538. The Pope’s AI Warning and Alastair Reacts to Blair’s Attack

Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com. The Pope's encyclical, it might be as important as anything that's been said. It was hard at times not to read that in the back of his mind was Trump, Vance, Musk, Netanyahu, Putin, other world and tech leaders. AI is now developing as the biggest single thing in global politics, economics. There are basically four different attitudes you can take. Except we can't do anything about it. Trust the tech bros, believe that democratic institutions can shape it or try to get Trump and others to stop it. Blair's just put out this very controversial essay. He's right that Labour needs to kick up the backside. But if I had had a red pen, there are quite a lot of changes and deletions I would have made. This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. 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To get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to NordVPN.com slash rest is politics. The link is in the episode description. Welcome to the rest is politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Now, Rory, we are going to talk about two very high profile Catholics, my old boss, Tony Blair, and his church's current spiritual leader, Pope Leo XVI. Because both of them last week published very much discussed, but very different essays, or in the case of the Pope, we call it an encyclical, but both of which were speaking truth to power in very forceful ways. Tony was giving some very harsh messages to the Labour Party in a 5,600 word essay, provoking a very mixed reaction, including, I must say, my own, as you'll hear, but at least some proper debate. And then my new hero, Pope Leo, who wrote an even longer piece, a 235 page encyclical on AI, a subject on which, fair to say, he and Tony have quite different views, but both of them talked about a lot more than AI. And so we will talk about a lot more than AI as well, because we're going to digest what they said and the ramifications. So do you want to start, Roy, do you want to start with His Holiness, the Pope, or His Holiness Tony? Who would you like to start with? Let's start with His Holiness, the Pope. This is a huge story, because as listeners will be aware, AI is now developing as probably the biggest single thing in global politics, economics. It could be mass unemployment, it could be autonomous drones, it could be war. And here is the first attempt for a very significant global public figure to make the moral case for how we should think about AI. But it's not just moral, it's a political case, and it's a Pope bringing with him hundreds of millions of Catholics, but more than that, actually articulating things that I would think will be shared by nearly 2 billion Christians around the world and doing it in a way that resonates not just with Christians, but as I think we'll find when we talk to you, with actually many, many people, including yourself, who's a sort of Christian-friendly atheist, because it is an attempt to frame it also in terms of the progressive humanist values of the post-Second World War. So probably the strongest way of looking at AI I've seen. It is a really, really unusual document, and I think I'd really encourage people to get into it. Probably not right from the beginning, I'd suggest maybe start on paragraph 118, if you want to be... No! No! No! Okay, go on. But the totality is just wonderful. Oh, that's beautiful. You have to read the whole thing. You have to read the whole thing. You've got to read the whole thing, 40,000 words of it. For those of you who don't want to read the whole thing, there is also an opportunity on YouTube to see the presentation of it, including the great theologian providing a little bit of a summary of some of the central arguments, one of the cardinals does it. But it is a really exciting thing to read, because it's so unusual in modern politics, because it starts really from the question of what are we here for? You know, what is human meaning? What's human purpose? You know, we take it for granted in the rest of politics that we're here to try to make people richer, live longer, fix the potholes, get the NHS working well, all of which is very good stuff, and a lot of which is what Tony Blair is implicitly focused on. But of course, the Pope takes us back to something more fundamental, which is what does it mean to be human? You know, what's the purpose of life? What's the meaning of life? And then he rubs that up against the question of AI. And the fundamental question he keeps asking is, he says, look, I'm not against technology. I'm very careful not to say that, because of course, famously, the Catholic Church got in a bit of trouble for confronting Galileo when he suggested that the Earth went around the sun. But he's saying that if you push ahead with this technology, you need to ask yourself again and again, is this going to improve the dignity of human life, and in particularly the dignity of the most vulnerable people in the world? And that's the big test. And he implies that he says, let's look at it in relation to unemployment, right? Is it going to lead to better jobs, including for the very poorest? Is it going to lead to better education? Is it going to lead to a more peaceful world? Is it going to lead to a richer sense of humanity? And is it going to lead to a more truthful world? And we'll get into how you answer those questions and what sort of model you have. But I thought that was, for me, the most interesting thing. Over to you. The title, Magnifico Humanitas, underlines that his big worry about AI is that it dehumanizes, that it weakens human beings, not in a contest with technology, but at the expense of technology and indeed the people who are driving this AI revolution. I mean, the reason why I found it so compelling is because, I guess partly because it felt to me, in fact, I asked your friend Claude on the back of listening to your interview with Jack Clark, I asked your friend Claude, how would you assess the politics of the Pope's encyclical? And it came out with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, therefore, classic left of centre values. Left of centre European values. So no wonder I absolutely loved it. But I'll tell you what was interesting, I was in Italy just after it was published. And of course, the media there was full of it, way more than it had been, than it has been in the UK. And then, as you know, I went to Hong Kong. And Kevin Rudd, the former Australian Prime Minister, he was on a panel about AI with Simon Johnson, British Nobel Prize winning economist, who's the UK's ambassador on AI. And you should, by the way, get on as your next AI interview, I think. And Kevin Rudd, I was only vaguely aware of this encyclical from seeing these Italian headlines. And I don't speak Italian. I just kind of got the message. Kevin Rudd, in his presentation, he referred to the Pope's encyclical. I didn't know that Kevin was a Catholic, but he is. And he said, it's a really important contribution to the debate. It might be as important as anything that's been said. So I thought, God, God, God, Pope, Christ, I thought, I'll read it. So I downloaded it, two, three, five pages, and it's brilliant. And of course, it is about so much more than AI, but I'll tell you how I read it as a call to all of us to rediscover and to implement in our own ways the values which he clearly feels are being eroded by the technology and above all, by those who are using it for malign ends in politics and in business. And even accepting my Trump derangement syndrome, it was hard at times not to read that in the back of his mind was Trump, Vance, Musk, Netanyahu, Putin, other world and tech leaders. And as you say, he is not anti-tech, he's very, very clear about that. He also seems to me understands it. I actually felt that the reason why I think you should read it all, including the original bit, the opening bits, although there is quite a lot of God and Bible, as you might expect, it seems to me he understands artificial intelligence and explains it better than a lot of its authors do. And he speaks about how to regulate it better than most of the politicians do. And I've got many, many favorite passages, but one of them, he has this one line, a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. And the many, not the few theme just runs through the whole thing. And it's obvious worry that there's going to be the risk that this is going to produce even greater inequality in an already far too unequal world. I think that's why I just felt it was so brilliant. It's on this sense that he understands things. I spent part of last week with his main AI advisor, and his main AI advisor is a guy called Father Paolo Benanti. And Father Paolo is very Roman, spends a lot of time talking about how he speaks Roman dialects. And I had him talking to another Roman and they were really joking about this. And he's a Franciscan friar, but with a doctorate in moral theology and a first degree in engineering. And he spends an astonishing amount of time. And I see him pop up in these AI conferences all around the world, hanging out with these billionaires when he himself, of course, has taken a vow of poverty and is working in a monastery in Rome where he's brewing his own beer in the way that monasteries do to try to raise funds for the monastery. And he's got a wonderful sort of old fashioned sort of slightly worldly Roman priest attitude to him. He's very polite in many ways towards the tech bros. And you saw one of them, again, a guy I know a little bit called Chris Ola from Anthropic was up on the stage. We've just done this interview. And if people really, you know, to really bring this all together, please do listen to the Jack Clarke interview that's just gone out leading. Just search the rest of this politics leading wherever you get your podcast to enjoy this interview with Anthropic's co-founder, Jack Clarke. Jack Clarke, Chris Ola and Dario Mode, co-founders of Anthropic, Claude, which in many ways trying to be the good guys in this debate. And Chris Ola has actually spent the last few months in consultations with Catholic Church, with Muslim clerics, with Buddhists, and actually people from different African religions, Asian religions, trying to get to the core of some of the moral questions. So I think you're absolutely right. I mean, Paolo really gets this stuff. I mean, he absolutely understands what a large language model is. He's an engineer. He gets how the weights and parameters work and how these models can be developed. And he also understands the personalities, the founders. The document that was produced, though, is really extraordinary. So to focus on one very practical thing, one of the things that Anthropic has said, and in fact, many of the other companies have said, is that AI is likely to lead to a lot of job losses. What do I mean by that? I mean, well, I was speaking recently to two big chief executives, one of whom was saying they can see nearly 1,000 people in their organization who would be difficult for them to keep their jobs. Another one was talking about 6,000, 7,000 people. These are people maybe working in things like call centers, software development. And the answer that you get generally from the tech bros in Silicon Valley is, well, okay, people lose their job, and either they're very optimistic they'll somehow reinvent themselves and get a new job, which I'd like to hear from you about, because I'm a bit skeptical about that. Because in fact, our experience, you know, for example, when under Margaret Thatcher, the coal mines were closed, it was very difficult for people to reinvent themselves and find new jobs. The second claim is, well, you can have a big universal basic income, and you just sort of pay people big welfare savings because the economy is going to grow so much. A couple of questions there. Well, whose economy? Is it the American economy that's growing, or is it the British economy that's growing? But even if the British economy was growing, and there was money available, the Pope's point is that work, and this is a big sort of bit of Catholic social teaching, work going back to the 1890s, is not just a way of making money. Work is how you feel that you are yourself contributing to society. Work is where you make friendships. Work is where you find purpose. Work is where you develop your vocation. Work is where you work out what your skills are and what they're not. And so the Pope would say, one of the most devastating things that AI might do is mass unemployment and that actually, if the large language models were leading to people losing their jobs in the name of productivity, he would suggest we should resist that because work is good in and of itself. I don't even know if I've read a full encyclical before, I probably have at some point, but one of the things that's interesting about it is he sets his own encyclical in the context of those that have made the most impression upon him in the past, taking a lot from his namesake, and I wonder if this is why he chose the name, Leo XIII, who was the Pope from 1878 to 1903, and he wrote one of the most famous encyclicals, Rerum Novarum, of the New World. And honestly, Rory, the reason I love that one, I went back and checked that, it basically reads like an old Labour Party manifesto. It talks about the dignity of work and of workers, fair wages for good work, let's put people above profit, he's very pro-workers' rights and pro-workers' associations. And Pius XI, Leo XVI reminds us, defined this as the Magna Carta of Christian social action. Then Pius XI, he sort of summarises his, and this was all about warning against the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few. And of course, Pope Leo is saying that what we're seeing now is the economic centralisation in the hands of a few. This Rerum Novarum, which is I think 1893 or something like that, is amazing because what it is, is it's very much challenging the excesses of mad industrial capitalism and inequality, but it's also resisting full socialism. So it's a really interesting, and it is quite new Labour. He's saying, look, there's no problem with private property. There's a sense in private property, both in terms of motivating people, looking after their children, giving them a sense of security and independence. And actually he even says it's justifiable to make money in order to retain what he calls your position in life. But beyond that, wealth is for the community. Beyond that, your wealth is there to serve other people. Your talents are there to serve other people. So as you say, it's a very powerful argument for the rights of workers and the duties of the employer and a way of thinking about what wealth is for. He keeps coming back to this idea that the wealth is not for you. Yes, by all means, save a bit for your family, look after your children. Beyond that, you're really there to look after others. And he also got a big vision of the state. The state has to step in to look after the most vulnerable. Anyway, back over to you. In fact, he's warning that one of the dangers of AI is that the state, the nation state is less powerful than the people who are actually in charge of this technology. So he actually says, again, underlining, he's not anti-technology, he says that technology has got all sorts of good things it do for healing, for education, but it can also divide. And so he says this, in the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity's problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics, Musk, Bezos, Altman, he doesn't mention them, the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it. And then he goes on to use phrases within that context about the idolatry of profit, deceitful goals, progress that exacerbate inequalities. And I just think that this is very much about the people who are driving this. I think it is throughout this whole thing, he's basically saying, I mean, if he was sitting down with Elon Musk, he'd be much more politer than I would be, but he's basically, why do you want to be a trillionaire? What are you going to do with your trillion dollars? Why don't you sort of maybe do more to help other people? And I think running through it, just to get a bit biblical, he has these two competing visions going through the whole thing. Are we constructing Babel? Or are we about rebuilding Jerusalem? And it's pretty obvious which one he prefers. To explain for people who are not big sort of Bible readers, just to remind them that the point about the Tower of Babel is not that technology is bad and not that people are constructing this huge tower. The point is that it's Promethean, they're trying to do it in a prideful way. They're basically trying to defy God and build a tower based on power, love of self, ego. Whereas Jerusalem, in his vision from Nehemiah, is not an individual ego project. It's a joint project where Nehemiah is literally getting the whole community, the women, the children, the vulnerable to work together brick by brick, compromising, negotiating, building this thing together. And he directly challenged, so Peter Thiel, who's currently apparently flitting from America to Argentina, no doubt to build one of these new prosperous, whatever they're called. But I think he's directly challenging that vision that somehow a certain subset of humans can become greater than the rest of humanity, which causes what Musk thinks, what Thiel thinks and what have you. So he's basically saying, this is what I mean about, he's asking us all to rediscover values that these people are eroding. And then of course, he then applies some of this to international relations. And again, very, very clearly, I invite everyone to conceive of ways of cooperating, of more effective international institutions capable of safeguarding the global common good without compromising the legitimate diversity of peoples and nations. Any attempt, in brackets, Putin, Ukraine, Trump, Greenland, China, Taiwan, any attempt or plan to eliminate or subjugate a nation is gravely immoral, and therefore unacceptable. And your point about the way the economy runs, he says, in terms, we can no longer rely on the invisible hand of the market, the famous Adam Smith quote. So this is new labour to the core. There's also a little bit of some of the stuff we talk about in terms of disagreeing agreeably. One of the things he's very interested in is truth. And he is particularly interested in the way that he thinks the new world of social media and politics and kind of Trumpian populism, you know, what you call post truth, he quotes Hannah Arendt. And Hannah Arendt says that the real danger of these kind of authoritarian regimes is not the kind of fanatic believers. But it's the people who basically, in the end, think there's no real difference between truth and falsehood, fact and fiction. He talks about truth as being absolutely fundamental to democracy. And you know what, why? Well, I mean, obviously, if we're voting for someone, we need to believe their manifesto, we need to be able to know what they've done in order to vote them out. Otherwise, we have no way of judging them. But he also talks about truth in a way that I was quite taken with, which is that truth is that it's rational, right? So it's a belief that it's possible to get the truth, there is such a thing as the truth. But it's also relational. I mean, and he keeps coming back to this word relational, he keeps saying that one of the problems of the way in which the tech pros conceive the world is they're conceiving these what you would call your sovereign individual, right? They're conceiving this idea that mankind is sort of self made, and mankind is the sole author of society, etc. Whereas in fact, the reality is that none of us are like that. We are so much more than we ever want to acknowledge part of relations, we only exist in relation with other humans, in relation with nature, we are the heirs of a really complicated relational system. And truth comes out of that truth comes out of us disagreeing agreeably. Truth comes out of dialogue, challenge, and that's also his hope for peace. So he also says truth is a common good, not the property of those with power or influence. In other words, Elon Musk is very, very powerful. And his truth, which is often riddled with lies, can impact politics in different parts of the world and is doing so. Donald Trump does not tell the truth. But he projects himself to his followers as the only truth teller on earth. And there's this other great line, indifference to the truth leads slowly but surely, he says this is the Pope, not Trump, to dissent into totalitarianism, because I've been flying all over the place and I've traveled with a lot of books, and I was reading this one, which is by a Dutch journalist called Rosanne Schmitz, and it's been translated into English. This is fascism. And let me just read a couple of very short sections. The fascist playbook, see it as a playbook. It unfolds step by step and the components are always the same, a yearning for some idealized mythical past, a profound contempt for fact, and the accusation that leftist elites and minorities are conspiring to destroy the country. Then you go on to chapter five. This relates to what you've just said and also what the Pope is saying. Fascism destroys democracy from within. It starts with talk, not tanks, elections, not a coup. And it takes hold thanks to people who think it won't happen here. We're heading down that road again, not with hundreds of thousands marching as they did in the 20th century, but with the rise of far right politicians in the U.S. and Europe. Wokebusters and a global coalition against globalism, with the algorithms and billions of tech giants who control our digital public lives, and with the millions of people walking along to their beat of the scapegoat drum. Brilliant. I was thinking that we are very, very, very lucky to have this Pope because when you're looking at the Tommy Robinson march, people in support of this far right convicted criminal marching towards Trafalgar Square with crosses, claiming to speak for Judeo-Christian civilization. These are people who, and Vance seems to be one of them, seems to want to try to use Christianity to say Christianity is about looking after your own family first and forget about the rest of the world, which the Pope reproved him about. That was the Order of Morris. They seem to be saying, a lot of them, including sort of reform, curious Tories, oh, human rights is ridiculous. We don't need to believe in human rights. We're anti-immigration. We don't believe in a rules-based international order. Put ourselves first. And they're trying to, their nostalgia for their Judeo-Christian past is really a nostalgia for Hollywood movies, the Crusades. They use a lot of kind of memes of the kind of leper king and his mask and this kind of stuff. But we have someone at the head of the Catholic Church producing a completely radically different vision of Christianity, saying to all those people who claim to be Catholics or claim to be Christians, no, his vision of Christianity in this is a Christianity that says the greatest achievements of the 20th century are Martin Luther King, civil rights, the United Nations, the UN Declaration on Human Rights, rules-based international order, the Refugee Convention. He talks about tolerance towards other religions. He's just been on a big visit to the Islamic world where he's been in mosques talking with Muslim leaders. In other words, he's rejecting every element of their Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-human rights, anti-international organization, cross-waving madness. And also he's doing, I read a thing in Der Spiegel about it yesterday. They were setting out the kind of reach of this, okay, because he's the Pope and it's a really interesting piece. So it's been translated into God knows how many languages, God doesn't know obviously, but a lot of languages. But the story was about the fact that some of the words he's used do not yet have a Latin translation because he's using all these words that didn't exist. So they're now having to describe, they're having to invent a few, what do they call them? Neologisms, find new words to define some of the things he said. But the other thing, we said at the start that this was about so much more than AI. He's very strong on the rights of migrants. He's very strong on women's rights. He's got a very strong passage about we have to face up to the strategies of these tech companies in terms of social media addiction. He's very strong in the environment and we've got to think carefully, do we really need all these data centers just because the tech bros say so? Health data exploitation, he's big on that. People trafficking, dangers of AI in warfare. And you mentioned J.D. Vance, who I think probably made a bit of a schoolboy error as a newly converted Catholic thinking that you could argue with the Pope about the meaning of Ordo Aboris. But I think this, I said he had some of these people in mind. What about this line? Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right of self-defense in the strictest sense, it's important to reaffirm that the just war theory, which is all too often being used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. J.D. Vance comes out and says, I'm glad to see the Pope is rethinking Ordo Aboris. Yeah, he's basically telling you that you are wrong in a very nice, polite way. It's amazing that J.D. Vance is so self-deceiving, isn't it? I mean, the Ordo Aboris that the Pope is talking about is literally the order of love. The theme that runs through the whole thing is love. He links human suffering and death to love. He links truth and relationships to love. He sees God through the Trinity as simply being love, as being relationships and the interactions between people. Let me just push on, push you then onto a policy question. We are looking at a technology with AI, which carries enormous risks. I mean, it's got benefits, but it's got enormous risks. It could lead to mass unemployment. It could lead to warfare becoming more common. So the Pope points out that with AI and autonomous drones, the friction that prevents people going from war is reduced. It could lead to mass surveillance. It could lead to an explosion and cyber attacks to bioweapons, etc. And broadly speaking, if you were just stepping back and looking at that, you would say, okay, great benefits in the future, health, cancer, etc. But normally we would take a prudential view and say the risks at the moment outweigh the benefits and we'd want to slow down and regulate. But there are two problems. One problem is that the AI companies are in this race against each other and they're not prepared to slow down. And the second problem is that we live in the world of Trump and he doesn't seem very likely to regulate, which means that there are basically four different attitudes you can take. And I'd like to know where you are, right? Number one is Tony Blair's view seems to be a little bit like there's not much we can do about it. You know, this technology is going to be developed anyway. We better get the best out of it. The tech bros, on the other hand, including Anthropics, seem to say, well, listen, trust us. So we're racing ahead, we're in an America's Cup race, but while we're racing, we're going to sort out the safety stuff while also winning the race. The Pope is saying a third thing, which is what we need to do is we need to be more democratic and use democratic institutions to make sure that this technology is shaped in a way that works for the dignity of people, elected parliaments, the United Nations, rules based international order, trade unions, etc. And the fourth view is that our best bet is to try to put pressure on the Trumps this world and the Xi Jinping's the world to simply stop it. Right? I mean, maybe to do an analogy with Brexit, the Pope is a bit more like me and Theresa May saying, well, maybe we can get a middle road. We can keep the technology, but we can stop it being too bad. And the stop view, which is what I'm sometimes tempted towards, is more like you, which is, listen, politics is pretty binary. You either go Brexit or you don't go Brexit. And it may be easier to convince Trump and Xi Jinping to just stop the stuff and stop it now, because now is the moment where it could be stopped because the data centers are so enormous. These things can be seen from space. So what's your instinct? Except we can't do anything about it. Trust the tech bros, believe that democratic institutions can shape it or try to get Trump and others to stop it. Right. Well, I don't trust the tech bros, by and large. I thought that it was interesting your interview with Jack Clarke, who struck me as one of the most reasonable voices I've heard on this. But even here at the end of it, I felt, this feels quite scary for a group of tech bros with a massive vested interest to be in charge of deciding how this gets framed. I think the other thing I worry about, particularly with Trump and Xi Jinping and their psychology, is that that is the big race at the moment, which of those two superpowers is going to really dominate this. And they will be operating slightly out of fear of the other. I am somewhere between the Pope and I'm probably closer to the Pope because I mentioned there was this debate in Italy, which was partly about this. And there was this argument between two people, one who was saying, we've got to put the genie back in the bottle. And the other one who was saying, well, it's too late for that, added to which you've got to focus on the good this can do. And there's a lot of good that it can do. I really liked the way that the Pope used this phrase about disarmament, where he talked about disarming AI. And he said that means freeing it from the mentality of armed competition, which I think is what he's thinking about between China and the US. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity, freeing technology from monopolistic control, that is democracy, opening it to discussion and debate, that is truth and democracy, therefore making it more human friendly, etc. For this reason, merely regulating is insufficient, it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible. So I think he's basically saying, we're in it, we can't get out of it, but we have to slow down and while we're doing that, there has to be some kind of international process involving politicians, people like him, the people who know what they're on about, and also civil society. I think that's what he's saying. I think I agree with that. Let me push one more time, because I think it's a bet, a bit like the Brexit referendum, on what's actually possible, what you can do. You can make an argument that none of these things seem very likely. I agree with you, it seems very, very unlikely that the tech bros can really be trusted to self-regulate. In fact, we saw with OpenAI that as soon as all their governance structures tried to kick in in order to control Sam Altman and they fired him, immediately the board was got rid of and Sam Altman was reconfirmed. So we can't trust them. Secondly, I agree with you, it's very unlikely that Trump and Xi Jinping are going to agree to stop this. I think they probably could, this is probably the last time they could, but it's extremely unlikely we're in this world of Trump. But the third possibility, which is the Pope and your idea that somehow international institutions, the Catholic Church, parliaments, democracies are going to disarm that stuff. Well, that seems pretty unlikely too, when these institutions seem weaker than they've ever been, populism's on the rise, and there's no reason for Trump or the tech bros to pay any attention to what European institutions do. Kevin Rudd made a very interesting point at this event in Hong Kong. He said that sometimes when you have these technologies developing or any political situation developing, the way that politics and modern government works, it sometimes takes a crisis to really focus minds. And he said, talking about Claude Mithos, he said, we've sort of had the security moment where even the tech bros are saying, hold on, we're not sure we can handle this. When that is allied, he said, to the potential for the jobs crisis, which I suspect is coming, then governments will suddenly feel that maybe they have to get together and act on this. So I don't know. I think we're still in the very, very formative stages, and the challenge with that is that the technology is developing at such an extraordinary pace. Simon Johnson was saying that even the things that he was witnessing just two or three years ago are now of a completely different, back then almost unimaginable speed and pace of change. So that's the issue that we've got. But I'm kind of, on all of this, Rory, I'm kind of with the Pope. In fact, Rory, how's your Latin these days? My Latin's okay. Tell me what I'm saying. Papa, bonus, dux, faccionis, mei, esset. So the Pope is a good leader. No, I can't get there. Go on. What are you saying? You know what? It says basically the Pope would be a very good leader of my party. Very good. I think if the Pope could step into elected UK politics, I'm backing that man. Very good. Okay, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back to a man who was a very successful leader of your party. Tony Blair after the break. It's nearly that time, everyone. The rest is football. We'll be on Netflix every day for the world's biggest tournament. Join myself, Alan and Micah for daily debates, unfiltered takes and the most special of guests, all from the heart of New York City. Yeah, that's right. We're excited to see you soon. Changes in sexual performance are more common than most people realise and support doesn't need to feel awkward. With MedExpress, everything happens privately online. Start by completing a short consultation reviewed by UK registered clinicians. If eligible, treatment is delivered discreetly to your home with ongoing support whenever you need it. You're not alone in this. Visit medexpress.co.uk slash podcast to learn more. Welcome back to the rest of this politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And here we are, coming up to two decades after Tony Blair left office, still talking about him. So Rory, Tony's five and a half thousand word essay. I was in Hong Kong. My phone was going nuts with the media saying, please do this, please do that. Please come on this, come on that. I decided I'm not going to do anything until I talk to you on the podcast. Basically this story breaks. Here is Alistair Campbell, who is one of Tony Blair's closest friends, worked with him very closely on New Labour Project. Let's just put out this very controversial essay and they want to know what does Alistair think about it? Okay, over to you. In no particular order, these were the main questions I was getting. Did I have anything to do with writing it? The answer to that is no. Was I aware he'd been planning to make an intervention like this at some stage? Yes, I was. Did I see it in advance? Not long enough to make a difference. And then finally, what difference would I like to have made? And so what I will do in answering that, I'll tell you what I said to him when we discussed it as this debate raged. Okay. Now, the first thing I think it does show, no matter how long he's been out of office, that his voice still carries and matters. And also there are very, very, very few politicians, frankly, anywhere in the UK or anywhere who have the range and the depth and the analytical mind. And that there was a lot in his analysis and some of his criticisms and some of his ideas that I agreed with and endorsed. Let's just do a little explainer on my rough version of how I read it, and then you can tell us what you said to Tony Glass. So my summary of it is that he said Labour won the election as a kind of acceptable default, but they haven't recognised that the world has changed dramatically towards a sort of G2, G3 world, which is US, China, possibly India, and AI. That a lot of the stuff they've done on workers' rights, cost of energy, North Sea, wages, maybe even non-DOMs, has been destructive to the economy, and they need a much more pro-business, pro-AI, let it rip. That Trump is a kind of reckoning, and he's a guy who, like him or hate him, gets stuff done, and all the US is really demanding is that we're stronger partners and things like NATO, and we shouldn't get too panicked. He regretted Brexit, but we shouldn't think about rejoining, because Europe is basically too uncompetitive. We should have allowed the US to use our bases against Iran, because that's where the real threats are. And that was my sort of summary. Okay, over to you. That was quite a good summary, but I get it. It underlied why, for me, there was quite a large but. At the end of my, I agreed with a lot of what you said, okay. I guess my but, first of all, relates to the timing. I don't think the timing could have been much worse, but there's poor old Keir. He's the Prime Minister. Tony's one of the few people alive who knows what it's like to be the Prime Minister under pressure. He's getting kicked from all sides, and Tony's been very good throughout his post-prime ministerial career as tending not to provide headlines, directly criticising his successors, but he does just that. Now, his argument is, firstly, that the current debate going on, West Streeting, Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner, whatever, is as much about personalities as about policy, and he regrets that. Secondly, that if Andy Burnham wins the by-election in Makefield, there will at some point be a challenge to Keir Starmer. It may well lead to a coronation, and there will be a change of leadership, but no real debate about whether the party needs a change of direction. So I think that's partly what he's thinking. And he did say to me, he says, look, you can always say now is not the right time, and that is true. It's never easy to make these sorts of interventions. My view is it would have held much more sway if you'd waited if and when there was an actual contest. Now, he says, well, there might not have been a contest, fair enough, but then on the substance of which there was a lot. Just to understand that one. So you were saying, listen, OK, if the point about this is to try to influence the way that the Labour Party and MPs vote, then do it when the contest starts rather than three weeks before. And he says, no, maybe my intervention will actually ensure that somebody will challenge Andy Burnham, because without my intervention, maybe Andy Burnham would just be crowned. Is that what he's saying? I think he's simply saying that if there is just a coronation, West Streeting decides not to challenge because Andy Burnham's got it all stitched up. It'll be a bit like, you know, Rishi Sunak takes over, but there's no contest. If you're going to have a contest, you're going to have a change. There has to be some sort of policy debate. And to be fair to Tony, he did generate a policy debate. I actually thought that Keir Starmer's response was one of his better descriptions of what the government is trying to do and what he stands for. What was Keir Starmer's response? I'm sorry, what did he say? His basic response was, I will always listen to Tony Blair. I accept he's always worth listening to. I do not accept we don't have a plan. He was also making the point, which I think is a fair point, is that the circumstances we inherited much harder, but he then went through a lot of the things that he's trying to do. And he said it was about trying to extend opportunity and so forth. Now, I actually think on the substance, there was a lot that I agreed with. What did you agree with before you disagree? I think the Labour government has lacked a clear plan. I think that there hasn't been a sense of, you know, growth is the big thing is we're going to do it. Some of the policies have been in contradiction to the core strategy. I think you and I have talked lots about, you know, the Winter Fuel Alliance as being the first thing. I think we haven't maybe just sent some signals to business that run contrary to what business was expecting. And likewise, but then there's other things where I would criticize the government where Tony didn't. I think actually, as you and I have said before, I think the position on Gaza has been as damaging to Labour as anything that he's done would anger the right of British politics. But where I felt there were the weaknesses in his argument, which I don't think helped. The first is, there wasn't that much recognition of anything the government has done, which I thought was unfair. I think there should have been at least, given it was so long, he could have put a little bit more than, you know, well, okay, they've done this. It could have been a bit more defending the government. Second, you only have to read Alan Milburn's recent report on NEETs, not in education, employment or training. And thank you, by the way, to Alan, who wrote a terrific piece for our newsletter, which if you don't subscribe to the newsletter, you should, it really was good. And there was only really a passing acceptance that the 2024 inheritance was much, much worse than what we had to deal with in 1997. Third, I felt on net zero, I felt his argument lacked any real rigor. I felt it was way too influenced by the tech bros and the fossil fuel arguments. And I thought there were a lot of false choices in there, particularly cheap energy or clean energy. I think cheap energy, clean energy is going to be the answer to cheap energy. And then finally, I thought the suggestion that we should have been more supportive of Trump on Iran, and indeed the warm assessment of Trump more generally, said to me he was speaking truth to power in labor, but not truth to power in the world. And I thought that was, I didn't like that at all. So don't get me wrong, I still think Tony is an exceptional political mind. He's right that labor needs to kick up the backside. And if you're the only leader who's won two terms, let alone three, it's a voice that we should always listen to. But if I had had a red pen, there are quite a lot of changes and deletions I would have made, particularly on net zero, I have to say. So one of the interesting things is that the analysis of what's wrong with labor's economic policy is going to become the absolute conventional wisdom, certainly for the conservatives, certainly for reform, probably for the Lib Dems. And it's worth taking seriously, because it'll be the thing that will dominate, I think politics in Britain for the next two and a half years. And it's basically the view of more and more people in business. The view is British energy is much too expensive. And that is the fault of Ed Miliband, and that they need to change track, or we'll never get competitive energy and without competitive energy, we can't have a competitive industrial policy. Now, obviously, you and Ed Miliband disagree with that. But I think you'll see that as the central attack line coming from Tories, reform and business. I think the second one is around energy security. People will say it's completely daft for us to import all this oil and gas and refuse to do our own drilling in the North Sea. And this isn't just about prices. This is about actually having our own security. And what the Straits of Hormuz has revealed is that if you're just totally dependent on importing from other people, when you have your own oil, that doesn't make any sense. I think people will also be pushing hard on saying a lot of this stuff on increasing employers national insurance payments, the cost to employing people, workers' rights, going after non-doms in this way is mad. You know, increasingly, if you talk to businesses, they say, why don't you just say to non-doms, listen, we're not going to go after you on wealth tax, inheritance tax, which is what's leading many people to leave to Milan or Portugal, we'll charge you 300,000 pounds a year, and you can just be here. And that will generate billions of pounds of British government, and that will work for the non-doms. And it will also be sellable politically. So I think that stuff, the kind of economic stuff is stuff that the center right would agree with. And I suspect some of the right of the Labour Party would probably agree with Tony Blaron. And I certainly think there are people in number 10, who've been pretty sceptical about Ed Miliband. There's been a lot of muttering about getting rid of Ed Miliband over the last last two years, a lot of frustration. It's not a secret that, you know, Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney, when he was chief of staff were among them. But I think this is where we've got to be very, very careful. And I felt, for example, in some areas, that Tony was closer to a Trumpian version of the world than Mark Carney. And I think the environment is one of those. I think he's absorbed too much of the very successful right wing campaign, which is framing these false choices. So this idea of cheap power or clean power, it's a false choice. There was an analysis by Nesta that showed since the 2022 crisis caused by Ukraine, wind, solar and storage projects that we have built in the UK have actually de-linked UK power prices from gas. And another one, somebody sent me this paper about Italy and Spain. So Italy, Spain supported renewables, reducing gas to 22% of its electricity. Italian government blocked renewables, Maloney, back gas. The result has seen far cheaper power in Spain. I think that is a false choice. Tony is pro-nuclear. I'm pro-nuclear. But you can't pretend that's cheap or quick. It is not cheap or quick. The second thing is that I think these lessons of war, I think that both Ukraine and Iran have exposed the dangers of us being so exposed to the volatility of the fossil fuel market. Because we have no control. And this North Sea thing, honestly, Roy, this is a mirage. This is Richard Tyson, his net zero, stupid, whatever he calls it, nonsense. Even the opposition party is pushing it, except that if we did more drilling in the North Sea, it's not going to affect the price. The North Sea is currently at full production, OK? New exploration is doing nothing for prices or security. And we are going to remain, even the IEA have said this, the Institute of Economic Affairs, we are going to remain a price taker, not a price maker, whatever we do. So it has to be, our answer has to be more investment in solar, more investment in wind. The challenge back, and this is a lovely thing which we keep coming back to, and maybe we should do an episode on rather than getting stuck in it now. But I think to speak up for Tony Blair, what he would point out is that, of course, he's committed to renewables. Of course, he's worried about climate change. But he would point out that the problem with renewables, wind and solar, is it's intermittent. And it requires an entire backup system of gas. We haven't got round that problem. We don't have the battery storage to accommodate all this energy. So when we look at the cost per unit, you're not really comparing like with like. It's absolutely true that once you've built your turbine, it generates energy much more cheaply than the gas power station. But the problem is that you have to back up your wind turbine with this whole gas network. Again, the point about the North Sea isn't about price, you're absolutely right, it doesn't have any effect on price. It's about the long-term energy security of Britain. It's very, very odd, given that we're going to continue to have to have this backup gas, not to have our own gas fields in our own sovereign water, so that we're not dependent on other people. Maybe we should get Ed Miliband back as well, and we should have this, you and he should have this out as well. Because the other thing, I actually thought, now BP, one of Britain's biggest companies or the biggest companies in the world, they're in a bit of a mess at the moment because their chairman's had to quit. But they actually had a very good slogan, and their slogan was, and not all. And that's kind of where I am. I'm not saying stop the North Sea, I'm just simply saying it is not the answer. So when Richard Tyson, the Tories say, oh, if only we drilled in the North Sea, we'd deal with this. You're not going to deal with that. You are having to do all this other stuff. And if you're going to talk about the North Sea and Norway, by the way, let's not run away from the main point on the North Sea, and is that the Norwegians and their sovereign wealth fund, that's why they're not facing the same crisis that we are. And that was a failure of the hero of your former party, or maybe still your party, the Tories. Two final quick points about Tony's thing, though, and look, it's very rare that I criticize Tony Blair. So this is an agreeable disagreement with Tony Blair, which I've had with him, but I think it's important. So he took the mickey a little bit. He was doing an interview, and he said, I mean, the idea that Xi Jinping sits there thinking, I wonder what Ed Miliband is planning to do, as a way of saying Britain is not a big player in this. But he made the opposite argument, rightly in my view, about international aid and development. He said Britain has to show global leadership on some of these issues, and I think he's right about that. And also, I think you're both wrong about public opinion. If you study, I tracked the polls on this, and it's true that the vehemence of Trump and the right wing and reform of the attack on Net Stupid Zero, as Tice calls it, has had some impact. The latest polling, if you track it, around 81% of the public backs expanding renewable energy. Now, maybe with a bit of and or, and do the lot, but I think Labour would be making a massive mistake if it suddenly decided, let's pretend that we can sort all our energy problems by drilling a bit more in the North Sea. The thing that struck me most about him is I saw him as the great sort of hero of the centre ground, the third way, and the sort of whole world of the 1990s. He seemed to me, when you were working with him, to be a guy who was all about liberal democracy, globalisation, free trade, rules based international order, responsibility to protect, all that stuff, right? Which Trump is absolutely against. Trump is not liberal democracy. He's populism. He's not globalisation, free trade, he's protectionism. He's not rules based international order. He's isolationism. In other words, Trump represents the kind of incredible epochal shift against the centre ground consensus of the 1990s. So what's a bit odd in Blair's calculus is that he doesn't talk about liberal democracy, human rights, rules based order, globalisation, international institutions, which he would naturally have spoken about eight, ten years ago. Has he just given up on those things? I was digging up some of his old speeches on climate change, which in 2007, he said, this is the biggest long term threat facing our world. Well, I think it still is. What I think he's done, though, I think he's on the board of peace. You and I have talked about whether we think that's a good thing or a bad thing, but he's on it. He's there for part of his thinking, and I'm afraid this is what happens if you suck with the devil. Part of him will be thinking, I better not say anything that the Trump people will pick up as being too critical of Trump. Well, can I interrupt for a second? I'm going to be a bit mean here, but why is he not saying, I better not say anything that's going to upset the leader of my own party? A very good point, Rory. I mean, why is he more worried about offending Trump than offending Keir Starmer? A very good point. A very good point. I sort of more gently relayed that to him, is that he's always been, I said earlier, he's always been very good. Same as Neil Kinnock is. Neil Kinnock, you just never hear Neil, I mean, the Corbyn era was challenging for everybody. But Keir Starmer, and we've seen, for example, in all these WhatsApp messages that have been revealed and this trove of stuff about Peter Mandelson, you and I, when we're talking to each other privately, might say something a bit different to how we speak publicly. That's just the nature of life and the politics of the world. But I think in the end, that's why I said, one of my four points, I don't think Tony needed to get into Trump. He actually used the line in the piece about Tony's argument about Trump is that most leaders, they see a problem. That's a problem. Let's sit and have a chat about it. Trump just says, I'm getting my bulldozer, I'll go through the wall. And he says that in a sort of almost praising way. Just to develop that analogy, because I was talking to the kids about it at breakfast this morning. So I said to them, in this essay, Tony says, love him or loathe him. The fact is, normally, when you're in politics, you're driving along in a car, you see a wall. And in normal politics, you spend a lot of time talking about it. You either give up or you drive around it. Trump drives through the wall. And yeah, maybe a lot of stuff gets knocked off the side of the car, but sometimes he makes it through the wall. And Sasha's comment was, that's insane. Anyone who drives the car into the wall is insane. You don't make it through the wall with a few bits coming off. As he's just discovered in Iran, you crash into the wall and the whole thing comes to a shuddering halt. Exactly, exactly. So, do they think Tony should be subject to a sealed indictment as well, or is it just Trump? Look, I will defend Tony Blair to my death, not least because so many other people attack him. And I think he was a terrific prime minister, and he's a good bloke, okay? And I always think that. Had he sent this piece to me, and I think the reason he didn't is because he knows exactly what I would have said. And one of the things I would have said is, look, please, you cannot, just because you're on this board of peace, you cannot, if this is all about speaking truth to power, make it just about the Labour Party. Do not get in get. You don't have to analyse Donald Trump. Just don't do it. Look, he's spending a lot of time with these tech people, and he does think they're amazingly clever. They are amazingly clever. His Holiness the Pope reminds us, Tony, where are their values? Well, listen, just to finish, because it's interesting for me, because what he reminds me of is actually one of my very best friends in the world who works in this world of finance and tech, who increasingly, I think, would endorse almost every word in Blair's letter. And there's a sort of view in British politics developing that people like you and me are sort of deranged lefties. And we're sort of appeasing Iran, soft on China, too scared about AI, too pro-European, and that we need to just get with the programme. And what I think is happening here, both with my best friend and your best friend, Tony Blair, is that we're dealing with the emergence of people who we know and like very much, who are beginning to sound disturbingly like the softer edge of Marco Rubio, JD Vance. I mean, not quite Trump, but a worldview that says it's a race, we've got to get competitive, we've got to get real, America's just trying to make its partners strong. Let's not get overly panicked about what the United States is doing, our future is Atlanticist. I think they're massively underestimating the dangers of all these kind of things we talk about, of fascism, of populism, of protectionism, of isolationism. But your point is interesting, I went to the Champions League final in Budapest, and two things to report, Roy. The first is, it is amazing how many working class North London Arsenal fans listen to our podcast. I even went past a bar with a terrace where this group of fans started singing a song about the rest is Arsenal, so there you go. The second thing was they, quite a few, because this was happening around the, you know, just after the sort of Tony debate thing was fine, so loads of them saying to me, what do you think of Tony Blair? There is still a lot of people who are not in the so-called political bubble who think that Tony Blair was the best Prime Minister we ever had, a lot of them. And they think, so you've got to listen to him, and I will always listen to him. But I think your point is right, so I had, as I was walking through the airport, and you always get advised in the days when, you know, we used to have the police around the house all the time, they'd always say, if somebody attacks you in the public, just ignore it and walk on, okay? So walking through the airport, this guy starts shouting from about 50 yards away, Alistair! And I ignored him. Campbell! Campbell! And he's shouting at me, and I look around and I thought, oh, he's with a little group of friends, I better just walk on. He then starts saying, I fucking hate you, I fucking hate your podcast, you're wrong about everything, okay? So I thought, I'm sorry, whatever the police advise, I'm not having this. I turn around, I go back, and I say, what is your issue? He says, my issue is I hate your fucking podcast. I said, well, listen, sorry, sorry mate, you don't have to listen to it. You live in a free country, don't listen to it. So he said, well, I don't listen to it. Well, sorry about it, a minute ago, you told me you hate it. How do you hate it if you don't listen to it? Well, I listen to it sometimes, to see what you're saying, and you always talk shit. Okay, fair enough, that's a view. So when we boiled it down, I ended up talking to this guy for about half an hour with a crowd developing. They thought it was going to kick off, it didn't kick off. He ended up, I thought he was a bit upset, he said, I'm sorry I shouted at you, give me a hug. I said, fuck off. Anyway, but what it boiled down to, he actually said, I've got a witness to this, Matt Lucas, the comedian, he arrives, he said, you're a Burnley fan, what you're doing is, I fancied the game. I said, anyway, I'm having a bit of an argument with this guy. The guy turned to Matt Lucas and said, I like you, because you're pro-Israel. And I said, hold on a minute, I am very pro the state of Israel, but I hate what the Israeli government is doing. Why do you have a problem with that? And he said, because it makes you pro-Iran. I said, have you heard what we've said about Iran? Evil regime, all that stuff. Anyway, so in the end, it boiled down to that. He hates the fact that you and I have criticized Israel. There is a common theme, even if people, I mean, that connects into it, which is true of my friend, which is that he's very skeptical about Muslims and about immigration into the UK and is very focused on Islamist terrorism and the Muslim Brotherhood. And I think all of that stuff connects to the way that people think about how we talk about Iran, how we talk about Trump, how we talk about Israel, how we talk about the economy, that it's a really interesting world appearing. And that's, of course, what very cleverly Tommy Robinson and others are picking up on when they're talking about Judeo-Christian civilization, because they're able to do this very odd combination of taking people who are worried about Muslims, worried about immigration and somehow connecting it to people who are worried about climate change, people who want more right-wing economic policies, people who are anti-European, people who are pro-Trump. And the whole thing sort of comes together in a very odd way that would be difficult even for the smartest AI in the world to get a logic to, but somehow it's drawing on similar energies. This thing about polarization, though, so you said that they think we're far too pro-European, soft on Iran, hate Trump. The guy said to me, this is your problem, you really hate everything about Trump. I said, I hate what he does as the most powerful politician in the world, but on China. So the other book I'm reading at the moment is, do you remember I told you about the scenario about Russia, if Russia wins? This guy, Andreas Fulda, has now done one about China. This guy, he's German, Andreas Fulda, and it's in German, if China invades, but he's actually a lecturer at Nottingham University, so I mean, he's nailed on for translation. The fact is, I'm not pro-China. And this other guy said, yeah, but you were very soft on them about the Trump summit. I said, that's because we're analyzing how these guys played their cards, okay? Xi Jinping is a dictator. Little book recommendation, Rory. Kevin Rudd has written an absolute tome, a new one, it's his second book about Xi Jinping. And this is, I recommend this for your next long book, Rory. This is an introduction. Some readers may be less than enthusiastic about wading through the detailed textual analysis of the Chinese official sources that make up the book's middle chapters. For you good folks, having taken five years to research the book, I can only sympathize. I suggest that you just read chapters one, three, and four, followed by chapters 14, 15, and 16 as a sort of cheat's guide. So he knows there are people like you, Rory, who think that if you get the Pope's encyclical, you should only read bits of it. Kevin, I'm going to read every single word of your book. Brilliant. Well, Alistair, thank you. Much more to discuss in question time tomorrow. So we're going to get into some really timely news issues from the UK. For example, what on earth Peter Mandelson was up to with his WhatsApps and emails and what that means. We're going to look at Peter Morrell, the former chief executive of the SMP and husband of Nicholas Sturgeon, being convicted now of fraud. And we're going to look at your recent travels to Hong Kong and Hungary, the time that I've just spent in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. And back to the question of handshakes, who's the best person whose hand we've shaken. Looking forward to it very much, Tamora, and thanks for a great episode. See you soon. Bye bye.