564. Burnham’s Media Machine and West Bank Settler Impunity

What is the thinking behind Andy Burnham's communications strategy? Is it working? Will it keep working through the very challenging times as well as this honeymoon period he's living through now? Whether it's ranking pub snacks or collaborating with content creators known as Bus Anti, Burnham's clear intent to reach different demographics in new ways has already led to him being called by some the TikTok Prime Minister. The new Prime Minister is certainly communicating very differently to the last one. It's a strategy relying a lot less on the Westminster lobby and a lot more on social media. TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, although he's not averse to a long chat on the podcast either. And we're hoping he'll be on this one very soon. But in the end, while strong communications is a huge advantage to any politician in the modern media age, isn't it true that any Prime Minister ultimately will be judged on how they handle the really big challenges? 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To get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com slash rest is politics. That's nordvpn.com slash rest is politics. And the link is in the episode description. A better help ad. Imagine carrying a backpack every day. Every conversation, every mistake, every expectation. You probably wouldn't notice how heavy it was until someone asked if you wanted to put it down. Sometimes feeling better starts exactly like that. Better isn't one size fits all. Better is personal. It's therapy tailored to you to help lighten what you've been carrying. Match with a therapist who truly gets you. Visit betterhelp.com slash rest politics. Welcome to the rest is politics question time with me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And Rory, we're going to talk about Andy Burnham and his communication strategy. We're going to talk about settler violence. Settler violence in the West Bank. So let's get going. Where do you want to start? So much interesting and important stuff to get into. And I think we really need to talk about what's happening in the West Bank, which is underreported and incredibly significant. But before we do that, we have a question. Where is the line between communicating effectively on social media and becoming a semi-influencer? Do we really need to see Burnham ranking pub snacks or talking about vintage football shirts when there are so many real problems facing the country? I just want to hand that to you with two brief things. Firstly, of course, to remind the audience that you were Tony Blair's director of communication. So you understand better than anyone how a new prime minister comes in and organizes his communications. You did it very effectively, but you did it some time ago. And the second thing is maybe before you get into the analysis, can you tell us what you think he's actually doing? What's the sense of what's different about his strategy? When I was thinking about this, we had lots and lots of questions about this in the last few weeks. And do you remember we had Jeremy Hunt on the podcast? And he said, he said that thing, which I've thought about a lot since, because I think he's right. And he said that, you know, we have to, you have to learn from the way Trump communicates. And that doesn't mean we all go around, you know, lying and intimidating and all the stuff that he does. But what he meant by that, and this is something that I think we'd accept Keir Starmer didn't necessarily do, is you've got to be in the conversation. And Andy Burnham has definitely decided he's going to be in the conversation. And he's going to do it in a different way. So I was talking to somebody in his team in the last couple of days, and they were saying, for example, people are saying the TikTok prime minister. Okay. Why are they saying that? Because he's actually started to use TikTok quite effectively. His numbers are growing. And he seems kind of fairly regularly on there. What I've learned, this is something I thoroughly approve of. He's got 10 minutes in the diary every day. And the prime minister, I've said to you before, the prime minister's diary is such an important kind of commodity in government. It's in there. So 10 minutes every day, he's filming something. They'll maybe film a couple of different things on a couple of different themes. And then his team take them away and they package them up in different ways for all these different platforms. And if you think of that, 10 minutes and the reach that he's getting from that, it's a very, very effective use of his time. More traditionally, and this is maybe where Keir Starmer was more inclined to go, Keir Starmer would make a speech and then turn it into a kind of press conference, make questions. I always thought that was a mistake because it meant that the journalists tended to set the agenda and make the weather out of the thing that you were trying to project. I think what Andy Burnham's doing is saying, I'm going to make the weather. I'm going to set the agenda. I will do it by doing big sit-down interviews like I did recently with Laura Koonsberg on Panorama. I will do podcasts. Interestingly, I was talking to one of his team who said that the social care, so he made a big speech about social care. It was covered live. It was on the news channels. It was on the bulletins. The papers sort of, you know, talked about it a lot. But they actually said that the thing that where they're in the focus groups that they do, where they really got a sense of it breaking through was when he went on Elizabeth Day's podcast, that demographic. So I think what they're doing is they're thinking, right, he's a new prime minister. They're conscious of the fact that even though he's been around a long time, he's basically known by most people as mayor. He's known as mayor of Manchester. Most, a lot of people don't remember necessarily his time in parliament. So he's broadening his profile. He, I think he sees himself as being in that phase of his premiership where he's getting the country to get used to him whilst laying out some interesting big things that you and I have talked about. So devolution, vocational education and so forth. So he's essentially he's putting together the different bits of a communication, strategy around what is traditional interviews, speeches, all the stuff that, you know, you know, well, I know well from the time I did it. But then building in much more of this sense of the modern. I was trying to think, you know, who's done this before in British politics and where did it came from? Twitter and Facebook are basically things that get going 2006, 2007. Yeah. So just, just before Gordon Brown takes over. And by the time David Cameron is beginning to run and he becomes prime minister in 2010, he makes a comment before that election saying that people who go on Twitter are twats, right? So he's, he's, he's still in a mindset. And I guess Gordon Brown won't have done much social media, but by the time we were getting into the 2015 election, the conservative party had hired Jim Messina who had done Obama's 2008, 2012 campaigns, which were very, very much credited to brilliant use, not just the social media, but of super, super precise targeting. The use of AB targeting, for example. And, and we were sent out knocking on doors with incredible sheets of data, which was supposed to tell us exactly who was likely to vote for us. It seemed on the basis of what they shot for in Tesco's fast forward. We then enter a series of prime ministers. Only one of whom I would argue was ever any good on social media until we got to Andy Burnham. It certainly wasn't Theresa May strength. It certainly wasn't Liz Truss, his strength. And it wasn't particularly Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer's strength. It was Boris Johnson's strength. I mean, he had a real natural flair for a comic video, you know, going all the way back to have I got news for you and the rest of it. And you remember he went into an election campaign where he recreated the scene and love actually standing there with, with signs outside, which really was Boris Johnson as an actor. I mean, very, very few other prime ministers would have been able to do that. And I think, one of the things I was thinking about when you were talking about that 10 minutes is that for Keir Starmer, it probably wasn't just a choice. If you stuck him for 10 minutes in front of a iPhone camera, a lot of the Burnham things seem to be selfies. I'm not sure he really would have been able to perform. I think he would have found it very, very uncomfortable. I mean, Andy Burnham is part of a new group of politicians who are able to do it very naturally. I guess, I mean, you do it very naturally. I mean, you're often asked to do little videos for schools and you've got used to it. But my sense is I'm not sure the sort of Theresa May to Keir Starmer lot actually would have done that well at it. Now, I think what makes Andy Burnham an effective communicator for the modern age, even though there's actually something very old fashioned about it, is that he will talk pretty much the same, whether he's talking to you as an MP that he bumps into in Parliament, or he's talking to a head teacher who's showing him around a school, or he's talking to an interviewer. I don't even be picking up all these impersonators who have started to do Andy Burnham. They're all doing it in slightly different ways. There's obviously, there's the northern thing. Russell Kane does some very funny videos about, you know, I'm normal. I'm just a normal guy. Here I am, I put some white bread in a toaster because that's what normal people do. But I think in terms of how it relates to his communication style, I think Matt Ford, who you and I both know Matt Ford, very funny Labour guy. And he's got this thing. I don't know if you've seen any of his impersonations of Andy Burnham. I can't do the voice. But in terms of the style, he's got this thing. He's got this thing. He's got this thing. He's got this thing. It's basically this thing about, well, what he does, Rory, he asks a lot of questions, doesn't he, Rory? So, you know, he's talking about the economy. And, you know, what people really want is a bit of help with the cost of living, don't they, Rory? And he's got this sort of style of the question. It's very conversational. But then he made this point that he hasn't quite got the tonality structures worked out. So, for example, he'll be saying, well, I was at the football last night, Everton. We played really well and had a few beers with the lads. My head's a bit sore this morning. But I've got to tell you, Rory, if the Iranians don't get their act together, I'm sending in the nuclear weapons. He can't do the pivot. So, and I think, but what you're speaking to, and I think Mark Carney's got this as well, is it's actually, they're very natural. They're not being something they're not. So, when you say Keir Starmer wouldn't be able to use the 10 minutes as fruitfully, it's because he'd be overthinking it. And he sometimes just sounded so kind of constrained. And, well, is that word right? Whereas Andy, we talked about Jay Snardy yesterday today. He obviously felt this was probably in his 10 minutes. He thought, look, I've got to say something about this. It's really serious. And what he said was just, he was just speaking like a human being. He wasn't really making any political points at all. And sometimes that's, you have to do that as prime minister. And I think what's coming over is that it's very natural and very authentic, not too scripted, not too stilted. Here's another thing I want to give him credit for, because David Cameron did a little bit of the taking. Behind the scenes. So, you'd sort of see him when he was foreign secretary, walking up those very grand stairs in King Charles Street and sort of looking over his shoulders saying, you know, I'm going into a summit on this and the other. Most of the Andy Burnham stuff I've seen, there is a sense of division between what's going on in the cabinet room and what he's talking to you about. It's not that he's sort of, it's not a reality TV show where he's taking you in behind the scenes. It's more that if you are going behind the scenes, it's him sitting down with his Cambridge professor. And having a little chat about that or something, but it's, it's not quite that he's like, here I am at the cabinet table. The chancellor just made a rubbish point. We're not really getting that, which I think is good. We don't, we don't, we don't really want that. No, we don't want that. We don't want that. And also that, that, if you do that, you're then relying, although, you know, the, the pub video thing that the, the, the, the questioner mentioned was, that's the one that I didn't like that much. He was doing with John Healey rating pub snacks. Okay. I think we need a bit of time. A bit less of that, but a bit more of the, again, I'll tell you one word I thought was really effective. And this, this happened because of the, in part, because of the timing of the 10 minutes that they had in the diary to do it. It was when he became, I think the first political leader of any note, basically to come out against Infantino and the new plans on the world cup. That was a classic example of where you've got your 10 minutes in the diary. So normally what they're thinking of doing is using him to supplement. What is the main thing the government is promoting on that? So let me put, I'm interrupting here because this is your thing, or is something very associated with you, which is the grid. And I think the idea of the grid was supposed to be this week. The big story is adult social care last week. The big story is devolution. So the temptation would be to say, got 10 minutes for the prime minister. What we're going to do is we're going to use him and everybody else to say, this is what we're doing on adult social care. Instead of which we get Infantino. So I think most days he will be thinking, and his team will be thinking, right, we've got West Street is out today doing some big new announcement on defense. Let's get the prime minister in behind that. On Infantino, I think they basically just decided this is a huge story. It does have a political dimension to it. And if he gets in ahead of this, that is a good use of this few minutes that we've got of his time now. And I think that's a very good example. Let me get back to the question from our questioner, because he does raise, I think, quite an interesting point, which is what's the downside of this? I mean, the upside seems to me that Burnham is charming, likable. He's getting a lot of cuts through. Incidentally, here's a kind of small thing. You'll see a lot of people saying that he's a TikTok prime minister, run the Facebook prime minister. It's true. He's had a very remarkable jump in the number of people following him. On TikTok, he's jumped up to about 400,000, 400,000. But interestingly, most of the real cut through is still coming on Facebook. So there's a very odd thing, which is that he's got fewer Facebook followers, but his Facebook posts are getting a million, one of them in case, almost 5 million views. Just on that, Roger, that's really interesting because members of the team that I was talking to, they made the point that when he was talking recently about the prisoner release situation, the really big breakthrough was actually when he wrote a piece, I think it was the Daily Telegraph, old style, okay, put the whole thing on his Facebook page. And I don't know if that was the one that got the 5 million views, but that was where they suddenly started to notice feedback coming through. He's getting most when things are visible. So he can land a million views if he's talking about buses. But buses seem to me quite an invisible, tangible thing. Oddly, when he's talking about cost of living. Or politics. He's getting only a few hundred thousand, 100,000, 120,000, 160,000 likes. So sometimes a tenth of that, sometimes maybe a sixth of that. And the question then, this is my question, is that a bit of a warning sign for one of the problems of this strategy, which is it works best if you're talking about a bus and a bus route or a pub, but it's less good if you're talking about something that's more difficult. If I were them, I wouldn't be overthinking it like that. I think they have to know what are the things that they're trying to communicate over a particular period of time. The other thing that, you know, one of my golden rules of communications is when you, the communicator, are sick to death of saying something, that is the point at which is getting to the outer radar of public consciousness. Now, Andy's got that. I always felt with Keir Starmer, you know, when you see those footballers doing interviews, they're like I said, like I said, in other words, they think they've just been given a line and they're just going to say it. And if you're a politician, you have to say, you have to say things like, because you need energy and Andy's got energy and you need empathy because you have to connect with people. If you say, you know, as I was saying earlier, or, you know, like I said on the interview I did this morning, people just think you're trotting out a line. You've got to have that sense of keep saying the same thing. And you also keep telling us that you've got to keep saying the same things, but not in the same words, otherwise you sound like a total robot. He's quite good at making the same point, but in interesting different ways. And I think, and I think he does that. So to go back to the Matt Ford thing, you might be saying, you know, you've probably heard me say this before, Rory. Yeah. You know, he'll do a lot. He's got this very conversational style. Now, when does he get tough? I mean, he has had this pretty good start. We've had the prisons issue. We've had, you know, the right wing going mad because he put out a post message to everybody about, you know, don't put your barbecues out. But I think he's had a good start. It will get tougher when parliament comes back. And that's when I think this communication strategy gets more tested. And of course, the other thing that will happen, it's already happening a bit is that the traditional media will start to get pissed off. And by which I mean, the lobby and the Westminster journalists, they're going to start to get pissed off. He's got to hold his nerve on that. You can sort of see that point. Because, you know, presumably, you felt a little bit peed off when you discover he's going to go on the rest of his football with our friend Gary rather than coming to us first. No, because I understood it. I understood it. You understood it. Okay. Well, maybe you're more sympathetic. I'll be honest, Rory. Here's something. You may not want to hear this. If I'd have been Andy Burnham's comms advisor at this point in his premiership, I wouldn't have advised him to do the rest of his politics. Shall I say why? Let's hope they're not listening. No, no. But Rory, don't worry. It's all under control. He will be coming on the rest of his politics at some point in the not too distant future. But no, I'll tell you why I wouldn't have advised him to do it. Because you and I would have been interested, would have been nice, would have been polite, would have done his childhood and his background and all that. But we both want him to be talking more than he is doing about foreign policy. Okay? They know that. So they'll be thinking, right, we're in that period of getting the country to get to know us a bit better, getting to know them a bit better. So during the World Cup, going on the rest of his football with Gary Lineker and Michael Richards and Alan Shearer, it makes sense. As long as you're not avoiding the serious stuff. And that's why I thought, actually, again, it was probably quite smart not to do the Laura Koonsberg show on Sunday morning where he gets 15 minutes and then three people sort of say how crap he was or whatever it might be. he gets a full one hour serious sit down interview so i think they're thinking about it very strategically well here's the other challenge i guess which is the challenge of scrutiny so the problem with social media you might say without sounding too much like i'm standing up for the for the journalists and the lobby journalists is that on social media he gets to choose what questions he answers and he gets to choose what he talks about and i think political journalists would say in their defense listen you need us and you need a system where prime ministers feel under a pretty strong obligation to sit down with us regularly and take and he isn't doing that i mean there was real grumbles from the political editors who were invited into the gardener number 10 and according to tom bulwin all of them collectively were allowed only four questions between them so they would say there's a democratic point here there's a able to pose questions that he hasn't seen in advance, that he's not expecting, and he isn't necessarily that comfortable answering. I'm not sure I buy that. I'll tell you why. Because we are, as you know, a parliamentary democracy. And he rightly gets tested hardest, should be tested hardest in parliament. I think he will do more and more. He'll do lots of media. I think he does make himself accessible. But I think it's this thing, one of my other golden rules is, you know, you, the communicator, you, the politician, you have to set the agenda. And so avoid the things where the agenda is going to be wrestled away from you. So for example, and it's just not the case. So I used to do two briefings a day, one at 11 o'clock in the morning, one at four o'clock in the afternoon. Now, I was speaking on behalf of the prime minister. The prime minister's spokesman in this system does the same thing once a day. In the morning, 11 o'clock. Now, so that's it. Okay, you're not seeing Andy Burnham, but you are putting whatever questions you want. You are then also able to influence the government and Downing Street as to whether they then think they need to address some of these questions through him in a different way. If he spent his whole time just not engaging with journalists, not talking to journalists, then I could see that would become a bit of a democratic deficit problem. But I don't think he's doing that. Final ventriloquizing for you. For your friend, Tom Baldwin, the biographer of Keir Starmer, who kept telling us never to underestimate Keir Starmer and anyone who'd underestimated him paid the penalty. His final line was to say that his team seems to have taken pleasure in misleading the lobby journalists, that they really enjoyed, three of them, three of the inner circle, basically told the journalists that Shabana Mahmood was going to be the next chancellor. So much so that the FT, which is very, very careful following up, ran it. And then after the event, they basically laughed at the lobby journalists and said, well, that serves you right. Shouldn't believe anything that you don't hear from official sources. And Baldwin thought that was a bit silly. Yeah, look, I think if that was how it happened, then it would be a bit silly. What they say to me is that, and listen, I had lots of experience with this and it used to drive me up the wall because what would happen is a newspaper writes, Rory Stewart is being moved from international development to health. Okay. And then somebody phones you up and says, is this story true? And you say, well, I'm not going to talk about it. I'm just not going to talk about it. What the team in number 10 say to me is that they neither denied nor confirmed anything. Maybe in their body language, they did indicate steer away from Ed Miliband. And that led to people saying, well, the only people in the frame were Ed Miliband or Shabana Mahmood. And that is what led people. No, I don't know. I wasn't involved in those conversations, but I can see easily how that could happen. Okay. I think if you deliberately mislead the journalists, they're going to get very, very pissed off. And unlike the Americans, by the way, as you and I have talked about this, the Americans don't seem to me stick together at all. The British media pack is much more herd like. And if you, if they start to think that you've been misleading journalist A and journalist B, C and journalist D think it could have been them. And so they, you know, they'll push back hard at that. But I think at the moment, I'm actually in Italy at the moment, and we're staying with some friends, some of whom, you know, work in this international communications world. And I just said, look, we run back to the podcast with Roy Stewart. We're going to talk about Andy Burnham's comms. What do you think about it? And they also think he's absolutely nailing it. But you think where the question is absolutely right, though, in the end, it is about what are the big decisions you're going to take? What is the economic strategy you're going to pursue? What is your foreign policy? These big questions are what ultimately will define success or failure, not, you know, how many views he gets on TikTok. Well, also, what a new world he's in. I mean, it's, I was looking at this amazing Reuters report, which has been done by Reuters Institute report from Oxford University, looking at where people get their news from. Again, we can share that in the newsletter, but the numbers are absolutely staggering. I mean, the number of people who say they basically are not interested in the news has gone from 16% to about 25%. The number of people whose primary source of information comes either from social media or from people like us, right, podcasts, is now more than the people who get their information from newspapers and television. So it's gone above 50%. And even within, I mean, we know print media is collapsing, something we've talked about a lot. And we know that television news watching is going down. Maybe less reported is the fact that traffic to the newspaper's own websites and content is dropping very dramatically too. I saw a, you know, really interesting example of this. You can see it again and again, if you go on X and you see what these companies are having to do to try to get people in. I saw one of the most kind of big blue chip names in British journalism trying to work out how to register on their website and see if they can offer them a few free articles a month. How do you think you do that in the modern world? Again, do you imagine that you're the economist or the FT and you're trying to get people to register and get three free articles? How would you do it on X? Have you got an answer? Have you got a good answer? Yeah, I've got an answer. Yeah, yeah, I've got an answer. Go on, tell me what it is. So what you do is you post something saying, how to relax on your holiday and get off your phone. Click here, free registration, and you can read the article. In other words, you're one of the big blue chip news organizations, but you're beginning to believe that the best way of getting people to register is to send sort of lifestyle holiday advice. I think that sounds terrible. Yeah. That's the opposite of what I would say. Absolutely. I'm not having that at all. If that's the FT or the economist or Bloomberg or Politico, no, I don't support that strategy at all. But you know, look, I'm nearly 70, Rory, maybe I'm just sort of out of all this. But it's interesting. I like talking to, I had a really good chat with one of his comms team about, you know, because what I think is going on, I don't think they're obsessing about it. The thing I used to loathe about doing the job that I did with Tony Blair was the sense I had that the journalists are never happier than when they're actually talking about themselves and their own trade. And that's why, you know, whatever strengths or weaknesses or mistakes, whatever I made, that's what really used to drive me mad about my relationship with them. And I think that's the thing that I'm really happy about. I was always conscious of the fact that they were interested in me in large part because they were so interested in themselves. And so I like the idea of maybe think that Andy Burnham, you know, I hear he still reads the newspapers. I think we need to iron that one out, but he still sort of gets the papers. And of course, the worst thing about all government buildings, I don't know why they do it. They leave the newspapers lying about everywhere. So if you're waiting to see somebody and there's the Daily Express or the Daily Mail there, you know, you're tempted to pick it up. No, don't, don't waste your time. It's going to get inside your head and knock you off track. So I think that they shouldn't overthink it. They know he's very, at the moment he's popular. He's had a good start, but you're now going to build up to the party conference, return to parliament. The big stuff has to start happening. And around it, you build a communication strategy, but his job is, that's a small part of it. And so the question, is absolutely right. You and I, journalists will talk about his comms. He'll think about it a bit, but don't think about it too much. And he's so naturally good at it in terms of this style. that he has it's going to grate on some people and already people are saying you know when will this tiktok nonsense end and all that just ignore it because if he was only doing tiktok people would think he was a joke but they see him doing tiktok they see him doing the big speech they're going to see him in parliament don't underestimate how important that's going to be when parliament comes back so i think he's doing pretty well i do think the tone has been very good i mean he's not a comedian it's not boris johnson he's not even like george maloney he's not actually trying to generate content by doing outrageous things he's certainly not trump he and nor is he showing off i mean there's not a sense of kind of massive personal vanity or projection or overly selling i mean so i think no i think it's great well before we go to the break um you had a little break from uh this sort of intense podcast work and allowed me to do a three-part miniseries with steve rotherham metro mayor of liverpool city region huge friend and very close political ally of andy burnham and steve and i sat down and we've done this three-part series which we're calling becoming burnham and it traces how andy burnham went from a teenager radicalized by thatcher era liverpool to being our seventh prime minister in just over a decade you can hear about all sorts of things this is all from steve andy burnham's imposter syndrome catholic guilt complex we're going to hear about andy burnham the dj andy burnham the footballer very interesting on how his word humiliated he felt losing particularly the second leadership election the one that was won by jeremy corbyn an astonishing story about how andy burnham actually found out about the manchester arena bombing which will alarm some people but there we are his big beef with boris johnson and the battle for covid funding manchesterism and all that andy burnham and steve and above all maybe steve's very well-informed predictions of how britain is going to develop under andy burnham so that's all coming up on becoming burnham you won't want to miss it so sign up at the rest is politics.com here's a quick taster of the series that i've done with steve rotherham who'd want to be prime minister of this country on monday 17th july 2026 the uk got its seventh prime minister in just over a decade andy murray burnham some call him the king of the north others a vibes leader all warmth no weight well i'm sitting down with the man who knows him better than anyone steve rotherham metro mayor of the local city region i got introduced as andy's bezzy mate so how do you think he's feeling right now he's probably thinking how did this all happen just weeks into his new job as mayor of manchester burnham has to lead a city in shock breaking news out of greater manchester phoned andy phone rings out phones andy again the phone in manchester a bomb's gone off at the arena can you get the girls out of manchester do we get them out now good evening the next pretty defining moment was covid protect our nhs stay at home and save lives and there was boris johnson trying to play me and him off against each other stupidly believing somehow that we weren't phoning each other every night every time i had a conversation with johnson i'd be telling andy and vice versa a frustration of a prime minister the political lead in this country playing politics during one of the most difficult times that any of us have ever been through andy's people skills are very very good and yet his relationship with kia it seems to me did very quickly become a bad one yeah do you think if he had been allowed to stand in gorton dental that you might have had andy back in they didn't want all the best players on the pitch we're gonna squander this three-figure majority and we're gonna lose the next election as an idol for us the first set of local elections frightened me the second set literally had me fired of what might come next to hear my three-part series with steve rotherham becoming burnham sign up at the rest is politics.com and just a reminder that members have access to a whole range of brilliant series including caroline lucas's new series on climate and national security my series with matt clifford on artificial intelligence alice's deep dive on populism the story we both did looking into the real jd vance and much much more when we come back from the break we'll get into something completely at the other end of the scale we're going to talk about which is settler violence the west bank and what's happening in israel palestine at the moment hello everybody it is dominic sandbrook here from the premier goalhanger podcast the rest is history and i wanted to tell you about a new series that we have out this week it is about the troubles in northern ireland now of course this is one of the great landmark events one of the darkest moments really in modern british history it pitted neighbor against neighbor and set the streets of deed of britain ablaze now i can't exaggerate how important this story is in fact i think in britain we don't talk about this as often as we should you had a low level civil war in part of the united kingdom you had in 1972 almost 500 people dying in a single year it changed the way i think that britain thought about ireland but also the way that britain thought about itself and of course it was a constant factor in a lot of people's daily lives if you want a deep dive into perhaps the darkest moment in modern british history then join us this week on the rest is wherever you get your podcasts the great game strategic struggle between britain and russia we assess a premise that with high confidence it was russian holding the russians accountable is world war three they took down a british passenger jet containing 350 people man in the kremlin is playing alex got to ask yourself you want to play or not you're the prime minister you've done nothing we would need to understand the policy context all the relevant context will be structured as a framework today disseminated in a way that will be used as a framework for the future of the future of the country you're going to go into an operation order or frago a frago that says to kill the president of russia yes new from gold hangar who is going to be able to pull this off you're my soldier are you sergeant tom mcduff duffy an audio drama journey like no other men like duffy they are our most valuable weapons devised as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller have two times friendly where britain plays its strongest hand he's the best against its strongest foe bear hunt available now wherever you get your podcasts so welcome back to the rest of politics question time with me rory stewart and me alistair campbell rory nor trip plus member from wiltshire in light of palestinians being besieged in their own homes in kusra in the west bank and the increasing expulsion of palestinians by israeli settlers in east jerusalem what can be done to rein in the terror wrought by extremist settlers on palestinian communities is the world doomed to watch helplessly until america ends its unequivocal support let me begin with two quotes from members of the israeli knesset a minister and a former minister to set what seems to be happening in israeli politics here's one of them i think targeted killings should be carried out every night 30 or 40 not only those who pose a danger if there are those who are not worthy of life they are not people in fact i'm already complimenting them by calling them people that's a quote from one minister a minister think of it so really interesting because you'll pick up that there's a very interesting echo there he's using him an equivalent of a german word yeah lebenswertesleben you know people who are not people unpeople here's a quote from another another minister former minister mirav cohen who's more from the center villages are being attacked communities deliberately driven from their homes sheep are being slaughtered orchards people are being attacked because they are arabs this is indeed terrorism it is jewish terrorism so that's mirav cohen talking about what is now happening in the west bank and she's brutally clear but we've got naftali bennett who's many people thinks potential future prime minister saying we did not establish a jewish state so violent groups could operate within it we've had the chief of the idf saying it's completely unacceptable and we've had the chief of the israelis saying it's completely unacceptable what is happening but here's the question israel is the most effective security state almost in the world extraordinary intelligence service internal intelligence service army its control of the west bank is unbelievable surveillance vehicles roads infrastructure and yet apparently it is completely unable to protect a house with a few palestinians in it from being attacked by violent settlers with a the israeli army standing right by and it goes on for days how's that possible well it's possible it's only possible if there is if they're working together And I'm afraid that's the conclusion that you're left with, is that actually this is part of the Israeli state and the way that it operates. And the questioner, how can this be stopped? The international community, for want of a better phrase, has to stand up in a way that at the moment nobody seems to be standing up. Apart from the NGOs, is anybody really speaking out against this at all? You know, we talked earlier about Andy Burnham clearly wants to be a domestic prime minister. Fine, I get that. And that's maybe quite a good thing, then, somebody as high profile as Ed Miliband as foreign secretary. But my God, I could have done with some pushback from the British government on Netanyahu calling Britain the Islamic Republic of Great Britain. I mean, there are a lot of people in Britain who can't stand him. And that has turned a lot of people against Israel. You and I, I think, are both supporters of the state of Israel and supporters of a two-state solution. Very few people have done as much to damage it as he has. For him to talk. For him to talk about the Islamic state of Great Britain, I find deeply, deeply, deeply offensive. To be fair to Mick Huckabee, we've talked about him before. He is the American ambassador to Israel. He is as big a supporter of Israel as you're going to find. He is a huge supporter of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, despite its illegality. And he has described the settlers who have been besieging these homes in Kusra as, quote, Israeli terrorists. That's as tough a statement as I've ever heard coming from him. The point is this, though. I saw, I can't remember where I saw it. I saw this picture in the, I think it was in the New York Times. And I've actually kept it here on one of my documents. It's of a young girl with her mother in their home in Kusra. And they're just looking out at these people who are terrorizing them. And they just look like, I mean, they're really kind of beautiful faces. And they're looking out with this sense of kind of dignity. They're looking out with this sense of dignified fear and total bewilderment as to what's going on. And what happened is that the security forces did go. And they did say to the settlers, listen, go away. And then the settlers went away for a bit. And then the security forces went away again. And then, of course, the settlers came back. What's the judgment they've reached now? Well, we probably have to get the Palestinians out of there then. Who does that help? That helps the settlers who are bit by bit, slowly, taking over the whole place. And Rory, I know you wanted to talk about the numbers game and the land. So why don't you just talk us through what's actually happening in terms of land taking? Well, let's start with a brief explainer and reminder. So after the 1967 war, Israel annexed the West Bank. So this big Palestinian territory, which was then administered by Jordan. And what you've seen since 1967, in what's called by the British government, the occupied Palestinian territory. So international law does not recognize this as part of Israel. International law sees this as it would see Israel being in South Lebanon at the moment, as a country invading its neighbor and occupying its neighbor. Settlements have been rolled out and of those settlements, about 163 are considered illegal by Israel and about 143 are considered legal by Israel. But they're all illegal. Illegal in terms of international law. And if you look at this map of area A, B and C, which is a map of the West Bank, you basically see that the majority of the territory now is under Israeli control. It's area C and areas A and B are these tiny little archipelagos or islands increasingly separated from each other by Israeli security forces. And the Israeli settlers are reinforced by Israeli governments who, on the one hand, seem to want to say these are illegal. We don't approve of it. Sorry, it's happened. But by the way, we're going to provide schools for them. We're going to provide water supply for them. We're going to provide roads for them and we're going to send in the Israeli military to protect these settlements. And by the way, we're going to approve more settlements, which is happening at a very, very rapid rate at the moment. So what's going on? If you look at a map and what's happened over the last 80 years in the region, but particularly since 67, it seems pretty clear that what's happening is, this is being annexed the Israeli government. Most Israeli politicians don't like that language. Although there are people in the Knesset who are very open about it and simply say this is Judea Samaria, this should be part of Israel. But if you look at what's happening on the map, it's happening again and again. And the tendency seems to be to be pushing Palestinians out of almost all the rural areas. And this is what a lot of the settler violence is about. Olive trees being attacked, orchards being attacked, sheep's being attacked into urban settlements, which are increasingly divided. So, you know, we're going to have to make sure that we're going to be able to do this. We're going to have to do this. We're going to have to make sure that we're going to be able to do this. So I was talking to a Palestinian friend today and they were saying that they had just taken two and a half hours to travel 15 kilometers that morning from Ramallah up to Jerusalem, driving 15 kilometers. Almost nobody in their family at the moment is visiting places like Hebron because you simply don't know whether you're going to be able to get there at all. And it's not just the checkpoints will suddenly be closed. It's the settlers will actually attack your cars on the road as you're moving through. So this is, this is two types of legal system. The settlers are mostly judged by civilian law and they almost never are successfully prosecuted. 94% of investigations against settlers have had no indictment and only 3% of them have ended up in convictions. Whereas the Palestinians are processed by military law, military courts, military detainment. And to make it even worse, there's a third group, which is causing a lot of the mayhem. Which is a group called Hagma, which is a form of reservist militia who the Israeli settlers predominantly from those areas with guns who've been directly involved. One of them has shot two people, drove his car into someone praying. No investigations happened. Why? Because the police say, the Israeli police say, well, we can't investigate them because they're soldiers. And then the military say, oh, they're not really soldiers. So they're not business for the military court. Anyway, back over to you. - Cool. - I think it would be a good point to tell listeners and viewers who haven't yet got across the latest episode of Leading. You and I sat down last week with these two extraordinary guys, Mayos Inon and Aziz Abou Sara. Mayos lost his parents on October the 7th. And he gave a really harrowing account of what it was like discovering that his parents had been murdered. Aziz's brother was basically died because he was tortured inside Israeli prisons. So you've got a Palestinian and an Israeli who both lost close, close family members. Because of this conflict, they've now come together, written an extraordinary book together, but they're now basically campaigning for peace. And I'd love it if some of the people, the big decision makers listened to them. But also I think all of us should just listen to two people who are explaining why the current approach of the authorities, pretty much wherever you look, is never going to work. And the only thing that's ever going to work is, if people do somehow reconcile in the way that these two are doing and asking others to do. Well, it's the most, I mean, if people haven't listened, they must. It's probably, I think, one of the most encouraging conversations I've had. One of the lovely things about this podcast is that we've got this privilege, I guess, to talk to people every week. And I just left so moved and inspired. And it's strange because what they're saying is, they accept sounds naive, but they basically say, just work backwards. It's got to be about peace. It's not in anyone's interest to keep slaughtering each other. And once you accept that peace has to be the answer, it's possible, it can happen. This cannot be the root. There are still figures in the Knesset and in the IDF who recognize that this is a recipe for disaster. That if you release violent settlers, if you push more and more Palestinians off their land, you are going to repeat the Nakba. You're going to repeat that massive cleansing, which then led to decades of terror, resentment, hatred, and alienated Israel from the entire Middle East. So it's got to stop. And those were two wonderful voices, Israeli and Palestinian, suggesting how that might stop without too many recriminations. There was very little jargon. There was very little talking about the past. I love the way that they kept saying this could be done in two weeks. So two weeks. Two weeks comes and two weeks goes and it's not going to be done. Yeah, but we could do this in two weeks. And I just love that mindset because actually it is true. It could end this, it could end in two weeks. Just on the figures, Rory. So the West Bank, roughly 3 million Palestinians live in the West Bank. 511,000 Israeli settlers, okay? Palestinians now, they occupy roughly 30% of the Gaza Strip, right? 30%, 40% of the Gaza Strip. 30% of the West Bank and 13% of East Jerusalem. So they've been squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. It makes me think of those police operations of Kettling where you just get people into kind of small, ever smaller spaces. But what does that do? Rory Sutherland: One is it reminds me a lot of when my father was fighting the communists in the Malayan emergency where they created something called a white areas policy where basically they removed communities from rural areas and put them in these urban settlements so that they could supervise them and surveil them and put gates around them and fence them. fences run. The second thing is I was wondering whether there was an echo when we were talking about the Hagmar militia with the Royal Alstic Constabulary. And a question of whether it can possibly make sense for the Israelis to say the people responsible for security in this area are the settlers themselves and expect to police their own neighbors and expect them to be fair with Palestinian families. yeah um the chief executive unicef just come back from the west bank says he's worked in humanitarian development for two decades and more he's never seen anything as bad as he's seen in the west bank pope leo my new hero rory particularly now that my blurb from the rest is politics is on the front cover of his book he's come out with another statement today which let's end this discussion on something a little bit more positive though so you may you probably know rory i'm sure you watched burnley against west ham on sky sports football yesterday absolutely yeah good comeback wasn't it good comeback yeah very good very good i mean some some weaknesses i thought on the midfield but otherwise fine you're not wrong you're not wrong um anyway but here's this thing we were talking last week about racism in the context of abdul el sayed and i got this lovely email from a gentleman by the name of wakas farid he said you mentioned the racism el sayed was facing because his wife wore a headscarf well guess what at burnley football club the women's team unlike the men were promoted last year than our professional team they've employed a team doctor who happens to be my wife check out at the exercise medic and she's the first headscarf wearing sports medicine resident doctor in the country by knowledge so there we go burnley football club is doing the right thing let's let's finish on a more positive note as you say carl alistair and rory it's the last couple of weeks of the summer holidays and i'm completely out of ideas for what to do with my children any suggestions i mean i i feel for him i've got my children endlessly playing football with me at the moment which you would approve of you any good i'm a bit better than they are yeah are you do you let them win do you let them win it's only because they're 9 and 11 no i'm really i'm really competitive then there's only three of us we take turns in goal and then whoever scores gets to go in goal but i'm always trying to hoof it from a large distance i was talking to somebody last night what age do you stop losing deliberately with your kids but do i get the sense that you've never lost deliberately um i i yeah exactly i'm like boris johnson like mowing down the japanese children on that um now come on um but apart from football whether it's you and do you have any ideas about what you're going to do with your children do you have any ideas about what you're going to do with your children do you have any ideas about any other suggestions for what children could be doing during their summer holidays they should be thinking about the future of the world rory they should be they should be thinking about the big challenges facing the planet because it is their future that we're talking about okay now do you remember so here's the thing and i'm being serious here this is for parents to get their kids involved and kids to get involved anyway okay so do you remember that last year we helped promote a petition for politica policy ideas for positive change where 16 to 18 year olds submitted their ideas to change the country for the better and this year rory is even better it's not just the uk there are no category restrictions you can write on any topic 800 to 1000 words deadline september 20th okay just a small addition which i mean i'm going to get in there before you point it out traditionally the majority of entrants were from private schools and since the appearance on trip i'm pleased to say there's been an incredible turnaround 84 percent of entrants were from state schools so there's still a lot of people from private schools entering i encourage them to do so it's wonderful that you're sending in but there's a huge number of people from state schools also entering too then well that is good news and i was really impressed the way that you um that you said that and you said you were pleased that this had happened by the way i saw this week did you see have a guess rory which uk university has the k university core blimey could it be you know something like durham or bristol or edinburgh well done durham durham is number one number two is imperial college number three is edinburgh number four is oxford number five is exeter six ucl seven cambridge 28.2 eight lec nine is bristol and ten is newcastle so there we are 6.5 percent of uk children go to private schools but that's the numbers 39.1 percent at durham nice working class area when i was at oxford i think it was still over 50 percent and i guess when my father was there probably would have been 80 90 percent yeah listen it's 16 to 18 year olds no category restrictions idea can be on any topic but these ideas for positive change 800 to a thousand words deadline september the 20th it's a lovely length 800 to a thousand words and love to see a great idea for positive change a shout out last year's winner was rosie halsall she wrote a piece tackling ideas to women's sport recommending free sports bra fittings across all secondary schools and since that by the way she has met her mp she's been on bbc news she's been on her local news she's connected with sheffield united football foundation and she's working with radix big tent and booby doo a sports bra company to transform her idea from theory into practice so that is what we want we want ideas that we can then help promote and support and get them to happen and to sign up for that just follow the link in the episode description now alistair i'm going to do something which is very very mean to you but occasionally you tease me so i'm gonna i'm gonna tease you because this is going to be extremely painful for you oh alistair i received a little box in my house and a note and it went like this it's my house in scotland dear rory was horrified to hear alistair mentioning two french preserve makers on trip recently here are some classic scottish preserves we are a second generation producer based in galloway love the pods and books keep up the great work all the best rory hesketh it seems to say so let's do a little shout out for scottish preserves yeah and and here is look here's an amazing cherry jam uh from gatehouse of fleet raspberry jam best best humor i don't know whether anyone can see it here um it's it's not totally branded the um the the the jam but it's really lovely it's called galloway lodge galloway lodge very very simple branding the most delicious jam and of course i'm here speaking to you in perthshire and angus and dundee absolute center dundee center of the marmalade got all those famously got all those orange journalism that's it jam journalism so i don't want to put you on the spot but along with everybody praising you here in creepier piping i wanted to say that you missed a trick on scottish jam well there's no the only reason i mentioned the french guys because i was in france i mean if i'd have been in scotland i thought about scottish jam i think to say they were horrified is strong i will always what he said i can share the note with the i'm not making that up no i i'm sure it's not but i think that's a bit harsh on me if i may say so somebody relentlessly promotes everything good about scotland and scotland being everything good talking of which although this is rather upset me as well we've just had piping live in in glasgow and we've had the world pipe band championships won by another bloody canadian band i told um mark carney about this and he said this is the consequences of global scotland well here's another positive spin i was yesterday uh sunday was the the creef highland gathering and it was incredible i mean really incredible you had the morrison's pipe band you had the comrie pipe band you had aleth you had blair gowrie marching through down the high street king street huge i mean i don't know how many hundreds of people huge noise but then we had the cattery police academy band so there we are all the way from the gulf to creef ah well in which case i'm going to give a shout out to my teacher finley because my teacher finley who runs the national piping center in glasgow he taught the qatari pipe band he teaches them oh i wonder if finley was there you should tell him to say he probably was he was definitely a piping live and but the other thing we should put in the newsletter because as you know rory one of my remaining campaigns in life is to get universal love for the bagpipes played well yeah there is the bbc we sometimes criticize they did a great job of covering it because they were just pumping out stuff on social media and on their website there's one particular shot of the masked bands playing scotland the brave and it is honestly you can see why the bagpipes led people into war it's fucking brilliant final shout out um my childhood friend thomas who very sadly died was absolutely at the core of getting these first big mass bands gatherings going in edinburgh and glasgow 25 30 years ago really began getting these mass you know 10 000 people i think is what he was aiming for at one point so i think that was a hugely wonderful legacy the biggest you know canada when the simon fraser university canada win the world championship australia's got the current world record for the biggest mass pipe band gathering final point rory maybe this was clues we did a poll last night and we found out that the biggest mass pipe band gathering in the last week because we're now becoming the rest is jam yep what is our listeners and viewers favorite flavor of jam i mean i'm sorry you lot this is pathetic strawberry and raspberry and apricot oh brilliant i won go on then go on now let me let me So next week, I want to poll on whether people agree with me that the Labrador is the best dog. Because my mother was furious. I literally came back and she was boiling rich because she has these Pekingese. And she was like, not only was she furious, her Pekingese were absolutely furious. With you? Yeah, yeah. She was saying, what on earth are you doing? My mother said, supporting a fat, greedy thing that lolloped off a cod boat. OK, well, I'm happy for our listeners and viewers to be polled as to what is the best dog breed, as long as they all say Cavalier Key Charles. OK, that's it. That's it. That's it. Very good. Thank you. Great to talk to you. Bye bye. Bye. Hello, everybody. We've got some exciting news to share with you. We do indeed. As you all know, the Restless Politics Plus members get early access to Question Time. They get ad-free listing. They get exclusive series. And a host of other benefits. And probably for me, the most exciting thing is these exclusive mini-series we're doing. And right now, we're holding a summer sale. 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