount of the British economy if they go up to three and a half percent. It has these massive implications for NATO, for Ukraine , for containing Putin. Can he do it? Not really, because the real question that the Treasury is going to be asking is not just who's the next Prime Minister, but who's the next Chancellor? And what does West reating or Andy Burnham or Angela Rainer or Al Khanes or any other think about this thing? Yeah. They all like to say, well, government can carry on, the business of government can carry on. A lot of it will. A lot of it will carry on . But you 're taking several weeks out of the political calendar. At a time when the reason why Labour did so badly in the local elections was in part because the country is saying we don't feel the country is working terribly well and we want you guys to fix it because that's what you said you'd do. And remember one of the things we've often criticized the last Conservative government for was the ludicrous number of ministerial reshuffles. So famously, you would have 10 prison ministers, 11 junior defence ministers, and so on and so forth. The first thing that will happen when the new Labour Prime Minister comes in, Mandy Burnham Westreeting, whoever it is, is there'll be an enormous reshuffle because they have to look after their supporters. Some people will remain in the cabinet, I don't know. Let's say uh one of them may decide to move Shabana Mahmoud from Home Secretary to Chancellor, but that's already a huge shift. And then at the junior level, they've got to look after the people who are with them, and they're going to be throwing out quite a lot of the people who were loyal to Keir Summer. That happened, I guess, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, right? There was quite a lot of reshuffle when you took over. Yeah. Very different camera. When Gordon took over, was it massive? Yeah, there was pretty big reshuffle, yeah. But I th I mean look, I I think that where where I've kind of ended up on this, and you could you could feel my sort of getting very agitated last week. I think it's very hard for how it's very hard to see how Kiastama gets through this because the debate has moved in a way already. Well okay from being what's he trying to do with the country to what are these people want to do with the country. Trevor Burrus, so let's imagine I'm the whisperer to the the the Joe Biden side of Keir Star mer, right? I would say you know it's very important for British governance and confidence and the bond market that you remain. And here we are, and thanks to West Streeting raising Europe massively in the minds of the voters going into this Makefield election, Andy Burnham may well fail to get elected. Now if Andy Burnham fails to get elected in this by election in a few weeks' time, he's in real trouble. Real trouble. Andy? Yeah, Andy Burnham's in real trouble. If he can't get elected in that by election, to come and say, oops, I failed to get elected in what used to be a very safe Labour seat in Northern England, give me another one, can someone else resign? I'll have another by election, have another go to get in he's toast, pretty much. It's difficult to recover from if he fails to get elected. Well the only just the only thing I say on that is he can remain as mayor of Greater Manchester until he gets elected. Yeah, he can remain as great. What he couldn't be Prime Minister and Mayor of Manchester. Yeah. But his credibility and his leadership race is massive So Starmer might well think, well, what are the chances of Burnham being elected? 50-50? And if he doesn't get elected, maybe Starmer thinks, well, I I'll be fine. We're streeting's very unpopular now. Much less popular than he was in November. November you saw data suggesting that West Streeting had maybe a third more support within the party than he's got now. He didn't manage to get his eighty-one MPs. So how about a Starmer View where he's sitting there with his with Morgan McSweeney and his mates saying, Well actually maybe this could be okay. Maybe Andy Burnham doesn't come in and I remain as Prime Minister for the next two and a half years. Well, yeah, possible. The o Well what is it they chant five more years. Five more years. Well he said he was ten. But the thing about and and also I must say, when West Streeting on the day that West Streeting resigned and we had that whole sort of day of not chaos exactly, but nobody quite knew what was gonna happen and what have you. There was a lot of anger around. Against Wes. A lot. No no this is and not just a lot of this is a famous cliche that I remember when I was going Exactly. This this famous story that you don't want to be the person who's seen as bringing down the leader. That Michael Heseltine made that mistake. You don't want to seem too ambitious . That actually the smart money is being slightly dark horse. Now, the the one person who managed to defy that was Boris Johnson, who was such an enormous brand. He somehow got away with it. Yep. But it's certainly true that Gove's reputation was deeply, deeply damaged by the sense that he'd been too clever by half, too political, too disloyal. And so all the people like you who are like, this is the last thing we need at the moment, all those leader writers who've been pumping out articles saying Britain used to be respected for its governance around the world and now we're a laughing stock, all those Tories who are saying this is ridiculous, we can't have another Prime Minister are blaming worse treating, aren't they? A lot of them are. And I think that when you made a point about I thought Andy Burnham's interview was actually quite effective in lots of ways, but I think a lot of real people will actually reach the conclusion that you reached, which is basically, hold on a minute, why can't you just say yes? Because that's obviously what you're doing. But I I I just worry from the Labour Party's perspective that the debate is get is you're already seeing it go going off in directions that nobody really planned. And then the other thing that I I 've said to you many times before that I I really resent the way that people claim to speak for whole regions and whole chunks of the population. There was this Labour MP on the television, on the radio over the weekend, who was really going for West Streeting, saying, you know, the last thing the country wants, Lisa Nandy saying nobody in this country wants to reopen the debate on Brexit. It's just not true. Lots of people do, including in the north of England. Including possibly Lisa Nandy herself. It's very odd that she's I mean I I like Lisa very much, but I seem to remember she was quite sympathetic on Europe. So what this guy Jonathan Hinder, who's an MP up in East Lancashire, and he's saying, you know, if I went to my constituencies, then we're going to reopen the whole debate. Yeah, if you put it in those terms, they might say, Well, that sounds a bit mad. If you said that this government is getting punished because we're not delivering on the things that we promised. And the first thing we promised was growth. And if we're serious about growth, we've got to reopen the debate about European Union. Recording where I said, you know, there could be a great story where Andy Burnham wins, proves that he can take a reform seat, comes romping in. Charismatic, delivery guy. Let me make the case for Westreating. Case Westreading is this: that actually there is a risk that everybody has become completely obsessed with reform voters. It's true of the Conservatives, it's true of Labour. And that's understandable reasons, because these are voters who are better at turning out, and they're also voters who are in these marginal constituencies that everybody's focused on. But as a number of the people in the country, it's actually not that many people. What you're talking about when we talk about the reform voter, only one in five reform voters uh have university degrees. They tend to be older than the general population, whiter than the general population. Eighty-five percent of reform voters voted Tory in twenty nineteen. Eighty-five percent voted Tory in twenty nineteen. They are an existential threat to Kemi Badenok's Tory party because she's trying to occupy the same space. But if you're Labour, there's a completely different strategy, right? The completely different strategy is to say British politics has changed. You no longer need to get 45% of the vote to win a majority. Keir Starmer's just proved that actually you could probably be the largest party with 28, 29% of the vote in a five-party system. And there is a huge vote bank of progressive, educated, more diverse, younger, pro-EU Remain voters. West reading was smart, allowed the Conservatives and Reform to duke it out, chasing the traditional reform voter. He has a huge space where he can get moderate conservatives, Lib Dems, Greens, and excite a loss of the progressive Labour base. And I think he could lead Labour in, he could be the biggest party, he could make a good coalition, he could get us back in the European Union. There you go. God almighty, you're becoming a Labour Party spin doctor. I mean, you know, you did you did you did the case for Burlab last week, you know the case for West Street. We'll get you on Al Khan's soon. I've got to say I'll show you this little graphic, which the the main Rory of my life dug up from somewhere. It's a graphic ten years of elections in Wigan. And this is relevant because Makerfield is Wigan. It where it's the Wigan area. Yeah, it's the borough of Wigan. Yeah. And what you'll see, Labour has been the biggest in all of them. Yep. Right? But the dark red is the three mayoral elections. Uh-huh. So what that says is Andy Burnham pretty substantially outperforming the Labour Party at the time. By a huge amount, every time. By a big amount. Yeah, yeah. So a lot is depending on that. And and there's been a lot of reporting from Makerfield' saysing whatever the um the national figures are, he's genuinely popular. Many of them are using buses that they credit him with providing as Mayor of Manchester. And it's not again, we we talk a lot about reform voters. One of the things that comes across is that it's easy to talk about a reform voter or a white working class older voter, but it's a very different story if you're talking about those voters in Nigel Farage's seat, you know, these uh East of England coastal constituencies, and you know, uh what was happening in places like Norfolk where they were taking a lot of Tory votes away. That's very different from the story up in the North. And even in the North, I think there are two different stories, aren't there? There's the difference between I don't know, maybe a community like Easington Colliery, which is in a very, very extreme type of deprivation and economic challenge, and some are like Megfield, which is actually on the edge of rising prosperous areas like Manchester, where in fact if you look at the data around unemployment benefits, it's not as deprived as some of the other areas of the country. Just to dig into the the population of Makefield would be a hundred and five thousand people, ninety six percent were born in the UK. Yep, compared to about eighty five percent of the national pitch, I think. it is correct But it's often in communities which don't necessarily have huge immigrant population that feel most strongly about immigration as an issue. And one thing for sure, it's already started. Because West Streeting has put Brexit and possible re-entry into the European Union centre stage in the Labour leadership debate. Andy Burnham, when he was asked, I think it was, I don't think he knew that West Streeting had done this when he was asked by Dan Hewitt in the interview on ITV. He said , I it was played back his words, I hope in my lifetime to get back in the European Union. And his response to that was, I'm not advocating that in this by-election. In other words, he knows that that will reform will really go for that. Now, I actually think if the Labour Party had not , since 2016, essentially conceded so much ground in this debate that actually that wouldn't be a bad place to be. Because the one thing one of Farage's we've interviewed Rahm Emanuel on leading this week, the American possible contender for the Democratic nomin ation. And he said, we asked him about him and the three presidents he worked for, and he said, you know, everybody's strength is often their weakness, and vice versa. I am convinced that if the Labour Party had over the last few years attacked Farage over his role in making every single person in this country weaker and poorer because of Brexit, we wouldn't be in the state that we're in now. But for Andy Burnham, that is a big risk to do at this time in this by election. We're back to the point about the the clash of those. And we're back to the point that all these parties , Labour and Conservative and Reform, are all fishing in the same pool. They're all trying to get the same pro-Brexit working class older white vote. It's and and that's partly because of the electoral mathematics. I guess if you were brut al, for Labour, where they have huge majorities in somewhere like London or Central Manchester. There's not much point in them adding a couple of votes there because of our first past the post system. But it's very weird. It means that the whole of British politics is being distorted towards perhaps twenty percent of the population who are not very repres entative of the population as a whole, who are more conservative, more anti immigration, more anti EU. But the problem is that is exactly the battlefield that Burnham's chosen to fight a by election of the yeah. Yeah. Mighty Andy Burnham has achieved something uh today, which is a very rare thing. He's managed to get the Daily Star to lead on the Labour leadership election with Burnham calls to sc rap var. What do you think of that, Rory? Well, there we are. There we are. Listen, listen. This this and this is the controversial video football thing, right? The video football thing is exactly what it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh would you support uh getting rid of VAR? I think I probably would. Is that because you're just a massive populist and that's just the thing to say if you want to get a tabloid deadlight? Yeah. Are you just saying that to flatter the listeners, the VAR thing. Do you really believe that? No, I tell you the only time that the Daily Star What would David Dean say if he was The only time that Daily Star the Daily Star led on politics during the 2001 election campaign was Britney Bax Blair. So gave me the daily start. They did the lettuce, though, did they with Let's Trust. But let me give you another football fact, Rory. This is this this will absolutely get the geeks. If Andy Burnham does become leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister, it means the two of the G seven leaders will be will support the same football team. No. First time in history. No, and who will they both support? Mark Carney and Andy Burnham are both huge Everton fans. No. There we are. Well that's a big change. David Moyce could be not being Prime Minister by the end of the year. And probably if Andy Burnham manages to leverage his popularity as mayor of Manchester and not be torpedoed, he wins the by election and he's probably odds on, I guess, in the betting to be Prime Minister. But there's a lot of butts there. And we have this very different, I think rather interesting candidate in West Streeting, who's pretty unpopular at the moment because he's wielded the knife and he's seen as a bit of a snake in the grass. But I'm really liking the shape of his policies. I think it's bold, I think it's radical, and thank goodness there's somebody in this era of nationalism and parochialism who's making the big structural arguments that we need for rejoining the European Union. I um I had a few exchanges yesterday with Gary Stevenson, sitting doing a bit of reading and research. Did he? Yeah, yeah. Did he? Well he got a bit cross with both of us on this latest one because I got several people sending me messages saying, Have you seen Gary Stevenson's thing? He's had a bit of a go at you and Rory. And actually it wasn't much of a go. He basically just said we were sort of centrists. But also what he was saying, he he did make some really I thought really interesting observations. There weren't sp he wasn't specifically talking about the issue of by election, he was talking about the rise the far right and how to beat them. And his big thing, and this is something which I think Andy Burnham was trying to do in his interview, talking about affordability, just as Mum Danny won on affordability in New York. He was basically saying that the reason why mainstream parties like Labour and the Tories keep losing and getting hammered is because the big, big, big thing for people is falling standards of living related to inequality. So the lows and rich ri very rich people, but there's so much more poverty. But the other point he made, and I this is where he sort of he basically thinks that you and I talk to people like us. Okay. Now I d I don't I've not seen the analysis of how many actual reform leaning people listen to us, but I d where I think he's got a point, and this is what Andy Burnham is definitely trying to do, this is why Andy Burnham was not he was ask direedctly, do you understand why people vote reform? Yeah. And he said one hundred percent. Whereas you know, I might be tempted to say, yeah, because they're manipulated and tried to liar and blah blah blah. Can I challenge for a second though? It's absolutely true, I think, if you look at all the data, that a lot of people who are furious with Labour and Conservative and attempted to vote reform are motivated by the fact that cost of living's going up, wages have been stagnant since two thousand eight, housing's difficult to afford, services are creaking. What they really are working for is a government that's going to be pro business, cut their taxes, cut welfare spending, get the economy going. The voters sound as though they believe that there are market solutions to this. not Not that that they want they want Gary Stevenson to come in and redistribute and steal the money from the rich and give it to the poor. Trevor Burrus, I guess he would say that in terms of the politics of this, that one of the reasons why Zach Polanski has made such an impact is because he has been pretty clear about wealth tax and so forth. But that that's not I think it'd be interesting. I mean I yeah how much of the vote that is and I mean we we get onto that that's a totally different vote market isn't it? There's a very young Green Party voters. But the other another couple of points you made up. I don't know, there's very few of them And and also the other the other thing I mean you've got this debate going on in Makerfield, the Greens are going to stand a candidate, whereas Caroline Lucas, former leader of the Greens, she was actually advocating for the Greens not to stand, assuming that those who might be tempted to vote Green would actually vote for Burnham and stop the far right. But the other just a couple of other points that Guy Stevens made that I thought were worth thinking about. The first was he had this line where he said we've got to stop the beef between the left and the centre. And I and I Yeah I he he said he's got Which was we yes, we're appealing to the centre, but we don't want to lose. We don't want to lose people that sort of thing you don't want the left's face. Correct. So and I think there's something that and he actually said the centre needs the left and the left needs the centre. Okay. And that is true. And I think that and then his f the final point, he made ten nine pretty big points. The other one where he absolutely is right. He was an hour long. Well I did watch. He was interesting. It was interesting. He mentioned us about four times, none of them very flattering, but let's just park that. It doesn't matter. But the other thing he said, and he's absolutely right about this. Instantly, he wrote a very good book. Read a very, very good book. He did write a good book. You had your name on the cover of it. Yeah, it's gonna be a good thing. He is a good writer. with Gary Stevenson. Uh but the other point he made was that this isn't just in the UK but around the world, and this is true, and I saw this in Germany, which we'll talk about after the break. The right wing parties, these populist right-wing parties are so much better at social media than and and I've been watching looking at Andy Burnham stuff, and it's fine, it's fine, but it's on a different level. What the right do is on a different level. And the other thing he talked about was funding. He was making the point that when these sort of upstart right wing influence start up, they suddenly get money getting given big donations to build them up and then suddenly they end up on Joe Rogan because there's this international network. And so I thought there was a lot in there that the Labour Party needs to get its head around because the truth is, on social media, both of the two main the main the two main parties, Labour and the Tories, they're still, to my mind, pretty lame. You know, I'm lame because it's not my thing, right? I'd like to think the podcast is better, thanks to the team that we have doing it. But but that is so it w the point he was making to me, he actually said he said, You, me, you're like a general sitting above and you sort of think you're ordering troops, but out there, the troops are all fighting in a different way. They're not reading, they're not listening to the BBC, they're not listening to newspapers. They're sharing anger-making videos about Muslims. And they're all that's why rich people. And rich people. Exactly. So I do think that we've and I my argument to him is I don't want to I don't want to get into the same means of fighting for the lying and the disinformation, all the other stuff and bear in mind Farage is going to chuck so much money at this pilation and they've got a lot of money to chuck. But I just thought you should watch his uh he did it yesterday, came out yesterday. It was interesting. Interesting. Okay, Wilde. Let's take a quick break and then back for more Changes in sexual performance are more common than most people realize and support doesn't need to feel awkward. With Med Express, everything happens privately online . Start by completing a short consultation reviewed by UK registered clinicians. If eligible, treatment is delivered discreetly to your home, with ongoing support whenever you need it. You're not alone in this. Visit medexpress.co.uk slash podcast to learn more welcome back to the rest of this politics for me Rory Stewart and me Alistair Campbell. Now Alistair I would love to hear what you picked up in Germany. You've been in Germany for the last week or so. Yeah, gone. So German politics really interesting. How's Metz doing? How's the greatest economy in Europe doing? How's how's the AfD doing? Are we gonna be able to have the middle powers led by Germany , recreating the global order. How's Germany Trump relations going? Germany? If people can remember those questions in order, badly, badly . Too well, and I don't think so. Okay. So Mer ti's doing very badly. Um his ratings are now pff just absolutely tanking. We went up to the very, very north. In fact it was rather starting to arrive at the hotel, there's gigantic portrait In in former East Germany. Former East Germany in Mecklenburg Fort Pomeran. Right. Is the is the the land, the state. And am I right this is like AFD territory? Well, interestingly, I'll c uh Mecklenburg for Pomeran and below us Saxony and Halt. Right. Okay. These two states the reason why I was particularly interested to go to go go into this area, they are the two states that have elections in September. Okay. And as things stand , the AFT are going to do well. Okay. How does it look? Well, so if you start in Saxony and Halt, the current minister-president, which is their kind of prime minister , is called Schven Sven Schulze, and he only took over in January because his predecessor was in real political difficulty. So he stepped down to improve their in their prospects. In the result in the last election was twenty twenty one, the Christian Democrats, Bats' party, got thirty seven point one percent, the AFD got twenty point eight, but that which was a d which was down from their previous vote, and then the Lincoln got eleven and the social democrats got eight. So the social democrat's not very big there. Latest poll last week, AFD forty one point four, CDU twenty four point nine, Linker twelve, SPD six. So that's Saxon Han Saxon Handhalt. Okay, j just to explain again to people, remind people, AFD. Strong links uh to fascism, real question about whether German constitutional court should actually be certainly launching investigations into some of the AFD leadership. And if they win this Lond on, if they win the state, they actually will end up with a president there who is in charge of the police. Yep. Who's in charge of a lot of local operators? Very, very disturbing if you end up with them actually having proper executive power. And and his um th th this guy is called Ziegmund, Ulrich Ziegmund, and his um this is the AFT candidate and his manifesto was as as out there as it Right. And remigration again to remind people, this is an idea that's beginning to get into British politics. And the idea is that effectively lots of people who live in your country are booted out. So reform is talking about millions of people. So not just people who are asylum seekers, but people who lack indefinite leave to remain. But some of the AFD adjacent figures are talking even about German citizens with German citizenship correct being removed from the country. And just to give you a flavor of the of the rhetoric, this is what he said at the launch, let's take back our country. In other words, it relates to take back control, make America great again, etc. Big clamp down on immigration, as you say, huge support for large families. And a family means a man and a woman and lots of children. Okay. Pushing back on all sides of that. The stuff that really worried me, one of the slogans that they that they run is we have to stop recognizing Ukrainians as war refugees. They are broadly pro-Russian. Um it was interesting how I I watched a uh documentary while I was there about why they were doing so well in this area. Quite a lot of people, elderly people in particular saying, you know, why are we giving all this money to Ukraine when we've got so many of our problems here? to what extent is this um similar to reform voters and to what extent it's different? Similarity, I guess they both are very, very focused on the question of immigration and control of immigration. Different is that this isn't connected as it wouldn't be in Britain with Brexit, instead of which it's connected with the strange relationship between East Germany and West Germany. And is there a sort of different feeling to this era of Germany to what you'd expect to see in a classic reform voting part of Britain? Does it feel different? It does yeah I mean we we you know we were driving around and the place I said to Fiona one point that we were d going through all these kind of quite small towns and villages, they all feel very clean, whereas a lot of the you know, this this the left behind communicators in Britain always feel very Yeah. So you you wouldn't necessarily have complaints that public services are collapsing, high streets are shutting. No, not in the same way. Not in the same way. And the other thing, I've got to say, particularly in Mecklenburg Fort Pomeran, apart from one waiter in one restaurant, we didn't see a single non white face. And yet this is the place where so at the last election in Mecklenburg Fort Pomron. Yeah. is This Merkel's constituency. Populations smaller than Saxony and Alt is about one point six million or something. The last election, the the governing coalition in twenty twenty one before the election was a Social Democrat CDU. Yep. After this election, after the twenty twenty one election, the social democrats got forty percent and they went into coalition with Delinka left party. Okay. You look now and the AFD which got roughly seventeen percent I think last time. Yep. They've more than doubled it. Okay. So what so they're now ahead. So one of the themes that we're seeing, and we maybe this is a good transition to Hungary is party loyalty is collapsing all the way across Europe. So France, Germany, increasingly Britain, the fact that your parents' grandparents voted for a particular party doesn't seem to make any difference. Between one election and another, vote shares can double, you know, millions more people vote. The other thing that though that you're picking up, um particularly in Saxony Anhalt, is that is the sense it's a very, very strong right-wing vote. And that's an interesting thing as we move to Hungary because there too the left is getting very, very little vote, even if there's a split between the far right and the right. Yeah. And then of course the other thing that this gives rise to, so let's just say for example that this guy Sigmund in Saxony Anhalt let',s just say he does get over forty percent. The angst that is running through the main parties at the moment is whether they can keep to this thing about the so called Brandtmauer, the firewall. Which is the right So none of the other parties will go into government with that. And to be fair, Mertz is holding that line, but there will be people in his party, which is the equivalent of Camille Baytonot's Conservatives, who will be thinking no no no no we need to go into coalition with that. Not least because for example in Thuringia, another of the Ger man lender, the CDU are in coalition with the Bundness Zaro Wagner Connect. Oh, which is the far far less. Breakaway far less. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like I mean, I suppose it's like yet it is it it'd be like Kemi Bade not going into c her party going into coalition with Jeremy Corbyn. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In your party. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The new Jeremy Corbyn. The new Jeremy Corbyn away from the Labour Party to the left of the Labour Party. So that that' ssort of getting up there. So it was look on the one hand, we were swimming in beautiful water, we were seeing lots of nice, happy looking German people having lots of interesting conversations. But the politics are, I would argue, in a really bad state. And Mertz, he l he's starting to look really kind of troubled by it. He's got this thing of answering questions very directly, which you and I both support, but you do have to be a bit careful. So basically he's just about got over the row with Trump about saying you know you're completely screwed up in Iran. He was asked whether he would advise his children to go to America and he said no not in the moment not with everything that's going on there. So that sort of made big Um but final thing before we go on Hungary. Um one of the things that's so troubling about your German story is that often if you were Gary Stevenson or someone, you would say the reason why people are voting for the far right is cost of living, austerity, creaking services, rubbish NHS, roads not working, councils not working, everything being ground down. But Germany is a lot better than Britain on a lot of those syndicates. Not perfect, I mean Germans listening to this will grumble, but it would take a hell of an effort for any Labor government to get the standard of public services, street cleaning, local services up to German levels. Yeah. One of the things I argued with Steve with Gary Stevenson about yesterday, because he was saying that the right wing parties are the only ones who are giving people a clear answer to how they're dealing with living standards. And I said to him, hold on a minute. What is that? Well, he said, you're you, people like you and me, you think parties have to come opposition parties have to come up with thought-through policies. They don't. They just want people to think because this law haven't dealt with immigration, the economy's screwed. Right. So he's basically saying it's not that they've got policy, but they've got an argument, which in this new media landscape is proving to be very, very powerful. So, but I'm going to, with the benefit of having now been back a few days, I'm gonna write a piece for our newsletter about the German situation, because it is fascinating. And if you want to sign up to that, go to the episode link in the description below. And the newsletter actually is is definitely if you haven't signed up, definitely worth signing up for. Getting a lot of high quality journalism out of Alistair, but we're also actually getting some amazing commission pieces by independent journalists. It's becoming quite an interesting magazine. And Izzy, uh newsletter staffer, I think we call her, is uh is churning it out. Excellent. That's a great, great, great thing. Final thing, Hungary. I just think it's interesting. I mean I mean I've I sent I do so I sent you a couple of videos. So there's Orban in power for forever. And one of the issues that led to him being brought down was the was the issue of corruption and cronyism and oligarchism. And Maj ar, who's taken over, he's putting out these fascinating social media posts where he's basically just taking people, including the media with him, on a tour of the government infrastructure that Orban built. So for example, going around offices which with these incredibly valuable paintings which ought to be in the National Gallery that are suddenly pitched up in Auburn's residence or his his office, taking them to showing them Auburn's house and saying, How you know, I know what the salary is, 'cause that's the salary I'm on now, so how has he got all this? He's also said that Orban changed the arrangement so is that when he if and when he lost office , he would get a very big payoff. And Maj ar has said, No, you're not getting that. I'm gonna give it to Ukraine. So he's sort of now you could say, well, that's a pretty populist move as well. But I think what he's doing is signalling as hard as he can, particularly to the European Union. I am very, very different. The European flag was flying from the Parliament the other day, because they need the money that Orban's moves meant with locked up. And I guess that the signal for uh West Streeting or Andy Burnham might be that. Put the European flag on the building and go after reform on corruption. Go after them on funding, corruption, expense. That's the thing you have to keep pounding. Without sounding too much like Gary Stevens on, I I would say that the key argument to make here is these are people who present themselves as speaking for the real people against the corrupt, out-of-touch, plutocratic elite. And boy , the whole thing is crazy rolling and millions and millions of pounds coming in from crypto donors from Thailand, whole series of people who've made their money and business I mean, take take your camera around and film some of Nigel Farage's five houses. Yeah. And the the um no 'cause this this um this five billion five million thing, we still haven't got to the bottom of it. He's changing his story every five minutes. By the way, Rory, I think I'm right. We've got through a whole episode without mentioning the word Yeah. Well we haven't done d don't try it, but but there might be a bit of a clue on how you might go after him too, because I'm not mentioning the ballroom. On which let's finish for the day. Do come back, listen tomorrow to question time where we've got some great questions which will allow us to do a deep dive on US China, on Russia, on Ebola, International Aid and the Far Right. Lot of things to cover tomorrow.