← The Rest Is Politics
The Rest Is Politics
435. Question Time: The Migrant Return Plan, Colombia’s Drug Cartels, and Will Rory Join Corbyn’s New Party?
00:42:17
Loading summary
Transcript63 lines
- [00:01]
Alistair Campbell
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 the restispolitics.com that's therestispolitics.com the rest is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy and Fuse are now offering £20 credit and free trip plus membership if you switch to a fixed tariff before the end of August.
- [00:26]
Rory Stewart
They've listened carefully to their customers and the number one request was gas tariffs. So now at last, you can switch both your gas and electricity to Fuse. One supplier, one bill, one less quagmire to navigate.
- [00:39]
Alistair Campbell
It's also cheaper. Fuse gas and electricity customers typically save £150 versus the price cap.
- [00:46]
Rory Stewart
Today's political climate is full of talk about control and clarity. Well, Fuse have quietly exercised some, at least when it comes to your energy bill.
- [00:53]
Alistair Campbell
And they began with a mission, which was to make electricity cheaper, cleaner, simpler. And Fuse now supplies over 50,000 homes across the UK, all done quietly, efficiently and without a single campaign bus tour.
- [01:08]
Rory Stewart
Fuse's support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with real people replying in under two minutes.
- [01:16]
Alistair Campbell
So go to fuseenergy.com forward/politics to switch your gas and electricity to Fuse and get your £20 credit and free trip.
- [01:25]
Home Depot Ad
Membership Right now at the Home Depot, you'll find storage solutions made to fit your needs. Grab an HDX Tuff tote to protect your tools, or keep your sports equipment contained with reinforced snap fit lids. Or stack up and make better use of your space with bins and totes built to last. Whatever you're storing, we've got the gear to keep it organized and protected at the Home Depot. How doers get more done.
- [01:56]
Espolon Tequila Ad
This episode is brought to you by Espolon Tequila Slow, Sticky, Snoozy they call these the dog days of summer, but Espolon, they don't do boring. Welcome to the Mark days. Espolon tequila 100% blue Weber agave born to shake up your summer. Just add lime agave and a little attitude. Visit espolontechiela.com espolontequila 40% alcohol volume 80 proof Copyright 2025 Campari America, New York, NY Drink responsibly.
- [02:34]
Rory Stewart
Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question time with me, Rory Stewart, and me.
- [02:37]
Alistair Campbell
Alistair Campbell and Rory. As we're recording, my phone is pinging away with messages about the European Commission ratifying the one in one out deal, as it became called, that President Macron And Keir Starmer struck at the UK France summit recently, which looks very, very interesting, because I think I said at the time, I thought there'd be problems in getting the whole of the European Union to buy this, but it seems like they are.
- [03:05]
Rory Stewart
I mean, this is the deal which we've been talking about the shapes of for months and I've been very, very interested in, because as we picked up with my slightly unfortunate, grumpy, regrettable encounter with Gabrielle Atal, your friend, the former French Prime Minister, I really have felt for a long time that it's ridiculous that people are coming from France, the uk, on boats in this way, because France is a safe country and that we should have had a very clear deal saying that if people arrived, we would send them back to France, and that in return we should be taking genuine asylum seekers, you know, female judges, fleeing the Taliban, for example, and bringing them to Britain. And it's really good, I think, that they've put the framework of that together. Again, the devil's in the detail. How many are they going to do? How long is this going to last and can they put this into a European framework? But it's definitely, I think, philosophically the right idea. They may be screwing up the implementation.
- [04:02]
Alistair Campbell
And the reason why I thought that this might fall apart at the European level is because some of the. Particularly the countries that are really badly affected in different ways, Italy, Greece, Spain, Cyprus, to some extent that they would have thought, hold on a minute, why is France doing a bilateral deal to get those people who've gone to Britain coming back to France, which is the European Union, and therefore they could end up on our door as well. But anyway, whatever has happened within the European Union debate, that seems to have been resolved. And also another shout out for Jeremy Hunt. He did make another interesting observation. He said, you know, when Labour came in, they didn't say, this is going to be really difficult, really complicated, and it's going to take time to sort. They said, we're going to smash the gangs. So even as you and I keep saying we're talking about relatively small numbers within the whole immigration picture, we're talking about something politically that Labour have to crack. The other thing, by the way, we've got loads of questions while you were away, but given you've only just got back, I thought you might want a bit of time to sort of dig into it. I'd like to talk as well about the Jeremy Corbyn New Party. There's lots of interesting things going on there that actually some of them Bad for labor, some of them. Not necessarily as bad as people might think. But maybe we can, maybe we can come back with both of those next week, either in the main podcast or on Q and A. I was at.
- [05:27]
Rory Stewart
The North North Berwick Fringe by the Sea Literary Festival on Sunday morning, and two people came up and said, rory, would you consider joining Jeremy Corbyn's new party? They were both trip listeners, so there's clearly a part of our listener base that's very excited about what Corbyn's party could mean.
- [05:44]
Alistair Campbell
And you said yes, did you?
- [05:45]
Rory Stewart
Despite my love of his ears, I didn't agree on the spot, but I said I'd look into it.
- [05:49]
Alistair Campbell
The love of the ears is an in joke, unless you have read Rory Stewart's book very, very, very, very carefully. Now for this week, because you announced you were going to Columbia, we actually got a lot of questions about Columbia. Felicity Anderson here. Very straightforward. Rory, welcome back. I echo that. Felicity says, I'd love to hear your reflections on Colombia politics, people. What are your key takeaways?
- [06:14]
Rory Stewart
Oh, well, I think the first thing is that, of course, Colombia still has some very, very serious trouble, and we can talk about that. There are armed insurgents, there's a lot of coca growing for the cocaine industry, and there's a big judicial fight going on with the former president, the kind of legendary former president now being convicted in court. But as a place to visit, it's really, really lovely. I mean, you have to be careful where you go. But we went to Cartagena, which is this incredible ancient colonial walled city on the Atlantic coast. We went to the beach. We went to Bogota, which is right up in the Andes, and climbed up to the top of the hill where you're 3,300 meters, 10,000ft in the air. But most interesting of all, we went to Macarena, and Macarena is down in the savannah, the llanos of the southern lowlands. And it was an area where, until relatively recently, was basically controlled by a guerrilla group. In fact, formally, in 99, 2000, the government briefly granted the whole area to this guerrilla group. The Colombian government backed off, and FARC ran the area. And so all the time when you're traveling, traveling with the kids, you saw all this infrastructure which had been built by the guerrillas. You know, the bridge had been built by the guerrillas. The initial landing strip had been built by the guerrillas. There was a guerrilla radio station, and it was an area where this leftist group, which had emerged from the civil war of the 40s and 50s in Colombia and was Arguing for a particular kind of vision of communist revolution different to other groups. And there are nine different armed groups in Colombia currently having peace negotiations. But this group controlled the area. It was almost impossible to get to Colombia's 50 million people, but the terrain is unbelievably challenging. As I say, you go from these 10,000 foot hills to the Amazon rainforest and bits coastal regions and this huge savannah, you simply couldn't get to it. This area was first spotted from a plane in the 1940s and settled in the 40s. They just used it for massive coca production. And then they began working with the great cartels. People will have heard of Pablo Escobar, who was killed in the 90s, but the Cali and Medellin cartels worked with the guerrilla groups initially so that the coca production was got there. And I, I saw the places where the coca had been transported and processed, and then fights began between those groups. So then you had paramilitaries emerging, which were often working for the landowners or for the drug lords against the old leftist guerrillas. Anyway, back over to you. What's your sense of Colombia?
- [09:09]
Alistair Campbell
I've only ever been to Bogota, and that was when I was trying to help Jonathan Powell, who was supporting Santos, then the president, in the first of all the referendum, which he lost, but then actually did manage to kind of bring the whole civil war to an end and got the Nobel Peace Prize for his success. Fascinating place. I found the people really smart, really interesting, very hard to get away from talking about drugs. And I know that irritates them. But we also had a question here from. From somebody called Jonas, who wanted to know what we thought about Colombia, specifically with the. What's happening in the drugs trade. And I'm afraid it's not as happy a story as the ending of the civil war, because I read a wonderful piece while you're away by a guy called Cesar Alvarez, who's a lecturer in terrorism and security. It starts by saying, imagine an area larger than the Australian capital territory, twice the size of London, four times that of New York City, covered in cocoa plantations. That is the scale of Columbia's coca cultivation, according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. And Santos, for whom I have a lot of time and a lot of respect. It's funny sometimes how things that you think are going to work for you can end up being counterproductive. So two things. In 2015, the Colombian courts suspended some of the herbicides that were used to kill coca because of the concern for health and environment. And then a year later, Santos introduced a scheme where basically you incentivize farmers, you paid farmers to grow non illicit plants. And the trouble with that is that these very clever people, the Colombians, they thought, oh, so maybe if we start growing coca, we'll start qualifying for some of these, these new subsidies. So actually the coca crops doubled during his second term and the cocaine has really taken off in a, you know, right across Europe, right across parts of Australia's got a real cocaine problem. So I think it's a very, very, very mixed picture. I mean, Rory, an opium man, famously, but did you see much of the drug stuff going on?
- [11:36]
Rory Stewart
This area I was in was an area that was very much a traditional drug area and I was, I saw coca plants and I, I chewed a coca leaf in order to make sure that I can horrify the Daily Telegraph even more. But of course, all this is hugely ringing bells with me from many painful years in Afghanistan looking at poppy production and heroin, which was very much a similar story. You know, could you spray it? Could you turn off the water? Should you be paying farmers to grow things that weren't poppy? So an amazing guy called David Mansfield I worked with there, and what he discovered is that of course it is possible for farmers to make good legal incomes, but it's quite complicated. So if a farmer, for example, in central Afghanistan doesn't grow poppy, but instead has a mixed crop, you know, some apricots, some wheat, it can free up family labor, they can go into the town, they can earn some additional income, you can put a family income together that is higher, but it's often quite geographically specific and of course security plays into this. I mean, if it's not illegal or in, in effect, the police don't do anything about it. It is a cash crop. And of course the drug lords are able to put huge pressure on you if you, you don't provide. I mean, Gustavo Petro, who is the new president, is coming up for election in a year's time and he's their.
- [13:00]
Alistair Campbell
First ever left wing president, isn't he?
- [13:02]
Rory Stewart
That's right. And the first ever proper populist. Yeah, I mean, Colombia is quite interesting. It's the third largest population, third largest economy in Latin America and after Brazil and Mexico. So it's a really important place and it stretches all the way across, you imagine geographically from the Pacific to the, the Atlantic, just sitting below the Panama Canal. And it's the strongest democracy traditionally in Latin America. I mean, it didn't have military dictatorship when other people did. So on the one hand, there's this very strong story it's placed with. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is from Botera, the painter. So it's an amazingly cultured, educated place on the one hand. On the other hand, no roads through a lot of the country. I mean, if you went to Macarenas, where, where I was just with a family, if you had been there seven years ago, it would take you something like three hours to go 15 kilometers, because there's basically no infrastructure. You can't get anywhere you're dependent on. It's got one of the oldest airlines in the world, Columbia, because the only way to get anywhere is to land on these small landing strips. And I was hearing, not a podcast I necessarily would recommend for the general listener, but it was on the details of what Petro is trying to do with the armed groups. And even I trying to mug up for this podcast, lost the will to live. I mean, he's trying to conduct simultaneous peace negotiations with nine different armed groups. And as you can imagine, there's a difference between the Bolivar army, the eln, who turns out to be, it seems, with more of a Castro Che Guevara route compared to the FARC that had a non Castro communist route on the Venezuelan border. There's now not an extraordinary combination of coca growing and Venezuelan refugees coming in. And the government sent in 10,000 troops to try to deal with it. And that didn't work out. And all this is overlaid because this is the modern world with very progressive conversations about gender inclusivity, civil society, indigenous action, but which seems to be often an alibi for incredible amounts of paperwork, bureaucrats, a huge civil service of peacemakers which aren't making much progress. I mean, Petro's under huge pressure because the country's in danger of going down. And in the middle of this, we've got another repeat of what we talked about yesterday, which is the great charismatic former President Uribe, who with the US with billions of dollars of American money and American military, crushed the FARC before the Santos peace deal. So one of the reasons the Santos peace deal worked is that he went very aggressively with huge human rights abuses.
- [15:59]
Alistair Campbell
Against them, and then didn't support the.
- [16:01]
Rory Stewart
Peace deal, and then turned against the peace deal, turned against Santos, his former defense minister, because he thought it was too soft. He was very close to the paramilitary. And this case is basically saying that he was connected to illegal paramilitaries that killed people. And of course, now you're getting mutterings from the Trump administration saying this is not fair. So you've got Marco Rubio out Saying, this is a witch hunt. This is a great man. This is ridiculous Latin American justice. And it sounds a little bit like the Bolsonaro Brazil story again.
- [16:30]
Alistair Campbell
So are you saying that the. The relative peace that the peace deal led to and which led to Santos getting his Nobel Peace Prize, that is not holding well?
- [16:42]
Rory Stewart
It's very, very sad. I mean, it still has a very high homicide rate. There are still, in particular on the Pacific coast and on the Venezuelan border, whole areas that are out of control of the government, where people are being displaced, people are being killed. I think there are something like 1200 municipalities in Colombia, and armed groups are active now in over 300 of them. So about. About a quarter of them. It's still much, much better than it was in the real horror days when Pablo Escobar was romping around. It's definitely a place where, if you're thoughtful, is a great place to go on holiday. And I like to pay huge tribute to the climate. That's one of the most beautiful, fascinating places on Earth. Um, but I'm afraid, yeah, the. It's not the. The horror days before Santos, but it's getting pretty concerning how much of it.
- [17:37]
Alistair Campbell
Is about the drugs trade, because Colombia accounts for 67% of the world's total, which is up 25% from the. The. The year before. And I. You know, I read the other day, Roy, cocaine is now the most used stimulant in the Americas, ahead of marijuana, ahead of amphetamines, and ahead of opioids.
- [18:02]
Rory Stewart
American demand is. Is up twofold. It's a doubling in demand. And I think that just the last few years in the U.S. yeah. Yeah. And so it's. It's basically. This is a story about Peru, Bolivia and Colombia.
- [18:15]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah.
- [18:16]
Rory Stewart
And the way in which the Colombian cartels took control of the distribution of cocaine.
- [18:21]
Alistair Campbell
Presumably lots of deforestation, definitely.
- [18:23]
Rory Stewart
Although some of this is grown in savannah area rather than forest area. And it's all intertwined because these groups that began as ideological leftist guerrilla groups, and Gustavo Petro comes from one of these groups. You remember, the president was part of an urban terrorist group that in the 80s, stormed the Supreme Court, and when the military drove a tank through the front door, ended up with half the Supreme Court justices being killed. I mean, that's the group that he comes from. But these groups became increasingly intertwined with revenue in some parts of the country. So on the Pacific coast, there are areas now, I was hearing, where all the checkpoints are now manned again by the armed guerillas. And the armed guerillas are issuing your effect of national ID cards for you to do stuff. So it's not the bad days, but it's going wrong and people are getting increasingly worried.
- [19:23]
Alistair Campbell
That's very sad to hear. I actually looked up my diaries for when I went to Colombia. Just sort of jog my memory. And my overall observation of Santos was deeply impressive. Heart definitely in the right place.
- [19:37]
Rory Stewart
Let's try to get him. I mean, I've also spent quite a lot of time with Ivan Duquet, who's the last person. So if we'd want to do a little bit on Colombia, I think Ivan Duques Santos would be great to talk to you, because it does matter. I mean, it's a population almost as big as the United Kingdom. It's one of the few economies in Latin America that grew at 5% a year for a long time, didn't go through recessions that other countries went through, didn't go through much education, but is still, frankly parts of it, shockingly poor. I mean, the rural areas, I was seeing things that, you know, people living in tin shacks, without electricity, without water, in a pair of shorts. And honestly, I could have been in rural Kenya.
- [20:19]
Alistair Campbell
Well, Santos has actually got a piece in the Economist last week because he's the chair. The other thing is he's now he's the chair of the elders, the group of elder statesmen and women that Nelson Mandela set up. His article in the Economist is about trying to take the lessons of the peace process that he presided over into Russia, Ukraine. And I have to say, if you knew nothing about Colombia, you'd read it and think, well, this guy has delivered the most extraordinary success ever. But where he has one really, really important point, and this is something actually that the Norwegian Prime Minister also said, is that even as war is going on, you have to do everything you can to try to build the framework for the peace and that you hope to follow. And he's talking here about Russia and Ukraine, as was Jonas Gara. We'll put it in the newsletter. It was a very interesting piece. And he's absolutely right. He refers to Northern Ireland. And that's very much the lesson from that. I mean, Colombia had this, what they call the general agreement that was signed in 2012 and that that remained the framework the whole way through. And it was about recognizing victims rights, how you generate deep political participation, security guarantees and so forth. So there he was offering all sorts of advice to Russia and Ukraine, basically to get around a table and try and sort things out.
- [21:42]
Rory Stewart
Great. And I think be lovely It'd be amazing to have mom, actually, to have a Nobel Peace Prize winner in that way. And a little shout out again to my friend Michael Reed, who's been the key Latin America correspondent for the Economist for many years, who just extraordinary. I mean, he was in this area in Macarena that I was in, very inaccessible area. He was there 10 years ago. We went to see this incredible place called the Rainbow river, which is unique in the world. It goes basically red, green, yellow, blue, depending on the light. And it literally looks like you're looking at rainbow in the water, all the way down. But of course, when he was there, you couldn't get there because it was all controlled by the gorillas.
- [22:25]
Alistair Campbell
Let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk about climate.
- [22:33]
Rory Stewart
This is an ad from BetterHelp. At the moment, we're getting advice from everywhere. You just have to go on TikTok. Could be Alice's cold plunges, could be my attempts to meditate or the digital detox that I'm doing in Colombia. But of course, one of the things that we know is that it can be incredibly valuable to talk to another human being, somebody who's actually been trained as a therapist to work through these ideas calmly, objectively and professionally. And as the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a very diverse variety of expertise. They've got over 5,000 therapists in the UK. They've helped more than 5 million people globally. And you can join a session literally at the click of a button. Change therapists anytime. It's obviously not about fixing you, but it's about hearing yourself clearly, maybe for the first time. So talk it out with BetterHelp, our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com RestPolitics that's better. H E L p.com RestPolitics if you're.
- [23:40]
Circle K Ad
Thirsting for no, we aren't there yet. Kids won't stop crying. We brought some, but they wanted other snacks. Stop pulling each other's hair. And we made it 14 minutes with no screams Level refreshment. We definitely have that. Swing by Circle K and get a polar pop for just 79 cents only for inner circle members. When you're feeling the heat, Circle K makes your day.
- [24:08]
New Balance Ad
At New Balance. We believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what Running is all about. Run your way@newbalance.com running.
- [24:43]
Alistair Campbell
Welcome back to the Rest Is Politics. And before we get on to issues of climate, the Rest Is Politics, let me tell you, is, as ever, efficiently powered by our friends at Fuse Energy.
- [24:51]
Rory Stewart
And this week, one of the questions we're discussing is in fact, behind Britain's energy infrastructure is a lot of complexity verging on chaos, you know, so we talk a lot about the green revolution, but the nitty gritty of, of how you actually build things, how the transmission distribution works, is really tough. We've got a question from Violet Green. So Violet Green asks, why is Britain a global leader in climate ambitions, still struggling to connect clean energy projects, EV charges and even new housing to the grid? And who's to blame for this bottleneck between policy and delivery? There we are. Question for your friend Ed Miliband.
- [25:35]
Alistair Campbell
I blame the Tories, I do. No, it's a very good question. The first thing I'd do, Violet, if you haven't listened to our leading interview with Emma Pinchback from the Climate Change Committee, I thought she has some very interesting explainers about the kind of big picture on this. But we do seem to have a real problem in the UK at these big modernizing infrastructure projects. But you must have had experience of this kind of thing when you're at the Department of Environment.
- [26:00]
Rory Stewart
The first thing is that all this new electric based renewable infrastructure requires a completely different model of moving energy and storing energy compared to what used to work when we were operating off coal, gas and nuclear power stations. Because they could be big centralized things. You see them often on coastlines or on hills, and you could build a very straightforward electricity distribution network straight off them. Once you move to wind and solar, you're suddenly having the electricity generated right across the landscape into the ocean in many different places. And you're trying to work out how to move it around and of course, how to store it. What do you do when the sun's not shining, when the wind's not blowing? And then you've got this issue around ev. We interviewed the Norwegian Prime Minister who said that this year or this month in Norway, 95%, I think, of vehicles sold are electric. But of course, for that to work, you need the charging infrastructure and that means everybody's house. Just think about a city, think about London. How do you get fast charging infrastructure to all those cars on all those streets? And that's been a real problem because there's planning issues. A lot of people understandably don't want massive pylons running straight past their house. It's an expense issue. Building out that national grid is hugely expensive and I think Britain just, that's exactly what we're really bad at. Partly because of rapidly changing ministers, partly because the way of our planning laws work, partly lack of certainty. So we're in a weird world where we've got off coal, we've done huge improvements in terms of our net emissions, we're leading the world in things like offshore wind, but to really meet our targets. The thing that I guess is keeping Ed Miliband up at night, and we did touch this in the interview, is this whole question of the stuff that connects it.
- [27:58]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, well the government is trying to fix the planning system, but that is not going to be easy. But Fuse Energy is going to help in all sorts of different ways. The way to think of fused energy is to think of sort of Amazon prime for home energy. Whether you talk about solar panels, EV chargers, thermostats, batteries, starlinks with lots of installers. We're back to the theme of paperwork. You have to do the paperwork, the planning and the grid approval with Fuse. They handle it to the end, they do all the work for you. Deal with the planning, grid notification on customers behalf so you can sit back and relax. So for lightning fast and affordable home upgrades, go to fuseenergy.com store now. Rory, Jamie Kelly, what do Rory and Alice think of the far right parties setting the climate agenda in the eu? What consequences will this have? Especially given the particularly extreme wildfires raging through Europe this summer?
- [28:52]
Rory Stewart
The wildfire thing is very, very, very real. NASA has calculated that the number of wildfires has more than doubled over the past two decades. And you've seen these terrifying pictures in Europe. You've seen these terrifying pictures of course in, in California I was talking to someone who basically saw the entire hillside around their house go up in flames and their neighbors burned to death. 300,000 hectares burned in the EU, which is up 78%, almost doubled on the same period last year. Number of fires up by 45% compared to 2024. And I guess the story here is this big story which is that climate, like artificial intelligence and like international security and nuclear disarmament is something that needs to be done internationally, globally. And of course what these far right parties are up to is creating isolation, challenging international organizations, rules based order.
- [29:53]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, but they're also the, the denial is the climate denial, isn't it? That's the part of the problem, the euro. And it's not just the European Union. I think One of the most influential voices in this, I'm afraid, is Donald Trump. You had the Europe Environmental Protection Agency in the States recently downgrading its own commitments to environmental protection and to the responsibility for implementing climate policy. No, I think this stuff's terrifying. And I think the other thing I hadn't. I'm in France at the moment and we had a forest fire near here a couple of years ago. And it was terrifying. You could see it coming across vegetation and, you know, a speed that was pretty alarming. And then you see all these planes flying over, dropping, all this, you know, the fire retardant stuff. I posted my tree of the day, Rory, the other day, I found this tree that had survived the fire. This is one tree all on its own, surrounded by what was some growing vegetation. But the other thing I read on my. One of my favorite reading products, the Conversation, there's a very interesting piece about how the fires then produce land that is much more liable to flooding. You get these sort of weird trigger chain reactions. So that one disaster, you deal with that and then you get a different sort of disaster. But the big point is that we just have to regain the argument on just how bad, difficult, just how important and just how dangerous this is. So if you have people like Trump saying it's a hoax and Farage saying that, you know, it's all sort of got up by, you know, the woke lefties, then don't be surprised if we start to see more and more of Europe burning. That's what's happening.
- [31:43]
Rory Stewart
I mean, and as you say, the, the. This is going to create conditions that we've really never experienced. I was just beginning to sort of process what you're saying. I guess part of the point is that as the vegetation burns, then the stuff that holds the banks together begins to erode the soil. It's because it's missing the root substrature to hold it together.
- [32:04]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, we'll put this piece in the newsletter. It was very, very interesting about how the fires of themselves then change the weather patterns in those areas. Staying in Europe. Jacob Lang. I recently read about Palantir. That's the Peter Thiel tech company being used by the German police, which is making me uneas. What do you think about this now, Jacob? I don't know if you're in Germany, because I actually heard a podcast on. I think it was the. They had a big discussion about this. It is a huge issue in Germany right now because what Palantir are doing is they're basically, you know, Germany's Federal constitutions. You have the lender, the regions, which have a lot of power, including over policing. So what you have is a Federal Home Secretary, Interior Minister, who is very, very wary of Palantir. But Palantir is going around state by state and selling this thing called Gotham, which is a sort of data collection system designed to help deal with crime, terrorism, et cetera. But it is currently. I don't know where Jacob got that from, but it's currently a massive debate inside Germany.
- [33:16]
Rory Stewart
So Panther does a lot of stuff and it's been very influential in the Ukraine war because it's one of the integrating platforms that allows them to gather intelligence from cell phones and connect it to drones and connect it to other data. They came across my desk when I was in prisons because they pointed out that all our data on prisons was divided into, I think, 150 different databases. So if I asked a question like, you know, how many prisoners have a university degree? We simply couldn't answer the question. And what the Palantir system offered to do is to integrate all this different information, like a kind of octopus reaching out and put it into a data soup to give you these answers. They're also working very closely with the nhs and this has been another. Both a huge opportunity, but also very controversial. The opportunity, of course, is that the NHS has the best big data in the world, because since the Second World War, it's been collecting all this information on the whole UK population and there's no equivalent of it anywhere else in the world. These other insurance based systems just don't do that. And Palantir is saying, quite rightly, that if you really were able to read that data intelligently using AI, you could find incredible discoveries in public health and improvements and correlations between things you correlated. I know. You know, for example, maybe you'd find a correlation between people with blindness and people with some other medical condition, which you never would have expected.
- [34:44]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah.
- [34:44]
Rory Stewart
Until you'd looked at the data. But on the other hand, the fears about Peter Thiel, fears about data privacy, who's going to get this data under the Tories, basically stopped all of that happening. And I think Wes Reading has started it again. Where do you sit on this question of. Because you can see the benefits.
- [35:03]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. Well, if you remember when we first discussed Palantir probably a couple of years ago now, and we were very much, I think, both of us in the sort of, oh, God, Peter Thiel, this sounds all very very libertarian, techno fascist sort of stuff, don't like that. So I got a call from the chief Palantir people in London and got taken in for a briefing. I was very impressed by some of the stuff that they were doing, but I remained deeply alarmed. And I do find Peter Thiel a very difficult figure to handle. We talked a lot about him when we did the series on J.D. vance. He's somebody who doesn't really believe in democracy, thinks that these tech bros are and should remain masters of the universe because they're, they're cleverer, they're richer, they should have even more power than they do. So I am genuinely concerned. And that's the debate that's happening in Germany. And of course it is. In a sense, it's quite a philosophical battle between freedom and security. I guess because you were saying there that, you know, you bring all these different data systems together within the prison system. I can see how that could help what they're doing with the police system in Germany. Essentially, let's say there's a. Something happens and they think, well, this particular crime has been committed. You know, find me the 50 people in this area most likely to have the profile that might lend them towards that. Okay. And straight away you will get names, ages, address, criminal record. You'll get stuff from their phone, you'll get all the stuff from their social media channels, you know, past and present. And then equally that may help prevent crime, it may help solve crime. But what the privacy campaigners are saying is that it is almost inevitable that innocent people get caught up in that. So that's the debate that's going on so far. Bavaria, Hesse and Nord Rhine Westphalia have bought it. Baden Wittenberg, which is one of the big ones. They are buying it or they're about to buy it. So that's from Teal's perspective. From Palantir's perspective is 4 out of 16. And of course, if they then start to show progress on tackling crime and antisocial behavior and all the other stuff that people care about, then the others feel they get paid off.
- [37:17]
Rory Stewart
This is another sort of small point on, on that. The, the software is called Gotham. And of course Gotham is to relate to my interest in these guys relationship with superheroes. So, you know, Musk dresses up as Iron Man. Gotham, of course, is the world of.
- [37:35]
Alistair Campbell
Batman.
- [37:36]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, exactly. And of course, Batman is a sort of vigilante super cop. And so they've deliberately named it after that. And just as Palantir itself, of course, is a name from the Lord of the Rings. And a lot of these new companies come from either their names are being taken either from fantasy or from superhero fiction. And of course, neither of those forms of fiction are particularly naturally liberal democratic. Okay, now here's a question for you, probably the final question, but I thought it was one that maybe would really ring a bell with you and I thought was very interesting. So, Peter Lowe, as a mental health campaigner, how worried is Alastair about changes to the Samaritans?
- [38:16]
Alistair Campbell
Quite worried, I'd say.
- [38:17]
Rory Stewart
Tell us what's happening, Give us a bit of an explanation.
- [38:20]
Alistair Campbell
So basically, what's happened? So the Samaritans, everybody will know what the Samaritans is. They take last year, 3.3 million calls from people who are feeling lonely, hopeless, desperate, often suicidal, and you phone the Samaritans and you talk to a stranger. The proposals that are the subject of the question essentially are these, that the plan is to close over a hundred Samaritan branches. That's around half of the number of branches to move to call center type situations. You know, more people in the same space. One of the worries is that's going to mean more the larger towns and the cities and then some, in some cases for the volunteers. And of course, Samaritans is more than 20,000 people volunteer as Samaritans. There's sometimes they would work for. From. From home. Now, why the argument that's been put by the chief executive is that they spend too much money on what she calls bricks and mortar. The argument against that is actually that Samaritans is very much a branch organization. The branches run the local operation. They make some. They spend some of their resources running it and give resources to the center. There's a big debate going on. The Samaritans head office has said that they're putting out. They want to. To sort of listen. They want consultation. We should put in the newsletter an article that was in the Guardian that a Samaritan volunteer wrote objecting, making clear that they. That he thought this was a bad idea, that it would make the service less effective. Another person I spoke to, and look, I have no evidence of this, but it was a very interesting insight given what we've just been talking about in relation to Palantir, said that their fear at a deeper level was that eventually maybe people will move to AI being on the end of the phone, particularly for the first stage. Now, as it happens, I was involved in setting up an AI mental health service. It's called Jack, Just Ask a Question. Where a number of us, both people who are service users and expert psychiatrists, you can go on to Jack you can ask me a question, say, about dealing with depression. I've recorded literally 20 hours worth of answers. And then if you say, should I take medication? I say, that's not for me. Speak to a professional. But I can then link them to a professional on the platform. So there's a part of me thinks that's okay. But I think the thing that's really unique about Samaritans is, you know, and sometimes they're called the sort of fourth emergency service. And there are other. Listen. There are other projects that do the same listening project and so forth. But there is something very, very, very special about the Samaritans. And I think one of the things that one of the people who are worried about this was saying to me is that the Samaritans are a little bit like the royal family. You can't really criticize them very much. But actually, there are quite a lot of people within the Samaritans, I think, who feel very, very anxious about this.
- [41:27]
Rory Stewart
It's difficult, isn't it, for brands like that? I mean, I think the National Trust went through an existential fight in terms of its identity. My instinct is very, very strongly that this sounds like they're going down the wrong path, because I'm sure that providing for advice to people works best if you have a local branch network that understands local conditions. I'm sure that your volunteers are much more important than you're acknowledging and you're getting their work for free. And I also think they're probably underestimating that they'll lose on the fundraising, that these local voluntary branches also are very, very good at doing fundraising, raising local support for these things. And I think most charities. I don't know much about Samaritans, but most charities that have gone down this path of dismantling all their local branch networks and trying to centralize, have regretted it and often ended up killing a lot of the soul and the spirit of the organization and the process.
- [42:24]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, well, I think we're pretty much in the same place, but, you know, anyway, there you are. Samaritan's wanted. Wanted consultation. Happy to be part of that consultation over the podcast. I'm not sure of the time frame, but I think it's kind of over this summer that they want to try to make these changes. We shall report back at a later time. Anyway, lovely to talk to you as ever. Nice to have you back. See you next week.
- [42:48]
Rory Stewart
See you next weekend. So have a great week. Bye. Bye.
- [42:50]
Alistair Campbell
Take care. Bye.