Pratique du Shadowing: Rory Stewart on Reform: 'it feels like throwing a baby out of bath water' - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo

Yeah, it's a huge issue, and I guess it's an issue that we'll see with people voting for reform now

and people voting for Trump in the US.

You're absolutely right.

I probably didn't fully empathise with how angry and irritated people were with the way things had gone.

Let us turn to Penrith and the Borders.

You're not from this part of the world originally.

What brought you there?

Yeah, I'm a Scot.

So I came down because I wanted to stand for Parliament and in the very weird way that British politics works.

There were no seats, which I could stand for in Scotland, they were all full, and the MP for Penrith and the Borders stepped down after the expenses scandal in 2009

and I felt it was an area that I had family connections to, but not deep connections, so in many ways I was learning on the job.

And you mention in the book, it's a constituency that strangely enough, although on the English side of the border, has only ever been represented by Scots.

Yes, and this sort of ties into its history, which is that Cumbria was actually part of Scotland and before it was part of Scotland,

and this is what interests me most, it was an independent kingdom, it was a middle land that was independent from both England and Scotland with its own language,

its own kings, its own history.

And my sense is that it's a place that still has traces of that very independent identity.

It's a very unusual area.

It's England's most rural constituency.

You write that concepts like neoliberalism, nationalism and centrism meant very little to the people there.

What did it teach you about politics representing an area like that?

Well, I think the first thing is an obvious point, which is areas

so far away from London have often very little to do

with what the Treasury may be talking about in London or even journalists are talking about.

For a start, 92% of people in the constituency worked for businesses employing less than 10.

27% worked from home.

It was a very large number of small upland farmers who

were declaring annual incomes for about £14,000 a year from their farming.

And this is an area which just doesn't fit any of the models that even we're talking about today.

If you hear Rachel Reeves, she's talking about growth, she's talking about productivity, She tends to be talking about major investments

and factories creating thousands of jobs and not really thinking about areas like this which are bewilderingly varied.

It's very difficult actually to even record the thousands of different jobs

that people are doing in summer like Penrith and the Border.

So the book itself, although it contains quite a lot of new writing as well, it's essentially a collection of letters you wrote for your local paper, the Cumberland and Westmoreland Herald.

And you say that you would spend sort of six or seven hours on each letter, often writing late into the night have taken extraordinary pains to write them

and indeed it shows in the writing it's a very beautifully

written piece of work why did you why did you feel

that they they deserved

so much work on the pieces of writing themselves did you

feel it was an essential way of communicating with the constituency

or perhaps for yourself understanding the constituency i think i think both i local newspapers are so important.

The Cumberland and Westland Herald's readership was about 40,000 people, and they covered primary schools,

they covered agricultural fairs, they covered local deaths.

They often had a lot more good news, actually, than a national newspaper would traditionally have.

But it was also a really good mechanism for democracy because as an MP, you could really be held accountable for very local issues in a way

that wouldn't be true if you were being reported on in The Times or The Guardian.

And it was a chance to discuss issues which I guess national newspapers wouldn't be interested in.

So I could write a column on the Penrith, trying to save the Penrith fire station or the local cinema.

I could write about a particular affordable housing program in Crosby-Ravensworth, a village, And I think,

in a sense, in a world of Trump with politics with a capital P, that's really what a lot of the healthiest, most interesting part of our democracy is.

But we never really cover it.

We never really focus on what's happening at the local level, which is often much more optimistic and creative than what we see at the national.

So, I mean, a lot of the people you meet in the book, presumably met as MPs, worked in farming.

Farming is, of course, much in the news at the moment farmers argue the government's

made their lives much more difficult by changing the rules around inheritance tax.

What do you make of that decision, thinking of the farmers you knew and sort of, you know, represented?

Well, it's heartbreaking.

It's heartbreaking.

And it's one of a number of things that have been done, which are basically killing small farms.

There's that decision.

There's the decision to stop the environmental scheme.

So when we left the European Union, the government promised this was people like Michael Gove promised

that yes we left the European Union

but money would still be available to support farmers

but they put them into very complex schemes

which many small farmers didn't manage to bid for

and not surprisingly the Labour government then said we've run out of cash

and the money won't be available

and right at the core of this of course is

that Brexit was very very damaging for small farmers because it was in a way it's since the farmers in France,

the farmers in Greece that created a system that helped keep small farms alive.

And we're now in a world in which trade deals with Australia, lack of support will basically destroy our traditional landscape, we will lose the dry stone walls,

we'll lose the local families that support the schools will lose the people who clear the roads in winter,

and we'll create a depopulated wilderness in many parts of the Lake District.

It's interesting, you mentioned Brexit?

Because I mean, although this book is largely about your local experience, of course, it covers a period during which an awful lot of big national stuff happened.

And one of the big national things that happened was indeed Brexit.

As you say in the book, a slim majority of your constituents voted for Brexit.

And you were, of course, a very outspoken, you know, very outspoken against Brexit.

Indeed, it was ultimately why you parted ways with the Conservative Party by extension.

Did that affect how you felt about your constituents?

Did it affect how they felt about you?

Certainly for some of the Conservative Party members who'd voted Brexit, it became very problematic because they wanted me to come in behind Boris Johnson.

And I thought he was a very, very poor candidate to be prime minister.

I thought he'd be very damaging for the party in the country.

So that was a big strain.

But with farmers who voted for Brexit, I remained very close to many of them, even though we disagreed on it.

I mean, I obviously felt that by voting for Brexit, they ultimately would actually damage farming.

But they felt that they were so fed up with the micro-regulations coming from Brussels, making them measure the width of their hedgerows,

etc. They had a sort of dream that they would enter a much more independent world.

And I think it's a reminder also, in a funny way, writing the book, how much areas like Cumbria,

which are very independent, very resilient, very self-reliant, are nevertheless bound into all these much bigger national,

international structures of trade, of subsidies, of regulation.

And that they can, you know, however resilient people are at a micro level, they can be killed by these bigger international moves.

But I mean, having, I mean, it wasn't a knife-edge decision for you, Brexit.

You were very much strongly on the Remain side of things.

Having been at such pains to understand the constituency

and to understand its people and to really let it get under your skin, as this book so clearly shows that it did, how can you have been on such a different page from your constituents?

How can you have understood this issue so differently from them?

Yeah, it's a huge issue, and I guess it's an issue that we'll see with people voting for reform now

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and people voting for Trump in the US.

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you're absolutely right I probably didn't fully empathize with how angry

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and irritated people were with the way things had gone

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and it struck me as sort of self-evident

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that you know the European Union could be irritating

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but in the round it was very beneficial for the Cumberland economy

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and beneficial for peace and security in Europe and for British trade and all this kind of thing

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And I underestimated how much it had become a lightning rod for people's irritations.

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And I think you can see the same a little bit in trying to understand people voting for Trump

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or people voting for Nigel Farage.

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I mean, I get intellectually that they're very irritated by a lot of things that, you know, people might be irritated by woke or transgender.

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They might be very angry about human rights cases going in directions they don't like.

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But for me, those are never enough to vote for what I see as these very dangerous politicians.

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It feels to me like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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So, yeah, I'm missing something.

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Is that fundamentally why you cease to be the area's MP?

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Because I know you've parted ways with the Conservative Party, which was obviously an important factor in there, given that you were a Conservative MP.

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But, I mean, was there a bit of you that thought, perhaps I just can't continue to represent these people

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because we've come down so dramatically differently on an issue that people feel so passionately about.

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No, it wasn't that.

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I think once I'd broken with the Conservative Party, the problem was that running as an independent in Cumbria,

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I would have been running against people who I'd spent 10 years with

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and who'd been out on doorsteps with me day in, day out, and all our local councillors, and I would have felt a very,

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very difficult sort of sense of personal betrayal running against them.

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And I think that's near what did it.

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I mean, I found, looking back on my political life, my time in Cumbria was by far the most fulfilling, satisfying thing.

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I did much more, actually, even when in the end I ended up briefly in the cabinet.

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But I found being in Cumbria much more fulfilling than running a government department in London,

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partly because it's much more concrete, it's much more practical, it's much more human, and also because Middleland, which is this book I've written,

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is really about the fact that Cumbria is such a hopeful story for Britain.

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I mean, all those letters, rereading them, are stories about people fixing things.

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I mean, they don't have affordable housing, they build affordable housing, they don't have broadband, they dig broadband in with a mole plough.

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I mean, it's a place that it's very easy to love and you can see...

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So I suppose what I'm trying to get at is in an age of Trump

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when we're all thinking about sort of big capital letters,

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slogans, that somehow I think our democracy would be much healthier if we could get back to the local.

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That's why I kind of believe in...

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You say that explicitly in the book.

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You write you're not a technocrat, which makes you different from many in the centre of British politics where a lot of people would place you, the fact that you're not a technocrat.

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You say explicitly

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that I suspect the answer to a national crisis crisis in a democracy is to become more local and more democratic, which is like, that's not a narrative we sort of tend to hear from the centre.

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And I'm sort of both very attracted by it, but also fascinated by how it would work.

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We haven't got a lot of time, but what would that mean?

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What would that involve doing?

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Well, I suggest a little bit in Middleland that it could include citizens' assemblies, which we could talk about on another occasion,

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controversial idea, but letting people, ordinary people selected like a jury randomly make decisions,

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a much more powerful local mayors with proper budgetary powers, changing our electoral system, having compulsory voting,

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a whole constitutional change that puts local areas at the heart and recognises that Cumbria is completely different from Newcastle

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and it needs to have a very different type of industrial policy and representation that can only be brought together by Cumbrians.

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Well, look, Rory, thanks for joining us.

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It's a beautiful book, and I should say for anyone listening, very little of it is about Brexit.

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It's really more of a travelogue and a love letter to Cumbria.

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So, Rory Stewart, thanks very much indeed for joining us.

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The book, Middleland, Dispatches from the Borders, is out next Thursday, the 30th of October.

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Rory Stewart, thank you very much indeed.

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Pratique du Shadowing: Rory Stewart on Reform: 'it feels like throwing a baby out of bath water' - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo

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