Transcript of Could Reform Get Millions From Musk? | BBC Newscast

On Tuesday afternoon, a picture was posted on social media of some British political figures meeting Elon Musk at Mar a Lago. If you look closely, it looks like it took place in front of a picture of Donald Trump dressed to play cricket. That's of secondary importance. What is more important is what is going on in that meeting, and does it herald a massive change in the funding of British politics? That is what we will discuss on this episode of Newscast, the BBC's daily news podcast.

Chris, would you like an update on our new newscast Christmas gimmick, which is father Chris Mason?

Oh, yes. I'm I'm, yes. I and I can offer an update of my own actually in a second, but I'll hear yours first.

Well, so Lily has sent us a picture of you in the festive Santa hat, elf hat artwork in a gay club in Sydney

Terrific.

With actually a big screen saying, Slay, which is, a all year round word now.

Spell that

out. S l a y.

Alright. Okay.

Do you

know about that's that's for next year. And then we've had a message from Thea who's on a raft off Coron Island. I hope I've pronounced that correctly. Where is that? The Philippines.

And it looks very, very scenic. And, yeah, I think it's sunset in the Philippines. And there's you on Thea's phone on a raft.

Oh, well, thank you, the Philippines. And thank you, Australia.

That is terrific. Thank you, Thea.

And I there's a little a little update that I can offer, which was, within moments, of this particular, wheeze being rolled out, a, you know, you have kind of WhatsApp groups that can remain dormant for quite a while and then suddenly spring into action. I've got a WhatsApp group of former school friends who I often you know, can go years without seeing in person.

And,

yeah, it suddenly sprung into action with the screen grab and all the rest of it and promises to take it around, you know, various auctioneers, pubs, etcetera, etcetera, which is also terrific. So the the sort of virtual or cardboard world tour, I am embracing entirely.

Well, there's not a lot of days to go because we don't have a lot of, live newscasts left before Christmas as it were. So if your mates on the WhatsApp group or anyone else wants to email us, newscast@bbc.co.uk, or WhatsApp us on 0330 123-9480. I suspect we can fit in 1 more episode of Where in the World is Father Chris Mason. Although, actually, keep sending them in because we keep monitoring it all all the time, and it's

really fun.

So Oh, yeah. I can roll it into January too.

Exactly. I mean I mean, when is Christmas in Russia? Isn't that like on the 6th January?

Like the orthodox Christmas. Exactly.

Right. Let's get on with an orthodox episode of Newscast. Hello. It's Adam in the Newscast studio.

And it's Chris at Westminster. We've never done an orthodox episode of Newscast, have we?

Well, it's like it's semi orthodox because we're gonna talk about just all the things that have been happening in British politics the last few days because there's quite a few things to write up. Yeah.

That's

true. Shall we start with the social media post that caught everyone's attention on what day was it, Tuesday afternoon, which was, and I'm now gonna try and paint a picture with words, Elon Musk

Mhmm.

With Nigel Farage, leader of reform and MP for Clacton, and Nick Candy, former donors in the Conservative Party, who's now a big donor and fundraiser for the Reform Party. And is it a portrait of Donald Trump wearing cricket whites They in Mar a Lago?

Yeah. They look like cricket whites. I I think, I'm I'm, informed that there is actually tennis attire Uh-huh. Apparently, which is more kind of, I guess, believable given that, I don't think cricket's massive in Florida.

Classic angrocentric interpretation of, of American politics. And, yeah, what do we know about what what those 2 were were doing there when they got their their photo taken with Elon Musk?

So the the the short answer to this whole thing is that that was a news making photograph because there is, Nigel Farage sitting alongside the world's richest man, who also happens to be a guy who is, a, interested in politics, and, b, has a track record of giving money to political causes that he believes in, I. E, Donald Trump recently.

And then them winning.

And then them winning. Exactly. On top of that is something Nigel Farage does incredibly well and has done incredibly well for a couple of decades, which is that he is great at creating political stories with a splash of intrigue. So when he got back from Florida, I was speaking to him, and obviously, I asked him about a donation. There's been this suggestion that was floated in the last couple of weeks of Elon Musk wanting to give a $100,000,000.

And as far as I said, you know, it's nowhere near that kind of number, and that would be ludicrous. But, of course, it could be nowhere near that kind of number and still a big number. And what did Najafar say? We talked about money, but then he wouldn't get into any kind of numbers. Now what we don't know is how much further the conversation or not might have gone, in private around all of that.

But it creates a sense of intrigue. It creates a kind of a dot to dot narrative where the temptation is to draw the next line to the next dot. And that is that's what he has sort of mastered the art of in terms of keeping himself kind of in the news. Now, you might think as a newscaster, ah, yes, but people like you, Chris, shouldn't shouldn't fall for that. But the reality is right now, that at a very senior level, folk in the government and folk in the conservative party are frightened of Nigel Farage, because they can see how a case can be made at the moment that neither the government nor the conservatives, granted Labor have only had a handful of months, but can necessarily point, when you look at the opinion polls, to, track records in government that voters in significant numbers are lapping up and are full of praise for.

And in that environment, that's pretty fertile for someone like, Nigel Farage. And Nick Candy is a big addition alongside him, also very deep pocketed. Zia Yousef, the relatively new party chairman, is doing a huge amount in terms of professionalization and organization, in terms of building, from the bottom up, a kind of operation that they think can be very successful. Now who knows whether it is or it isn't, or whether it fizzles out, or whether people conclude in the end that a government, either Labor or Conservatives, is delivering sufficiently that that they're happy to, you know, reelect or elect the other lot between the main 2 parties at Westminster. But right now, Nigel Farage has a certain momentum, and that's why I think that, you know, photo was newsworthy and whatever comes next might well be too.

And here is some of Chris' conversation with Nigel Farage after he came back from that famous photo op, and you can interpret it how you will.

We did talk about money, and we will have ongoing negotiations on that. I mean, he is fully, fully behind us. He wants to help us. He's not opposed to the idea of giving us money, provided we can do it legally through UK companies.

Did you get to numbers?

No. We didn't. We didn't. We didn't. But I mean, it's an open negotiation.

It's a conversation we will have again with him.

And so, Chris, just on the technicalities of of electoral law and specifically the funding of political parties. So, I mean, Nigel Farage said it there. It's like a company can donate money to a political party in the British political system. It has to be a UK based company, but that could be a subsidiary of a company that makes lots of its money in other countries.

Exactly. And therefore, an entrepreneur with the range of kind of business platforms that, Elon Musk has in this instance would have a vehicle through which, pardon the pun in the context of 1 of his businesses, he could channel a donation legally. Now what we've now got is a conversation where, given the potential scale of a donation from Elon Musk, the government is saying, well, it wants to look at kind of foreign donations. You have a bunch of MPs called the Old Party Group for Fair Elections, suggesting that the law needs to change, needs to be tightened, and that channeling it through a company, if ultimately you are a foreign donor, shouldn't be allowed. That kind of runs the risk from the government's perspective of having the whiff of changing the rules halfway through the game because it's politically expedient to do so.

But then there's that wider thing that, you know, when you've got someone like Elon Musk, who is, as I say, super rich, mega politically interested, and willing to spend money, you know, put his money where his mouth is, you know, how collectively comfortable is the UK with the prospect of someone, 1 individual having perhaps massively outsized influence. And on that point, I thought Miriam Cates, the former Conservative MP, who's been on newscast, I think, in the past, she said something on on X actually as it happens. Say, look, when you're weighing up this in your head, in your mind, as to whether or not you think this is a good idea, you've got to detach Nigel Farage and Elon Musk from it. So run the same argument in your head with Bill Gates and Keir Starmer, and then ask yourself if that changes your view because your political prejudice lines up on 1 side or the other. And instead, so she argued, you've got to come to a decision as to whether or not, in principle, this sort of thing is something the UK should encourage, or not.

Yeah. Because, I mean, if you look at the numbers, Labor get quite a small percentage of their financial donations from companies and an even smaller percentage from companies that are based here and also somewhere else. So, yeah, you can see why it would be very easy to make an argument that they were kind of rigging rigging the rules in their favor. I see. The conservatives, for example, get a lot more money from corporate donors.

Yeah. And then and then all pretty quickly, you're back into the argument that always pops up when you have roused about political donations and political donors, which is the ultimate alternative if you were to sort of turn all of those taps off.

It's all of us.

It's state funding. Yeah. It's a mandatory taxpayer funding of political parties, which political parties tend to be sufficiently self aware of the unpalatableity of the most people that they never suggest. But the alternative to that is is these moments of kind of anguish slash awkwardness around what is a legitimate donation. And then the the obvious secondary question to that, which is what does the donor get out of it?

Mhmm. Now the moment in which we are recording this episode of newscast is 6:38 PM on Wednesday, and we just had an email drop from Downing Street about some more transatlantic traffic. And this is a phone call between Keir Starmer and president-elect Donald Trump. So Nigel Farage didn't quite get to Trump this time, although he spent plenty of times with him before, but Keir Starmer has had a phone call. And, actually, the readout as these things are called, you can sort of you can actually picture this conversation happening, can't you?

So the prime minister congratulated president-elect Trump. I bet he did. And then president-elect Trump warmly recounted his meeting with Prince William in Paris at the at the reopening of Notre Dame. I bet he did. And then is then when it gets a little bit more, kind of, less agreeable as it were.

Yeah. I mean, so I was trying to work out actually when this just, dropped into our inboxes. I thought, oh, because they haven't spoken all that often. But actually, they've spoken they've met once at Trump Tower back in September, which prime minister talks about the whole time. Mhmm.

And

The chicken dinner.

The chicken dinner, and David Lammy was there, the foreign secretary, etcetera, etcetera. 2nd helping, blah blah blah. All that stuff. They have actually had a couple of phone calls, because there was a phone call shortly after the first assassination attempt against Donald Trump earlier in the year. There was a congratulatory call when Donald Trump won, and then there was this, and then there was the face to face meeting.

So there's been a few, and there might have been another 1 that I've forgotten about. But yeah, what else does it get to in this? The prime minister reiterated the need for allies to stand together with Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.

And the fact that the prime minister reiterated it means that Donald Trump didn't agree?

Yes. Or he felt he had to say it again because exactly it wasn't it wasn't exactly the same words or similar formulation and sentiment didn't come back from down the other end of the, the the the phone line. So, yeah, you can you can begin to see even when sort of washed with the highest kind of diplomatic detergent of these things to turn it into something that just sounds very bland, where the, where the kind of tram tracks of argument are gonna come.

Now another big story that's been brewing at Westminster in the last couple of days is to do with the WOSPI women. So WOSPI stands for Women Against State Pension Inequality, and they've been campaigning for many years on behalf of women who were born in the 19 fifties, who saw their state pension age increase quite dramatically so that it was equalized with men, but some of them didn't get informed quite in the right time period. And so they've been campaigning to get their pension made up as a result. And this has been a campaign that you and I have been reporting on for, well, years years years as political journalists, but it's now reached Keir Starmer's desk as prime minister. Or Liz Kendall, the working pension secretary's desk, as working pension secretary.

Yeah. And it's nuanced, this, as these things so often are. So it's nuanced because this is principally a row about, a failure to properly inform those who were affected. Some of the campaigners make a broader argument about the money that they lost as a result of the changes over and above the failures of communication. There was a report done by an ombudsman into all of this that concluded that there was a communications failure and that there should be compensation.

The kind of wider context is the the big picture 1 of the government's, public finances being in a bit of a mess and then also handing out compensation in other cases like the post office scandal and the effective Budd scandal, 2 of which, amongst a number of others, were kind of more egregious state or institutional failures, than this 1. And then, I think, it it it's worth saying that if you follow politics, minute by minute, hour by hour, as I do and you do, I don't think there's much surprise amongst that tiny naught point, naught naught naught 1 percent of the population that the government has not given compensation. And by the way, the conservatives wouldn't either in all life.

Because it would be tens of 1,000,000,000 of pounds.

Because it would be tens of 1,000,000,000 of pounds. And again, you know, as I say, not as egregious as some of these other cases, state of the public finances, etcetera, etcetera. But but the problem for Keir Starmer is a massive failure of expectation management. Because even though he didn't promise to pay compensation in the Labor manifesto by the way, neither did the conservatives in theirs. In recent years, he and Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, were photographed alongside WOSPI women to use the campaign, the campaign acronym, for for the campaigners.

Sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, giving the impression that, a, they supported their cause, and, b, ergo, they would give compensation if they won the election. And here we are afterwards with this gap in expectation between what it was probably always likely would happen, I, they wouldn't pay the compensation, and the expectation from the campaigners that they felt that they were on their side. And that, in an era of these kind of hurricane force cynicism about politics, is a massive problem for a government because it just adds fuel to those who think that governments of any recent color either don't keep their promises or can't be believed or don't deliver. And actually, that loops all the way back to our conversation about Nigel Farage a bit ago because that's the kind of political atmosphere, if you like, in which he can make a message that say he can, you know, articulate a political message that says neither the conservatives nor Labor are any good when they're running the place. Nothing changes, etcetera, etcetera.

That kind of argument. That might be unfair. It might be opportunistic. But the, the the climate, the atmosphere in which that argument might receive a warm kind of welcome is probably helped along by moments like this.

Mhmm. Very interesting. And, of course, because politics has hooked on the recent past, everyone goes straight to Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems and tuition fees before the 2010 election.

Yes. Yes. I mean, the the 1 distinction though is that it wasn't a manifesto promise in in this instance. But that almost sounds like dancing on the head of the pin because who on earth reads election manifestos other than people like you and you and me? But they are the kind of meant to be the kind of sacrosanct promises.

Now it doesn't stop a government doing something you know, you can do stuff that wasn't in your manifesto if you're in government. But, the the fact that it wasn't there, means that they can say we didn't promise to do it, in our kind of bundle of promises before the election. But as I say, it's the sentiment that you they they left hanging in the air creating that gap in expectation.

Chris, thank you very much for that minute by minute account of the state of British democracy on Wednesday 18th December.

I was trying to think of something witty to say. I couldn't think of anything.

Well, you

know why I did it like that? It's because I'm next gonna have a conversation with professor Ben Ansell Oh. Who's professor of comparative democracy at Oxford University.

He hasn't got any real lectures to give, so he's coming on Newscape.

Exactly. We're giving him a plat we are his new podium. And, basically, the reason we thought we'd catch up with him is because at the start of the year, because he did the reflections about the state of democracy around the world, we got him to preview all the many, many elections that are happening.

Yes. And now he can do all the way around. Now review

now. Yes. In particular, his predictions about the US elections, which he made in quite strong terms on the episode of newscast before the American election, which turned out to be really quite wrong.

Oh, right.

So we can now listen to me catching up with Ben Ansell earlier on where the first thing I did was challenge him very gently on his incorrect predictions about the American elections, which he very gainfully held his hands up to being, yeah, quite wrong. Professor Ansell, hello. Hello, Adam. Welcome back. Thank you.

Last time we were sat in this room was the day before election day in the US.

Yes. It was. How did

that go for you?

Well well, not very well for my prediction that, that Harris would win, which turned out like many other people's predictions.

Yeah. You weren't alone. Including Rory Stewart.

Yeah, to be wrong. I I think I had fortunately said on news night

a few days earlier also to me.

That it was it was a very you know, it was very tight, and no 1 could tell you what was gonna happen. I think a number of people, like myself thought over the week before the election that Harris had caught up on Trump and was pushing ahead. That clearly was not true. The polls, in fact, were not that far off. The problem is they were still off and they were still biased against Trump.

So it looked like it was gonna be in a very marginal lead for Harris in the popular vote. That didn't even transpire. And, you know, when that didn't transpire, there was no hope of her winning the electoral vote.

Is that gonna change how you think about future democratic events?

I think it's going to change, how I think about trying to poll populist candidates. You know, the funny thing about that is we did really well here this year with polling reform. The polls had them at about 15%. They got just over 14%. That's that's pretty good.

And the group of people who vote for reform have some similarities to the group of people who vote for Donald Trump in that they're motivated by some of the same kind of anti system, you know, down with the mainstream parties, you know, sets of thoughts. And yet, it seems to be easier to pick up reform voters than it is Trump voters.

I know. And, actually, I'm thinking back to the the we're now talking about a different election, but I'm thinking back to the exit poll on the night of 4th July, the British election, where actually John Curtis was predicting that reform would get 13 MPs.

Yes. I I should tell John Curtis that when he criticizes my US election prediction.

But I mean, he did revise it throughout the night, didn't he? But but but

just Well, Anne and Marine Le Pen was overestimated earlier in the year. Right? Mhmm. So populists had been had been, you know, the polls people have been adding secret sauce to them to, but it turns out that there's a special Trump secret sauce that's different from other populists.

Yeah. And also, what I'm trying to work out is because it's very it's very hard to actually put yourself back in the mind that you had the like, months months ago. And I'm just thinking 2 things. Was it actually that the American polls were right in the end? It's just that the actual outcome was within the margin of error.

Because, actually, the election was still fairly it wasn't like a Trump, like, mega landslide.

No. Absolutely.

And, actually, the polls have a margin of error of plus 2 or 3%. Don't they?

When you're in that very, very close domain, anything could happen. It it was in electoral college terms. It was more than Biden got. It was a borderline landslide, but not a landslide like the 19 eighties where Ronald Reagan would win all but 1 state or even like the landslide that Barack Obama had in 2,008. So this was a huge victory for the Republican party in part because it's a trifecta, and in part because Trump did better than most of us thought, but it is not remotely unprecedented.

And also the other thing that makes it difficult for us observers who are not on the ground the whole time talking to American voters the whole time is that, are a lot of our experiences mediated via the American media? And it turns out lots of the American media was biased in favor of Harris and reported and analyzed accordingly.

Yeah. Now Trump's gonna sue them all. It's it's true, you know, and probably in most countries around the world that there is there is some form of implicit bias in in the mainstream media. It's it's very, very hard to be totally objective about multiple parties when, you know, journalists are people too and, you know, they're allowed to vote as well. And it's very easy for people to engage in just a little bit of wish casting.

But I think what's more important in the American case actually Wish casting is where you sort

of predict based on what you want.

What you would like to happen. But in the American context, I I don't think that people were doing that at the start of the summer even had they, you know, been more pro Biden because it really looked like he wasn't going to win. What American media love more than anything else is a horse race, and Harris gave them a horse race.

Yes. Because she managed to recover so much ground that Biden had lost.

Yeah.

So it looked competitive.

So arguably, the Democrats are not in a bad position with the House of Representatives. Right now, because of some slightly bizarre choices that Trump has made in terms of who he's putting into his cabinet, taking them from the house, the Republicans have a 1 or 2 seat real majority in the house. Now that may change as some of these seats are filled, but it makes it really hard for Mike Johnson, speaker of the house, to get anything through. So they have a trifecta. It's quite a narrow trifecta.

And to the degree that Harris did anything for the Democrats, I think she probably got the house of representatives closer than Joe Biden would have done.

And you mentioned the trifecta, which is the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. And if you've got all 3, you've got the trifecta. But the the other point about that is that, okay, you're you're president for 4 years, but there's an election in 1 of those other bits every 2 years. So it's a it's a kind of rolling thing, almost like like the weather as versus British general elections. Right.

Where should we go next then in terms of elections we've had this year?

Well, we've had some recent elections since we spoke last, or we've not had them. In other words, in Romania, there was a presidential election, and then there wasn't, which is a very unusual thing to happen in a democracy.

So, yeah, this this kind of came from nowhere populist candidates who did very well on TikTok

Yeah. Colin Georgescu.

Was the winner of the first round, surprised everyone, but then the Supreme Court, like, struck it down and said, no. That isn't what happened.

Yeah. So it it it's a bit murky, and I've been trying to figure this out. The European Union have got involved. The sense is, that the intelligence services in Romania have very good information that there was a concerted Russian campaign to influence TikTok, a Chinese owned social media company, to promote videos of Calin Ceausescu, this populist candidate. That is being considered in some way or another.

And I'm not enough of an expert on Romanian electoral law to know exactly how to have violated the the presidential election or the first round of the presidential election in some sense. And so it has been annulled, and we go again next year.

And I think well, obviously, that's significant for people in Romania. It's significant for the EU. But where it's extra significant is I feel a lot of the conversations we've had over the last 18 months about the role of, outside interference or disinformation. There have not been that many concrete examples people can point to and say, look, here's an example where it might have happened. This is an example where it looks like it it might have happened, and we will be able to get get some data as a result of this to then judge the threat and the risk posed by these things.

Yeah. I mean, what's true here is, I think, more broadly true, which is that outside interference generally helps populist candidates. Is it because those populist candidates are Manchurian candidates secretly sponsored by the Chinese or the Russians? Not necessarily and probably not in many of these countries.

The Manchurian candidate being a famous old film where that happens.

Yes. Thank you. Obviously, we're all fans of 19 fifties movies here. So that is probably not the case. What is the case is that China and Russia are interested in sowing dissension about the mainstream parties of the west and those that they see as, you know, backing, for example, western intervention in Ukraine.

That's something that Georgesku was very unhappy about and spoke about being a candidate for peace. We saw a similar pattern in Georgia where Georgian Dream, won the Georgian elections. Again, a Russia backed party, we think, or at least a Russia sympathetic party. And getting elected, you know, on a kinda combined policy program of social conservatism on the 1 hand, which which is not unpopular in places like Romania and Georgia, and being pro peace where pro peace means not wishing to engage in further western intervention in Ukraine. Mhmm.

Right. Let's look at France now where they had those surprise elections in the summer for the National Assembly, which has ended up in a situation where no group of parties has a majority, which means Macron just can't get a prime minister who lasts. For example, last candidate being our old friend, Michel Barnier, who did not last very long. Is that an example of that old phrase of the people have spoken, we just don't know what they've said? Because actually part of the National Assembly, they're split into 3 blocks of a similar size.

Yeah. Well, look look, what

I think it is an example of is how much Emmanuel Macron loves drama. I mean, having this election in the first place that he entirely did not have to have, was a very dramatic thing to do. He then ended up somehow by the skin of his teeth at least surviving. His own party got decimated, but he didn't face what I think we all thought the risk for him was of, Marine Le Pen's getting a a majority or a near majority in the French assembly. That didn't happen.

So he sort of survived that.

He actually did do better than he he was in theory was going to do.

Party didn't, but his opponent also didn't. Right? And the left did well. That, of course, creates a new problem for Macron, which is he doesn't really want a prime minister of the left either. And so then he imposes Michel Barnier.

He he can choose the prime minister. That's the French president's right. Barnier is sort of supported by a group of Macron centrists. The remaining French center right party, Les Republican, where where he comes from, and then in a kind of confidence and supply kind of arrangement by Marine Le Pen's party. That can't last, really, because Marine Le Pen and Macron are loggerheads.

But Macron also doesn't want a candidate of the left, who, you know, themselves have a large block. And so now we have Macron's sort of old Svengali figure, Francois Beru, who is this sort of centrist Chekhov's gun candidate who's been around French politics forever, if you ever been looking. And finally, he gets to be prime minister. So in the end, everybody becomes prime minister in French politics.

But is this an example of the the French system working as designed? Because, of course, the the current French electoral system is really or constitutional setup is really not that old. It's from the 19 fifties, isn't it?

Well, yeah. Exactly. From 1958. Yeah.

And it is So nearly the 19 sixties.

Right. And it well, so the current But it

was never designed to come up with this kind of outcome, was it?

Well, it was designed to come up with a strong president, but exactly what that meant for the National Assembly wasn't always clear. So there so the 4th republic is this period in France, you know, after the 2nd World War, before 1958, which doesn't last very long at all, of constantly cycling governments and a prime minister every week, and then you have the Algerian civil war and it collapses. The goal comes in to provide strong leadership, but that strong leadership is based in the president. Now the president hasn't lost their powers. The only real difference is that they've moved from a 7 year term to a 5 year term.

Macron still has huge powers in foreign policy. It's the power to pick a

prime minister. And basically anything that happens at a European level, it's the president decides what what to do. Yeah.

But for budgetary matters and for pension reforms and all of those kinds of things that

Which are hot potatoes at the moment.

And that never happen in France. Right? Or that every time they do happen, get get removed again. That's where you need, you need the French you need the assembly. And they are elected in a somewhat similar fashion to the UK in that there there's geographically based seats, but they have 2 round elections.

And so you end up with, you know, in the 2nd round, something that looks a bit like the UK with plurality voting. But in the 1st round, you can have lots of different parties. So we've ended up with a slightly awkward situation of having quite a lot of parties being represented, being able to coordinate in what's called the pro republican front against Marine Le Pen. They could do that because of the 2nd round, but that doesn't mean that the anti Le Pen parties really get on with each other, and that is where we have got stuck.

Some people sort of fantasizing about, oh, Macron's final roll of the dice would be resigning and and and triggering a new presidential election. I mean, it doesn't look like that's gonna happen. But if it did, would that necessarily solve anything? Because that doesn't really that just means somebody from a different party might have the same problem that he has with the assembly.

Yeah. I don't I I can't see a world in in I mean, look. Well, I've already told you that Macron loves drama. So I guess, you know, all bets are off in the world of Emmanuel Macron. But, you know, he he will stay in place.

The problem that Macron has created for himself is he has no obvious heir to Macronism. There was this his initial prime minister who lasted a long time, Edouard Philippe. That was the guy that that people thought would be, you know, the the second coming of Macron, but, you know, Macron has essentially fallen out with with anyone who could replace it. He he didn't even want to put in his old kind of mentor, Beirut, as prime minister. Macron said, you know, a week or so ago, you know, give me 2 days, and I'll come up with the prime minister.

And the 2 days elapsed, and he was still basically going, oh, I don't really wanna have Beirut. I guess I've gotta have him.

And they were didn't didn't the Elise brief out that even while Beirut was sat there being hired, Macron was thinking about if there could be somebody Yes. Sat there

as well. The French press were reporting that Beirut has discovered he will

not be prime minister. This time in the room. Exactly. Let's look at Germany then. And they're I mean, they were due in election, but it's just happening much sooner.

Yes. Exactly. So, the social democrats are governing in a, multiparty coalition. The first sort of proper German multiparty coalition that, you know, it doesn't involve a kind of grand coalition. So it's the social democrats, the Greens, and then the the FTP who are, what Europeans will call a Liberal party, but actually doesn't really have, a counterpoint in the UK or the US.

They're they're basically an economically conservative socially liberal party. You know, those tend to get sucked into parts of center right or center left parties here. And the problem, that the social democrats have faced is that this liberal party does not want to go along with their budgetary policy. And so they've basically blown up the coalition. That's meant the they're stuck.

They they don't command a majority anymore. And so roll on the new elections. So we just had a vote of no confidence. And we will have new elections early next year, which I suspect will go very badly for the social democrats. And at the moment, the interesting thing is sort of who is who is in command of the CDU and who's really going to be the next German chancellor.

And will it be Frederic Mertz, somebody who had basically had been around for ages and then got written off and actually sort of retired from politics and He's the Francois Beru. Yeah. Exactly. Lots of these lots of these figures. An election that didn't get as much coverage as it maybe should have done because of other things happening, or maybe because the outcome wasn't very exciting.

Ireland. Yeah. What's your take on the on the Irish election? So basically, Fine Gael, Fianna Fail, who were, like, sharing power before are gonna share power again. They're back.

Yeah. So Having never gone away.

Important time for for anybody who doesn't know what Fina Finiguel, to remember that these 2 parties have been around forever. The distinction between them is largely a distinction about how they felt about the treaty that established the Irish Free State back in the 19 twenties and their disagreements on that. In terms of party politics in an ideological sense, they don't differ that much. Ireland has basically always had 2 center right parties, And those parties have alternated in government and sometimes they've joined in government and they remain joined in government. And so you might think, well, how can this continue?

Surely, there is some opposition to this and there is, Sinn Fein. And I think we all thought 2 or 3 years ago that come the next Irish elections, this would be the moment for Sinn Fein, a nationalist party of the left, which is quite a rare thing internationally, obviously, a party that wants to reunite Ireland, that they would finally get into power. And they flunked it, which is a surprise, I think. The other thing that

Except for Sinn Fein to get into power, they would need to win, like, more than half of the votes.

I mean, there's no other party

is prepared to go into government with them. So they for them to win, they need to win really big whereas the other parties can win really small.

Yeah. And so maybe we were kidding ourselves thinking that, well, this is their moment because it's it's an impossible barrier for them to meet given this, you know, what we would call in Europe a cordon sanitaire by the other party. So just they draw a line and they won't they won't cross it. We did, I think, also think, political scientists studying Ireland, that there might be more voting for right wing populists in Ireland. They certainly got a lot of social media coverage.

They also flamed out. So, you know, everything is sort of the same in Ireland as it was before. Irish politics truck along looking much like they did in 19 seventies or 19 nineties or the 20 tens.

I mean, the big difference in Ireland compared to the UK though is that the Irish government has got shed loads of money to spend because they rake in so much corporation tax, including corporation tax from people like Apple that they didn't charge enough corporation tax on a few years ago, and the EU told them to to collect some more. Right. Let's think about 2025. I won't get you to make predictions because as we've seen, they can be

Yeah.

Yeah. It's terrible. By the way, Yeah.

Joe Curtis has reminded me never to do that, although I won't let him know.

Give us some things to think about in 2025 then in democracy terms. So We already hinted at some of the elections.

So we're gonna have the German election. I think it it it would be surprising if if the Christian Democrats didn't do very well in that election. I think the thing that people will be looking at and getting excited about, though, is how Alternative fur Deutschland do the the RFD. That's the German right populist party who have been very successful at winning regional elections, in, you know, German east ex east German states. Right?

And they've done really well there. Haven't really crossed to the west. The other interesting party that's been doing well in East Germany is the Sara Wagenknecht party, if I pronounced that correct. That is a populist left party that is a sort of anti migrant populist left. Now, again, that's an unusual combination in Europe.

Not necessarily unusual though in Eastern Europe because we're talking about the old East Germany. It's it's interesting to see that kind of crossover there. So I think that election goes 1 of 2 ways probably. Either the CDU, the Christian Democrats, Angela Merkel's party, Frederic Marx's party, they do really well. We go back to kind of standard German mainstream center right governance, or these 2 populist parties do really well.

And we have, a fragmented French style parliament. Interesting. And

I know you've been doing the Radio 4 series Rethink, over the last few months where you look at big subjects like AI or the nature of the price of things.

Mhmm.

I just wonder what's it been like for you having, like, your normal politics bit of your brain and then this really kind of not out there, but, like, just thinking about other trends going on because I'm still waiting for the moment where British politics moves off the classical things of taxing, spending, the deficit, the NHS, reform of the planning system, the benefit system, and the rates of tax, and that it actually starts thinking about things that feel really kind of modern. Well, obviously, every politician should be listening to my show. Thank you, Adam, for that that that that publicity science.

1 thing I will say about an an episode that we have coming up in January is we have an episode on political labels because 1 of the questions we had is, do the old, labels of left and right make much sense for British politics anymore. And I think there's good reason to believe that this election that we had in July 2024 was 1 where a multi party electorate was pushed screaming into a 2 party wardrobe. And it's producing our electoral system is producing outcomes that fundamentally don't fit the way that people are voting. So not only did the conservatives and labor get the lowest ever 2 party share of the vote, But actually, the 3 party share, which includes now reform, was also the lowest ever of the vote because the Lib Dems and the Greens did so well. And yet we're in the situation where a government that got 30 odd percent of 34% of vote has 2 thirds of the seats in parliament.

And so, you you know, we can have all these exciting conversations about Rachel Reeves' budget and taxes. But underneath all of that, there's clearly a lot bubbling under in how people are feeling, and maybe we saw some of it in the riots in the summer. We're going to see, we're gonna see in terms of issues, around social rights, environmental rights, and it's just not well dealt with in our system.

And then you realize when the system does try to acknowledge that. So, for example, Keir Starmer doing something that previously he disagreed with or not doing something he previously promised to, he gets completely pillarized. I've just invented a new word, pillarized, pillaried and criticized, pillarized, for not being, true to himself. But actually, you could make the argument he's just trying to govern for a broader group of voters Yeah. Than his core Yeah.

Group of vote.

Yeah. I mean, being the prime minister does mean leading the country, and you would hope that politicians were public spirited enough to say, yes, I'm going to I'm going to be trying to govern for more than just my party base. Especially if you're Keir Starmer and you know that lots of people lent their votes to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens because they knew Labor were gonna win and they were trying to get the conservatives out. Okay. So fair enough.

I think the real challenge we all have at the moment is Labor clearly benefited from an extremely disproportionate way into which votes turned into seats in parliament. That's true. And their polling rates, polling ratings are very low at the moment for an incumbent government. Also true. But they're gonna be in power for another 4 or so years.

It it is almost inconceivable to think of a way in which that doesn't happen unless the party fragments

crazy. And historically, Labor doesn't get rid of its own leaders when they're in power really.

It's also not clear who that rival would be. I mean, I was thinking about this the other day. Any conservative cabinet, you can pick at least 12 people who fancy themselves as prime minister and let you know it all the time. It's actually quite hard to see that with the current labor cabinet. So he's probably safe.

And he's in this unusual position, which is he's gonna be in power for a while. He knows he has to govern for the long term. We're all looking at his appalling approval ratings and saying, gosh, those are terrible. That is true. But Emmanuel Macron has always had appalling approval rates.

When you're president, you're still there till the end of your 5 year term. So we might have to look at it a bit more like that. And and, you know, ultimately, Steinman will be judged by the time he comes to the next election. That's a long time away.

Ben, thank you very much. See you in 2025. See you in 2025. And that is all for this episode of newscast. Just to let you know, Chris and I and Laura and Henry and Patty and Alex Forsyth and Mariana and all sorts of people have been recording lots of extra bonus episodes of newscast that we will be sending your way over the Christmas period so we can continue to keep each other company.

But there will be a classic news based daily episode of newscast coming your way, which we will record on Thursday. So stay tuned for that 1. See you then. Bye bye.