Reflecting on Global Polarization

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 RestisPolitics.com. That's the restispolitics.com . How serious is the new Ebola outbreak? The answer is very, and the cuts to US global health funding are probably part of the reason why this is happening now. Elon Musk is worth hundreds of billions. I mean he could feed all the hungry people in the world. Especially as he was the one who cut USAID in the first place. One of my favourite quotes of the whole thing. He's trying to flatter him but he's basically just abusing the country. Trump said he's very, very tall, especially for this country because they tend to be a little shorter. As we speak, Putin is on his way to Beijing. Yeah, and his 40th meeting. And that'll be very interesting. 40th meeting. Very interesting watching that . This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. 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Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com . Changes in sexual performance are more common than most people realize, and support doesn't need to feel awkward. With MedExpress, 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 Welcome to Rest Politix Question Time with me Rory Stewart. And me, Anasta Campbell. Now, Rory, we managed to get through the whole of the main episode without mentioning D J Trump. Um, but we're not gonna succeed this time. No, we're not. So we're gonna do we're gonna do US China. To follow up on the episode we did, what actually happened in that summit, what came out of it, what does it mean about the new world? We're going to look at the Ebola outbreak and what that means for the world. We're going to look at the question of the far right in Britain. And we've got a rather interesting question about communities. So a lot of things to get through. So Alistair starting on this, and it'd be also interested whether you think we got what we got right, what we got wrong, but Evie's asked are C. and Putin playing Trump and Roy, not Rory, has said has Trump's visit to China shown that China has trumped the USA and that USA is now subordinate to China on the world stage? It's interesting how those questions I think reflect most of the questions that came in about this, which suggests that most of our listeners and viewers do think that if there was a winner or loser, then G was the winner and Trump was the the loser . Look, I thought it was fascinating to watch, I really did. And I've got to obviously try to park my Trump derangement syndrome. And before the TDS, give us a sense of what it looked like and felt like in there. out to me was to go to Evie's point, I did feel that he was being played, because he loves all that stuff. He loves all the children waving their flags as he came off the plane. The MAGA crowd was saying this is a bigger reception than Obama got when he went there. I'll tell you what I found the most interesting thing was that right at the top, President Xi said something really tough about Taiwan. He basically said, if we get this right, that would be great for relations. If we mishandle this issue, it will affect American-Chinese relations at every level. And then the other thing I thought was stunning was when he basically said it was this one phrase, I mean in English on the translation, it came over in five words, and it said , century-long transformation is accelerating. And what that said to me, I'm not a China expert, but what it said to me was this was him to Donald Trump's face saying, we are overtaking you. It's an amazing moment. I was struck by the fact that it's uh there's this famous story in detective stories you remember, the dog that didn't bark. So the the coverage has been about what didn't happen. But I think that's very significant. So we go back. The last twenty years has really been about America and China pumping up for a new Cold War. Started with Obama, talking about pivot towards Asia. During Trump one, we had his Secretary of State who we've interedview, Mike Pompeo, lacerating China as a dictatorship. And then actually even on the Marco Rubier does the same. Did the same. Yep. You'll remember when we were recording podcasts, some of the very tense meetings that Jake Sullivan was holding with his Chinese counterpart and Biden not visiting China and skirting around the edge of each other at Bali and trying to read this. So you would have expected until this year, one of two things, right? Either that narrative, which is the narrative that Rubio was pushing, Elbridge Colby was pushing, who's the deputy uh Secretary of Defense, and he's written a whole book about this, um, which is how is this used to really put China back in its box? So their dream would be number one, you reinforce deterrence on Taiwan, you really signal to China. We've got Taiwan's back, we've got the back of Japan and South Korea, and all of the US military is concentrating there. Not in the Gulf, not in the Middle East, not in Europe, it's all there. Second thing, you'd probably lean very, very hard into unequal balance on trade. So let's say you really felt as many, many people do, and particularly Republican voters, China's hollowed out American industry, cost millions of American jobs because they've unfairly manipulated their currency, subsidized their industries, stolen our intellectual property. This is a summit in which you really stick it to China on that. Or you do something else, which is you do the G2 model. The G2 model says the rest of the world doesn't really matter now, we're fifty percent of the world economy. China, which was smaller, smaller than the British economy in two thousand four, right? It's now about seven times larger than ours. So it is a G2 setup in this world. So you might say, okay, let's sort out the world's issues. Right? We're going to sort out AI safety, we're gonna come up with agreements on global development, global trade. That's all the stuff we said they might do. Environment, climate, you know, whatever, right. Whatever you might do. None of that happened. But what's interesting for me is that it could have been worse, right? Trump I mean, I don't know whether he gets a cookie for this, but he didn't really say very much about Taiwan, which was a turn up for the books because pretty much anything he said about Taiwan would have gone wrong. And the summit ended really with these two big superpowers circling around each other a bit suspicious, but they haven't upped the ante either in trade wars or cold war. Yeah. Should tell listeners we've interviewed this week Rahmanuel, who was Araq Obama's chief of staff, and he's now putting his toe pretty deep into the water to try and become the next American president. He's still very hard over on China. We've also had quite a lot of feedback that we weren't hard over enough. Very, very interesting how we sort of quite liked him, but our team really, really didn't so uh be fascinated what listeners and viewers think. It they're two when you said what was it like to sort of watch them they're two such different people but actually they've got they've got similarities and one of my favourite quo favourite quotes of the whole thing was Trump said this of G said, he's very, very tall, especially for this country. He's standing there by the way. He's very, very tall, especially for this country, because they tend to be a little shorter. Which is the kind of he's trying to flatter him, but he's basically just abusing the country at his own sort of his own pre racist. Do you know do you know do you know that the height of Chinese teenagers has increased something like five inches? And and a lot of this has to do, you know, we're I and I don't want to turn this even more into a health podcast, but it's almost entirely about protein. The same happened in Japan after the war. Incredible expansion height. I was born in Hong Kong. Yeah. And my parents lived in Hong Kong till nineteen ninety seven. And when my mother started teaching at Hong Kong University, my mother's very short, she's about five foot two, three. She was taller than a lot of her students. By the time she left, she was dwarfed by her students. Incredible what Project does,. yeah Well he anyway so he's very, very tall. I was also struck by how absolutely exquisite President Xi's suits were. Is that what he noticed? Oh, I mean they cost a fortune. They were they were really, really smart. Trump's because their styles are so different. Trump goes in. If you remember the last summit when they first met, he said I give the meeting twelve out of ten. We know he struggles with maths, right? But twelve out of ten isn't a thing really. This one, he went in saying the first thing that's gonna happen he's gonna give me a big hug. Well, he didn't give him it was pretty cold. And so you have the situation, particularly as after the summer ended, Trump gets on everyone. There was no you remember that famous fraternal embrace that that Brezhnev used to give these German leaders, yeah, where they kissed them on the lips and the thing. There's nothing like that. There was nothing like that. But Trump kept saying the whole time he's a great friend, he's become a great friend. Uh I get a lot of trouble for saying he's a great friend. He said all this stuff. He was really trying to lay it on. And Xi was having none of it. And then when they got to the briefings after the whole thing, one of the the Chinese foreign ministry guy was asked whether they were friends, as Trump kept saying. And his reply was, the two sides exchange views are major issues. So Trump gets on the plane and was, and they were all saying, well, that was all a bit disappointing, wasn't it, Mr. President? He was he was amazing with the deals and this and Boeing Boeing's shares fell, by the way, because the expectations were not bad. Incidentally, but but just sort of footnote here. Trump has just disclosed his financial uh investments. Oh, I know. He's a big investor in Boeing. You hear people in the newspapers speak on behalf of Boeing saying if you want to make President Trump happy, buy Boeing. He's a big shareholder in Boeing. He goes around the world selling Boeing airplanes and he's a big shareholder in Boeing. Trevor Burrus He's also done more trades since becoming president than every president in history. Aaron Powell Anyway, so there we go. So anyway, so he went off, bought lots of Boeing shares. I'm going to sell lots of Boeings and the Boeing share price will go up and I'll make lots of money. Well in fact it went down because he oversold how many he was going to sell and they didn't buy quite as many. He gets on the plane and says they've got all these amazing deals. So then Wang Yi, the Chinese Foreign Minister, is asked about all these amazing deals, and his answer is this. We're continuing to implement all the consensus reached in earlier consultations, agreeing to establish a board of trade and a board of investment, addressing each other's concerns over market access and advancing the expansion of two-way trade under reciprocal tariff reduction framework. But I mean, so in an age of kind of authenticity, populism and sound bites, basically every quote you're giving me from the Chinese government sounds like some 1990s policy paper. Yeah, but they're both saying No. Bullshit. Yeah. They're both saying bullshit. And here's the other thing, Evie's question are she and Putin playing Trump? As we speak, Putin is on his way to to Beijing. Yeah. His fortieth meeting. And that'll be very interesting. 40th meeting. Very interesting watching that. I thought the other really interesting thing about from and and it was so deliberate, he was doing it so deliberately, was when he talked about all the differences between them. But he then said, you know, the key question is: can we, China and US, can we overcome the so-called Thucydides trap? And this again, I think, was a way of saying we're overtaking you. Because the Thucydides trap, which was made famous by a book by a guy called Graham Allison. Graham Allison, whose book was called Destined for War, and his thesis is that whenever there has been a rising power approaching a an established power, a hegemony, that inevitably ends in war. And he studied sixteen uh situations like that, twelve of them ended in war. So Graeme Alison actually was a colleague of mine at at Harvard, I I know him quite well, and he is pretty amazing because he defines these ideas. And one of the great tricks actually in being somebody working on government is he came up with a phrase Shucyd's tra It's not getting there very quickly, is it? And it's now three years old and that persevere. I mean he's Xi Jinping, he is Persevillion. Yeah. I mean he just he's just you keep going. So I think that was him saying, as he was saying with the transformation, by the way, which he said the first time he said that concept of the acceleration was in a meeting in Moscow two years ago with Putin. So I think what he's saying, and I actually think the timing of Putin's visit is deliberate, it's basically saying the state media today in China is saying this shows that we are now the center of global power. We had Trump last week, we've got Putin this week, we've had all those leaders that I mentioned last week who are going. So I think they would have felt they got a lot more out of this. Than than America did. Okay. Well look we we talked about the fact that they didn't talk about the big global issues global development, Africa, climate, AI safety. And one issue they didn't talk about was global public health. So we've had a question from Ezra Helen . And this relates exactly to this. How serious is the new Ebola outbreak? Should we be worried about it spreading beyond Africa , especially with the cuts to US global health funding? Very good question. The answer is very . And yes, and the cuts to US global health funding are probably part of the reason why this is happening now. Big plug, as always, for leading, and people who aren't listening to the back catalogue of leading, Atul Gawande has done some wonderful stuff on this recently. He was the USAID deputy administrator who led on Global Health. Um th this is something I means a lot to me because I was the minister during the last big Eboda outbreak about ten years ago. Yeah. And when that happened ten years ago, I got together in Paris immediately with Mark Green, who was the head of USAID. We went for a walk over that bridge with all the padlocks on it, in the margins of a uh I think it was a G7 development analysis meeting. And we worked out funding. And I think we put in an extra 100 million, USAID put in an extra 100 million. Why does it matter? It matters because that allowed us to fund protective equipment, getting the nurses to the front line, doing the testing, developing the vaccination. I then went out to Eastern DRC. I went into these Ebola centers. I sat with a nurse who'd very sadly contracted Ebola and was dying in front of me. I saw children whose parents were in the cent re dying, we were washing ourselves in this very, very intense way to try to make sure there was no fluids of any sort. Is it through fluid that you get it? Yeah. And once you've contracted it, your mortality rate at the moment is about fifty percent. Half a chance. So very different to COVID. So when you were with the nurse, you who had it, what was the It was a plastic sheet between me and him. Right. We were talking through a plastic sheet. He was very, very courageously talking to me and he probably had two days to l ive . So it's something where and people will hear this paradoxically because it's so lethal, it doesn't spread quite as easily as things like COVID, because so many of the carriers are killed before they can pass it on. But the bigger issue is that global pandemics are, along with AI, probably the biggest threat for the next 20, 30 years that we need to worry about. And dismantling all the money in the global health architecture that stops not just this outbreak of Eboda, but other forms of pandemic coming out of poor developing countries, overwhelming their health systems, overwhelming their borders, and ultimately getting to Britain But if you go back to our previous discussion about the summit, Trump and Xi , given that it's not that long ago since COVID, and given Trump at the time was obsessed with the you know the China element of COVID. Yeah. You'd have thought that might have been part of the discussion. What have you learned? Have you studied it? What more can we say? But they're just because it's not a sort of thing. It's so weird because even for Britain or Germany, if you're looking for a type of investment in international development where you can prove that there's a national interest, you're not just in a vertical wasting money giving to people in another country, but you're actually protecting yourself. Global health is the key example. You know, you spend on the border between Uganda and Eastern DRC and you are less likely to end up with a voter in Britain. Um I don't understand why people are not making these arguments. I don't understand why we're cutting our global health funding. I had uh a meeting this morning with a guy, a Swedish guy called Carl Schau, who is the C OO of the World Food Programme. And this doesn't relate specifically to a bowler, but he was explaining the uh what he has already seen about the consequences of USA ID , UK DeFi, German, other countries that have cut their defense spending. He literally got back today yesterday from Afghanistan. He was saying they've had an earthquake, they've had two floods, they've got 2.5 million refugees that have come back from Pakistan and Iran. USA D has cut all , every single penny of funding to Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Okay . He was talking about Gaza. He said basically in Gaz a they are now managing World Food Programme is managing to get food in, but that is all that's going in. Okay, can I just interrupt then? Because just to make the problem worse. Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Gaza . When USAID and DIFID took its money out, the only people really who stepped up in significant amounts for that were the Gulf, Qatar, Saudi, UAE. And their economies are now being crippled by the Iran blockade and this war that Trump and Israel have launched on Iran, and Iran's response, which has been attacking them and closing their exports and destroying their economies. So the backup, the plan B, which was to get wealthy Gulf countries to step up and handle these problems, that's foreign side because those wealthy uh Gulf countries are now freezing their funding and are struggling to to make their payments because they're not getting the income in. That's absolutely right. He said there are four key areas, themes, that are direct directly related to making their life much more difficult as a result, specifically, we'll come back to the cuts, but the Iran war. The first is they're having to step up their operations in Lemon and to some extent Gaza as well. The second is the cost of operations have gone up 25% because of the rise in the oil price. There are currently 300 million acutely hungry in the world. And he says he said if the oil price stays above $100 for any considerable period of time, they've calculated another 45 million will be pushed into acute hunger. And his final point is fertilizer. All of Africa's fertilizer comes through the Straits of Formuz. So that's going to put pri ces up and supply down. I think huge credit to the people who are desperately trying to fill uh some of these gaps when these governments are falling aside and when this chaos is happening. Huge credit to governments like Catar, which is still trying to support communities in these places. Huge credit also to the private philanthropists. I mean, I think it's it's wonderful that you do have private individuals being unbeliev ably generous, stepping in where governments are falling aside, but it's not it can't carry it. You can't you can't deal with Ebola on this basis . You can't deal with vaccinating people, you can't deal with malaria bed nets, you can't deal with a really big multi-billion dollar things. Well, hold on. Some of these guys, the guys you talk about in your AI series, they could. I mean, this he he Carl said it would take thirteen billion dollars to feed the hungry of the world today. Okay. And the war in Iran is costing two billion a day. So stop the war in Iran, and Elon Musk is worth hundreds of billions. I mean he could feed all the hungry people in the world and it would be a rounding era and it would be nice to see him do it. So Elon, if you're listening Especially as he was the one who got USAID in the first place. Absolutely. If you're listening, step up. I know you're very, very uh anxious about global population collapse. Fantastic opportunities, support some of the countries in the world that have the strongest population growth and maybe invite them to the United States where they can provide that labor that you're so worried about. I can see the sincerity with which you're putting that. Final word from me on Carl. He said this thing which really kind of hit home to me. He said, we have been cut, and by the way, UK hasn't got a great story to tell here. The funding from the UK to the World Food Programme has been cut from 600 million to 200 million. That's two thirds gone. Yeah. And he said he t he put together all the big countries that have pulled back. We've been cut to the bone and he said this, we are taking from the hungry to feed only the starving. Grim, okay, let's take a break. I'm back for the break. This episode is sponsored by Starling, the bank that helps you organize your money, build great habits, and stay in control of your spending. But knowing how to manage your own day to day can be more of a challenge, especially when it comes to being good with money. That kind of self-assured self-governance could start with just checking your balance daily. And yes, it can feel like opening the books at the Treasury, but eventually you'll feel like the Chancellor of your own ideal exchequer. Of course you'll want to examine the data around your balance for that. There are tools like Starlings Spending Intelligence. It's an AI-powered search bar within Starling current accounts where you can ask a question about your spending habits and get an instant answer in app. Helps deepen your knowledge and make more informed money decisions. A bit like having a select committee in your wallet. Search Starling Bank to find out more. Good with money starts here . Welcome back to the Dresses Project Question Time with me, Anister Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Rory, somebody here with a wonderful name, Josh Prose as opposed to Josh Poetry. At the Unite the Kingdom rally over the weekend, Tommy Robinson, AKO Stevens Yaxley Lennon, explicitly told his supporters to join right wing political parties ahead of the twenty twenty-nine election. Given recent revelations about Nigel Farage's funding and reform UK's growing profile, how concerned should mainstream politics be about far right street movements transitioning into the ballot box? Well I think the first thing is that one should be disturbed. And disturbed by the number of people that are supporting them. I mean I was out, as many other people will have been in London, and I saw the edge of both marches and I saw How close were they? Well they were one lot were mostly around when I saw them around the edge of Hyde Park, the other rot were around Trafalgar Square, so I suppose the police were keeping a distance between the two. But anyway, it was it was impressive. Impressive policing. But it's pretty scary. I mean it's yes, the numbers were down , but there was all this business which I guess you wouldn't find out. Actually I I sorry, do correct me if I'm wrong. One of the things that kept happening is people kept picking up wooden crosses. And Tommy Robinson sent out a tweet with the Lord's Prayer in it. So this is all this kind of leaning into uh Christian nationalism. Would Le Pen's party or the AFD be going so strong on Christian symbolism? I've not seen it. Um I think I suspect some of it will. I mean, I mean in France it's the layout, right? So they wouldn't they wouldn't be g going to You'd have thought not, but they might they might do it in terms of 'cause I mean there is a sort of a streak of anti-Islam in all of them. Yep. Well more than a streak of anti-Islam. Yep. And so it was very, very deliberate. I mean I didn't go to the march but I was watching some of the coverage. There were these piles. You know how when you go to stop the war marches, I mean you have piles of of um placards. There were piles of crosses. Yeah yeah. Now I don't see Tommy Robinson as being a very Christian person in terms of the way he looks at other people and the way he conducts himself. This is so interesting is of course that all the leaders of the church are expressing serious concern. I mean we saw the Pope expressing concern, but you also most of the Church of England clergymen are horrified by this idea that you're sort of using Christianity to to chase this. I also again talked to people who um had relatives on the march and again the narrative was oh it was all very friendly, they're very normal people. Well, maybe. But the people who were speaking on the stage are are far from normal. Some people were banned from coming in. But the kind of people he's trying to get speaking are people who claim that Islam is a supremacist religion trying to wipe us all out. There's a particular guy in fact, wasn't on this much, but who they love retweeting, who's a great inspiration to Elon Musk, who claims that of the two billion Muslims in the world, hundreds of millions of them are engaged in a genocidal attempt to try to wipe out the rest of us. Many of them talking about expelling Muslims , many of them talking about banning non-Christian places of worship. A lot of this story, which we hear again and again on Twitter, Elon Musk's civil war in Britain is inevitable, right? And and when he said that, it got literally millions of retweets and likes. And here's my final point. Twenty-six percent of UK voters have a positive view of that march. And 50% of men aged 25 to 34 have a positive view of what's going on. I was very troubled. I do not like the vision of a bunch of people marching with crosses, swaggering around in the central London, going to hear speakers who want to expel all the Muslims. The reason why Elon Musk is so important is because his whole platform that he's turned into what he's done with X is the weapon ization of hatred and division. Um and you see a lot of that. And of course you will get people saying, well, it's because I'm worried about this and worried about that. This is where I kind of have to have a bit of difficulty with the Gary Stevenson point that we talked about on the main podcast is that you can't not confront this. You can't just pretend that it's part of a well the country's not really working very well. This is this goes way beyond that. People like Yaxley Lennon, they go way beyond that. And of course, the whole kind of infrastructure that's developing on the right of British politics is so interesting because he didn't just say , you know, get involved with rest ore or advance Rupert Lowe and Ben Deebe's parties. He said think about joining reform or the Conservative Party. So they're lumping all in together on the right as you have to hate everybody else on the left of you. And one of the very disturbing things for me as somebody who comes from the Conservative Party and are now seeing a lot of Conservative voters becoming reform voters, I was talking to a former colleague of mine this morning on the phone, who um is a former MP, saying on no account am I to quote him but he would be tempted to vote for reform if he thought it would keep Labour out. Two-thirds of reform voters have a positive view of Rupert Lowe. 61% of reform voters like Tommy Robinson, like Tommy Robinson, and 54% of them think non-white British citizens born abroad should be forced to leave the UK. That's more than half of reform voters. So this story that we're getting out of moderate romaine voting Tories that this is just the Tory party, it's all fine, there's no problem, they can just go across to reform. They're joining a party where more than half the members think Tommy Robinson's a good thing and think that non white British people should be made to leave the UK. You not were born in the UK. Anyway, so huge thank you to Evan, who did a lot of uh research on it, but also Hope Not Hate, which has done quite an interesting report on the British far right, from which quite a lot of these figures have been extracted. Now, final question maybe from me, or final serious question, which comes from Brendan Cox. Brendan Cox was married to Joe Cox, um my colleague in Parliament, who was horribly murdered just in the lead up to the Brexit referendum, and whose sister Kim Ledbetter is now in Parliament, has been leading all the stuff and her sister dying. Brennan Cox is running an initiative with Oxford University where he's asking people to record 60 seconds on what they think about community, which is then going to be fed into a large AI model, about which more later. Um and he's asked us to do it. So I it's a bit unfair to you because you've had no prep, but gone, give us sixty seconds on what you think about community. I've got my timer up, ready? No, I've got I've got ready, ready, ready. As you know, Rory, I am uh for an old man, uh sixty-nine next week, I am a great believer in young people in this country. Uh-huh. So I want to live in a country where we respect young people and where young people respect each other. Yeah. And I think that starts by teaching values in schools, by teaching history in the context of how we have become the country that we are, and being proud of that without feeling that we have to own every mistake in our past as well. So I want to live in a community where everybody is well educated , uh, where everybody is taught values of tolerance and respect , and where everybody feels that there is a there is a set a possibility of them making So just on your minute, Alistair. Here's my fifty-eight seconds. So firstly, I think we need to start with a sense of anger and shame at how bad things have gotten Britain. We need to accept that we have levels of poverty which are complet ely unjustifiable in the country as wealthy as this, that the situation in our prisons um with the homeless is solvable by any government that wanted to do it, that our retreat from international development assistance is a complete betrayal of the world. We need to deliver decent functioning servic es. And that also involves radicalism. That will mean cuts to welfare. That will mean unfortunately some civil servants having to lose their jobs. That will mean very radical reforms. It will mean localism, driven by figures like Andy Bernon, and it's going to build towards a positive vision where we know each other, we share values, and we have a positive sense of national pride. Okay. Okay. Was that bang on a minute? That was bang on a minute. Bang on a minute. Yeah. It got a bit rushed at the end. Yeah, well, okay. So the history point I thought was interesting. I mean, one of the things that I think reform voters sense is they worry that I don't know Labour elite living in London doesn't really resonate with the kind of history that they care about. Um and I mean it's gonna striking David Cameron asked what his favourite movie was, said it was Zulu. And clearly quite a lot of people who are watching uh who are uh conservative reform voters love watching Where Eagles Dare or uh The Battle of Britain and this kind of stuff. Um What was yours? I I love really cheesy action films. I love things like Gladiator. I think it's really cool. Yeah, I think it's really cool. Gladiator, that's really cool. Yeah. Why's Lady Things of the Blues? Ladies Things of the Blues, yeah. I thought you were going to say some weird Japan ese black and white nineteen fifties thing. Um do you think there is a question around how you tell a positive sense of history w you know, what replaces if you're Andy Burton, you're gonna be like quietly patriotic, appealing to the working class vote. What do you do with stories about the Second World War, which actually after all look pretty recent? You know, our parents, you know, our fathers were alive as adults during that time. Um do you have to abandon that entirely? Can you talk about that then? Definitely not. No. One of the things I loathe about the right is the way that they've they think that they own all of that sense of, you know, the military and war and fighting and fighting for values. What I don't like about the debate about history is this sense that you know we have to, as the the statues thing sort of brought this home, you know, we have to we have to apologize. We shouldn't necessarily apologize, but nor should we pretend that everything's been perfect. That we've always been this perfect country. And this thing about make Britain great again is all about going back to something that we've allegedly lost. Why do I would I define myself as progressive rather than conservative? Because you want to progress, you want to improve from everything that's gone before. So no, I I think history is incredibly important. So I I don't know really why. I mean you sort of you threw the question at me. I had no idea it was coming. So I thought I did quite well for my 60 minutes. If I had a few minutes, Rory, I'd have made it much more. I thought you were a bit policy heavy. It's a bit policy heavy. Um so what's happening, the Sanjay Javid explained it really well this morning. He's he's been involved in this with Brendan Cox is that you record a sixty second voice note saying what you want your community to feel like to be, etc. Hopefully with a bit more preparation than you and me. With more preparation. You could even write it. Yeah. And it then goes into some sort of amazing AI thing. And out of that will come a kind of assessment of what people mean by community. And if you want to take part, which we encourage you all to do, then just go to the link in the episode description. And it's really interesting. We we again I keep plugging back leading, but Audrey Tang, who was the AI minister in Taiwan, used a lot of AI to do government and consultations, and it's been done at a local level at American towns by MES. I think we may find that actually it produces surprisingly interesting things, not boiled down platitudes . But actually I'm quite confident that these models will produce things which might be quite powerful for politicians. Okay. Good. And by the way, we're we're coming up to the tenth anniversary. Tenth anniversary because we're also coming up to the tenth anniversary of the referendum. Yep. Which is why sorry to sort of keep poking Nigel Farage, I thought it was disgusting when he was arguing that he's five million pounds was given free security, when he said he's been the m he's the most attacked politician in the UK, right? Joe Cox was attacked to the point of death. David Amos was attacked to the point of death. So I'll just leave that there. But the the so so but what Joe Cox's politics is all about and what Kim is trying to do and what Brendan is trying to do is this sense that there's more that unites us than divides us. So I think I guess that's the big point. Where do we find the things that unite us? So on the radio this morning when I was come heading into the studio, they were interviewing people somewhere about, you know, whether we can unite, whether we feel more divided. I can't believe that every single person they spoke to said yes to that question. But every single person that was on said yes to that. So we're more united. We're more divided. We're more divided. There's more hate. Well it' its is it's just divine. But part of it is social media. So um we we should lean into this a bit more, but so question from Jenny, which I'm gonna use for for a massive tilt to link what you just said to what I want to talk about. She said, why don't you talk more about demography and birth rates? There was an amazing article by John Burns Murdoch in the FT who does this stuff on data, and he was looking at the collapse and birth rates. I was teasing Elon Musk about this before the break. But one of the big questions is why are birth rates collapsing all over the world, right? You know, often in some countries we're down to children having on average a quarter of a child, right? Whole populations are vanishing, South Korea , Japan's collapsing, right? And there are big ideas, you know, is it affordability, people can't afford to set up a home. And of course, what he points out is that can't really explain it because it's happened so quickly. So here's the key data point. If you compare how quickly you get 4G and then 5G coverage on the internet and connect it to falling birth rates, there is a direct correlation. As soon as people get on the internet and on their phone, they stop dating, stop going out, meeting anyone, stop having kids. Trevor Burrus, I thought the whole thing about it. I thought people were dating all the time by using that. Aaron Powell No, it all the data suggests that actually what you're doing is you're sitting on your phone uh scrolling around when you could be going out, socializing, going on dates, meeting new people and getting new friends. And it's really interesting because it's too sudden the collapse in childbearing to have anything to do with long-term socioeconomic causes. It's one of the other things for which this machine should be blamed. Yeah. And polarization, obviously, which is where you began, is the most dramatic example of talk, because these are algorithms of division. They get us all going by winding stuff. So we're all seeing images of people picking up crosses marching on Trafalgar Square. And we're either picking it up because we love it or we hate it. Yeah. But it's polarizing us. And the division between young young women and men, which is exploding around the world. Well, another reason apparently why they're not dating is young women are increasingly left wing. Young men are increasingly right wing and it's driven by what they see on their side. you know, masculine influence are so-called, they are driving men to hate women. You know, misogyny's on the rise in part because that thing. You're absolutely right, by the way. We're going to look back on this as one of the worst social experiments of all time. Yeah. Just I'll just explain to you, um the, AFD in Germany, they say that the low birth birth rate has been caused by sexual deviation and non-reproductive lifestyles. That is why they intend to ban gay pride flax. So there you go. Well Yeah. Well yeah, that's that's tells you a lot about the AFD. There is incidentally no empirical data whatsoever to back that up in any way. Famously they had the one child policy and then they realized the birth rate was um a problem so they then said you can have more children but it's not happening. And thirty-two per cent of Chinese people aged eighteen to twenty four, that's one in three, say they have no desire to have children. In twenty twelve it was five percent. So there we are. Okay. That's it, right? So we'll change . Trevor Burrus Well, exactly. What's changed from 2012 to 2026? It's not. That's a very short period of time historically. Yes, there are big socioeconomic things, but a change that rapid has to be about social media and technology. Well Alistair, listen, we've covered a lot today, as usual. We've done China and see we didn't get on to Russia Ukraine, which I think we should talk about next week, but we've done the China Xi Jinping Trump visit, we've done Ebola World Health Organization funding, we've done community, we've done social media and demographic birth rates. Thank you very much indeed. I've got can I just read out though the question that I've only just noticed, but maybe we can come to next week when we talk about Russia or Ukraine. Matthew, Trip Plus member from Billingham. I recently watched a documentary that Alistair featured in. It was a clip of Tony Blair and Alistair meeting Putin and I saw that Alistair shook his hand. Question both to Rory the Tory and to Alistair. Who is the most evil person you've shook hands with? That's the both think about that. We'll both think about