583. Is Burnham’s Budget Too Safe and How Brazil Defied Trump

A budget is one of the big moments in any parliamentary calendar, and you would think that would be especially the case when you have a new Prime Minister and a new Chancellor. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, Chancellor John Healey, and John Healey stood up and gave an interesting assessment about the state of the economy, said he was very, very resilient. He talked about giving some breathing space for now, fresh hope for the future, delivered to the British people by this Labour government. There were certainly plenty of announcements, many of them have been trailed, and there was a big commitment on defence, which is why he and Andy Burnham had a phone call with President Zelensky this morning. Interesting thing on Budget Day is that the Chancellor is immediately followed by the Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, who basically got up and said, is that it? Well, how a budget gets felt by the country in the end is a better judgment than how it goes down on day one. Day one, weirdly, I think both sides. We're quite happy with the performance of their leaders, what the country thinks. We'll be talking about that for some months to come. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. Most energy companies are counting on you doing absolutely nothing, not questioning what you're paying, not switching, just letting your tariff roll on, which is costing you hundreds of pounds every year. But the apathy goes deeper than our bills. We've almost given up on energy itself. We seem to all be accepting energy is expensive. The system's out. But that complacency is costing us. Fuse Energy does not accept that because the energy transition is not something that just happens somewhere else. Fuse is building an energy company which is designed to bring down the cost of energy. And right now, its tariffs are up to £100 below the off-gem price cap. So switching isn't just about paying less. It's about expecting more from your energy company. 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And how do you protect yourself from online scams? Well, the answer is I find NordVPN useful for that. It's not just a VPN app. They've built in next-gen antivirus block scams, phishing attacks before they reach you, so you can carry on knowing you're secure. To get the best discount on your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com slash restispolitics. You'll get four extra months free on the two-year plan, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is in the episode description. Welcome to the Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair. I'm Alistair Campbell, and Rory is in the United States. I am in the United Kingdom, where I've just been watching the budget, John Healy's first budget, and Kemi Badenoch's response. And we're also going to be talking today about three extraordinary elections in Brazil, in Serbia, and, of course, in Israel. But, Rory, shall I kick off by sort of trying to tell you what happened in the budget? Give us the classic explainer of what the main points of the budget were. Well, it was long. It was about – John Healy's speech was about an hour long. And, you know, it was – I don't think it's going to get down in history as one of the sort of, you know, epoch-making budgets of our time, but there was a lot in it in terms of announcements and argument. The narrative they were trying to frame was breathing space now, growth in every postcode, fresh hope for the future. And I guess the reason why listeners will be excited and want us doing the budget rather than just snoring is this is the first budget. It's the first budget of the new government, right? It's the way in which Andy Burnham's going to define what the difference is with Keir Starmer and John Healy, what the difference is with Rachel Reeves. And is this the budget that's going to define the strategy of Burnham and help him win the next election? Is that right? Is that the kind of background on why we should be caring about this budget? Yeah, you definitely would. That was how normally I would want to see a budget. But it was interesting how much they were pointing to things still to come, the 10-year plan, the spending plan. Review, the Milburn report, the Tim's report. There were these things that they were indicating that they would be coming down the track. So essentially what they were doing was framing this sense of the economy being more resilient than maybe we think. And they were pointing to figures from the Office of Budget Responsibility, from the International Monetary Fund, and so forth. But I think it was very interesting to watch John Healy do the budget, getting a very, very, very warm response from the Labour backbenchers, but then Kemi Badenock, the Tory leader, sort of came straight in. And it reminded me a little bit of the title of Bob Geldof's autobiography, which I think was called Is That It? And she was at her usual pretty snarky best and essentially saying there just wasn't enough in this. And also the Tories are obsessed with this line that Labour are addicted to welfare and there was nothing on how they're going to get the welfare bills down and so forth. For me, in terms of the things that I think you would find particularly interesting, I think. I think it's the first time that I've heard him, on the record, in Parliament, commit in the way that he did to 3% of GDP on defence by the end of the decade and 3.5 beyond that. Unclear exactly how that's going to be paid for. I think there was a little bit of, again, that's something that we're going to be announcing in due course. And also quite a lot about AI, your obsession. And this new idea of a data centre covenant, that people can build data centres, provide that there is a sort of local commitment to understanding the role of jobs and the environment. And tell me if this is a new idea, that if they couldn't get connection into the grid straight away, that the data centres would be able to generate their own power, subject to those concerns. And then the rest of it was really just, I would say, helping particularly people who are really, really struggling with energy bills, both businesses, small firms and medium-sized firms, and also families. So getting rid of gas standing charges, this new idea, which I don't think I'd sort of trailed anywhere. If you're an A to D council tax home, you're going to get 100 quid off your energy bills. The VAT cut on electricity bills is going to be taken forward, paid for by a one-off tax on the banks. And then other measures that are going to be paid for by a tax on gambling companies. And the other thing that was interesting was there was quite a lot, I felt, of pointing to issues related to women. Fresh commitment on the gender cap, talking about an entrepreneur's fund, particularly for women who are starting up businesses. I thought that was quite interesting. And then also paternity leave for self-employed men. So it was a kind of, you know, on the big picture on the economy, he was basically trying to paint the picture that this is a resilient economy, which is going better than people maybe feel. But he was not. Acknowledging that people's living standards feel very, very challenged, energy prices in particular. So a few things on that. And then, you know, big picture stuff on housing, defence and AI. So that's how I would summarise it, having literally just left my sofa where I watched it. Very good. So I guess coming in from Dayton, Ohio, where I am now, and maybe that's the kind of horrible 10,000 foot view listening to you and having just caught the end of Healy's speech. I suppose if I was going to be challenging, let's imagine. I was like an American journalist covering this. I might say this sounds pretty boring. It doesn't sound like anything really big is happening here. It sounds like a budget, which is giving some relatively small giveaways to people who are feeling the financial pinch, but it's in the region of a few hundred pounds. It's reassuring, I suppose, for people who were worried that there were going to be big changes. There's not been any big changes on tax. Although I'd like to come back to that. because one of the things that has kept going wrong with labour budgets is this tendency to pre-brief in advance that there are going to be raises in wealth taxes and are going to be raises in capital gains tax, or maybe not pre-brief, but leaking from unhelpful members of the Labour Coalition and from think tanks and funds who are really keen on these things, which actually terrify business and which the chancellors never do. To be fair to Rachel Reeves and John Healy, what actually happens is that they're staying with relatively orthodox economics. They're not going for wealth taxes or racking up capital gains tax. But there's this horrible thing that for months before these budgets, all the left of the Labour Party and the think tanks talk this stuff up, which I think has a freezing effect on confidence and investment, makes the government seem much more left-wing than it actually is, puts off international business. And then when the budget actually comes, it turns out that, broadly speaking, Reeves and Healy are pretty conventional, trying to keep taxes down, trying to keep public spending under control, trying to reduce borrowing, trying to reduce the deficit, not doing any of the stuff that the left of the Labour Party would like them to do. But this muddled messaging, I think, is a problem. And I don't know how they allow this to happen in the run-up to the budget, rather than stamping on the journalists in a way that I imagine you would have done. If the message is, we are sticking to the fiscal rules, there are not going to be wealth taxes, nothing's changed, and we're not going to be able to do anything changing, you can invest in this country, you can expect the next three years to be a pretty predictable situation where we're going to keep taxes under control, borrowing under control, spending under control, then hammer it home and come down like a ton of bricks on these people who, for the last two years, keep trying to feed these stories saying that they're going to go left on wealth taxes. Yeah, well, that is a lot easier said than done. I think one of the difficulties the Keir Starmer government got into was that it was such a big gap between the election and the first budget. That is not a mistake that they've made this time. I actually think the discipline on this budget has been better than previous budgets. It's very, very hard though, Rory, with a budget, because you say come down like a ton of bricks. The minute you start defiantly, adamantly denying one particular story and one particular outlet, the next one that pops up, you're expected to have the same reaction. You've got to take a judgment. I actually think the discipline on this has been pretty good considering. I do think we've got into a habit in recent years of just briefing out too much of budgets in advance. There's been a little bit of that on this one. Now, whether that's been sanctioned leaks or it's just been chatter, I don't know. But I think it'd be very difficult to do what you're suggesting without then getting drawn into endless running commentary. Because the truth is, budgets, they're like reshuffles. People just love to write about them in advance. One thing you'll guarantee is that no journalist will today draw attention to this. And I think that's a big part of the attention to stories that they've written where they predicted something that hasn't happened okay or what they'll do they'll do what you just said to say this was down to think tanks briefing it out or a cabinet minister saying i like it if they did this so i think the the the point about whether it's your word a bit boring um i actually found it quite interesting to watch as a spectacle because i could see him balancing all sorts of different challenges he's got the mps behind him that he wants to kind of make think there's a plan and make think that get them going back into the constituencies with something to sell he wants to discomfort the opposition which he did in a couple of ways although kelly came back pretty hard but he also has got this problem with the markets where the truth is whether we like it or not the reaction of the markets will be an important judgment on the budget now the immediate reaction seems to be pretty stable we're recording this literally immediately after kemmy badenock's response so somebody can tell us if i get that wrong very very quickly but i think that so i think what he was trying to do was actually what you're saying steady as she goes uh the fundamentals are pretty strong he mentioned i lost count after a while but at least five or six times he mentioned the conflict in the middle east he basically he wasn't doing it in a sort of big way i blame trump but he was basically five or six times he said and because of what's happening in the middle east because of the because of the difficulties caused by the war in iran he mentioned that several times and that was i think the sort of backdrop they were trying to trying to paint that's something again which here in the u.s barely features but is one of the really biggest themes in the whole global economy so what's happening in the british budget will be repeated in the french budget the german budget the japanese the south korean and my goodness any of the gulf budgets that the single budget is going to be the biggest thing when people say you know is it china shock to all the u.s that's really disrupting the global order you can make a pretty good argument that yes china is subsidizing businesses and tech and has got a very weak currency and that's uh undermining over the medium term european industry but the short-term impact of these u.s israeli fight with iran is unbelievable because you know we we keep it's almost boring to keep coming back to but the the world's oil an astonishing amount of the liquid natural gas fertilizers but also a lot of specialist products used for things like plastics and all of this means that america is not feeling it as much directly because they are a net oil exporter they're energy independent and the pressure put through particularly energy prices on all its main allies from britain right the way through to japan is absolutely unbelievable one more quick thing i think just on the macro picture it's worth pointing out what's happening under the surface so as you say andy burnham's budget feels like a relatively stable budget which probably won't frighten the market and with any luck could actually reassure investors which is what we desperately need to keep growth going in britain and that's why i sort of actually wish that there'd been clearer messaging for two and a half years from labor saying that's the kind of government they wanted to be i think gordon brown would have given us that i think that would have been a new labor message that this is uh in investment friendly pro-business government that and and really leaning into the idea that their promises on taxes and borrowing um are real and they're not just an accident that happened to beat the tories and the problem is that so often those fiscal promises which starmer and reeves made were presented as being a sort of necessary bit of political calculation in order to defeat the tories in the election but they were never really owned by labor as being the central part of their economic and growth strategy and that's what they need to do instead of turning it into we made an error in the election and we're regretting it ever since lean into it and say boast about it and say the one great thread that's going to run through all our governments is this is going to be a government that's going to try to keep tax under control spending under control borrowing under control bring the borrowing down not put up the main taxes and face down the labor left you know make an ideological fight about it this is a government that's not going to do well with taxes not going to put up your taxes this is a pro-business friendly government rather than sort of apologizing for that stuff yeah i don't he wasn't apologetic about that and just your point about the the fiscal rules i mean it'd be very interesting when we because it was you know this is the first time i think i've heard him set out this this such a firm commitment on defense but then when it came to explaining the funding i think we're going to have to look at that pretty closely i think it sounded quite complicated i think it sounded quite complicated i think it maybe there are ways of sort of tweaking the fiscal rules when it comes to looking specifically at what he's announced on defense but the other the other part that i think you'd have found very interesting there was a big step on fiscal devolution um there was a essentially talking about the that rates uh and taxes that were raised in local areas being kept in those areas and again how that is how that works in practice we shall have to see but it was in a sense it was of a piece with the fiscal rules and the fiscal rules and the fiscal rules and the fiscal rules and the with some of the broader messaging that andy burnham has been talking about rewiring the state getting more economic activity within localities there was another part of the speech where he was announcing you know relatively small sums of money three million here 10 million there 15 million there i know it sounds like a lot but that in government terms is very very small but in specific places for specific projects um so listen it was a it was um it was an interesting he delivered it pretty well um he's uh he's not the most you know naturally charismatic sort of politician but it was delivered with a with a certain authority i didn't get the feeling that the the response by labor was as it were staged at the end you know i love these little rhetorical bits where there's a rhetorical style which you then know what's going coming so i took it and i noted it down i this is my message to banks i celebrate and i'm grateful for the role that you play you just you just know that is that is preceding and therefore i'm going to put three percent on the bank surcharge but he did have a very good line there as you know i've often felt that the populism is caused by the global financial crisis socialism for the banks austerity for the people and he did say in terms the british people helped you out 20 years ago uh almost 20 years ago in the crash and now you can help the british people out through this difficult time on their energy bills kind of thing so you know i i think putting it all together i'll be very interested to see because budgets normally you know when it happens the ft does a sort of 24 page pullout the news does sort of you know hours and hours of discussion there's a lot to discuss what there isn't is a sort of you know a big strategic shift and and i think actually that is part of his messaging he even started the only time where i felt the tories were really laughing at him was when he did a big tribute to rachel reeves because they're all sitting there thinking well if she was that good why have you got rid of final thing for me is just to look at the big macro economic picture of britain and how very much the british economy has changed over the last 20 30 years not just since you were in office i mean the changes there have been unbelievable right the amount of taxes percentage of gdp has exploded when you were in office actually taxes percentage of gdp in britain was quite low we weren't a very heavily taxed country we're now a very heavily taxed country debt interest has also increased and we're now a very heavily taxed country and we're now a very heavily taxed country gone through the roofs but that's also true even since i was in um well i was i was last in government in 2019 and you look at the figures there in 2019 taxes percentage of gdp was still only about 33 percent of gdp it's now at 30 it's now at 36.3 heading to 38.5 percent which is the highest level basically that it's been since the war public spending gone from 38 percent up to 44 million when i was in to about 1.3 trillion now and the percentage of the money spent on debt again when i was in 2019 3.7 percent of the budget was spent on debt interest it's now at six percent heading to seven percent yeah and at the same time health spending when you were in with tony blair was about 26 percent of what the government spent was spent on health it's now 43 percent gone from about quarter of the amount of money we spent was on the nhs to nearly half so that's goes along with also 118 billion pounds in tax rises of which nearly 50 billion came from the tories and between 65 and 70 billion pounds of tax rises came from rachel reeves and the oddity of it is that the public don't feel this so massive increase in taxes both in real terms and a substantial gdp but it's not really feeding through into improvements in public services because so much of this is just paying for past commitments for covid spending for debt interest um which brings us to the final point i guess which is the great cliche which rachel reese began with which is growth and you know where is the growth strategy because if you're just trapped in a world where all you imagine you're doing is redistributing the pie you know cutting spending here increasing taxes there borrowing a bit more there the only way out of that trilemma is growth and that's where i'd like to see them saying you know we're going to learn from france which is able to build roads uh for a fraction of the cost has much cheaper energy bills can get its nuclear power stations built much more cheaply does much better riots a bit of riots yeah but we can learn from sweden which has more billion dollar startups than anywhere outside silicon valley so i'd like to see a sense of you know what are we doing on planning what are we doing on uh attracting entrepreneurs are we ever going to be able to unlock this story that we keep hearing that the uk pension funds have a huge amount of money but they're not going to be able to be used in the way the canadian and australian funds are used to really finance business growth and buy shares so and then finally i think you'd probably add the european union yeah he was definitely trying to tap into the the kind of keeping entrepreneurs here and supporting young entrepreneurs supporting women entrepreneurs etc europe actually will maybe move on from this now but that was the big clash at primelist's questions which preceded it where kemi badenock was trying to get andy burnham to say that he wanted a referendum on freedom of movement it kind of didn't go anywhere but i think it's a good idea to do that i think it's a good idea to do that i think it's a good idea to do that i think it's interesting how andy burnham is definitely sticking to his guns and saying we have to have a debate about our relationship with europe just a quick thing before we move to these extraordinary elections we've got some very interesting briefing from luke trill who's you know one of our leading pollsters and some very really interesting stuff in what he was saying and it your point about about tax there's there's been a sense most of the time i've been been around where when you ask the public do they prefer more public spending on health and education or tax cuts generally they will the the bigger numbers will go for the the public service investment that appears to have not be the case at the moment and the other point he was making is that energy bills are now the number one kind of cost of living issue for people and the the feeling and this is where labor have got to be still be worried about reform in a way is the feeling in what ed milliband used to call the squeezed middle is that the people who are very very poor get a lot of support from the government and the people who are very very wealthy get away with whatever they want and the people in the middle are the ones that are really really struggling so i think that's why a lot of the messaging was was aimed aimed at them anyway well downless you know the analysis of the budget will go on at least until next week when you'll be back in the country and we can maybe revisit some of the reactions then but that's my my take on the budget and which of these which of these three extraordinary elections would you like to start with you got brazil you got serbia you got israel if you want a low turnout election we also had the bulgarian presidential election with a 22 percent turnout so we could 22 percent wow yeah that that makes that makes local council elections in britain look very respectable doesn't yeah not good not good okay let's take a quick break and let's come back to brazil this episode is brought to you by lloyds now the political landscape as we talk about in all recognition brexit trump ukraine there's so much stuff going on that maybe we couldn't have predicted a while back no it's absolutely unbelievable if you look at just what's been happening in the last few days in ukraine it's something that we could never have dreamt of what's happening in straight of hormuz what's happening in yemen basically the whole world order is being reorganized 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took down a british parliament russian 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 into an operation order or frago a frago that says to kill the president of russia yes new from goldhanger 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 where britain plays its strongest hand he's the best against its strongest foe don't do it bear available now wherever you get your podcasts hi everyone it's katie k here from the rest is politics us the midterms are almost here it's the biggest political moment of the year and anthony scaramucci and i'll be right there with you making sense of every twist and turn as the result of this podcast you know that's right we're going to be live on youtube covering the midterms as we get the results will donald trump be a lame duck for the next two years or walk away with a mandate to do whatever he wants we're about to find out so join us from midnight to 3 a.m eastern time on november the 4th we'll be live reacting to all of the results as they come in so make sure you're subscribed to the rest is politics us on youtube and turn on notifications please you won't want to miss this welcome back to the rest is politics with me alistair campbell and with me rory stewart and as we promised we're coming back to this incredible brazilian election i think we want to start with this because it's part of a general theme that we keep coming back to which is what a different world we live in and what a nightmare it must be being in the polling and prediction business because basically universally every single poll, newspaper and analytics. in the world believed that President Lula, the incumbent president in Brazil, was not going to win the second round of the Brazilian election. And you could have made a very strong argument. Nobody even bothered to consider the possibility, basically, that he might because Flavio Bolsonaro, Bolsonaro's son, had beat him in the first round. And in Brazilian history, nobody who'd lost in the first round had ever gone on to win in the second round. And in fact, even more than that, it was clear that there were a lot of other right-wing candidates whose votes were expected to go to Flavio Bolsonaro. Add to that the fact that incumbents are very unpopular, the Brazilian economy is not going very well. And it looked as though Bolsonaro had an attractive offer, particularly for working class people and small businesses. And it looked like Lula's defeat was absolutely guaranteed, instead of which 10 million new voters came out of nowhere, either flipping from right wing candidates or from left wing candidates. And it looked like Lula's defeat was candidates or who hadn't turned out before. And for the first time in Brazilian electoral history, the turnout in the second round was higher than the first round. And this incredible political survivor who's right up there with Netanyahu and Trump and one of the great comebacks of all time, President Lula won again. Over to you. There is a word for what he did, Rory. The word begins with P. Somebody wrote a book about it. Is it perseverance? Is it perseverance? He is very, very perseverant. The other thing that, and the thing was, it was about old-fashioned mobilization because he had Meta. He was involved in this long-running legal battle because Meta was being accused of sort of, you know, putting the brakes on any promotion of Lula. Bolsonaro was getting a kind of free hit on the social media networks. He had, Bolsonaro had, you know, a lot more money, a lot more support in lots of, in the traditional electoral way. They had, in Rio, a million people turned out. And the other thing, I was talking to somebody involved in the campaign the other day. They said, you would not believe how many, this, what they called intergenerational campaigning, where they were getting young people to take old people and old people to take young people. And they had this guy who started a new WhatsApp channel for Lula. And by the end of it, they had 11 million people on this. And there weren't just, using it to sort of, you know, say Lula's great, Bolsonaro's terrible. They were saying, we need volunteers now here. Here's a video of Bolsonaro that you should all share now with all your, all your kind of moderates. So it was, it was extraordinary. Of course, Bolsonaro, look, he's a terrible, he was a terrible campaigner. I'm afraid he admitted himself. He didn't have his dad's kind of charisma or political skills. He made a couple of terrible mistakes. The first is in the last debate, he referred to the fact, that Lula's only got nine fingers. Well, the reason Lula's only got nine fingers is because he lost a finger as an, in an industrial accident as a young man. And it allowed Lula just to remind people, he's a kind of come from a tough working class background against this sort of silver spoon posh boy. And then the other thing he did during the campaign, he took time off to defend a police officer who had killed a young girl. And the girl was called Ana Clara. Okay. And she's dead. The mother of Ana Clara, turned up at one of the debates where Bolsonaro was speaking. And she spoke about this. And Bolsonaro tried to do a kind of nice empathetic, Andy Burnham style, warm, friendly communication, but he called her Ana Clara, the dead daughter's name. And the woman just shouted out, screamed at him, she's dead. And this was like, and of course he had to apologize and all that, but these are terrible mistakes. So he made two terrible gaffes in the last couple of days. Meanwhile, Lula, who's in his eighties, just had a kind of, I don't know, because the first, first round, Lula was lacking in energy and suddenly he found this energy. Maybe Donald Trump shipped him some of these, you know, energy drugs. I don't know, but he looked pretty, pretty impressive. Listen, it's now going to be tough though, because he's got a right-wing Congress, a lot of right-wing mayors, a lot of right-wing regional government, but it is, it is going to be studied in the per civilian comebacks of all time. There's no doubt about that. So over the last 18, 19 months, there have been seven straight wins by right-wing leaders in Latin America, and we've covered all of them. It's been an incredible sequence from Argentina through to Colombia and Peru. And it looked like this was going to be the eighth. And Trump was all lined up for that. And of course, predictably Donald Trump's now come out saying that it looks like another rigged election. So that's, that's, I think, interesting. Also the way in which we think about narratives that had he lost, which it looked almost certain as though he was going to win. We would have had a very, very strong narrative, as it were, of, you know, kind of Trump, right-wing people taking over Latin America, which has suddenly been weirdly interrupted. And we'll get onto that, maybe whether the same thing's happened in Serbia. Yeah. And it's the fourth, it's the fourth biggest democracy in the world. The other thing that you often talk about is gerontocracy, right? These guys are unbelievably old, right? I mean, it's, it's staggering how old people like Trump are, Lula are. You know, Lula was in as president from 2003 to 2010, right? I mean, he was right at the height of, it was like a kind of new labor pinup guy. Obama called him the most popular politician on earth. He was all about, you know, poverty, climate change, hunger. And then he got caught up. And this is the other thing that is so difficult. People talk about Latin American politics as corrupt. And a lot of the Brazilian election was fought around this subject of corruption. And corruption and crime are right at the heart of all these Latin American elections. But in Brazil, you see it in a way that you don't see it elsewhere. I mean, you'll remember the Petrobras-Odebrecht scandal in Brazil, which implicated, get this, 271 out of 594 members of Congress were directly implicated in the scandal. 271 out of 594. Lula himself, who obviously, for people like you and me, is a kind of progressive, he's a progressive. Progressive hero was sent to jail, right? And there are transcripts of him saying on phones, why can't we intimidate the prosecutors more? He had wine cellars full of wine given to him. He was paid millions of dollars for speeches by construction companies. He had beach French residences done up. And there was this particular thing, which, you know, right at the heart of it, which was a senator called Delcidio de Amaral, who just sat there and in his plea bargain, just revealed every unbelievable deal, the colossal bribes, the hush money, the cover-ups, the paying money to vote-buying businessmen, $3 billion of bribes. And Dilma Rousseff, who was Lula's successor, tried to protect Lula by making him, the ex-president, her chief of staff, so that he could avoid, get immunity from prosecution. So it's important to understand that this guy who's portrayed kind of as a good guy, you can see why Brazilians are just horrified. And indeed, actually, I'm afraid this is true in a lot of Latin American politics. I mean, often when people say it's corrupt, I'm looking for examples. And I hope I've given a little bit of an example of what we mean by saying this politics is corrupt. The final thing is, it's not just the historic corruption, it's what's going on right now. So listeners who are paying attention on Brazil, will have followed the reporting around this Supreme Court justice, Alexandre de Moraes. He was the guy who put Bolsonaro in jail. He was the guy who shut down social media sites, jailed rioters. He then faced sanctions from Trump and was attacked directly by Trump. And he's now been sucked into corruption scandals because texts have now been released in which a disgraced banker, Daniel Vaccaro, has been sending texts pointing out that he gave tens of millions of dollars to the Supreme Court justice wife's law firm. As usual, we've got Brazilian corruption right up to the date, taking out both the heroes of the progressive left and the heroes of the right. And often it's the same people who are being linked by journalists to payment and influence on both sides. Well, don't forget as well, Bolsonaro, senior, sentenced to a long prison sentence, although he's now serving his hour home. And Bolsonaro, junior, has, it seems, fled the country, not least because he was worried about a possible investigation into money laundering. So yeah, we're talking about fairly unsaintly politics. Just on Millet, by the way, you mentioned Argentina. I don't know if you saw this, Roy. He's losing the plot. He's going full kind of Trumpian. He did a speech the other day during which he called out five journalists and he named them and said they should be burnt at the stake. And he said, well, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. Which, you know, when you think about some of the kind of horrible stuff that happens to politicians at the moment, it just sort of seemed a really, really weird thing to do. Before we go into Serbia, joking aside about Perseverance, and by the way, thank you for your excellent interview. I'm sure it's one of the reasons why the book has gone straight into the top 10 Sunday Times. Very pleased about that. But I do want to draw attention to the next interview in our series, because we talk a lot about politicians like we've just been talking about. Who are a bit this, and a bit that, and a bit the other. And this is an interview with David Blunkett. think it's really interesting i think it's the the team who were in the room which has recorded it said it's one of the most inspiring uplifting episodes that they think we've done and so this is david who's been blind all his life became one of the most impressive and important figures in our in our government and he's just so interesting talking about how you live with blindness when you're doing a job as difficult as the jobs that he has done and also a wonderful bit where he talks about his relationship with his with his different dogs the dogs that have been his guide dogs down the years and also some pretty compelling assessments of why politics and politicians are maybe not what they used to be so if you want to listen to that and all the other episodes in the series just go to the rest is politics.com forward slash club now rory you're a very close friend alexander vuchich who you got very close to when i introduced you to him in belgrade that's a joke listeners you should be able to hear that you should listen to the episode what do you think of serbia well amazing absolutely amazing so there again again as a sort of brief explainer alexander vuchich was one of these figures who seemed like the most incredible political survivor he was somebody from the right who had made the most disgusting statements as milosevic his propaganda chief and the guy that was almost working as your opposite number during the kosovo campaign who was on record so saying that uh he thought that i think it was that 100 bosnians should die for every serb which he later said was just a figure of speech whose government uh although he kept a little distance but not much distance from it essentially took back uh ratko mladic the war criminal who was responsible for the srebrenica genocide to something pretty close to a state funeral when he returned a few weeks ago a man who dominated the media uh so that when we were in uh serbia doing that election um someone from the british embassy had basically got themselves caught up in a horrible situation in a provincial town and the control that vuchich's team seemed to be able to have over the media and the way that they were able to replay the bits of our interview that seemed positive to him right across the national media were unbelievable and he then took this gamble a sort of macronized gamble that he'd hold an election earlier than he needed to and so that he could remain in power because he'd finished his presidential term he would run as prime minister and people were arguing that this again was a classic example of the way in which democracy is subverted and the way in which people rewrite the rules and it seemed very difficult to imagine how somebody who'd stitched up so much of the media and stitched the rules in his direction was going to lose but boy he lost and he lost to to nobody i mean that's the amazing trick there was that he's ran he lost to a party with literally no leader and nobody that anyone could identify he lost to a group of anonymous people over to you well they're not anonymous in that they were teachers and economists and doctors and just people taken from from civil society really um but just just a a point on the um the media side of things the because remember he said in our interview oh the media give me a really tough time and you're you don't understand i'm always i'm on the back foot i'm the victim etc the main serb tv station read an apology to the nation the other night after the election the may then one of their star news readers said you know we owe you an apology we have we did not hold him to account we did not tell the truth about this government you know absolutely straight out there and some of them resigned and sort of whether in shame or they were hounded out i don't know but this just this this is i think one of the most interesting elections there's been for a long time anywhere because you say they're nobody in that they're not recognized politicians so we've talked many times about this novi sad this collapse of a of a canopy and a railway station 16 people killed lots of the then demands for the contracts to be exposed the contracts were revealed lots of corruption was was exposed and this they call themselves the student list but you know one of the cleverest things that i've seen is that they've been exposed to a lot of corruption they've been exposed to a lot of corruption so they've been exposed to a lot of corruption they did they said that none of us are going to stand none of the students who started this because they were saying we don't want the power we want to change the system they then had this kind of like a mass citizens assembly type getting the different candidates to stand and they've got they've now got a majority you know they've got 100 more than 140 out of 250 c's they got over 50 of the vote um and they're now going to have to form the government and it's interesting there's we should be able to do a lot of things but i think it's interesting that we should put in the um in the newsletter of a guy i know very well he worked for me for a while a guy called kevin keith who now campaigns on the role of civil society in different parts of the world and he wrote a really interesting piece on on linkedin i'll just give you a couple of lines for years power in serbia had one face the movement that has defeated it has thousands for more than a decade alexander vucic dominated politics on sunday conceded defeat to a student-led movement that refused to organize around a single leader and they he says this we hear a lot about the loss of trust in institutions i long believed it's not lost it is displaced it leaves those who will not answer and looks for those who will and if you just said even when we were in belgrade a few months ago rory if we'd have said aren't you worried that a bunch of students might actually carry on with this protest that's been going on for months and months and months and they'll try and field a slate of candidates from the civil society that way he would have laughed at us absolutely which is why he held the election because he can't have thought this was a significant strategy wouldn't have triggered triggered an earlier election and it's i think a couple of things that strike me one of them is that there's a it's something that almost feels like a throwback 15 years to the arab spring which again was a very very anonymous almost social media civil society organized movement without obvious leaders that toppled someone and of course raises the question what next because this is a very odd coalition um you know we want to believe because they took down vucic that they're necessarily going to be pro-european sympathetic to kosovo nothing of the sort there's a lot of ethno-nationalist serbians in this group there are people who want to lift sanctions on russia there are people who are very supportive actually quite a lot of the nationalist rhetoric they just want to get rid of what they saw as a corrupt useless government and of course that's a bit reminiscent of what happened in hungary because again peter mogia is again not a left-wing politician at all he's very much from the fidesz urban tradition he is in a sense sort of right-wing nationalist populist who represents people who just were so fed up with the corruption and uselessness so there's a sort of sense in which governance issues have become separated from uh from ideological issues um however as we said with hungary it may begin to unlock things right there is an opportunity here vucic although he was very good at charming people was a big problem he was big problem for security in the western balkans because he was perpetually threatening kosovo albanians threatening to back republica serbs against bosnia he was very very much flirting with trump he had a very strange relationship with the united arab emirates which hasn't been covered much in depth and is and something we can get on to in the future which is the way that particular gulf stakes create these kinds of alliances it was an alliance which was with the uae and not with saudi or qatar and something very interesting going on there and i and i'd hope that this might be an opportunity to give a little bit more energy into at least ideas around single market then the other thing that's coming down the line um which i'm going to talk about but you may not wish to join me on because he's a friend of yours but eddie rama is facing real trouble so eddie rama the president of albania another enormously tall a figure with uh is in real trouble because he got again too bloody close to trump yeah and trump's property deals and trump's family and you know the board of peace and all this sort of stuff which these kind of yeah a lot of these balkan politicians get dragged into and maybe they feel that their countries are too weak too marginal to be able to stand up with the european union against the united states but he is in real trouble and um he who like vucic has been a great survivor may well be coming to the end of his tenure too which again could unlock new possibilities in balkans yeah the just this point about the about trump so i'm just reading this book at the moment it's french marion fan renta femme extreme it's a profile of maloney le pen and alice vidal but there's a really interesting passage in there about how there was a time when all three of them wanted to identify themselves very closely with trump and it's just interesting to see how she analyzes how they're all just slowly sort of you know we want to forget the things that we said about trump trump will never see himself as a negative as a liability but i think he probably did damage bolsonaro ultimately lula was able to present himself in that way and likewise vucic liked to project himself as being friendly with russia and friendly with with with america just before we go to israel rory um steve rosenberg the bbc guy in moscow who um we interviewed a leading not that long ago he does this very interesting review of the russian media where he translates bits that he puts his post-its with very he's got very nice handwriting unlike me um but it's fascinating these aren't editorial lines these are like news stories here's one the serbs this in russia the serbs are absolutely dependent on our gas which they receive cut price via turk stream which meets 90 of their requirements it's easy to guess what would happen to a weakened economy if these supplies were to stop next one possible sanctions on russia would hit serbia's energy sector big letters it isn't worth it for russia relations with the balkan country will now become more difficult the visa-free regime and direct flights are in doubt i mean you talk about bullying and intimidation but that's why the student list who in they didn't really have a manifesto they had a kind of document that sort of made a few points but it included them describing uh kosovo as an inalienable and integral part of serbia and a component of our national identity so we're kidding ourselves if we think we've got a nice kind of you know scandi to style western liberal democrat movement but we've got a big big change that's the point right less clear israel less clear israel and again you know maybe this this theme repeats which is you know there is a lot of change happening in israel um but the question is what does it really add up to ideologically so uh first thing is my normal boring point about how uh anyone who thinks they can predict elections in advance is either lucky or fooling themselves we both said this would be closed rory we were right we both said it would be we both said because but but but but the israel thing is really interesting because this weird 3.5 threshold that they have you know a party like ram which is the arab party could either pop up with five seats or pop up with zero seats depending on whether it gets 3.4 percent or not and i think that's a really interesting or just over 3.5 threshold um compared to the analysis that was out last week netanyahu has performed slightly better people thought maybe he'd get 23 seats looks like he's on course for probably 27 yasha maybe performed a little bit worse maybe got one seat worse but the real change has been this astonishing arab turnout yeah and people who might have been predicting arabs getting 10 seats they could be getting close to 18 seats and nazareth they went from a 48 percent turnout in the last election to 72 percent yeah another arab constituency from 35 percent up to 76 percent and so the the story that we told um that the arabs the king makers remains um but my fear that we were going to be back to 2018 2022 which was this israeli election crisis where basically likud had uh the most um seats but was never able to form a stable coalition looks more and more likely final thing for me um i i want to pay tribute to uh two extraordinary analysts of israel gil hoffman uh and dahlia scheindlin so gil hoffman is the man who's emphasized that this is an election which was defined by animosity animosity towards netanyahu animosity towards arabs and animosity towards the ultra-orthodox dahlia scheindlin emphasized what this election was not about the election was not about the election was not about the election was not about the election this was not an election about democracy about human rights about universal values it was not an election about peace or concessions or statehood or even palestinian well-being and therefore almost whoever gets in if you're a neighbor you're likely to have an israeli government that is still absolutely committed to crippling iran to occupying lebanon and syria and to using military force rather than diplomacy to resolve things this was defined by a lot of people as a referendum on netanyahu if you take it as a referendum on that you know he lost but he's a great survivor as we've said many many times he's claiming that he's winning because he got the most his party got the most seats but the most depressing thing about the election is the opposition bloc read by led by gaddy eisencott they were basically ruling out any sort of deal with the arab parties one of the arab parties ram has been in government before as part of a previous coalition but in a sense it underlines a kind of apartheid style approach they're basically saying that those votes don't count the arab parties don't count and the most interesting thing i've seen today out of all of this was a piece or a statement by yaya golan who leads the democrat party which is one of the eisencott bloc and he he said this we must no longer accept netanyahu's racist division between jewish votes and arab votes the voice of an israeli citizen voting in taipei is worth exactly as much as the voice of an israeli citizen voting in givat shemel no less not approximately exactly he made this point as well which i think i think is really really important this that essentially what both sides have done has said who's got the most zionist votes okay and he has pointed out golan has pointed out that in netanyahu's bloc you have 16 knesset members who are from the non-zionist haredi parties okay who promote mass draft evasion as he puts it while our children are fighting and dying so if he's insisting if netanyahu is insisting and saying you can only count it as if it's a zionist majority he loses 16 on that basis so i hate the way that both of them both the netanyahu bloc and the eisencott bloc are basically saying the arabs don't have a place in this well as you say technically the arab parties are now the kingmaker and if they're not going to be allowed to have a role in working out what happens now they've got no option probably but to have another bloody election what else are they going to do i pity i guess the kind of political scientist who's trying to weave all this stuff together trying to make a story out of um brazil serbia and israel what are the themes i i guess one is the theme about great political survivors so lulu and netanyahu these aging men who seem to come back again and again and who were you know who were leading their countries you know before you even came in the case of netanyahu came in in 97 or in lula's case overlapped with your government and are still sitting around in the same way that figures like putin are still sitting around maybe the second thing is anti-incumbency but that doesn't really work with lula either you know anybody who said the whole story uh is that if you're an incumbent given how rubbish the economy is you can never survive doesn't really seem to be about social media maybe i mean part of your lula story that you were sharing with us was how lula who hadn't done much social media somehow between the first and second round you told that lovely whatsapp story no he didn't even have a phone yeah i didn't have a phone exactly he got a smartphone between the two elections and how that may suddenly have made that difference to the to that critical 10 million votes that brought him through um trump may be a theme isn't the theme that autocrats eventually get found out the the bolsonaro brand is now in deep trouble trump's influence on these elections even though he's claiming to be a president he's claiming to be a president he's claiming to be a president credit for netanyahu having what he called an amazing comeback trump's influence was not that great as i said earlier in relation to europe most european right-wing leaders now don't want trump anywhere near them vucic you know defined as an autocrat defeated by this ragbag as it were so i think it's that isn't it isn't that where we get hope well i think you yeah i think you're being too optimistic yeah too optimistic because i think unfortunately it's not a decisive repudiation of netanyahu in israel he didn't actually do that badly in fact he's done slightly better than the polls predicted but i said that's because i think they made a mistake they fell into his trap the minute they did that i thought that is a big mistake when they announced they would have nothing to do with the arab parties in in advance of the election then one they made it virtually impossible for themselves to form a government because they were never going to you know their voting system doesn't allow them to get think they're going to get a majority on their own but secondly it allowed the debate to take place on netanyahu's terms on the terms of the hard right which is basically all talk of a palestinian state all talk of the two-state solution is for the birds i just think that's a terrible mistake and so where was the voice and i understand the impact of october 7th of course i understand that but i just think it meant that you were having once you say it's a referendum on the existent incumbent leader unless the others are offering a real alternative what was the alternative they were offering they're basically the same thing they were offering they were offering a real alternative basically say we're not as bad as bad as netanyahu but they weren't saying anything that different they were still saying he was pretty supportive of what was happening in the west bank a little bit a little bit pissed off with some of the atrocities but not much i think the arab parties will have been motivated to vote in the numbers that they did because there was a talk at one point should we just sit this out because it's pointless i think they were motivated by the the horrible nature of the campaign you know we're basically being told you lot don't count so let's show that we do well my final theme which i maybe is part of this is that we're in a period of unbelievable instability which is presumably why uh macron got it wrong calling an election didn't work for him why vucic got it wrong calling an early election that blew up in his face and led to him losing why bolsonaro and all the pundits on brazil got it wrong between the first and second round of the brazilian election i mean there is something really interesting about modern politics uh if you look at the fact that we're breaking records all the time and what's happening yeah i happened in Serbia, nobody's seen it before. That's a very, very weird thing. I can't think of a single example in any European democracy where a party that barely existed with no identifiable leader manages to win, you know, an overwhelming victory. Brazil is literally record-breaking. You know, there's been no example in history of the person who lost the first round turning around and winning the second round, particularly with all the other factors that were in Bolsonaro's favour. And also the inability to follow trends. I mean, you might have thought after seven straight victories for pro-Trump right-wing parties in Latin America, you could imagine the eighth. You can't. So, I think we're in a world, and I don't know whether this is social media, I don't know whether this is voter anger, I don't know whether it's just political culture, where even really seasoned operatives like Vucic or even Lula are going into complete the unprecedented elections. And it's very, very difficult for anyone to quite know what's going to happen in advance. So, Rory, we've had a bit of a different to usual week because we waited for the budget to record the main episode today. We've had these elections to talk about. We're going to record a question time this week, which will go out on Friday. And we're going to exploit the fact that you're in the United States, Izzy from the newsletter is in the United States, and we've been asking Americans, as well as people in different parts of the world, for their questions about the midterms. I'll be looking forward to your take. My Rory, my son Rory's out there as well, sort of traveling all over the place, getting a sense of what's going on as he goes about his business. I'm not going to make bold predictions, the sort of which you made at the presidential election, but we'll have a very good discussion about it on Friday. See you then. Looking forward to it very much.