540. The Untold Iran Crisis, Henry Nowak, and Farage’s Politics of Rage

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. Donald Trump has driven us into something that is one of the worst economic crises that we've faced in living memory and something that we're very, very poorly prepared for. And if the Straits of Hormuz don't open any time soon, we are not that far away from an energy crisis, which of course has the potential to lead to an economic crisis as well. We could be a few weeks off, a massive crisis on jet fuel, diesel, that we're not even beginning to talk about. The damage done is now going to take months in the case of gas and possibly even two or three years in the case of oil. We, Europe, became reliant on Russia for energy, China for the economy, USA for security. We're now facing real security pressure from Russia on energy and we're facing political pressure from the United States. This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. Fuse has introduced the tracker tariff designed to give customers what matters most from their energy supplier, savings, clarity, and a bit more control. And it guarantees that your rates stay below the off-gem price gap, which saves you up to £200. And the tariff updates automatically every quarter. Energy prices don't move in straight lines. Global events and market pressures you can't predict and certainly can't control still find their way onto your bill. And if you're on the wrong tariff, you can be stuck with higher rates after the pressure has ended. With Fuse Energy's tracker tariff, that changes. If prices fall, your rate adjusts at the next quarterly update. And it's automatic. No switching, no trying to second guess the market. You're protected while prices are high and ready to benefit when they fall. Switch to Fuse Energy's tracker tariff at fuseenergy.com slash politics and use code politics to get a free trip plus subscription. Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions. Welcome to the rest of politics with me, Alice Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Today, we're going to be talking about Iran, the Strait of Hormuz and energy and renewable energy before we get in the second half on to the tragedy of Henry Nowak and his murder and what that means for British politics. But the first half comes out of a conference that Alistair and I just attended in Finland, where we had some very interesting conversations about renewable energy and about Ed Miliband and about Britain's energy policy and the world's energy policy, which I suspect we're going to get into a bit of an argument about where I'll be taking more of the side of his friend Tony Blair. But we're also going to look at the biggest unreported story, I think, which is probably the biggest story in the world right now, which is the way in which the Strait of Hormuz, which continues to be blocked, is on the verge of crippling Asian economies, African economies, European economies, and not just through oil, which is people talking about, but through oil products, jet fuel, diesel, NAFTA, fertilizer, and the way in which no national politicians are being honest about the fact that Donald Trump has driven us into something that is probably one of the worst economic crises that we've faced in living memory and something that we're very, very poorly prepared for. So Alistair, let's start maybe back with the conference. Tell us what you felt about it. Tell the audience about the conference. Alistair McEwen This was a really interesting, very enjoyable conference, essentially about electricity. It was hosted by Euroelectricity, E-U-R Electricity, which is the electricity sector across Europe, and two parts, in a way, which is why I left a bit troubled. The first part, absolutely amazing progress that's being made on the whole renewables agenda, especially in that part of the world where we were, Scandinavia is kind of showing a lot of leadership on this, but then also talking to people who really know the energy markets worldwide inside out, who say that we're not remotely being educated sufficiently about just how severe the energy crisis that we're possibly facing really quite soon as a result of Trump starting the Iran war and now his failure to stop it, and if the Straits of Hormuz don't open any time soon, that we are not that far away from an energy crisis, which of course has the potential to lead to an economic crisis as well. Alistair McEwen It was of course, as always, completely astonishing and impressive, the progress, and particularly many of the Nordic countries, which are getting incredible backup renewables from things like hydro, and of course, Spain, which is doing incredible stuff on solar. One of the problems of the debate, of course, is very quickly people will say, well, look, how come this is happening in Scandinavia, or how come this is happening in Spain, and it's not happening in Britain, and Britain can do the same, and the truth is Britain doesn't have that enormous hydro, and it doesn't have the sun that Spain has, but there's other particular problems with Britain, which at some point we're going to get into, which is to do with the fact that we're still paying enormous amounts for the cost of the renewable energy that's already been installed. So even though it's cheaper to put in the stuff, the way the government subsidized it, all of which is sitting on our bills or on taxation, is still paying for a massive amount of renewable energy investment, and secondly, this problem of distribution and transmission. They kept saying very casually things like, well, of course, you know, Britain, it's all going to be fine provided you put all the wind turbines in the southeast of England. The problem is that you have them in Scotland, and the transmission costs are too big. Anyway, enough on that. One of the things, though, that I think brought us to this is that it wasn't just about electricity, and we began to realize how much the story of the Strait of Hormuz is causing an existential threat not just to Asian and African, but also European economies, and that it's not just striking through the electricity bill, it's striking through things like jet fuel, diesel, and fertilizer. Over to you. I think the thing that probably stuck with most with both of us was we had a very private briefing with a leading figure in the sector who painted a pretty bleak, but the longer he went on with the detail, I felt highly realistic scenario if the Iran crisis is not resolved and the Straits of Hormuz don't open sometime soon, and the other big point that was made to us was that even if it does open, like tomorrow, the damage done is now going to take months in the case of gas and possibly even two or three years in the case of oil. As you say, we've been at these presentations, and just to give two or three of the things that really impressed me, Norway, now every single new car sold is electric battery run, every single one, Iceland's power, 100% renewable electric, and in Finland where we were, if you take renewables and nuclear together, you're talking more than 90%. Okay, good news. Bad news on Iran, we were briefed that since the start of the Iran war, energy costs in Europe have gone up 465 million euros a day. Now 465 million, I went to one of your friends, Claude friends type friends, and I said, what could I buy for 465 million euros if I was a government, and he sent me this thing from a German government website and said that the German government estimates that 465 million is the cost required to offer what they call robust tax reductions for corporate zero emission vehicle purchases. In other words, you could subsidize your entire corporate vehicle fleet in Germany for that cost. So we're talking huge sums of money. And for no benefit. At the point, you're paying 465 million euros a day more, and you're not getting a single bit more energy. Exactly. So it's a pure cost. There's no benefit at all. He went on essentially to say that governments are not really wanting to be that open about the consequences of this because they're dealing with enough problems as it is. And also he said that the first thing that will go is jet fuel. Now that would obviously upset people if their planes for their summer holidays get canceled or whatever. But that's also a massive impact upon global trade. And then the second thing that would get hit would be diesel, which of course would have a massive impact upon the trucking industry. And you know, he was talking a timeframe that was closer than maybe we think. So I think the thing that I have this sort of twin reaction on the one hand, sitting in these debates thinking these guys are amazing, it's incredible the stuff that they're doing, this is really exciting. And then precisely because of what Trump and Netanyahu did in relation to Iran, another world as it were, where these same people are having to face some really, really, really difficult choices. Do you remember there's the guy who was telling us that at the time of the Ukraine invasion, when there was a thought amongst Northern European governments and the Scandis and the Germans or whatever, that Putin might just literally pull the plug on Russian gas. Now as it happened, he needed the money. So he kept going as long as he could, but where they were actually having cabinet meetings talking about whether, for example, the German economy could survive, whether one of the Northern European governments literally having a meeting about whether they would have to send in troops into factories to say, we have to shut down the power because we're having to ration energy. So it was a pretty apocalyptic, it's the wrong word, but what was your sense of it? I mean, I left that quite alarmed. Yeah, it's very alarming, very, very alarming. Number one, it takes us back to a world that we thought was a long way away. I mean, if you go back to the stories of the First World War, a lot of that was about Germany and Britain being concerned about where they were going to get the oil to power their navies. And actually, a lot of the Second World War was about the Germans advancing to try to seize oil fields. That's why we're going to talk, I think, a little bit about the Caucasus, but that's why the Caucasus really mattered to Hitler. And of course, in the 1970s, there's actually quite an interesting book being written by called Philip Delft-Broughton about this. The war in the Middle East, which was the invasion of Israel, the Yom Kippur War, led to an oil embargo, which then sparked a global crisis. Now, because of the world we've been in since the 80s, the world of globalization, we've created a more and more interconnected world, and we've become more and more reliant on other people, and more and more tending to assume, if you're Europe, that you've entered a new universe. You might think, for example, you don't need to worry so much about oil and gas because you've got so much renewables. Now, the problem with that is, of course, that even with a lot of renewables, most countries need gas to back up the wind turbines when the wind's not blowing and the solar when the sun's not shining. But more important than that, our whole economy doesn't run on electricity. Our trucks need diesel. Our planes are not electric planes. They still need jet fuel. So the 2022 shock made us wake up to gas because we suddenly worked out we were very dependent on Russian gas, but we didn't worry about oil and jet fuel. Why not? Because we were worried about our enemies, not our allies. So we were worried about gas, and we built up these big stockpiles, and Europe committed to getting 90% stockpiles on gas, but we basically don't have any stockpiles on jet fuel and diesel. I think 90 days in one case compared to Japan, which has 200 days, or China, which has the most enormous stockpiles of oil. We don't have that stuff, and we don't have that stuff because if you'd asked, I think, the National Security Council in Britain or European leaders three years ago to spend, as the Chinese have, untold amounts of money building up huge oil stockpiles, we'd be like, what risk, what threat do you think you're actually dealing with here? And you'd say, well, the threat we're dealing with here is that maybe Qatar will no longer be exporting its gas. Well, that's insane. Why would Qatar not export its gas? It's their whole economy, right? Well, what would happen if Iran would close its trades for me? Well, they're not going to do that, are they? Because it would cripple the Iranian economy. Okay, what would happen if, yeah, go on, interrupt, because you know where we're going. Well, I'll tell you what's really interesting. In the back of the car on the way to the airport as we were leaving this conference, you and I just had this particular meeting that was, you know, really interesting, and you showed me this, I don't know, is it an app, it's a something, where you talk into your phone and then it fact checks it for you all in one go. But the quote that we put into your app or AI model, whatever you want to call it, was we hadn't modeled enough on oil. Russia had given us the gas shock, but we hadn't fully thought through there would ever be a time when we'd be so badly stuck on oil, because the only way that was ever going to happen was if the United States was stupid enough to get the Straits of Hormuz closed. And of course, so that is what has happened, and that is why the consequences, and I even got to the point, I mean, I'm parking my Trump derangement syndrome, and my view that generally he's not as clever as he thinks he is. I even got to the point with all this anti-Europeanism, we'll talk about Vance in relation to Henry Novak or Pete Hexeth sort of insulting the Normandy people with his ridiculous nonsense about, you know, this new invasion of refugees and comparing it to the Nazis. I even wondered if this was deliberate, because of course America now does not have the same fears that we're facing and that Asia's facing, because they are such a big exporter. To make, again, our listeners uncomfortable, a big exporter partly because of fracking, an enormous amount of fracking. And when we asked people, why are U.S. electricity costs a quarter of those that they are in Europe? The answer was, well, they've been fracking. They've got all this oil and gas. And that then leads to why is the U.S. able to build all these data centers and power the AI revolution and lead on cloud computing and technology? Well, because they've got much cheaper energy. And why have they got cheaper energy? Partly because they're fracking. So there's a connection between all these things. There's a connection between our green agenda, our renewables investment, the types of things we concentrate, the kind of threats we think we see, the kind of priorities we place. Let's come back to straits, though, for a second, because I think, again, if you are like me, a regular listener to the Today program, you're a bit surprised to discover what's actually happening in the straits. My guess is most of us don't really know, because what you tend to hear every morning is President Trump is on the verge of reopening the straits. He's got this wonderful peace deal, and it's just about to happen again. And the first ceasefire was announced in April. And you've been quite good at pointing out that it doesn't seem very likely that this is going to happen. But the markets have kept betting that it's just about to reopen. You keep seeing these very weird things where, you know, May the 24th, for example, Brent oil prices dropped very dramatically on the announcement. We're now talking on the 9th of June that the straits were about to reopen. The truth of the matter is there are about 1,500 ships still stranded in the strait. Basically none are getting through. I mean, occasionally, there'll be stories of three or four ships getting through. But there were, in the old days, about 100 and I think 130 ships a day going through. There are now 1,500 ships stranded, probably 20,000. You've talked about this, too, 20,000 crew members in pretty horrible situations. And either the US intercept Iranian ships or the Iranians intercept ships with gunboats that don't have their permission, which are very little getting through. Now, that means that if you get a beyond Europe, and as you say, Europe is in real trouble. We could be a few weeks off a massive crisis on jet fuel, diesel, that we're not even beginning to talk about. But if you're Japan, you're already in that crisis. Because NAFTA, which is a petroleum product that you use for so many things, right? It's what you use for inks, dyes, specialist plastics, rubbers, right at the heart of the whole manufacturing process, and 90% of Japan's oil comes from the Middle East. You know, South Korea is worrying about rationing, Vietnam is worrying about rationing. Well, the other thing that's interesting about Korea, they're already, I think you call it rationing, but they're encouraging people to work from home, Vietnam, and other countries in that part of the world, coal, we talk about the rush to renewables because of the oil price shock. But also, in those places where they've got coal, there's also a bit of a rush to coal. So no, I think that's what I find most interesting is that I felt we were learning something new. I mean, there's been this talk about there's going to be a crisis, but talking to some people, they were sort of saying, this is a lot closer than people imagine. Of course, if you have an energy crisis, that will then lead not just to the whole rationing thing and all that, but then to an economic crisis as well. And so if you've got Trump there saying, well, this isn't affecting America, I don't really care, and he wants to sort of punish Europe for all sorts of crazy reasons anyway, I just think this is something that maybe we need to hear a little bit more from our politicians about what the stockpiling strategy is and whether it's going to be necessary. Sorry to go back to the net zero agreeable disagreement, Rory, and by the way, well done for you didn't trim too much. You trimmed a little bit in front of this audience, but even when they came back at you pretty hard, you kind of held your ground. I was there a day earlier than you, and one of the presentations I really enjoyed, and I introduced you to this guy, Jan Rosenau, who's a German. He's the professor of energy at Oxford University, but he actually gave me a really interesting explanation as to the billing thing is much, much more complicated than maybe either you and I had really understood when we were talking about it so knowledgeably last week. So he starts by saying that, look, there's a school of thought that says wind and solar, this is the sort of net stupid zero people like ties. Wind and solar are making your bills dry up. Not true. People like me are saying renewables are bringing your bills down, and he says, neither of those stories stacks up fully. It's much, much more complicated. This is the real problem in the British market is this thing about the way the market sets hour by hour, and when gas price, when gas is setting the price for the market, wholesale market prices are much higher, and that hits us very, very badly. When you've got a mix, a proper mix of renewables, hydro, as you said, nuclear imports through interconnectors, Spain, you mentioned Spain, Spain has got all that mix, and so there are far fewer hours where Spain's market is being set by gas, and then the other point he made is if you look at the components of your retail bill, every time you switch on the switch and your thing goes up if you've got one of those meters, right, the wholesale electricity is only a part of it. The bigger things are networks, taxes, levies, and they don't move with the wholesale price, so I hadn't really fully understood how this billy works, and it is more complicated than me just saying renewables good, even though they are, and when you talk about the Scandis, that is one of the reasons why they are doing so well, but it's actually the whole way that the market operates and is structured that we have to try and change. Yeah. Now, I guess there the point is that the challenge is still on Ed Miliband. I mean, look, there might be any number of explanations for why our industrial energy costs are higher than those in Europe and much higher than those in the US, but it's a big, big problem. It's a big problem for industry. It's a big problem for tech. It's a big problem for our sovereignty, right? If we don't start building data centers, we are going to be, I don't know, the British are going to be like the Zulu Empire at about the time of the arrival of British industrial colonialism. We're going to be in a completely mad world where we will totally lack access to the technology which is going to drive the next industrial revolution. We've got to build those data centers. Did you read the piece I sent you by my friend Rachel Donald who does this very, very, very activist environmental blog called Planet Critical and she does a podcast as well about the planned data center in Fife in a little village called Octotool? I did and part of that is that she simply doesn't believe there's an AI revolution coming. She disagrees with the idea that AI matters and that Britain needs to be in the AI race. I'm afraid she's almost certainly entirely wrong. The entire global markets are betting against her and anybody who uses these models, I think feels that they are improving out of all recognition every three months and that the countries that have those models will be able to do things with their economies, the health services, with their defense equipment that people who don't have them won't be able to do. It would be like choosing in the industrial revolution not to have steam. So it's just not an option that a sensible country can take. Even the Pope who's wonderful, encyclical. Thank you to all the Catholics who told me that I mispronounced it and Rory didn't correct me. Encyclical, not encyclical. Thank you to everybody who pointed that out. But what about her broader point? Let's put the argument of AI to one side. There was this extraordinary aerial photograph of the data center as it was going to be built which is right next to a village and it is bigger than the village. So you get a small village in a beautiful part of Fife. Exactly. You're totally right. And this is why data centers are now increasingly unpopular in the United States. I mean, these data centers, look, the upside is that you get to participate in the AI revolution which is going to reshape the whole world. And if you don't have those things, your economy will collapse. The American economy will boom and you will have no leverage at all. So it's not really an option. But the cost of installing these data centers is unbelievable. There's the cost of the landscape. They're really big and they're really ugly. There's the amazing energy costs. So 50% of the increase in electricity demand in the US is driven purely by data centers. There's the water cooling problems. There's huge environmental impacts of these things. And the question, I guess, if you're a government is, it's the classic problem, I'm afraid, with any planning. Yeah. And, you know, I don't want to use the word NIMBY, but we've got to build these things. Where do we build them? So if you don't build them in next to a sparsely populated village in Scotland, are you going to build them in Hampshire? Where are you building these things? I mean, I agree with you about there was an element of let's just not do this at all. You know, I can, even though I'm very suspicious about the people behind AI, a lot of them, I totally get where you're coming from on that. And I thought the Pope was interested in that too. But it's also, there does seem to me to be a fundamental dishonesty about the way that they're projecting this stuff. So this particular one up in a place, wonderful name, Ochter Tool in Fife. And it's being put forward by this AI group. Now how do you, when you see that they say the data center will be zero waste, net zero, and it will only use the equivalent of 239 residential homes, annual water usage. When the average use of one of these data centers is between 11 and 20 million liters a day, you sort of do worry that they're not really being straight with people. I think that's what's going to get the public around the world really pissed off. If these kind of masters of universe just think, look, get with the program or lose out. People will get really pissed off. And I think get with the program is a horrible phrase. But do remember, I mean, I was very, very involved in Cumbria with community groups fighting against wind turbines. And you would have seen very, very similar arguments made against the wind turbine company that they were using dodgy statistics. Yeah. And I love wind turbines. Yeah, right. Absolutely. But what you would have seen is the campaign is producing very, very similar documents saying the company said this, but that's lie. This is the truth. This is the impact on these birds. This is the impact on this biodiverse landscape. This is the picture they've shown us. This is the real picture. This is what the law says. So I'm afraid this is the story around HS2. This is the story around third runway at Heathrow. This is the story around data centers, the story around buildings. There are very, very good reasons for local communities passionately to oppose these things. Wonderful reasons because they love their landscape. They care about their community. And these things are a net negative to that community in Fife, but they are a net positive, I'm afraid. In fact, more than that positive, they're vital for the security of the national of Britain. Yeah. Yeah. My sort of gentle criticisms of Tony Blair, really interesting some of the responses to that. I had a lovely message from somebody who worked for Barack Obama who said, I thought you handled your criticisms of Tony Blair very well. You were critical without being disloyal. And I should also say that word got back to his holiness, Pope Tony. Tony Blair. Yeah. And so he did leave, so I got this message. How can it be in our interest to spend billions accelerating to net zero when our emissions are relatively low? I think I dealt with that on the global leadership thing. Why are we stopping our own oil and gas production when we're importing someone else's to meet our needs? He claimed the North Sea is not unviable and that Shell would put 10 billion in. So this is really interesting, and I'm sorry I didn't get on to ask you more quickly about how Tony had responded, because it's an obvious question. But let me try to play his part here. The normal argument against us doing stuff in the North Sea is that it's not going to make a difference to the price. Fair enough. You know, gas prices are global, but it's difficult not to think that there's a national security benefit to having your own gas off your own coast rather than depending on importing from other people, particularly at a moment when we have to get our gas either from the US, which is now one of the reasons that Trump doesn't care so much about straight-haul moves, is that American oil and gas companies are making out like bandits. Europe is the largest single importer of US LNG. Or Qatar, why wouldn't you, from a point of view of national security, just as you grow your own food, even though, broadly speaking, food prices are set by global markets, would you not keep your own oil and gas supply? But we talked earlier about the importance of having a mix, and you have to work out what that mix would be. I mean, at one point he said to me, stop just giving me Ed Miliband talking points, which I didn't think I was. I thought I'd actually read a couple of books and I'd be at this wonderful conference listening to real experts like Jan from German, from Cologne. But no, I get a bit. In terms of the cost, he says Shell are prepared to put 10 billion in. What I haven't seen is what that would then produce and at what pace. So I just still think the North Sea oil thing is a bit of a mirage. It's a mirage because of the time that it would take and because of the quantities that it would produce. Revenue for the British government? I mean, Alastair, you've also been one of the first to point out that one of the reasons that Mrs Thatcher was able to fund a lot of her stuff was the revenue from North Sea oil and gas. That is true. Tax cuts for your rich friends, yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, not just for rich friends. It, you know, helps, you know, even during the Blair government, revenue from North Sea oil and gas. I agree. So I think it's quite difficult stepping back not to raise your eyebrows and say it's a little bit odd. Right. We've just told a whole story where the U.S. is in a much stronger position because it's fracking and getting gas out of the ground. It's independent. It doesn't have to care about the Middle East so much. It's able to be an exporter. It's making a huge amount of revenue and it's able to build all its data centers. You're not pro-fracking, are you? I think it may be. I mean, look, I'm not sure. I was sympathetic to the idea and then they started doing it in Cheshire and it kept sparking earthquakes, at which point I guess we get into questions of whether the British geology allows it. But again, remember, with all these questions, are we being honest with ourselves? Are we being a bit nimby? Because presumably, all those American fracking projects, the communities were horrified and worried about groundwater and worried about earthquakes and opposed them. Still are. Some of them still are. Looking at in the round, did the U.S. benefit from fracking or not? Does the world benefit from the drill, baby drill and going against renewables? There's another guy you missed. I think you missed, but you met him. Do you remember the tall, very elegant guy with sort of gray, wavy hair who came up to say hello before going to do his own presentation? He had the wonderful name Kingsmill Bond. My name is Bond. My name is Bond, Kingsmill Bond, and he's a strategist for Ember, which is an energy think tank, and he made an interesting observation. He said, this is the first time we've had an oil shock. And by the way, the International Energy Authority says this is the worst oil shock in history. He says this is the first time we've had an oil shock where oil faces a superior alternative because solar, wind and electric are cheaper, more local, faster to deploy and they're huge. And he made this observation, they were winning even before the crisis. This should galvanize change. And I'm kind of, I guess that's why I remain resistant to the idea that we should go down some of the some of the less obvious routes. Can I just throw on Kingsmill, just to return to the thing, because I think we, I think one of the weird things about this whole crisis is, it's partly about how America, our ally, can do much more harm to us than our adversaries. Secondly, it's about how none of us have any leverage over Trump. And we're all talking in the world of AI and so on about how we get leverage over the United States. This is the classic example. The whole world wants him to change, especially China, Japan, South Korea, Qatar, Saudi, Dubai, Europe, and none of us are having any impact on him at all. We don't appear to have any leverage over the U.S. to force him to change direction in any way at all. But the third thing is that it's about moving out of a world where we thought that real stuff didn't matter so much, where oil and gas was less important, where we were in a world of kind of digital and renewables. And we've sort of been forcibly reminded of something that Kingsmill Bond, of course, understands, but he's not being completely honest about when he's saying to you that, renewables can power your electricity, but renewables are not going to give you your NAFTA, your petrochemical products that you actually need for your plastics, your rubbers, the solvents for your dyes. They might one day. But we're always talking about these rules. I mean, look, there's also a short term, medium term, long term problem. Our national security threat at the moment is our planes need jet fuel. Our trucks need diesel. They don't run on renewables. They might do in 15, 20 years time. I'm a bit skeptical about how quickly we're going to fly planes with renewables, but may happen. But the problem at the moment is our economies are going to grind to a grinding halt. We're going to end up without the basic stuff to run our economy and we're looking foolish. When China is stockpiling oil, Japan is stockpiling oil, we're all patting ourselves on the back in an illusion that we don't need it. We do need it now for so many things. Yeah. Well, I want to focus on that because the other big event on the first day of the conference was President Stubb, Alexander Stubb, and he's in such an interesting place because it's a relatively small country, but in large part because he's such a good golfer and also he does the Ironman, which is the sort of thing that really impresses Donald Trump. He's sort of a bit closer to Trump the most, but he said some really interesting things. He basically said, look, we Europe, we became reliant on Russia for energy, China for the economy, USA for security, right? We're now facing real security pressure from Russia on energy and the war in Ukraine and we're facing political pressure from the United States and he called that out very, very frankly. His answer to the whole thing was more Europe and he actually said this, you know, you and I've talked, we talked about this a little bit on the podcast. He mentioned, by the way, that he maybe he should have called his book, The Rectangle of Power rather than The Triangle of Power. Do you remember his triangle was Global West, Global East, Global South, and maybe Europe's the fourth corner, but it was very, very interesting and it really went down well. The line that got the biggest round of applause was when he said, so you've got to get Ukraine, you've got to get the UK, you've got to get the Balkans, you've got to get Norway, you've got to get Turkey because of their military and wouldn't it be great if instead of becoming the 51st state of the United States, Canada became the 28th member of the European Union. They went wild for that, Roy. Beautiful. Well, let's take a quick break and when we come back talking about an issue which just to make the transition, it's very interesting. This is the tragic death of Henry Nowak, which has been a much more dominant issue than the fact that we're about to go into an economic recession caused by the Straits of Hormuz. And it tells us a lot about the tragedy. It also tells us a lot about what politicians are talking about and concentrating on and the things the public are interested in. Let's take a quick break and then back from there. This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's. Now, it seems like there's a big new political news story every day, but what we often don't get into is all the systems which are ticking around in the background, which actually keep things running and keep things safe. In fact, an awful lot of what keeps the UK going isn't talked about that much at all. It's the diplomats abroad doing great work on behalf of the country. It's our intelligence agencies, it's civil servants, it's systems, it's structures. It's the people that are out there when we are sleeping and that we just frankly take for granted. And finally, fraud, you know, how fraud evolves, how it spreads, how much effort goes into preventing it by governments as well as businesses. So, take Lloyd's. They operate at a scale where fraud protection isn't just a feature, it is part of their infrastructure. Yeah, Lloyd's are very serious about it. They've invested £100 million in technology to protect their customers from fraud and they make on average 23,551 transaction checks every minute, which you have to say is a pretty vital system for all of us. So, search Lloyd's protect yourself from fraud to find out more about how Lloyd's helps keep you and your money safe based on Lloyd's Banking Group data 2023 to 2025. This is a paid advertisement for better help. Look, we tend to think about summer in really idyllic terms, like we have visions of sunshine and holidays and maybe even a bit of barbecuing. But in reality, summer can, like many other parts of the year, be a very stressful time. There's the frantic pressure, could be a social calendar, could be trying to get out in as many sunny days as possible, juggling childcare with a full-time job. And that's why it's crucial to look after yourself. But in the core of all of this, better help can be useful. Better help a qualified therapist. They help you understand your needs, set boundaries, so summer can feel a little lighter. It's all very straightforward. They do the initial matching work for you based on a short questionnaire. So you get straight to the part that matters. You don't have to say yes to everything this summer. Find support in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash restpolitics, that's better, help.com slash restpolitics. Welcome back to the rest of this politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. So while we were in Finland, Rory, the news back home was absolutely dominated by the killing of Henry Novak, 18-year-old student at the University of Southampton, just being dropped off a few weeks early by his mum and dad. Gets involved in an altercation with this guy Vikram Digwa, whose brother calls the police to say that he, Vikram, has been racially abused. Police arrive, Henry Novak tells the police that he's been stabbed. They appear not to believe him. They put him in handcuffs and not long thereafter, he dies. His killer is Vikram Digwa. He's now facing a very, very long jail sentence. But the thing, the incident in particular, the body cam footage from the police provoke this extraordinary debate across UK politics about so-called two-tier policing, about anti-white racism, whipped up by Nigel Farage, whipped up by Elon Musk, and then eventually whipped up by none other than the Vice President of the US. So, now that we've had a few days back, Rory, what have you made of it all? Well, I think the first thing is that it took, I think, quite a long time for most people to really understand what had happened. So, I think it's quite important to get back to what actually happened and then we'll get on to the question of what did the police do wrong and what we can conclude from that. So, as you say, it's after 11pm at night. And the first thing to understand is Henry was a lovely, kind, empathetic boy. And Vikram Digwa brutally murdered him, ended his life, plunged Henry's family into complete misery, brought incredible shame on a whole series of bits of society, and of course, massive social unrest. But what was the incident that led up to it? So, Henry Nowack is walking home about 11pm at night. He has a chance meeting with a man, Vikram Digwa, who is wearing a large Sikh dagger openly on his clothing. And this is something which members of the Nihang Order of Sikhs in Britain are able to wear. It's a privilege. It's also very much a responsibility. And it's never to be used in an offensive way. There is then an incredibly complicated debate, which we don't need to get into, about the relationship between the kirpan, which is a knife, ceremonial knife, which a Sikh carries within his garments, and the display of an external knife associated with the Nihang Order of Sikhs, and some members of Sikh communities saying this wasn't a kirpan, this was a Persian knife. But the basic point is that certainly from the point of view of Vikram Digwa and many young Sikhs who wear this, this was part of their religious identity. There is an interaction, and Henry, perhaps cheekily, asks Vikram if he's a bad man and starts filming Digwa on his phone. Digwa seems to have felt disrespected and felt the filming was intrusive. He grabs the phone, and then we have to assume that Henry struggled to get the phone back, during which time Vikram Digwa's turban was knocked off, which, again, he as a Sikh may well have seen as a serious act and mark of disrespect and made him very angry. He then stabs Henry in the chest, and then twice in the leg, and then once in the groin, and once in the face, and then films him. Henry is now dying from this attack. Vikram is standing outside his family home, and his brother comes out, and his father comes out, and they call the police. Not to say to emergency service, someone's been stabbed, come rescue them. They call to say, a drunk guy is at our house and has been racially abusing us and called me the P word, and we've restrained him. So the police deploy quite quickly, and the police arrive, in their mind, dealing with a young drunk man who they've been told has been racially abusing this Sikh man. When they arrive, the mother of Vikram Digwa has hidden the knife. The police, it's dark. Henry's wearing a dark top, and he says he's been stabbed. You cannot see any visible blood on his stomach, and the arresting officer, and this is the critical moment, says, I don't think you have been stabbed, mate. In fact, they ask Digwa, has he been stabbed? No, he's not been stabbed. I don't think you've been stabbed, mate, and he handcuffs him, and meanwhile, Henry is dying. What's going on? Question number one, why do the police ignore somebody who says, I can't breathe, I've been stabbed? Well, the answer is that it's actually quite common, police officers say to me anyway, when they are handcuffing someone for somebody to say things like that in the hope of getting released. So it may be that the police officers aim off for that. Secondly, they've framed the whole thing in their head that this guy's a thug trader. However, it's bad police procedure, right? There should have been some professional curiosity. They should be treating both sides equally, and they should be prioritizing a claim of stabbing over anything else, and it's also very questionable why they felt they needed to handcuff somebody who was basically dying on the ground and didn't need to be restrained. Over to you. Yeah, I think that's a fair summation. And, you know, you took a few minutes to explain it. And the reason why this has become such a toxic issue within the public debate is because none of that framing or nuancing was indulged in by those politicians and those parts of the media that decided to turn this into a story not about a murder by one person of another one, a horrible person of a nicer person, but turn it into a debate about race, about two-tier policing so-called. And I think the reason why people became so offended by Nigel Farage in particular, who very grandly announced, and bear in mind, this is Nigel Farage who's been hiding for two weeks because he refuses to answer questions about where all his money is coming from. He appears in some sort of grand-looking field with a few sheep behind him, tweets that he's going to make a national address like he's the king or the prime minister at a time of war or something, and talks about, you know, the response must be one of rage, and unleashes, I would argue, or plays a significant part in unleashing a debate where the facts very, very quickly get lost. Now you've set out the facts, but you've also given a context. What we are led to believe by people like Nigel Farage, Zia Yusuf, who was sort of the one who went out to do the interviews, and this on the back of the father, and I do think in these circumstances actually genuinely respecting the family's interest is a good thing to do. And his father said, we want to use Henry's heartbreaking story to make change for the better. We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension. I would argue that much of the media, Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe did exactly that, and I think it was absolutely shameful. And I think actually the reason that Nigel Farage did it in the way that he did it is because of politics, because they are worried that Rupert Lowe, who was in reform and has now set up his own party, Restore, he's a very wealthy man independently. He's also got the backing of Elon Musk. First Elon Musk piles in, one word, tweet, rage. Rupert Lowe's tweets routinely get tens and tens of thousands of repostings because Musk has told the Twitter algorithm to do just that. And then what happens? And then you see this. I mean, I was, you know, I mentioned this book last week, Roy, this is fascism. And there's a paragraph in here. Every fascist destroys the truth by undermining public debate and censoring criticism. The propaganda machine is given free reign to strip facts of their authority, rob society of the ability to think independently and create an alternative reality. Every fascist does this by lying brazenly and frequently, not to convince people of the lie, but of the idea that there is no truth, but the one he decrees. Now, this is obviously particularly about Trump, but I think it applies here. When facts lose all meaning, there's also no need to be consistent in one's lies. In fact, this journalist says the ability to change the story at will is a demonstration of power. I think we saw that with the five million donation. We saw it with this. Sir Yusuf went on television and was asked whether he had heard the father saying he didn't want this used politically. And he said, yes, I did. And that's exactly what Nigel is responding to. Absolute bullshit. Well, there's also this amazing thing from Vance. So Vance, I mean, you know, I've just given an account of what happened on that night, right? So take that on board. Think what you like. Fundamentally, what you're thinking about is the lovely kind man was murdered by a horrible, violent guy who totally unjustifiably overreacted to whatever he perceived as the site and murdered somebody for no reason at all. Vance said Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies. He should still be alive today. And he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it, right? So there's a lot of things going on in that sentence, but it's right at the heart of not just the way that JD Vance thinks about the world. I suspect the way that a lot of the far right in Britain think about the world and a lot of the way the AFD think about the world. So let's just break that down, right? What is he actually saying there? So the first thing is this claim, the mass invasion of migrants, right? This happens because the mass invasion of migrants. Presumably what he means is Henry Nowak would still be alive if Vikram Diggawar wasn't living in the United Kingdom, I guess is the claim, right? Many of whom despise the West and the people who love it. Is he saying Vikram Diggawar despise the West and the people who love it or just many migrants despise the West and the people who love it? And then the last few generations of European elite, if they stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred, Henry would still be alive. What does that mean? How would that have saved Henry's life if European elites had stood their ground against self-hatred? And there seem to be two different claims being made here. One of them is a very straightforward, we don't like this guy because he's not white and he killed a white person. And the second is this claim that if it were not for anti-racism policy, DEI, we wouldn't have had this horrible scene of the police responding unsympathetically towards Henry and taking Vikram Diggawar's side of the argument before they arrested Diggawar. But the other thing is that what the people like Vance and I would argue Farage and Rupert Lowe and the far right in the UK, they're brilliant at gaslighting. They're brilliant at taking something that may be true and completely inverting it. The truth is, if you look at all the data, you are more likely in the UK to be a victim of bad policing or bad treatment in prisons or bad treatment by the criminal justice system or bad treatment in relation to stop and search if you are black. That is indisputable. They want people to think that you are more likely to be treated badly by the police if you are white. The other thing they want you to think is that because we've had, you know, immigration and we now have a large proportion, a sizable minority in our country who are, quotes, don't look like us, don't look like JD Vance, don't look like Nigel Farage, that somehow that is the reason we've got crime, okay? Fraser Nelson, who doesn't share my politics, very much on the right, I would argue, is politics, but I really recommend he's written a very good sub stack about this with the facts and he points out the immigrant population has doubled and during that period, crime has actually halved. He says that Vance is talking about a Britain that simply does not exist and he's doing it because of, you know, we should maybe tell people that the leading interview on this week is the brilliant Norwegian historian, Arne Westad, who speaks about a lot of the things we were talking about earlier in relation to what might lead to war. But next Monday, we've got James Cleverley and, you know, he was actually interesting, said a lot of interesting, measured, thoughtful things. But I think that, you know, today, Kemi Badenock's making a big speech about aspects of the Equalities Act that she doesn't like and I'm sure it's sincere and I'm sure it's what she thinks and it's certainly in line with things she said before, but I worry that this is an example of an initiative announced because a debate has shifted and it's been very deliberately shifted by people that I would hope are to the right of Kemi Badenock. I think we're dealing with a fake narrative a lot of the time. It's nonsense. It's nonsense that white people get treated worse than black people in this country. It's nonsense. Okay, so one of the challenges James made in our interview, so as a conservative politician, we haven't had many conservative politicians on, is to say that the Labour government is not good at listening to all minorities. It's good at listening to some minorities. I guess what he means by that is it's not very good at listening to the minority white working class population. Let me try to get beyond Farage is a massive hypocritical dick and, you know, there's no more evidence of his hypocrisy than the fact that when Trump commits a crime, he's on record saying there should be quiet anger as opposed to rage. You know, nothing's achieved by rage. When it's a woman, Sarah Everett, killed by a man, Farage says we mustn't allow tragic murder to turn into attacks on men and police. But when it's a white man killed by a Sikh, he's not saying we mustn't allow tragic murder to turn into attacks on Sikhs and the police. Put that all aside, though. What is the issue going on in the background? Why are so many people who wouldn't consider themselves natural reform or restore voters agreeing with Farage? And what's he getting into? There could be socioeconomic arguments. So you'll have friends who'll say this is because the white working class are not doing well economically. But there's an underlying sense that we have created a big, big compliance state. So what you'll see a lot of the right wing media talking about is that the amount that councils have been spending on diversity initiatives has doubled in the last few years, that the number of people specializing in this stuff has increased, that since the Equalities Act, many civil servant departments are gold plating this. And the argument I think that probably we have to make is quite a difficult one, which is we absolutely defend the Equalities Act, that Kemi Bednok is wrong to get rid of it, that every developed country in the world has protection for women, for racial minorities, for the disabled, and that this is the basic sign of a civilized society. But there may be problems with the way in which things are complied with and implemented. And people may be sensing that one of the frustrating things with government, and maybe in their mind, they associate it with health and safety, they associate it with bureaucratic box ticking, is a whole culture of compliance, which seems for them to go against common sense. And what they're trying to say is, listen, the police's job is to be good police, get in there, do their investigation, be curious about what's going on. And what on earth does this guy think he's doing, handcuffing somebody who's lying on the ground? And what is the context that could possibly cause that? I agree with you. In an ideal world, the police would have arrived, they'd have first of all said, oh, this guy's on the ground, need to check he's okay. And a fairly routine check might have established that he was bleeding in several parts of his body. Okay. And then there might have been a different story. And I also agree with you earlier when you said that because of the lies that were told by the killer's brother in reporting the crime to the police, the framing that was given to the police officers who were arriving on the scene was such that they were in their minds programmed to think something. And actually, it was a very interesting example of that in the interview with James Cleverley. Do you remember when he was telling us a story about one of his superiors when he was in the military and we were discussing racism and I had just, I made an assumption that the guy he was talking about was white because I'm assuming that his officer, he's a rare non-white person in the military at that time or relatively rare. I'm assuming he's white and I made an assumption about that guy. And then when I learned he was black, I sort of changed my mind. So, you know, we all do it. We all have framings in our minds. The police have done that. It's a terrible mistake. I do feel sorry for them and I feel sorry in particular for, I don't know if you read this, Rory, a woman police officer who was wrongly named online as being the police officer who was there, who's now living under police protection. Apparently, she's not even in the police force anymore. And so when politicians like Farage talk about rage, and as you say, with all the hypocrisy underlining it, there are people who are going to take that and say, right, let's go and beat up the coppers in Southampton. Let's go and have a little riot. Which is what happened. For international listeners, 11 policemen were injured, a police dog was injured, and there were terrifying scenes of guys literally attacking police lines, trying, I think, to get to Vikram Digwa's house. Yeah. And now I read something about one of these. So now there's a number of people who were involved in these violent protests who are going through the courts. Some of them will go to jail. Most of them are being held in custody. And I read something about one of these guys with his family weeping, weeping, as it dawned on him that he's probably ruined his life. On a weekend, when the multimillionaires, the Farages, the Musks, they'll be off doing what multimillionaires do at the weekend. Not giving a damn, really, about these guys who are now going to spend a considerable part of their life in jail, having been whipped up to do this. Now, do they have any justification to be angry? You have justification to be angry that one police officer, two police officers, didn't handle a really difficult situation well in the moment, right? Do you really? Can you really claim that if you're a white working class person, the police treat you worse than they treat non-white people? I just don't believe that stacks up. And then to have the vice president, the vice president of a country with one of the highest murder rates, where you get kids killed in schools because anybody's around, you know, they've got this ridiculous gun culture. And he's telling us about civilizational decline. Makes me vomit. And these people, the Farages and the Lowe's, they side with him, J.D. Vance, against the police who are trying to protect us and who are trying to, you know, stand up for British values. I mean, I just think it's evidence of how, and I think to go back to our first half of the discussion, Richard Tice, net stupid zero. It's part of the same thing. Take any debate and twist it to an agenda. And also the normalization and degradation of British politics. I was listening to the debate in Parliament when we were in Finland, and I realized that the language being used in Parliament is not language that would have been around when I was still in Parliament. How easily Generic stands up and says, will you accept that it's not just black lives that matter, but white lives matter too? Or people asking the Home Secretary to commit that white people will be treated equally under the law. I mean, it's really weird. I mean, that stuff would have been booed six, seven years because it's ridiculous. To ask Shabana Mahmood, will white people be treated equally under the law, right? And the fact that that's become normal in politics and J.D. Vance's tweets have become normal and that there is this incredible thing going on now. If you point out what Lowe said or what Farage said, the first thing you get back is, oh, well, you know, it's exactly the same as George Floyd. George Floyd said he couldn't breathe. And Henry Novak said he couldn't breathe. So it's George Floyd, right? George Floyd said he couldn't breathe when he was literally being murdered by a police officer. It's a completely different case. He was being murdered by a police officer. He was saying to the police officer who was strangling him. I can't breathe. That is a very, very important difference. Again, people point out that Keir Starmer took the knee and that Keir Starmer said, I think, at the time that he felt shocked and angered by George Floyd's death. But that is not the equivalent of Farage saying, I suggest the rest of us respond with pure cold rage. There's all these false equivalences. OK, enough for me. No, but your point about language, actually my book, it has this line, right wing populism was seen, you talk about how things have changed in the last few years, was seen as a call for a different, more direct form of democracy, certainly not as a threat to the system itself. Now that view is shifting. What we're seeing is that these right wing populist parties are radicalising and the dividing line between the radical and the extreme right has become wafer thin. So what Lowe is doing is moving Farage even further. Farage was trying to avoid all this stuff not that long ago. And that, I think, is, you know, I got the feeling from talking to James Cleverley. People can make their own minds up on Monday. I've got the feeling he's very loyal to Kemi Bainot, but I think I get the feeling he's maybe a little bit worried that they're moving too far in the direction. And your point about language is this. Just listen to this. This is Umberto Eco, who has written about this for years, emphasises that every fascist uses simple language reminiscent of Orwellian Newspeak, quotes, an impoverished vocabulary, an elementary syntax, this is Trump, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. This form of language almost seems designed for the messages on social media platforms like X, which in turn become the megaphone of contemporary fascism. Now, you said if you go back to the election when we were in New York, the American election, and we were having a debate about whether we thought Trump was a fascist. And I remember you said, well, not sure. Is it that helpful to say so? Blah, blah, blah. But I remember you saying, I think you're right, but I do think Musk is a fascist. And I think X, I mean, yes, I'm still on it, and you're still on it. And I kind of don't like the idea of vacating the space, as it were. But to see that stuff being whipped up, and to have the richest man in the world, the South African, I would argue, fascist, and the American vice president, when they see it being whipped up, whipping it up further, in order to project a vision of the world that I think is actually abhorrent to most decent British people. But then, bit by bit, you normalize it, you change it, and people start believing that, well, these councils, I mean, the reason we haven't got any potholes mended, because, you know, all they do is employ people to tell us that we should respect black people more. And the worst thing, even Rupert Low called this out, Rory. And this is why I worry about, and by the way, part three of our reform funding miniseries is out this week. We're now into the Harborne story. So there's Farage with, you know, untold riches to spend. I was talking to somebody up in the Makerfield by-election yesterday who said, somebody, they were out knocking on the door, and somebody told them they're going to vote Restore. And they were showing them the stuff on their phone that they were getting. And even Restore, even Rupert Low called out what reform did, because they took something Kemi Badenock said. Kemi Badenock was trying to say, you know, we should be colorblind, as it were. It shouldn't matter if you're white or black, everybody gets treated equally. But she said, I'm fed up with this white lives matter, black lives matter, okay? They clipped her saying the bit about, I don't care about white lives, okay? Now, Kemi Badenock's black. So a big, big graphic with Kemi Badenock's face and basically, I don't care about white lives is then put out. Even Rupert Low called that out. And this is what, this is what the millions are being used for. Not, he doesn't give a damn about people like us and coming on our podcast, doesn't give a damn about all the stuff he normally does. They are just using this money to distort, mislead, subvert democratic debate. That is my humble opinion. Very good. Well, I think we violently agree on this. So thank you very much. More to come. Question time, a lot of issues. We've got Mille, Argentina, Armenia, the World Cup and many directions to go. And so look forward to speaking again tomorrow. See you tomorrow. 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