Quite right!: Rory Stewart interview | Part one

0:00Granger knows if you're a procurement manager at an industrial manufacturing facility, you're balancing inventory and budget while sourcing critical supplies across the operation. Too much inventory? Cost climb. Too little? Production slows. Grangers, $2 billion in on-hand inventory helps you get what you need when you need it, so you can help keep budgets balanced in lines moving. Call 1-800-Granjer. Click ranger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the once, who get it done. Hi and welcome to QuiteRite. This week I'm talking to Rory Stewart. If there is such a thing as a Renaissance man in the modern world, it's Rory, former soldier, former diplomat, best-selling author, also presenter of a rival podcast. But critically for today, author of this wonderful new book, Middleland, which reflects his time as Member of Parliament between 2010 and 2019 for Penrith and

1:03the border. I'll be talking to Rory about being a Member of Parliament, constituencies, borders, and also conservatism, different varieties and different flavours of what it is to be. Rory, this book is a collection of pieces that you wrote for the local newspaper while you were Member of Parliament, interspersed with your own, reminiscences, and reflections on your time as MP. Four people who don't know your own constituency, Penrith and the border, can you give us a flavour of what was distinctive about representing that part of England? Yeah, so firstly, it was the largest, most sparsely populated constituency in England, and it had half the English Scottish border, so the Northern Lake District, Hadrian's Wall, a loss of sheep farms, I'm in anyone who's seen the Northern Lake District, can imagine it. So, staggeringly beautiful, very, very unusual also, because the boundaries of the constituency were actually shadowed the boundaries of an ancient lost kingdom that had nothing to do

2:08with England or so on. So, like you, I am a Scott who's fed a lot of time in England, and like you, I'm a Unionist, I'm very skeptical about Scottish Nationalism. And here was a constituency which had a very different story, which was a story that was reminding us that actually even England and Scotland are not natural entities, that there was this whole lovely kingdom called Cumbria, which had its own language, its own bards, its own line of kings, that existed long before these things we call England as Scotland came to being, and there are still bits that are my constituency, so in some ways, I was lucky enough to be representing a place that sometimes felt like a small country rather than a constituency. Yet the sense of you being an ambassador from Cumbria to Westminster comes through very powerfully. It's a familiar trip of our times that Westminster doesn't understand so much of the rest of the country has become a strange from its concerns, but your constituency, as you mentioned, has certain unique qualities. One of the things that comes through in the book is a sense that it history matters, perhaps more

3:12in Cumbria than anywhere else in England. The survival, threatens survival of small farms, the fact that community life and certain points have been called the big society wasn't an innovation or a gimmick. It was the reality of life for so many people in the constituency that you represented, and that so many of the plans that were developed elsewhere for economic transformation, including plans well in the past, were templates which were almost thrust onto the people of Cumbria rather than being delivered with them. Is it a real sense still in your mind that Cumbria is a world apart from Westminster and also a representative of an older perhaps better England? I think it is an older better England, and it's an older better England where many of the things matter most to people, keeping fulfilled, keeping happy, improved their lives are things that should be to do with local government, not national government, and what do people actually care about?

4:15They care about where a housing development is built. That doesn't mean they're nimbis, but they want some say in where those houses aren't how they work. They care deeply about their landscape, their local school, their local road, but these are things that they often know more about, care more about, can do more about the dissident official, and the can do is quite important because there's a whole untapped potential of an incredible number of people who are prepared to give their time in a voluntary fashion to support these things. I was struck in my own village that's something like 90% of the people living in the village were involved in somewhere and other with organizing a 5K run or keeping the church open or running the parish school or supporting a sports day or a fair or whatever. That's first thing. Second thing is this extraordinary story about a very, very over centralised Britain, which as I was writing the book, of course, I kept reminding myself, it's a very, very old story. It's a story that goes back to the Norman Conquest

5:18because the first time that Cumbria is on the receiving end is when the Norman Forest laws are imposed on it. This whole area, and people remember that famously William the Conch from William Rufus loved the deer more than they know. The Forest laws were this horrifying bit of autocratic government that imposed swinging fines, crested wildernesses, and imposed it on us. Fast forward. By the time you get to the 19th century, this is the place where you flood whole valleys to create reservoirs for water for a Manchester. By the time the First World War, this is where you put the big munitions factories to generate the stuff that's fired in the First World War. This is where you put your new clear generation. This is where you put your weapons testing sites. More recently, this is where people like George Monbio think that you're going to rewild. But all these things have one thing in common. They treat Cumbria as though it's a blank space on a map, onto which

6:19the state or the centralized vision from London can impose its dreams. It's really allergic to, I want his pretentious, but I want to say that the texture of particular local life, but maybe a better way of saying it is, it's not really addressing what is Applebee, what is Kirby's Stephen, what is Ruf, what is asking who are these people, what are their lives, what do they actually want, what are they actually doing day to day, how do these things work, and what makes an area which, and this is my final paradox, which if you look at from Westminster in the economic statistics, looks very unfortunate. I have farmers declaring incomes of 8,000 pounds a year, and it's one of the lowest income parts of the country. And yet it regularly in polls was one of the happiest piece plus, it was self-report, enormous happiness. So that's another problem for treasuries that are endlessly trying to generate growth and productivity. Here's this area

7:23that claims to be happy, that doesn't have any of the things that our whole modern political system assumes is the driver of happiness. And the position that you take and the little way in which you describe your constituency is very Tory. You're seeking to preserve a way of against universalising and abstract forces. In a way, it's not romanticising because the reality of life there, but in romantic terms, you are like Tolkien defending the shiner against ultra-modernity. Is that fair? I think it is fair, but I think it's important to understand that that can cut in two different directions because famously Elon Musk used that analogy as a way of making an argument against immigration and Islam. I don't see it in that way. I don't see it as a fight between some inherent ethnic Englishness against the other. I'm a, insofar as I'm a nationalist, I'm a Cumberan nationalist, right? And what being a Cumberan nationalist means for me

8:28is listening to the people who live there, most of whom are white, but there was also a very interesting bungalow that actually was some population, there was a Gypsy travel population, there are people who self-identified as scots or Polish, right? And I think there's another really interesting word that you use there which is romantic because you, because you're being thoughtful in general, has always offered the word and then withdrew it. But the reality is that most people hearing me say, I want to preserve all the things that I love about Cumberan. Describe that as romantic. What do they mean by romantic? What they mean is I think at some level, it's not realistic. It can't be done. That's the inference, yeah. Yeah. And that in the real world, Cumberan has got to get with the program, right? Why? Why has Cumberan got to get with the program? Why can't people in Cumberan continue to live the kind of lives they want to live in Cumberan? What's this program that we all have to get with? And I feel the same, I've just been in Scotland for five weeks in grief. And there again, I look at grief and I think this is good. I mean, if,

9:33okay, so I'll get back to grief in a second. No, I think that one of the consistent threads in your writing and speaking has been a resistance to the idea that the arc of history has to bend in any particular direction. And that actually there is wisdom embodied in institutions, ways of life, patterns of existence that is not immediately apparent, certainly not from a distance. And whether or not it's the new concept of project to remake Iraq, whether it's particularly crude ideas of nation building in Afghanistan, or whether it's Westminster's lack of understanding of Cumberan, it is the case that sometimes super-smart people with the best intentions don't appreciate that folkways and traditions have a wisdom and a resilience that are at the very least, even if you don't want to endorse, worth respecting. Yeah. And I think you've put your finger on what I see as probably the biggest theme in life,

10:35which is the surreal gap between rhetoric and reality. So you're completely right. I saw it first in Afghanistan where I walked across the country, stayed in small villages, walking 20-25 miles a day. And as you can imagine, rural Afghanistan is pretty rural, pretty remote. Turn up in Kabul, it's just after 9-11. And here the to be present, if Afghanistan say every Afghanistan is committed to a gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic, centralized state based on democracy, human rights, the root of law, right? And obviously, I can't even translate that into Dari. I don't know how I say that to somebody I've stayed with. In fact, what he's actually disclosed is exactly what it isn't. He just put noce in front of every word. You've got one of the digits, right? So then I'm thinking, is he naive or is he dishonest? And then I realized, this is one I'm going to break through. So I'd be interested in how you feel about the politician, that if I were actually to say to him, Ashraf, come with me to this village, is this gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic, centralized based on democracy, human rights, the root of law? He would be a bit offended because he isn't actually trying to describe Afghanistan at all. And that's why this idea, because the rhetoric actually is completely disconnect.

11:38It's addressed to someone else. It's addressed to journalists. It's addressed to World Bank. It's a sort of conversation and development organisations. Developmental with them. Something completely different. Now, fast forward to why I think this is relevant today. This mindset which began as a modernist mindset, the mindset and the enlightenment, and actually becomes the mindset of total terrorists. If you were to hear the Bulgarian Communist Party talk about Bulgaria, they would also describe their country with different words, you know, pro-Taria to quality, but it would have equally little relationship. Multi-fabulous, right? No, nothing to do with the reality of life. But the manifestation today is AI. Yes. Because the tech-brows are now generating a very, very similar astonishing, hyper-modern vision of the world, where, you know, I've just come back from California. And they will say to me, we are going to end Councillor, some of them even believe they are going to end death, we are going to end poverty. These are going to, you know, increase one of them suggested to me that it would make US GDP grow by 10% a year, which you

12:44want to say, and would mean that it doubled in about six years, right? At some level, very, very brilliant people. I mean, these are people who, you know, were star mathematicians at 15 or 16 champion chess players, who are extraordinary intellectual ability, are not in touch with reality. And so I think that must be something about human condition, because reality is so complicated, and elusive, and difficult, and there's so many millions of us in Britain, and so difficult, we get a bit bored, trying to focus on what people like and come rear, and so we retreat to the abstract. Granger knows, if you're a procurement manager at an industrial manufacturing facility, you're balancing inventory and budget, while sourcing critical supplies across the operation. Too much inventory? Cost climb? Too little? Production slows. Grangers, $2 billion, and on-hand inventory helps you get what you need when you need it, so you can help keep budgets balanced in lines moving. Call 1-800-Granjer, click ranger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who

13:48get it done. Well, go on to AR in a moment, because I know that you've spent time in California, and you've done a lot of work in helping people to understand some of the moral and political questions that the tech revolution poses. But I just wanted to go back to something that you alluded to earlier. You mentioned Elon Musk, deeply controversial figure, but the context in which you invoke to him is the whole context of migration, multi-ethnicity, and multiculturalism. Do you think that there is a particularly difficult balance to strike in a country like the United Kingdom when it comes to accommodating people from different countries with different traditions? There are any number of issues, including Elon Musk's focus on grooming gangs, which have meant that this has become an even more live issue in our politics than it was when we were both members of Parliament. When you look at the landscape now, we were both politicians,

14:51we were both ministers. If you could add and break some principles on migration and integration for the UK, what would they be? First principle would be that anybody arriving on a boat from France returns back to France. There is no argument that France is not a safe country, and the basis of the entire refugee convention is the idea that you're providing asylum, people who are in danger. People in Northern France are not in danger, and there's absolutely no reason for us to accept. I would actually argue if I have more time that it's actually in France's interests to embrace this principle. It's interesting that a Macron who somehow thought he couldn't do it because the right wouldn't allow him to do it now finds that Jordan Barrela was quite happy to accept that in the reform conference. That would be my first principle. Nobody gets to cross a border in a boat. In return for that, a proper asylum system run in another country, which provided asylum for a set number of people, such as female judges persecuted by the Taliban,

15:53rather than 16-year-old men who happened to have paid someone to get an abode coming to Britain, is fine. I think we have a moral obligation to take a number of people, and probably a number of people every year who are facing persecution in their countries, but it needs to be organized on that basis. That's the asylum bit. The asylum bit, I don't know what the figure would be, but I would imagine a refugee convention where you would get Canada, Europe, Britain, other countries to sign up to a target every year. Let's say it is 0.02% of your population a year that you accept, and everybody takes the same number of proportionate population. As a way of dealing with Cedar and Reffkansa, much we did similar things with Vietnam, both people back in the 70s, 80s. Second thing is regular migration, economic migration. There, I think Boris Johnson went entirely mad, and I don't understand what was happening there. I don't understand what he and I think was pretty putel the home secretary, then I mean, she seemed to be a support for this

16:57kind of project. Why they thought bringing close to a million people in a year. This is a country which was taking back in the Aces 30, 40,000 people a year and that found itself a David Cameron coming in when you and I came in to government 2010 saying he was going to try to keep the number below 100,000. Suddenly with a prime minister who's deciding they're going to let in close to a million, it's mad, and particularly mad because only about a third of them were even coming into work anyway. A third of them turned out to be a boondoggle to artificially support universities. So I think the absolute numbers of legal migrants need to be radically reduced. Yeah, tens of thousands. Yeah, I don't know. Is it is a 100,000 a number to aim at, but it seems like a sensible number to aim at and a number that you could achieve. And you need to stop illegal migrants. Why are you doing that? I think you're not doing that because I'm particularly worried about Islam. I'm actually very, very sympathetic towards Muslims. I spent most of my working life before I went to

17:57living in Muslim countries. And I think Islam is as a lived experience of 2.2 billion people are far more moderate, flexible, humane religion than most people understand. I think it is to do with particularly the fact that this is a country that's already more crowded than India. And I am suspicious of GDP growth generated by increasing population. And I also think that one of the things that we haven't got to bottom line, I'd be interested in you know, that the governments and actually this is true of the right. I mean, the right seems to be cross with immigrants taking jobs. It's not clear to me whether people are being honest about what they're worried about. They pretend that their anxiety is immigrants taking kind of blue collar vocational jobs. I think increasingly what is upsetting some people in Britain is they don't like the fact that if you go to the Royal College of Endi-Stheologists and see the people becoming doctors,

18:59and most people becoming professionals, dentists, doctors, etc. are often people who are first or second generation immigrants. So there's an interesting question about whether the problem is that you are disadvantaging poorer people with less educational qualifications or the anxiety is that you're creating a new professional upper middle class where people feel patch-mised by people who they feel uncomfortable with culturally. I think both of those things are true. And you mention Islam and it's benefitfully the case that with millions across the globe finding spiritual comfort and sucker and elevation and inspired towards generosity towards their neighbours by Islam, you can't caricature that faith. There are however concerns too at least one is that in those areas where you have a preponderant number of people, often from one particular whose families are from one particular part of the globe and people look at Birmingham or Bradford or whatever. What you have

20:02is a political culture which seeks not to integrate but to set itself apart from its neighbours and relate us to that and this is not a faith question, it's very much a culture question. You have some of the practices which the Gruebingang's controversy, Shona Leishan. What are your reflections on both of those things? So do you think that there is an obligation? First, second, third generation families, particularly from places like Ghar Bangaladesh and Kashmir, to accommodate themselves and their traditions more to the UK? I think there's an absolute obligation for anybody, British, French, Pakistani, Nigerian, Polish, to obey the law, to be a good citizen. We require people to be good law-abiding citizens. That's about the limit of it. I feel there is no obligation on somebody to be ashamed of their

21:02culture or their heritage. That one of the lovely things that you find in the United States is the hyphen phenomenon. I was talking to a friend who just became an American citizen and not Steve Holtman. And in there a moment there was a lovely moment where the judge said, you've become an American but don't give up on what you were. You can be British American, you can be Polish American, you can be Indian American. So I think that's natural and healthy. And I think people assimilate surprisingly quickly and most people assimilate. Now there will be naughty problems, right? And I'm aware. But specificity helps. Or I think it does. So it is, I think, sorry, let me just sort of focus. Please do. Are there communities that are a problem? Absolutely. Yes. Were the horrible abuse and grooming gangs absolutely? Are there families living in Birmingham who I think are creating bad issues for their own families and society? Yes. Do I think that this is a big problem for Britain? No. Okay. This is a manageable

22:07problem, including some very unpleasant things where the police did not act correctly. People behave in an evil fashion and they need to be prosecuted. But what are the real problems facing? Not this. And the thing that winds me up is that the cultural worries talk as though the fundamental problem facing Britain and some it's an irrelevant problem in the greatest scheme of things. The fundamental problems of Britain are our economy's not growing fast enough. We have no vision of the global order. We don't have a proper AI and technology policy. We don't know what to do about innovation, up like services are creaking. Those are the real things that will make lives better. This question of whether, oh, not whether it's true, right? A particular group of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men raped women in Britain, right? A raped girls, children. It's horrible. Absolutely horrible. And I'm not going to get into what aboutery, but of CSU can imagine, I can point out a lot of other horrible things done by a lot of other communities in Britain, right? And all of them make me angry. But what worries me is that it's bad faith here. The people banging on

23:10about this are banging on about it totally disproportionately. They're forgetting that a lot of this happened some time ago and they talk about it as though it's now. There's a lot of a listen. Is Elon Musk clear in his mind that a lot of the cases he's talking about happened 10, 12 years ago? It's an ongoing question controversy debate. Part of it, and it relates to your point about the economy, is confidence in Britain because part of the question is in order to allow people to integrate or certainly to find a comfortable place in the country, which allows them to safeguard and respect their own tradition, but also to appreciate what it is to be truly British. You'd have a sense of what being British is. You'd have something to integrate into. On part of the challenge with some of those communities in which this abuse has occurred and it continues to occur, is that it's also much a faith matter. It is that you will have had people who will come as you point out some parts of Pakistan Kashmir and Bangladesh who have chosen whether through patterns of marriage or whether through where they choose to live deliberately to set themselves apart.

24:16And at the same time, there's been a reticence on the part of the British state and its agencies about saying these are the standards by which we live. And there's also been a lack of confidence in saying one of the wonderful things about Britain are these traditions, not just abstract values, but traditions. Do you think that there's anything in all that or do you think that I'm being crustally reactionary and in hawk to the dooms? I don't think it's in crustally reaction in hawk to the dooms. I suspect that I can't prove it that many, many people who talk about these things, and I've no idea whether to include you in this, have not spent much time in mosques and have not spent much time living amongst these communities. My general experience, if I go to Birmingham as people's houses, is it's not remotely like people imagine. And what I noticed, I mean, in one way of bringing it across is you will be friends with and know very much people like such a javid or nass Shah who will describe very, very clearly that they came from these kind of backgrounds and who their fathers were and their uncles were and their grandfathers were,

25:19and how quickly things change. Now, of course, it wouldn't be true for everybody, but the vast majority in my experience of Muslims and Britain have moved very, very quickly from quite traditional families. Case of Nass Shah, she was returned age 10 to a village in Azad Kashmir, looking after a buffalo, put into a forced marriage at the age of 12 in Pakistan, and she is now an extremely outspoken liberal, funny member of the British Parliament. That's in a single life tongue. Generally, what happens for almost every community, and this is what horrifies the elders of the communities is that the tendency is to assimilate, not to isolate, that one of the things that's actually keeping the community elders up at night is that so many of their young people are simply becoming very recognizable modern British people. And this actual phenomenon you're talking about exists, of course it does. And I'm not comfortable with people living in isolated communities. I'm not comfortable with people sending their children to faith schools.

26:23I'm not comfortable with people overly emphasizing their alien, this I would like people to feel that they are British and that they're trying to make their children British. This though is not just true. I'm afraid of the Muslim community. It's true of many, many other communities in Britain who also are very, very attached to other countries which are not Britain, are very, very much trying to put their children into faith schools, are very much trying to isolate themselves, trying to say yes. I have an equal opportunity objection to people who don't feel to me to be committing to the project to being British. And do you think that there is insufficient clarity about what it is to be a British? Do you think that there is too much of a cultural grin, a lack of confidence and self-denigration about Britain's institution, traditions and history? Yes, but let me add to this and try to develop it. If I were talking to somebody in Birmingham or somebody in Golders Green who was sending their child to a school where it could be a, often I talk to Jewish friends who say that when they went to school,

27:29about 5% of the people in their school were Jewish and now 95% of the people in their children's school. Or I was talking to someone in Birmingham who was struggling to reconcile themselves to modern Britain. I would not be interfering. I would be trying to portray a positive, voluntary vision of a different type of Britain. I'm not trying to go into their lives and say, you can't have that religious belief, you can't wear that headdress, you can't do this, and I'm not French, I'm not obsessed with Liste. I'm trying to say here is a richer, jolly-er vision. And luckily, their children are generally on my side. Luckily, most of them want to get the hell out of it. It doesn't matter whether you're, I mean, to make them less conscious, we're not talking about Muslim people or Jewish people, our friend Johnny Messer grew up in a mad white Christian Baptist community with an abusive father, whatever was seven siblings forced to wear crazy clothes, unable to speak to anyone, unable to integrate. Not

28:29surprising, Johnny wants the hell out. And I want to encourage people like Johnny to get the hell out of any abusive, restrictive, controlling, familiar environment regardless of the color of your skin or your religion. But again, is that the biggest problem in Britain? No, this is a relatively small number of people. It's very, very sad for Johnny. It's incredible. It's actually tragic and illegal for the victims when people are actually raped. But is this what the battle line between Tories reform? No, let's talk about the economy, let's talk about technology, let's talk about international relations, let's talk about why Trump is a monster rather than get, and Elon Musk is a monster rather than thinking because he occasionally says rude things about Muslims, he must be our friend. Right. On the question of restoring confidence in Britain, do you think that the denigration of our past undermines confidence in Britain now? And would you, if you could acquaint people with our history, our traditions and our institutions better, would you point to particular

29:30things and say, this is a part of the British story that's insufficiently appreciated and needs to be vented more. 10,000 things, but let me give you one which will wind you up. That's the end of the first part of my conversation with Rory Stewart. You can join us for the second part in which we discuss class, education and growth on Thursday. You're balancing inventory and budget while sourcing critical supplies across the operation. Too much inventory? Cost climb. Too little? Production slows. Granger's $2 billion and on-hand inventory helps you get what you need when you need it so you can help keep budgets balanced in lines moving. Call 1-800-GRANJURE. Click ranger.com or just stop by. Granger for the once who get it done.