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Intelligence Squared
Rory Stewart on Trump, Nationalism and The Value of Rural Life (Part One)
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- [00:04]
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Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is Part one Of our recent live event with former MP and co host of the Rest Is Politics, Rory Stew. For over a decade in British politics, Roy Stewart saw firsthand how power really works and what forces drive communities apart. He served as a backbench mp, held several ministerial posts and even ran for Prime Minister before being sacked from a Conservative party he had come to barely recognise. Now, from outside the political arena, he shares his insights on global affairs as co host of the UK's leading political podcast, Stuart joined us recently at Friends House in London to discuss the state of Britain and the world today and his new book, Dispatches from the Borders. In conversation with Caroline Lucas, former leader of the Green Party, Stewart argued that to truly create a better future for all, we must understand the tensions that exist between rural and urban, between farming and the natural world, between the need to preserve and the need to grow, and and between local and national politics. Let's join our host, Caroline Lucas now with more.
- [04:12]
Caroline Lucas
Well, I am delighted to see all of you here tonight for this conversation and even more delighted to be in that conversation with Rory Stewart about his new book, Dispatches from the Borders, which is a book that I absolutely loved. And unless you've been under a rock for the past couple of years, you will know that Rory Stewart is the co presenter of the hit podcast the Rest Is Politics, author of the Sunday Times bestseller Politics on the Edge, and that for nine years between 2010 and 2019, he was the MP for Penrith and the Border. He has served as Minister for Environment for International Development, for Africa, for Prisons, and then as Secretary of State for International Development. Experiences that he documents in all their headiness and horror in Politics on the Edge. But this book is very different. This book does not focus on Westminster, but rather on Rory's constituency in Cumbria, Penrith on the Border. And it's based on weekly articles that he wrote as MP over a nine year period for the Cumberland and Westmoreland Herald. And I have to say I really warmed, Rory, to your description of struggling over those deadlines where you were spending six or seven hours, I think you said, on some of those articles, and late into the night writing these articles. But then it also struck me it's a bloody miracle that they actually ever appeared because you describe how you write them. And I just wanted to share this with our audience because I think it'll increase your appreciation of the book. So Rory writes often. I got into the bath for the last two hours, propping my laptop on an adjoining chair, trusting to the combination of cooling water and terror at Dropping the computer to. To keep me awake through the editing process. That is definitely something you should not try at home. But this book is a wonderful hymn to the beauty of the Cumbrian landscape. It is a testament to the spirit of its people and a powerful argument as well, for political reform. So Rory and I will have a chat about it for the next sort of 45 minutes or so, and then there'll be plenty of time for questions. But I wanted to start, Rory, with the place itself, with Penrith and the Border. And you write, I had never lived anywhere so elusive, so quietly impressive, or so improbably beautiful. And that sense of deeply rooted place comes over so powerfully in the book. So can you explain why this part of the country is called Middleland and what it means culturally, historically, geographically, personally?
- [06:49]
Rory Stewart
Well, thank you, and thank you all very, very much indeed for coming out on a cold Monday evening. And Caroline, thank you very much. If you've not had a chance to read Caroline's book, I would strongly, strongly recommend it. It's a very, very beautiful book. It's beautifully written, very, very thoughtful, and has a great sense not just of meaning and a vision for the country, but also a real vision for nature. And now Cumbria, Middleland. Well, this is really a story of a vanished kingdom, a kingdom that existed before England and Scotland, that spoke a language which was neither English nor Scottish, had its own line of kings, its own bards, its own warriors, its own epics, its own saints, and it first sort of hooves into view at the time of the Roman invasion of Britain, where this part of the country. So for those of you who I presume most people in this room have been to Cumbria. But anyway, the Lake District we're talking about and the English Scottish border, this part of Britain was then known as the state of the Cavetti with the deer tribe. And one of the wonderful things is that we know about these people because they found a tombstone from the man who was described as the Senator and Quaestor of the Cavetti in about 120 AD. In other words, he's basically the member of Parliament for Penrith and the Border. He's my predecessor. And I became completely obsessed with this man about whom we know very little, partly because what I sensed was the total nonsense of being a Roman member of Parliament and a British member of Parliament, in particular, the fact that his tombstone is very grand and gives him all these titles. But presumably, a bit like me, he spent most of his time feeling completely ineffectual, unable to do anything, and endlessly apologizing to his constituents for laws that were coming from far away.
- [09:05]
Caroline Lucas
We will come to that, just to say no, no.
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Rory Stewart
But Cumbria, I think, is somewhere which still retains that sense of difference. And it really came to life for me during the English Scottish referendum, because the Scottish referendum was all about clear lines on a map. It was all about saying, basically, there are two identities. There is Scotland and then there's the other, which is called England. And here was this place in which I was living, where really, if you were me, or indeed a sheep wandering back and forth across the border, there wasn't much difference between one blade of grass on one side of the border and the other. And indeed, historically, everybody, both in the Scottish borders and the English borders, spoke the same language, came from the same culture, sung the same ballads, and you can see it in the place names, in the agricultural practices, in the deep history. So it made me revisit my idea of Britain. And particularly, and I'll finish on this, made me realize that everything that I'd been taught in school about English history, about this very particular group of people who originated in Saxony and Germany and who set up a little kingdom in Winchester in Hampshire, this bunch of people, sort of Germans from Hampshire.
- [10:30]
Were sold to me as the story of England. And they completely ignored places like Cumbria, which were kingdoms that existed long before this bunch of Germans arrived in Hampshire and decided to present themselves as the English.
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Caroline Lucas
You call it the imaginative soul of Britain, which is a very beautiful label. And what do you mean by that?
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Rory Stewart
Well, essentially, Cumbria is.
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In two ways. I mean, firstly, I think it is at some deep level.
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What many, many, many British, but particularly English people probably think of when they think of England. It's very striking during the First World War that many young men fighting in the trenches had postcards of the Lake District as a way of remembering what this country was that they were fighting for. But it's also quite literally the birth of the Romantic movement. This is where Turner does his painting. This is where Wordsworth creates his great masterpieces, Preludes, in particular. These are the hills across which Coleridge walked. These were the lake poets. And actually, on the other side of the border, this is where Walter Scott creates Scottish Romanticism. So the whole of European Romanticism, we're talking now all the way through German to Greek romantic movements, comes from this funny area of northern England and southern Scotland, from those hills, from those ballads, from that sense of oral history. And for something that we have still in Cumbria, which doesn't exist in the rest of Britain, which is. Or exists in very little of the rest of Britain, which is the tradition of very small family farms and what that means for a sense of rootedness and identity. Yeah.
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Caroline Lucas
But it's in spite of all of that, which is a pretty strong set of accolades, it comes across in the book as if this is a place as well, at which Westminster and the politics of London simply do not understand at all. And so I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about the particular challenges that you feel kind of faced your constituents. Given that, I think it's fair to say that you've got a pretty dim view, really, of central government and their ability to kind of really get under the skin of the warp and the weft of that kind of community.
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Rory Stewart
Yes. I mean, one thing, of course, that was a real reminder to me of this is I remember I was very lucky in government. My bosses were Liz Truss, Priti Patel and Boris Johnson, and the first of these was Liz Truss.
- [13:17]
Caroline Lucas
And you must have done something really bad in a former life. That's all I would say.
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Rory Stewart
And Liz Truss.
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I remember saying to me, when I took over for my first day, I was in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs, and I was the Minister for the Environment and Rural Affairs. And Liz Truss said to me, rory, I think there's no such thing as rural affairs. There's no difference between cities and rural areas. Which I thought was a great start for the somebody who was the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. She then proceeded basically to explain that she had no interest in agriculture or in the environment either. But this was sort of striking. And every conversation that you had in Westminster was about trying to compare somewhere like Cumbria to the costs of doing things in somewhere like London. So to give you an example, broadband, Right. I would say the number one thing that we need in Cumbria is super fast broadband connections, because people need to run businesses, they need to run their farms. 25% of my constituents work from home. 92% work for businesses employing less than 10. Their only hope of economic survival is to have superfast broadband so they can communicate and actually get medical care and education and lots of other things down broadband. And of course, what people would say is, yes, but in London, you know, we can connect a house to fiber for £500 a house, whereas in Cumbria, you know, it costs many, many thousands because you've got to run the fiber. Right. They were up a hill. Ditto with mobile signals. We were told basically we were not entitled to mobile signals because not enough people used a mobile mast compared to what would be true in more densely populated areas of Britain. And so these arguments, which I guess my predecessor probably had, because when Willie Whitelaw, who was the MP for Penrith and Bourne in the 50s, took over.
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A third of the houses had no electricity and 35% of them had no indoor lavatory. And presumably the reason for that was that London kept saying, well, it's too expensive to install electricity or piped water for these communities.
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Caroline Lucas
And how much of the struggle, in a sense, of getting some of your secretaries of state to recognize the particular needs of someone like Penrith, how much of that was just down to distance and how much was it about rural versus urban? Because it just feels like in some parts of the book you get pretty angry. I mean, there's a bit here the problem is how to take the lessons of these very local encounters and hurl them like a grenade at the policy center. So you really get this sense that you just want to give them such a good shaking because they're simply not understanding what the kinds of issues are that you're trying to describe. Is that because anything north of Birmingham is another world, or is it because it is that rural versus the urban?
- [16:22]
Rory Stewart
Well, I'd be interested also to bring you into the conversation and get a sense of your constituents. One of the things that I felt very strongly is partly that the economic language that we exist under, so you can see it with the current government growth productivity efficiency scale.
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These things.
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Don'T mean the same thing. If 92% of people are working for businesses less than 10. And when the economy in Penrith and the border could mean.
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Literally walking down a street. One person is an environmental consultant, the next one is making chocolate puddings. The next one is a school supply teacher who's also organizing the half marathon, who's also volunteering for mountain rescue, the next person's advising for systems advice. And actually in some cases the same person is doing all those things.
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But it's not necessarily the case that if you went to a small firm and said to them.
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You know, I'm going to do a business training program for you, you're not productive enough, you're not efficient enough.
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That that conversation really makes sense. Because of course, maybe it would be more efficient to close all the hundred acre farms and have 10,000 acre farms like they do in New Zealand with three people and lots of sheep and no humans, but that would be completely missing what gives meaning and purpose to people's lives. So you've got a tension between what the government understandably has to do. I mean, the government needs to generate growth because if it doesn't have growth, it can't pay for the nhs, it can't pay for education, can't pay for defense. But.
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At the level of the individual farmer, they are living very tough lives, which they are profoundly proud of, on incomes of 17,000 pounds a year. And.
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I don't know how you explain that to a government that thinks that someone on 17,000 pounds a year has somehow failed when they haven't failed. In fact, they're succeeding every day to live a life they're very proud of.
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Caroline Lucas
It seems to me that there's just like a really profound lack of imagination from Westminster. I don't know what it is. When people kind of enter into some of those offices of state, they seem to lose some of that imagination of what it might be like to live these other lives. Because to answer your question, I mean, I think our constituencies were about as dissimilar as they possibly could be. You had the largest, I think, most sparsely populated constituency in England, Brighton Pavilion was like the opposite. You know, I could get from one end to the other in 20 minutes. And I think you've got about two hours.
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Rory Stewart
Yeah, but let me just to put you on the spot for a second. I mean, presumably.
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Even with Brighton, describing what everybody did, I mean, knocking on every door is a surprise, right? It's completely.
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Caroline Lucas
And what I wanted to say really was that notwithstanding those very differences in the kind of shape of our constituencies, nonetheless, I'm thinking back, for example, during COVID and the almost impossible job I had of trying to persuade people in Whitehall that being self employed was not just some kind of, you know, bit of pin money on the side. People who are self employed are people who are absolutely dependent on this money. And therefore the furlough scheme needs to take into account the. The self employed. And it was like banging your head on a brick wall. It was just like, unless something fits into the box that has already been preordained on a piece of paper. It was really, really hard.
- [20:12]
Rory Stewart
So one thing. And you live now more sort of, sort of East Sussex. Yeah, yeah. Because there too, I mean, I know that bit. So you come into Seaford and you see those sort of villages as you come through. Describing what people do in those communities is very complicated.
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We. And actually, one of the things we don't really admit in Britain is we don't actually know what people do. My county council couldn't tell me because actually we don't have detailed census information that tells us what everybody does. It's a very generic view on what's going on, what you actually find. If you were to, I don't know, if you get off the train two stops before Seaford and walk through those villages down to where you live and knock on all those doors, I think it'd be extraordinary. I mean, one person could be a telecoms consultant in Dubai. The next person could be an aromatherapist. The next person could be running, I don't know, Buddhist meditation retreat. The next person.
- [21:10]
Caroline Lucas
What are you saying about your Sussex and Brighton?
- [21:21]
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Caroline Lucas
I want to come to the because it's related to this, about the role of a constituency mp, because we kind of hold to the importance of that constituency link so, so deeply in this country, and yet I think you're a bit equivocal about it. You talk about what you describe as the radical strangeness of our democracy. One person trying to understand and then represent the separate needs, desires and dreams of 100,000 people. And then he go on to say, most of the time I'm not initiating or deciding, but instead doing that ambiguous thing called representing, which I think could also be described as juggling incompatible roles, managing my own ignorances, choosing between lesser evils and reinforcing energies which are already there without me. And I'm just not clear from that description whether you think that's actually quite a noble thing to be trying to do or whether you think it's overreach and arrogance or whether you think it's kind of irrelevant. Where do you see that constituency link, notwithstanding all of the challenges of actually acting on it?
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Rory Stewart
I think there's one thing which.
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Is strange about it. We're very aware now, maybe in a way, that people weren't 40, 50 years ago, about the problems of speaking for other people, of representing other people, right? I, I, if I wrote a book as an African American woman, people would question what I was doing representing that, right? But as an mp, I'm being asked to represent all of you and not just all of you, right? I mean, how many 500 people in this room I'm being asked to represent 10 times, 20 times this number of people, even in my constituency and then in the country, 70 million people when I'm in the Cabinet. And what does that mean? Right? It means that, and you can see this on Twitter, people will challenge me, understandably. They'll say, how can you represent somebody who's living on benefits? Have you lived on benefits? You know, how can you speak for a woman? How can you speak for any of these things? Right? And we know this, we know this is a big problem. I'm not getting overly kind of sort of postmodern about it. It's a problem. How do you speak for other people? But the problem isn't fixed by replacing me with someone else, because they too are not able to represent all the others. And so I'm schlepping around the constituency, I'm trying to understand the life of a small farmer. I'm then trying to understand the life of. I guess I think the word. It's probably unfair, but I probably had about. Guess. 3,000 retired school teachers from Manchester living in my constituency who love the lake districts and love walking in the hills. Right. So I'm getting my head around them and I get my head around small farmer. Right. But of course.
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That reflects something about me. I'm drawn to small farmers, I'm drawn to retired school teachers from Manchester. Am I as drawn to take as much interest as a Cumbrian? I don't know who. Maybe I like Cumbrians who work in quarries. But I struggle to relate to people who are working, I don't know, on the checkout or. I mean, and what does this say about me and my fantasies and my life and my class background? And then how about the fact that 53% of people have voted for me, but by definition 47% of people haven't voted for me? And that a lot of them disagree with me about a lot of things. They hate my political party, they disagree with my view on wind turbines or they disagree with my view on rewilding or I want to build houses in this place. They don't want to build houses in this place. So how can I, to cut the chase, speak for you? What does it mean to speak for you? Do you want someone to speak for you or would you rather speak for yourself? This is a bit of a problem at the core of representative democracy. I guess most of you quite understandably would rather speak for yourself than have someone like me speak for you.
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Caroline Lucas
No, I mean, I think it takes us right into those debates about citizens assemblies, for example, which you certainly speak about in the book in a very favorable way. And yeah, this kind of impossible job that we're trying to do. And yet I think having a constituency MP is a good thing. I mean, I'm in favor of a fairer voting system, proportional representation, but you can do that and still keep a constituency link. Would you do that?
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Rory Stewart
Yes. I think our current system is terrible and I think it's particularly mad at the moment. We've basically got a five party system, not a two party system now. I mean, look at the polls at the moment there are five parties hovering between 15% and the vote and upwards and we've got a first past the post system. It doesn't make sense. We've got to find a way of breaking the hold of Labour and Conservatives. I mean, labor and Conservatives got the lowest share of the vote in the last election achieved in any election since the Second World War.
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This labor government came in with a big majority, with the lowest percentage share of the vote of any government achieving a majority this century. The Conservative Party got the lowest vote share on record that the Conservative Party's ever achieved. Right.
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And yet we've generated a system in which Labour has this immense majority in Parliament. And I think we need a system that retains, and that's why I like the New Zealand system that retains some of those constituency links, but gives a much fairer reflection of what the different views of people are. And that's part of this representation point. Again, one of the reasons we're fragmenting is because we do sense that the Conservative Party, that used to be a big tent that used to be able to stretch all the way from sort of, I don't know, well, broadly from the left to the right, is now increasingly narrowing and is becoming more and more right wing, which then leaves this huge, gaping hole in the center, and nobody's really occupying that. And in our current electoral system, it's very difficult for anyone to occupy that space.
- [30:40]
Caroline Lucas
And do you have any confidence that Keir Starmer might wake up and see the writing on the wall and recognize that actually it's probably going to be in the interests of labor to support proportional representation before the next election? Because he could do it with the.
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Rory Stewart
Number, he could do it and it would be in his interests.
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Caroline Lucas
So how do we get him to recognize that? Because otherwise, I really fear, I mean, being very serious, I really fear a Farage government that is no longer an outlandish thing to suggest.
- [31:08]
Rory Stewart
No, no, no. I mean Farage because of the way first past the post system works.
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Whereas in the last election in 2024, Farage got a lot of votes and very few seats. As soon as you get beyond a certain percentage of the vote, it flips the other way. You then get far more seats as a proportion of Parliament than you got percentage of the vote. And that's the position he's now in. If an election was held today, the Conservatives would almost disappear. And.
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I mean, again, as Alastair keeps pointing out, the election isn't being held today, but were it held today, yes, he would be the Prime Minister.
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Caroline Lucas
And the fact that he has now really toned down his support for proportional representation for AJ has and tells you everything, because suddenly now he's in a position where first past the post might do him very well, because it means you can be a Government on, you know, 29, 30% of the. Of the vote, which is a scary prospect. However, coming back to Cumbria and wind turbines and rewilding, which are two things that you just mentioned. So one of the themes I think in the book is certainly around, you know, how do you make those really difficult decisions about. About development or not development in somewhere as beautiful as Cumbria? And you talk about wind turbines and you say that maybe looking back on it, there were some times when you opposed onshore wind where you might now have supported it. But then you ask this question, when is loving your own landscape or imposing infrastructure on someone else's selfish? And so I was going to ask you what you thought the answer was to that question.
- [32:48]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, well, it is a very interesting question. Right. So.
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Of course, when Cumbrians stand against things being done to them, they are described as NIMBYs, right? So if you don't want somebody building a large housing estate on the edge of your village, you're a nimby. If you don't want someone building a big wind turbine in the middle of your view, you're a nimby.
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And you're perceived as very selfish. But of course, the people who are doing this to you don't live in your area, right? The people who are cheerfully projecting the housing and the wind turbines. And actually not just that, right? Cumbria over the last hundred years has also been the place where London has decided to put the biggest nuclear facilities in the country. Nuclear energy generation.
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Nuclear production for nuclear weapons, ballistic missile testing sites, munitions depots, army training sites, whole valleys, villages were wiped out and put underwater with reservoirs. Other valleys were wiped out with the Forestry Commission planting conifer forest right across them. And the community was quite literally displaced and moved. And at every moment at which Cumbrians stood against these things, they were described as NIMBYs and selfish and standing in the way of progress. Right? But my suspicion is that often the people projecting this at them, and I think rewilding is actually the last chapter in this story.
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Are treating Cumbria as though it's a blank space on a map, as though there aren't any humans living there, as though this is a good place at which to dump nuclear waste, quite literally. I mean, we were about to receive.
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The nuclear waste repository for Britain, despite the fact that our geology, the kind of stones we have, leak like a sieve, leak like a conservative cabinet, Right?
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And there are bits of the United Kingdom which have a proper clay base.
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Oxfordshire, for example, would be a very good place to put nuclear waste. But for some reason, they wanted to put this stuff, which is literally radioactive for a hundred thousand years, going to be leaking into our thing with us, despite the fact the stone is not suitable. Why? Well, because you get the suspicion that it doesn't matter. So hence my question, right? When is it selfish for us to oppose these things and when is it selfish for people in London to be pushing these things at us? Because Oxfordshire isn't volunteering for the nuclear waste.
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Caroline Lucas
And this is a bit of a distraction, but what is your view on nuclear power more generally?
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Rory Stewart
I'm very torn actually. I mean, the more I got into the nuclear waste, the more I really took on board. I mean, I mean it's really, really a roar. In Cumbria we have an entire industry in Whitehaven where we are paid two and a half billion pounds a year to clean up nuclear waste which was deposited there in the 1950s and 1960s. There are these huge lakes, these kind of green glowing radioactive lakes full of weird bits of dumped equipment. And some very brave Cumbrians earning.
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Decent incomes subsidized by the government at the tune of two and a half billion pounds a year to slowly go through cleaning up 40, 50 years worth of nuclear waste. And.
- [36:51]
Yeah, that, that makes me wonder what on earth the economics of this thing are. I mean, I would like to be assured that this amazingly cheap method of generating electricity doesn't actually involve you spending two and a half billion pounds a year every year for the next 40 years cleaning up the byproducts.
- [37:08]
Caroline Lucas
I, I suspect it might, we can, we can discuss. But it just feels such a distraction when there are so many cheaper, safer, better ways of generating our energy.
- [37:19]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Connor Boyle and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and to join us at future live events head to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full live events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Square Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [37:58]
Rory Stewart
And Doug, here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual Mutual.
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Advertiser
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Rory Stewart
It's accompanied by his natural ally Doug Limu.
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Advertiser
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Rory Stewart
Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com.
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Rory Stewart
Quick choose a meal deal with McValue, the five dollar McChicken meal deal, the $6 McDouble meal deal or the new seven dollar Daily Double meal deal each with its own small four piece McNuggets.
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Rory Stewart
Prices and participation may vary.
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