Thanks for listening to The Rest Is Politics. Sign up to The Rest Is Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com. The rest of this politics is powered by our friends at Fuse Energy.
And Fuse is a green electricity supplier, which means they generate all their energy from renewables. And they're actually offering a new bundle for anyone who switches to Fuse. And included in this, you'll be pleased to hear, is some merch, Alice's hoodie, baseball cam. apps, mugs, the rest of this politics merch you may have seen on tour. And all you've got to do to get it is go to getfuse.com slash politics and use the referral code politics.
And so the merge is great, but more important is actually that if you do switch to fuse, you're going to find you get your energy cheaper than with all the other big companies. And they invest 100% of their profits back into renewables. They also now offer 24-7. and support which you can access through the fuse app so dead easy get fuse.com slash politics referral code politics find out how to get your merch and how to save yourself money
This episode is brought to you by Google. We've talked before about AI transforming the UK workforce, but Google's just produced some research which estimates that in total, these tools could save the average worker in the UK over 100 hours a year by...
And their research also estimates that almost two-thirds of jobs across the UK have the potential to be significantly enhanced by AI, which is a big opportunity, but it does mean people will need new skills to make the most of it. Google's also leaning into this upskilling. 2015, they've provided free digital skills training to over a million Brits in hundreds of locations. Just another way that Google is making AI helpful for everyone across the UK. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.
Looking to start a side hustle or become your own boss? Do it with Shopify. Whether you're selling succulents or stilettos, Shopify has the industry-leading tools to help you create, control and grow your own business. So get serious about selling and get Shopify today. Sign up for a £1 per month trial period at shopify.co.dek slash specialoffer, all lowercase. That's shopify.co.dek slash specialoffer.
Welcome to the Restless Polities Question Time with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Now, Rory, we mentioned in the main podcast that Schultz was in Ukraine. And Olivia Holman, hot off the press. Olaf Scholz has pledged $680 million to Ukraine. Will this be enough to help them win before Trump comes to power in January? So firstly, no, absolutely not enough to help.
Ukraine win. I mean, Germany has been very generous, given maybe 15 billion euros. But to put it in context, the US has given north of 100, 120 billion over the last couple of years. And Ukraine is losing ground fast. Russia has made a lot of advances, even over the last three days. It seems as though Russia still has a huge superiority in the number of men it's able to deploy.
Zelensky has been reluctant to conscript 18 to 30 year olds at the rate at which we'd expect. And we'll hear a bit more about that in another one of our leading interviews coming up. But it raises the bigger question. of whether if Trump decides to stop the $50 billion a year from the US, whether Europe would want to step up and find that money itself. Finding that money would mean some pretty difficult choices about stopping funding.
of health, education, infrastructure programs in Europe in order to give money to Ukraine, which it's not currently giving? Secondly, are they going to try for unanimity? What happens when Viktor Orban from Hungary tries to veto them from doing this stuff? smaller coalitions and thirdly
What do they do about the fact that there's still some kit that we don't produce in Europe? It'll be many years before we can. We don't have any real equivalents of the US Patriot missiles, for example. So we'd still have to buy from the US. And this is all about stopping. helping Putin continuing advances. This is not about Zelensky winning, as it were. Anyway, over to you. Look, the sums of money involved already are enormous.
I wonder whether Scholz will get criticized in Germany. I mean, it's always difficult when you're into an election campaign and you start doing these massive spending things. Because he's not always been, if you remember, we were very excited at the start of the Ukraine crisis when Schultz made that speech talking about this being a site and vendor, complete sort of epochal change and German attitudes and so forth.
And yet he's often given the sense of having to be sort of pushed into things, very, very cautious and so forth. So this is definitely a signal of real support and intent. Whether it's partly with Trump in mind, I just don't know. You know, last week, Rory, we discussed whether Trump might be a little bit less obvious on Ukraine.
than the cartoon. And then Anthony Scaramucci and I talked about that on when I was manfully standing in for Katty K. And I had a couple of calls from people in the American system. who thought, and maybe one of them said, maybe this is wishful thinking, but it is kind of the developing theme here.
He won't just be ready to give over Ukraine. And the point that Anthony made that Trump hates this label of being Putin's little lackey. Anyway, we'll see. Let's stick with America for a while. What about this one? Poppy. Which is worse, Hunter Biden or Charles Kushner? So Hunter Biden has been pardoned by his dad, Joe. Charles Kushner is the...
father-in-law of Ivanka. He's an ex-convict, dad of Jared, who made a lot of money out of being an advisor to Trump first time round, very close to the Saudis. So which of these do you think is worse? They're both bad, but which is worse? So I'm going to really annoy you and most of the audience by saying Hunter Biden's worse. I think it's totally shocking. that Joe Biden has pardoned his son. It's unforgivable, and it feels to me corrupt. Charles Kushner at least served time in jail.
I think it's ridiculous that Donald Trump is making his daughter's father-in-law the ambassador to France. But I hold Trump to very, very low bars. What Biden's done is just shocking. And to remind listeners, there is no equivalent in Britain. There is a royal pardon, but we use it very, very occasionally to pardon dead people. So Alan Turing was pardoned for...
being convicted very unfairly for homosexual acts after the Second World War, the great computer genius. The idea of using your position as president to pardon your own son from a criminal offence. I mean, hell does that say about the rule of law? Yeah. I mean, my criticism and my anger over it is more to do with the politics.
It won't surprise you to know. Where Joe Biden has a point is when he says that none of the stuff where they've gone after Hunter Biden would have happened had his name not been Biden. I think we can...
kind of accept that it's been it has been weaponized it has been politicized but that happens in politics yeah well yes exactly and can i just point out that that's exactly what trump supporters say they say none of these cases would have been brought if it wasn't going against donald trump both of them are saying the entire US legal system is prone to
political bias and they don't trust the rule of law. Yeah, I think Joe Biden is making a different point about Hunter Biden. He's making the point that had it not been for the Republicans going after Hunter Biden like it was the only thing in town. it would not have become the case that it did. Whereas what Democrats will say about Republicans, rightly, is Donald Trump, you have broken a lot of laws yourself. No, no, no, hold on. Let me just push this too far.
Obviously, Trump's point is that the case for which he got his 32 felony convictions, I'm perfectly prepared to believe would not have been a priority for prosecutors, that kind of case, if it had not been Donald Trump. And he's probably right that the incredible flurry of cases that have been mounted against Trump reflected a concerted Democrat campaign to try to make him...
ineligible for office or at least discredit him. And exactly the same is true about Hunter Biden. In both cases, these are people using the law to go after their political opponents. But in both cases, the proper response from the Democrats and Biden is to say, I believe- Believe in the rule of law. I believe in just process. And don't go around pardoning your son. My great hero, when I was at school, we read this story about this Russian general.
Torquatus. I think it's called Manlius Torquatus. Oh, I saw your tweet about that. My life is too short to look it up, but hopefully he'll tell me later. Yeah. So his son, he'd issued an order to his army that... nobody was to engage with the enemy. They weren't to advance. And his son was challenged by an Etruscan to single combat.
He went out to fight the Etruscan in single combat, defeated the Etruscan, took his arms. The whole army cheered. He came back to his dad with a big grin on his face and said, look what I've done. I've just won this great victory. and his father ordered him to be executed at once.
And you admire that? Yes. And the Romans admired it greatly. It was the story the Romans were told again and again. And of course, the point of the story is that not only are you not supposed to do what Biden does, you're actually supposed to prosecute the law with greater rigor against your own children. Yeah.
Anyway, Donald Trump has also, he's put another father-in-law into another senior job today, Tiffany's father-in-law. So there's a sort of big father-in-law theme going on. Listen, I think the whole pardon thing is utterly ridiculous. There's much vaunted American constitution. I mean, it's got some...
ropey bits in it. It really has. I just think the whole pardon thing is awful. I get why you wouldn't want to if you got that power. Of course, Bill Clinton did the same with his brother. He pardoned his brother over some time. It's shocking. Just in case I sound like I suddenly weirdly flipped from being Kamala Harris's biggest champion to Trump's, the Charles Kushner case for which he was sent to jail was absolutely beyond imagining awful.
So, Charles Kushner in court apologized to his sister, get this, apologized to his sister for soliciting a prostitute, sending the prostitute to her husband, seducing her husband. videotaping the encounter between her husband and the prostitute, and then posting his sister the videotape. Because his brother-in-law was planning to testify against him in a federal prosecution.
Yeah. No, they're lovely people, Rory. They're lovely people. I think the equivalence you make with the Joe Biden family is absolutely so well made. Brackets are being very ironic. Now, listen, Rory, there's a question here, which I think we should discuss. It's got a link. Philip, with two former Conservative ministers on the Question Time panel last week, is the pretense of BBC neutrality...
Finally dead. Well, let me answer that one because one of the ministers was Rhys Mogg and the other one was you. So I really don't think there's a kind of neutrality issue there. But there's another one. Should Question Time be doing longer deep dives? With the specialized panels for bigger issues like immigration, climate, unemployment, 10 minutes per question never seems to do them justice.
Also, is Rory's finger okay? I noticed your finger, Rory. Was that a pen? Yeah, it's really embarrassing. It was a red pen. And everyone thought that sort of scarred my knuckle in some fight with Jacob. Yeah. But what were you doing? Were you drawing on your finger? I was...
trying to take notes with my red pen before question time, which largely involved drawing all over the only space that you can find in the Times newspaper, which is the cartoon section. With the result that I realized that you could see on television that I... drawn red marker all over Benjamin Netanyahu's face. I saw that. Who was the cartoon of the moment. So I thought I was going to get in trouble for that too. Rory, have you ever heard of this stuff? It's called paper. It sounds amazing.
And you write on it with a pen. Get some of that stuff. That's brilliant. Listen, I think I know what your answer would be to deeper diastolic regression because you said to me when you watched me that that was the most boring question time you'd ever seen in your life.
We were trying to do these really serious deep dives. I didn't quite say that. I didn't quite say that. I did find it quite dull. Jacob Rees-Mogg has decided... to be even more courteous and polite than ever, because he's got this TV reality TV show coming up, I thought that Mariella Frostrup and Anand Menon were good.
on immigration. I liked what they had to say on immigration, but they were kind of slightly echoing each other. I saw you couldn't quite decide whether you were on the podcast talking like you are now or you were on a kind of cutthroat tv program and you couldn't quite get the balance right yeah well i definitely i mean i've noticed so for example i try to say something i often say on the podcast which is
We need to be very humane and honest about the immense benefits that immigration bring us. And we also have to demonstrate that we can control. the numbers of people coming into Britain. And I realized that, boy, you don't get any applause for that. And when it was put out there, I noticed that on Twitter, nobody knew how to respond because
The left were really alienated by my talking about controlling immigration, and the right were completely enraged that I said we needed to be humane and accept the contribution that immigrants make. So that's another problem. I think it's a huge vacuum if you try to do... Yeah, but I also think you had a very flat audience. It was a smaller than usual audience and it seemed very flat.
Well, now, good news, though, is for the listeners, because it's not going to be flat this week, is it? Because we're going to have Alistair Campbell and none other than our friend Nigel Farage on the same panel. Yeah. So what's your advice for that one, Rory? Well, you see, I mean, I'm afraid last time I thought, you know, the answer was to be kind of courteous, sort of do what Jacob Rees-Mogg does, kind of avoid by being very polite.
But I think you're up for a fight, aren't you? You're going to try to show us what a more entertaining question time looks like. It kind of depends what comes up. But I don't think I'll let him get away with a lot of his nonsense. And by the way, they've told me that they've, I don't know whether this is as a result of yours, but they've told me they've decided to go back to a panel of four this week.
Well, I do think five was too many. It's absurd. I don't know why they put five on or what they think. If you get a stopwatch, I mean, how many minutes in total do you get on the whole thing? It's not many. No, no, no, no. You barely, barely speak at all, do you? So you do all that research on the train, on the back of the Times cartoons with your red pen. Exactly, that's right, yeah. Yeah, and you get four subjects. You get about two and a half minutes on each, don't you? Yeah, exactly.
That's why podcasts and the long format of the future. Well, we're all going to be really looking forward to watching you. Right. Here's a self-serving question for me. Percy, when Rory talks about visiting Afghanistan, This summer sounded like the charities working there are still able to help women and families despite the international community leaving when the Taliban returned. What can we do to help this work? So answer on that, Turquoise Mountain.
which is the charity that my wife Shoshana runs, is still running in Afghanistan. It's supporting 4,000 female weavers. It's keeping education, health going in a very difficult situation under the Taliban. And this week... is an amazing thing called the Big Give, where hundreds of British charities who raise funds will have their funds matched. Turquoise Mountain is an example of that. I would encourage people to look up Turquoise Mountain, the work that it's doing.
Thank you, Percy, for that searing question, which allowed Rory to do, even by his standards, a blatant plug. While we're talking about plugging, Rory, what did I say to you before you went on Question Time? I have to plug the podcast and I completely failed. And what did you get? get a question that was basically about kim ledbeater who happens to be the guest that we just had the leading interview on the podcast
And I completely failed to say, as you would have heard if you'd listened to the rest of us politically. Yeah, or you can even be more subtle. You just say, we had this really good interview with Kim this week where she said X. Yeah. Anyway, never mind. It was terrible. No, I did walk off thinking I was going to be.
told off. And sure enough, I was. By the way, I don't want question time to think I actually watched the program. I watched it to see how Rory got on. I watched it to see whether the audience reacted when they announced that. Nigel Farage and I were going to be on, which they did. And I watched it to see whether Rory would actually make any notes that didn't make his hands look like he'd been in a fight. Okay, question to you.
What do you think about the chance the Georgians, so that's the country in the Caucasus, to break away for Ivanshvili's autocratic wishes? Remember, Ivanshvili is the oligarch who basically controls. Georgian politics, very pro-Putin against the war in Ukraine. Elena says, I'm a Russian living here in Tbilisi since March 2022. So hello to our Georgian listener.
Young people here really want the euro integration, but still there are a lot of older people in the country who do not. Alistair? Well, I think what's going on in Georgia is really interesting and actually quite inspiring. You've got... It's three nights on the trot now, thousands of people out on the streets. The latest provocation is the government saying that they're basically stalling on the discussions and negotiations to get into the European Union.
But it's becoming, you know, we talked about proxy activity. There's a proxy element to this as well. The Russians are very much driving the Georgian Dream and the Georgian Dream government. setting the direction that it's setting. And in addition to Elena, we got some really amazing emails this week from people in Georgia talking about why this matters so much to them. I think they really do have this sense of...
their country being at an absolute inflection point. It can go the Russian route or it can go the European route. And it's clear, certainly the people that listen to us, maybe this is obvious, it's clear the direction they want to go in. Yeah. Quick reminder to everybody. So Georgia, obviously... former part of the Soviet Union, and whereas Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, which were part of the Soviet Union,
join the EU, join NATO. And in the cases of places like Lithuania, their economies have been completely transformed. They've become double democracies. Georgia looked like it might have been on that journey, had one of these color revolutions. There was a huge amount of optimism around the technocratic Georgian government. Got candidate status, so on its route to joining the European Union and on its route to joining NATO.
And of course, that is real anathema to Putin. I mean, that's what really frightened him about Ukraine. The idea that NATO could be getting closer, the idea that EU membership could be coming to Ukraine. And so he's really set out to make sure that... that future is locked off. How could Europe get Georgia back on track again? Well, the most powerful thing it's got, which no other body in the whole world's got, which makes the European Union completely unique, is it can offer membership.
Offering membership means that you can offer free movement of people, access to single market, enormous amount of money and pre-accession, post-accession funds. America doesn't begin to have power like that. it can't offer those kinds of carrots to a country to transform. But of course, Europe's lost its nerve. So one question I had to you is whether maybe there's a middle ground of whether they could think about offering things like single market.
membership, which is what they offered to the Scandinavian countries before they joined the 4U, as part of that carrots to places like Georgia or Serbia to begin moving in a better direction. It's interesting reading Angela Merkel's book, how keen she still is on growing the European Union, continuing to give countries in the East hope that they can come in. I think the politics in Europe make it very, very difficult at the moment. So I think you will have to start looking at...
different kind of options. And I guess this sort of idea of a multi-speed Europe is part of what Macron talked about when he first came in. Talking of Macron, by the way, you know, I saw this wonderful interview with the president of Georgia. on one of the French channels. I thought, my God, she speaks incredible French. So I looked her up. She's French.
So it's amazing. We should get her on because she also speaks fluent English. This is President Zorabishvili, Salome, Zorabishvili, born in Paris. Georgian political refugees, became a French diplomat, rose to the level of ambassador, was sent to be ambassador in Georgia.
and then with the French government's permission became a Georgian citizen, then joined their diplomatic service, and she's now the president. And she's refusing to go because she says the election that they had recently was not legitimate. They cannot choose who the president is because they're not legitimate. So she's basically staying put while these protests go on. The sooner we can get her on, the better. So if our Georgian listeners have access to the president of Georgia.
Yeah. It couldn't be more relevant or more timely. That's a great idea. Yeah, she was great. Okay, Alistair, quick break. This episode is brought to you by Google. So Rory, you have just had your expert training on Google's AI tools through their free training program. So is there anything I could use? One of the things I think you'd really enjoy is called Notebook LM. What Notebook LM does is it uses...
a large language model to help you make sense of complex information which you upload so you can upload your own documents and it instantly becomes an expert on all the content of the specific documents you've uploaded so you could take seven or eight recent articles
that really interested you about what's happening in German politics. You could then analyze, compare, frame them, put them into bullet points. You could ask it, what are the contrasts between the different articles? What are the main salient points? For me, I find it really...
helpful in organising thoughts. Let's say I've got it in my head that what's happening in Thailand and Malaysia is a complete contrast to the story of Europe over the last 15 years. I can literally prompt it by saying, okay, I get that their economies are doing different, but
please suggest seven other aspects of Thailand and Malaysia, which might explain the fact they've been in a different direction in the last 10 years. And it will generate this. It doesn't mean I agree with all of them. And sometimes, you know, you might challenge it. And I can also say, could you please remind me what was the name of the Thai Prime Minister?
three times ago. How many military coups have there been in Thailand in the last 20 years? Stuff that would really irritate a professor on Thai politics. So it's Notebook LM. What you were saying is you're sitting there, you've got your kind of raw material.
As you go through, you have thoughts, you have questions, you have queries, you have worries. You can adapt, add, subtract, distill. Exactly. So that's just another way that Google's making AI helpful for everyone across the UK. This is an advertisement from BetterHelp. Now, you'll have noticed the evenings are getting darker here in the UK. The days are shorter and the daily swims are getting a lot.
colder. I use my gloves for the first time today. It's that time of year that for some feels great with the holidays ahead of us. Many love the idea of a cozy Christmas period. But for others and I quite often count myself among them, it can be a very, very tricky time of the year. We don't always feel wonderful at Christmas. It can be very lonely. It can be a very isolating time of year when you think that everybody else is having a great time and you're not.
But it can also be a great time to reflect on the year just gone and look forward to the year ahead, set some goals, or maybe just talk through any difficulties you may have faced. And with BetterHelp, you don't need to do that alone. over 5000 therapists in the UK already. They can provide access to mental health professionals with a wide variety of expertise. Find comfort this December.
with BetterHelp. Our listeners will get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash restpolitics. That's betterhelp.com slash restpolitics. So this special segment of today's show is brought to you by Google. Now, if you're a keen listener, you'll know that Google has been sponsoring the podcast and has been giving me some training in some of their AI tools.
All to better understand how Google are making AI work for everyone across the UK. In other words, they're giving me the same training they're giving a lot of people in Britain. They're also looking at policy and they've released a number of policy recommendations that they're...
trying to get the government to adopt. And they've got a question for us, Rory. Google wants to know which of the recommendations that they put forward in their AI opportunity paper, which we've read, which do we think are the most critical? at making AI work for everyone across the UK? Well, I think it's a lot of interesting stuff here. So one of the things they point to is all the productivity gains that you could bring in health.
And the very obvious one that we often talk about is that AI is very good at looking at x-ray scans, better generally than a human radiographer. But it's not an either or.
You know, we talk a lot about the idea of super agency. In other words, what AI is really doing at the moment is not necessarily replacing humans, but supplementing, sitting alongside them like an incredibly bright assistant. So in the case of health, AI can pick up stuff that human eyes miss because it's able to go through a far larger data set.
and isn't constrained in the way that we often are psychologically by what we're looking for. So that would be one really strong example and one that's really relevant to Wes Streeting, who's always talking about this shift from
analog to digital, which, you know, I'm always a bit doubtful of. But I mean, I think what Google's doing is quite interesting. I mean, I think they've recognized that the technology on its own doesn't work. You've got to think about it in terms of how it works with government and how it works with citizens.
So what they're trying to do is think thoughtfully about how AI can actually help the government in the government's priorities, whether it's health or the environment, and then think about how to make it feel relevant. and useful to citizens and then connect it to what can the uk do to have a bit more of a stake in this industry develop its own ai industries
and how we can also think about involving citizens in the management of the risk that could go along with AI as well as its benefits. So congratulations, I guess, that they're trying to think about the bigger political dimensions because often technology is just
throw out a tool and then assume that people are going to love it as much as they do. I also think the fact that they're addressing it in that political context, making the point that actually the countries which lead in this are going to be countries which benefit in the long term. And, you know, to be fair to Rishi Sunak, I thought it was what he did having that kind of AI summit was a very, very good idea. The current Labour government
is going to have to get on top of this, both in terms of its relation to government and government public services, but also what sort of economy we're going to build for the future. I'll tell you what I like about the Google paper. You keep saying that nobody in the world knows what these Labour Five missions are. Yeah. So I was very, very pleased and encouraged to see that they've partly related their entire strategy.
to the Labour's five missions on the economy, on health, on crime, on the environment, on education. So I just think that's clever politics from their perspective, I would say, because government is going to have to be persuaded that the sort of arguments that you raised are worth having in order...
to improve productivity and improve growth of the economy. Final thing on Google and AI. I think the other thing that's interesting here is that they're setting out to make sure that a million people in the UK already have been exposed to these models. The best hope of getting AI.
through a skeptical public, getting support is to make sure people know what these things are and have used them and understand the power of them and understand the potential of them. Because if you are pitching this kind of technology, to a skeptical public that's never used the stuff, it's going to be very difficult to get people to adopt it. There you go.
proving yet again, Roy, that you know more about this than I do. Concluding this special segment brought to you by Google. Lots to be excited about when it comes to AI, and we cannot wait to see what Google is working on to make AI work for everyone across the UK. Here's a great question, Rory. So this one is from somebody called Anna Hack Everding. I usually listen to every episode of your podcast, but I cannot muster the energy since the American elections.
and the UK press turning on the UK government, brackets, no government was out, fail, give them a break, it's not been that long. What can you say or what can I do to reverse that? The only thing I thought when I read that question was how is she going to know? because she can't, if she's not listening anymore. So if anybody's listening who isn't Anna, but is a friend of Anna, please tell Anna to listen to this bit of the podcast anyway. The short answer is you can't just give up.
It is depressing. We're turning on the news every morning. There's bloody Donald Trump appointing, you know, Mickey Mouse to be in charge of transport. Pluto to be in charge of the fight against crime. But, you know, we've got to stay engaged and stay involved. Yeah, if only if it was Mickey Mouse and Pluto. Here's a question from Nick in Tokyo.
When you gentlemen refer to someone with a foreign name, it seems to me you both attempt to pronounce it properly. But when referring to the mooch, you both pronounce his first name with a hard T, whereas he pronounced it with a soft thirst sound. Actually, I disagree. I say Anthony. Any reasons why PS loves the show? Yeah, I say Anthony. I say Anthony. I mean, as I keep telling Mr. Scaramucci, it is the English language.
And Antony is pronounced Antony. Wait a second. In English, Ajax is pronounced Ajax. Yeah, but that's because, Rory, the Dutch, as a sovereign nation with their own language. You can be a sovereign individual with your own name. That's exactly what this is about, isn't it? The mooch wants to have his own.
language as a sovereign individual. I'm glad that Nick in Tokyo noticed that we do try. I balls it up on Maccabee, Tel Aviv. I think it is important to give it a go. But the truth is, you know, we can't all be... We can't speak every language in the world. But no, I'm sorry, the Mooji's Anthony, as far as I'm concerned. It just sounds weird to me, Anthony.
It doesn't make you scared of him. Very good. Right, Rory, here's one. Lee Clough, I know both of you support mandatory voting. I want to know if you think MPs should also be subjected to mandatory voting in the House. If we can't abstain, why can't they? Good question there. I support mandatory voting, compulsory voting, but you must have the right to say on the ballot that you choose none of the above. Likewise, I think MPs should be allowed to abstain. very very rarely. What do you think?
Did you ever abstain? I did. I actually abstained on a number of important bills. Why what? Well, I think some of them I was traveling abroad as a minister. I mean, part of the problem is that you are registered as abstaining when you're not in the country. Weren't you able to pair up? No, no. The whips basically destroyed that system when I came in in 2010.
Oh. There's no proper pairing system left. I mean, I think the whips do a pairing. So when I abstain, they probably agree with the Labour whips that someone's abstaining on the other side. Oh, I see, but you don't go down as having voted, right. There's no defined individual. Yeah. Okay. I think there are things that abstaining is an important option because you're under so much pressure from the whips and it gives you a chance of registering a protest.
short of an outright rebellion. And if you took away that option, I think you'd find an even more compliant parliament in an unhelpful way. Well, let me throw this one at you because I know... We get questions from email, we get them on social media, we get them sent to the podcast. This one comes from a name we both know, Rage Omar. I'd like to turn your attention to what's just happened in Somaliland. Somaliland has just held what was deemed a completely free and fair election.
first in the world to use biometric voter registration. The incumbent lost and conceded, and there is going to be a peaceful transfer of power on December the 14th. Please tell us why this is significant in relation to the politics of the whole of Africa. Well, I think the first thing is that the really central is that yes, Somaliland is an unusual success story. It's more peaceful, more democratic.
than other parts of Somalia. But the trick is that answer than other parts of Somalia. Somaliland is not recognized by the UK or the US or most countries in the world as an independent state. It sees itself as an independent state, and that goes back to colonial history when it was separate. But in international law, most people see it as part of Somalia, and it wants to gain international recognition.
I have a lot of sympathy for what Raghi says. I've always been really moved and impressed by my visits to Somaliland. It's an incredible example in a really difficult area of the Horn of Africa, of a country or a province that's really making a go of it. But the problem that Raggi is not pointing to is there's some risks involved. Now, if you are sympathetic to Somaliland, you would say UK and others should recognize it and it'll be fine.
But people on the other side will say, no, you are tearing apart one of the most vulnerable countries at one of the big international hotspots of the world. So in Somalia, it's right along the Red Sea. And all these different countries, Ethiopia is trying to get a port by creating deals with Somali land. But UAE... Turkey, many, many others are trying to get ports dealing with other states, Qatar.
backing the government in Mogadishu. It's a very, very fraught situation. It's on the edge of starvation and has been for the last seven, eight years. It's a conflict almost nobody talks about. It can draw in. a lot of proxy actors and neighbors. And that, I guess, is the reason why if you were a risk averse diplomat in the Foreign Office.
despite the amazing achievements of Somaliland, you might suck your teeth about recognizing its independence. Yeah, although, Rory, I think if you were the head of station listening to the diplomat who sort of accidentally said, province, country, nation. You might be in trouble. I think you need to call back for retraining. Anyway, Raggy, thank you for listening and thank you for sending in your question. Here's one, Rory, from Ed Hillier.
What do Alistair and Rory think of Keir Starmer's dismissal of the petition to change the government, saying that is not how our system works? He is, of course, right. But do you think there should be more engagement with the two million people who signed it? Well, I think you can't ignore. 2 million people signing a petition, even if it's been pumped up by Musk, who clearly is now, I mean, it's just a small digression on this. I mean, it's unbelievable what Musk is doing. He's now...
deliberately amplifying far-right voices from Germany and Austria. He is determined to troll Kiyosama. He seems to be completely obsessed with taking down Kiyosama. He obviously was involved in promoting this petition, but you can't ignore that number of people. And petitions with far fewer numbers got onto the House of Commons. And we've passed a rule in the House of Commons, the petitions that get that numbers.
get debates. We may have to change that rule, but in the meantime, you've got to take it seriously, whatever your private reservations are. I don't agree. I actually think I would be very dismissive of this. It doesn't mean that there aren't people who
are very angry with the government. It doesn't mean there aren't people who think that they want to get rid of the government. But to talk about getting rid of the government a few months after it's been elected or a three-figure majority, I think it's absurd. And then when you do see... There's something like 150 countries, people from 150 countries were on this. You realize that it's a sort of tech thing as opposed to...
political thing. So I think there's a danger if you say, yes, I'm sure they're raising legitimate concerns about this, that, and the other. I'd be very dismissive. Okay. Barry D. Kelt, how much information would you share with America? If either of you were the head of Britain's intelligence service, this follows on from you teasing me about what the head of station would say if I had managed to call Somaliland a country.
If either of you were the head of Britain's intelligence service, how much highly sensitive information would you be willing to share with your American counterpart if that person was suspected of being very sympathetic to Britain's enemies? Over to you. Well, interestingly,
John Saw's ex-head of MI6, who we interviewed a few months ago, he had a piece in the Financial Times at the weekend, and he had a passing reference to this. It was actually, the piece was about the challenges that Donald Trump's re-election throws up. to the world and to Keir Starmer and what have you. But he mentioned this Tulsi Gabbard or Tulsi Gabbard or Gabbard. I don't know if it's a Maccabee or a Maccabee, but he asked that question.
whether you would feel comfortable sharing all your intelligence when you know that there's somebody there who's broadly sympathetic to your enemies. I think that is a serious question that the agencies will be... having to think about america is clearly the bigger player in all of this but at the same time you look at some of the stuff these people put out already and some of the stuff they say and you were defending donald trump over his um criminal stuff, right?
I think it's a little bit of spin. Don't rise to the bait, Rory. You were sort of coming out as Donald Trump's biggest fan when he came to his criminal activities and saying Joe Biden was far worse. Right. But the one that I think is just unforgivable is the stuff about his transportation of classified documents around the place.
I mean, you just can't do that when you're in that position. I'm not going to rise to your bait. Listeners can make up their own mind on the basis of listening to the beginning of today's podcast. But this is a good opportunity to do something that I very rarely do, which is to plug something. And I am plugging the rest is classified. The rest is classified is the latest iteration from the astonishing stable.
which includes the rest is history, the rest is politics, the rest is politics US, the rest is entertainment, the rest is money and the rest. And this looks at secret intelligence and what you'll find, I mean, they're getting into a great conversation. this week to launch which is on the amazing
amazing shenanigans around the US and Afghanistan. But when they get back to the story of the setting up of the CIA, this question of how much information you share was absolutely central because the CIA quite understandably thought Britain was completely rife with the kind of people you hate.
old school tie, public school boy, nonsense people. Anthony Blunt. Yeah, that's right. All these old Etonians, Guy Burgess. Exactly. And they were bloody right to be worried. I know, absolutely. These posh boys running around selling us out. Yeah, I think Philby maybe went to Westminster like Nick Clegg. Oh, okay. He was a working class sort of kid. Yeah.
And of course, they thought, listen, we can't share too much intelligence with the Brits because it's riddled with Russian spies and this stuff will get back to Moscow. I also remember having a meeting years ago with the CIA. about a particular country in the world where they kept saying to us very charmingly
of course, you know much more about this region than we do, and we're so sorry we can't share any information with you about it, because frankly, we don't know anything about it. And then finding out a few months later that the whole country in question was kind of rife with their offices. staff. The question of what you share is central and we have this thing which you were right at the heart of called the Five Eyes relationship where Britain
The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand traditionally share information very, very freely. But even within that, there is a limit. And with your most sensitive agents, you're certainly... going to be very, very reluctant to go beyond a need to know basis. You might share the intelligence take, but not the identity of the individual. You've been plugging so much. I'm going to plug the new European because in my column this week, I've told this very funny story.
about that Alex Younger told at this event we did together in Oslo. And we were being interviewed by this, what I describe as Norway's equivalent of Michael Parkinson. a guy called Frederick Scavlant. Gosh, was he just like Michael Parkinson? No, he wasn't just like Michael Parkinson, but he's the most famous chat show host, is what I'd say.
But he's got similarities. But he said to, he was talking to Alex about this thing about whether it's true that you can't, if you work as a spy, you can't tell anybody what you do. And Alex Young told this story about when he got married. His then-girlfriend, who became his wife, said that one of the conditions for getting married was that she wasn't prepared to live with this nonsense that his own mother didn't know what he did for a living.
So she insisted that he tell his mother that he was a spy. So they went to have dinner. They sat down and said, Mom, there's something I must tell you. I'm a spy. And his mother said, Oh, how marvelous, darling. So was I. That's very good. It's a great line. That's a great line. Now this reminds me of the great Michael Parkinson line as we just sort of transitioned. So he's interviewing Muhammad Ali and he says to Muhammad Ali,
I'm not going to argue with you. Muhammad Ali gets a beat pause and he says, you're not as dumb as you look. Okay. Final question for me. Two geniuses. The final question has got to be Ed Davey. Yeah. Yeah, there you are. Antonio Rodriguez. Will you be bringing out a Christmas charity song like Ed Davey? Now, this, for listeners who don't follow the grinding details of the horror of British politics, is the latest massive indignity vested on us by the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party.
who decided to appear in a Santa hat, dancing around, as far as I could see, at the bottom of some staircase in somebody's front room. I mean, what on earth? The whole thing was initially justified on the basis that he was going to win elections. Then he said to me, it was a brilliant tactic and look how well they'd done the elections. They did do very well in elections. But why is he still rolling on this? Roy,
I'm going to read out to you a message from sources close to Ed Davey. Yes. Hi, Alistair. Happened to notice that your rest is brother in arms has been having a go at our campaign style again. Thought you might be interested to know that our slightly weird TikToks have all been in aid of the Carers Trust. And we've released a Christmas single...
with a choir of young carers all for a good cause. So I just think you should lighten up, Rory. He cares about the issue. He's raising money for carers' charities. And it's... And how's it going? Has it become a top single? Has he made it to the top? I don't think so. I don't think so. But we should probably, maybe we should, you know, that stuff we did at the O2, we should maybe set it to music.
put out as a Christmas signal, what do you think? What, like an agreeing disagreeably signal? Welcome. To the rest. Yeah, I think getting the phrase, agree disagreeably in a hit song, that is my ambition for 2025. And per civilians, we could get that in. I failed on that one. Give us the line, show some perseverance in your best crooning voice. show some perseverance how about that lovely thank you so that's a good good end to the podcast thank you very much jolly good see you soon bye bye