Tony Blair 01

PMs interview with Downing Street website

Interviewers: I am Sarah Sands from the Daily Mail; and I am Michael White from the Guardian. Good Afternoon Prime Minister, on behalf of us both. We have had 500/600 questions come in via e-mail since this event went up on the Downing Street website. You will not be surprised to know that some of them are hostile. One chap wants you to jump off a bridge immediately, others are more friendly, but most of them are curious about aspects of government policy, want to know more, want you to justify things, as you would expect. It is a good crop and we are going to ask a couple of questions of our own and go through the crop. Sarah Sands: So if I can just start, and this is a question reflected in a portion of the e-mails. It is really whether the game is up, that your Cabinet Ministers, as we know, are sort of fighting like ferrets over jobs that may not even be vacant, there is an impression that people are more interested in perks, in freebies than the work, and from the outside it looks a little bit like anarchy. So what I would like to know is firstly whether you regret not going earlier when the going was good; secondly, a lot of the people who have e-mailed want to know is can you now set a departure date; and thirdly, what you will be doing afterwards? Prime Minister: Well I think, on departures, I have said enough and I dont want to say any more because it just gets in the way of what actually I think most people really do expect me to do, which is to get my sleeves rolled up and get on with the job. And whatever it looks like from the outside is different from the inside. I mean I have spent today, this morning with a whole group of people from the National Health Service and the private sector, looking at the possibility of collaboration there; and then with a major set of public service reformers from all over the public services, whether it is police, or health, education, local social services, working out how you improve public services. And I know this sounds like the sort of normal whinge from the politicians, but honestly when you are on the inside you are getting on with the job, and this stuff that comes in, which is often very, very lively and eats up a lot of news coverage, you have just got to ignore, because otherwise you dont get on with the job. And I think the interesting thing about the government is, and it has been a rather tough time obviously in the last few months, but if you look at the policy direction, whether it is pensions, or it is National Health Service reform, or it is the schools policy, or it is energy, we are actually getting on with the job, and that is I think what people expect. Sarah Sands: Let us enquire about your own reputation, you must think about that, and the timing of your departure is very much linked to that.

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: You know the thing is you get to the stage where you come to a very clear view that your job for as long as you do it is to do your very best for the country, try and take the long term decisions for the future, try and make sure those are the right decisions, and the rest of the judgments made at a later time, and whatever you know comes in and out every day does not necessarily affect that. And if you take a long view, you know why bother trying to sort out the pensions framework for the future? Answer - because if you are actually interested and passionate about true politics, which is not a lot of the stuff that comes in and out of the media, but is actually about ideas and policy, then you have got an obligation to work out the best framework for the future for the country. Michael White: And yet the picture of calm at the centre you have painted, a week ago, almost, John Prescott gave up Dorneywood, at your suggestion we are told, but said he was staying as Deputy Prime Minister, Deputy Leader. And yet since then we have had the appearance - perhaps it is all our fault - that a number of your colleagues are sort of jockeying for the prospect of that vacancy when it occurs. Prime Minister: Well you know the funny thing is when I actually read what they said, and sort of hearing it all, but you actually read what they say and most of them are desperately trying to avoid getting drawn into those types of questions. Because it is just the way that the world of politics and its interaction with the media work today, which is one of the reasons for doing this, because it is a different. people will be able to access the whole of this interview, but the biggest problem you have in politics today is having a dialogue with the public. Because your dialogue is constantly mediated through the things that the public will see, for example on the news every evening or in headlines in the newspaper, and the disjunction now between what we actually spend our day doing and what is out there as the things that most people must think preoccupy us is just enormous. Michael White: Then should we assume, unmediated, that you and John Prescott will step down together when the time comes, whenever that is? Prime Minister: Well as I said, if I get into all of those questions you just get into a great, you know rigmarole that goes round, and round, and round, and then before you know where you are you are not talking about the issues, you are talking about Michael White: Right, lets talk about an issue. A number of our callers, people who have e-mailed in, are concerned about home affairs policy and about the troubles at the Home Office, which everyone knows about. Coincidentally this morning, a couple of hours ago, I had better get her name right, Lyn Homer, the woman who runs the Immigration and Nationality Directorate inside the Home Office where much of the recent trouble has been, said about the foreign prisoners affair, and I quote, I have checked this quote: "I felt I let him down" - in

Tony Blair 01

terms of not alerting him to the scale of the problem is what she means, she is talking about Charles Clarke of course. John Reid has since taken over, he has read the riot act and said the department is dysfunctional, I dont know whether you agree with that dramatic way of treating civil servants, but it leads one to wonder, should you have let Charles Clarke go, because you know we are told you wept about it. Now should you have let him go? Prime Minister: I wouldnt believe everything that was written about that. Michael White: So you didnt? Prime Minister: Well I didnt actually, but does it matter or does it not matter. Michael White: OK, unmediated, it is a fascinating detail if you did. Prime Minister: Yes, you know but there are a lot of fascinating details, they tend to be somewhat, how can we put it, made up. No, I think that, we were discussing this with all the public service workers today, the most difficult thing is to get a sense of balance. If what you read about the Home Office over the past few months was all that the Home Office had done over the past few years, you would literally think they had messed the entire thing up. And actually, for example, if you look at asylum - which is a big concern for people - over the past few years they have transformed the asylum system. It used to be one in which it took us months and months, 18 months sometimes to do an average decision, we only removed 1 in 5 of the unfounded asylum claims, and we were proportionately, probably the top, asylum nation in Europe. None of those things is true any more. Now does that mean that the Immigration Department is now working you know as it should? No, because there are a whole series of different and other challenges. And Lyn Homer, whom you mentioned there, who we have brought in from the outside, is actually doing a fantastic job, but it is a hugely difficult job as well. I mean I was doing a video conference with President Bush this morning, and the interesting thing is the number one issue in America today is migration, immigration. If you look at France or Italy for example, a major issue today - immigration. Why is that? Because you have got globalisation which is pushing waves of people, you know crossing frontiers across the world, most of those people we want in our countries because they are students, visitors, tourists, people who come to work for good reason. As globalisation takes effect, then what happens is the challenges of the system become immense. Now the difficulty for us is how do you explain that you have made progress on A, B and C, but yes, because of the changing pattern of things you have now got X, Y and Z to contend with, and those challenges remain. And even in the comments that John was supposed to have made about the Home Office, what he actually said was look, of course Home Office officials are accountable, I am accountable, everyone is accountable, but in the end we are actually doing our best to tackle an extremely difficult situation.

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Michael White: Did he ever do it Mr. Reid? Prime Minister: No, again I think if you read what he actually said, he was asked should heads roll - which is the type of question you get asked. And he said well of course you know if people are accountable they are accountable. In other words he didnt sort of go out of his way to condemn all the Home Office officials. And I think, as I was saying this morning, that the issue of whether it is politicians to blame or officials to blame, I mean obviously you get situations that come about where there are mistakes made, and you have got to own up to those, and there was a mistake over the foreign prisoners, there is no doubt about that at all. But some of the most difficult issues are just about challenge and change, and whether it is in schools, or in health, or in law and order, the fact is the world is changing incredibly rapidly and therefore what government has to do, and how it has to respond to that, is a world different from what we could do even when we came to power 8 or 9 years ago. Sarah Sands: If I can move on then. A question that does come up a bit is the standards of behaviour amongst politicians, and John Prescott in particular. And one e-mail I have here from Justin McKeating from Brighton, that says: "Dear Prime Minister, there have been several allegations of sexual harassment made against the Deputy Prime Minister, notably from the wife of a Labour MP, who alleges that in 1978 Mr Prescott pushed me quite forcefully against the wall and put his hand up my skirt. Were these allegations to be made against a teacher, a social worker, a doctor or anyone else, do you think they should be treated as a private matter - as you regard the Deputy Prime Ministers conduct or do you think that person should face disciplinary proceedings?" Prime Minister: I think the simple answer, Sarah, is if someone has done something wrong they should face disciplinary proceedings. But I am not going to accuse someone of doing something wrong on the basis of, well I dont know actually, I havent heard about this thing, but presumably a report in the paper. And I think, how can I put this, I think the problem that we have is that of course politicians should be accountable for their behaviour, and actually if you look back over the years politicians are regularly held to account. But I think the most important thing is that if we do something wrong, fair enough, but I think like everybody else we shouldnt be assumed to have done certain things just because people make allegations about us. And I try to, when allegations are made of particular behaviour, I try and investigate it and there are Ministers that have left government as a result of doing things that are either wrong or contrary to the interests of the government. But I think sometimes you can get into a situation where you are expected just to follow every single story that is written about someone, and my experience is that when something happens and someone does something wrong, there may be truth in the original allegation, but then virtually anything can be then added in the mix to say that they have done half a dozen other things that when you actually investigate them turn out not quite to be right, but.

Tony Blair 01

Sarah Sands: And how do you feel about John Prescotts defence that it is because he is a human shield for you that he is indulged and that he is allowed to stay on when perhaps other people wouldnt? Prime Minister: Is that what he said? Michael White: He used the word shield in an interview with the Guardian last week. "I am the shield taking the battering", and he meant you Prime Minister: Yes, well it is, I think the difficult thing for anyone in his position is that you do get a certain amount of hammering, but I suppose I would have to say I get a certain amount myself. I mean in the end the part that he has played in changing the Labour Party, I think people will look back on and say is as substantial as anyone elses, funnily enough, including mine. Michael White: Right, substantial as yours. Right, we have got a huge pile of questions here which we have been through quickly, so I am going to change tack. On behalf of Julian Moseley, writing here from London E8: "Dear Mr Blair, my daughter is at Exeter University in her first year. While the lecturers - some of whom are on strike of course - may have a compelling case, and employees and government may be unwilling to settle at the required levels, it seems bizarre that the only people who are going to suffer are the students. This dispute will eventually be settled, but other people will move on with their lives, but what will happen to the students, it will affect their entire futures. Cant you intervene, Mr. Blair, in this grossly unfair disaster, intervene now?" Prime Minister: I am reluctant to try and negotiate this myself because I dont think that the precedents for that are very good. I hope they can find a solution. Michael White: But is it right that lecturers and in a position of responsibility, authority figures in our society, should take the sort of action which affects, if not so much the first year students, although worrying for them, it is the people taking their finals isnt it? Prime Minister: No, I am really sorry they have taken industrial action. Michael White: Is that enough in your position? Prime Minister: Well I think the best thing is for us to encourage the two sides to negotiate a settlement. I hope they will, I think it is possible that they will and they should do so as quickly as possible for the sake of the students, but I dont think it is a situation that should ever have been allowed to get to industrial action. Sarah Sands: Could I ask about Iraq, there is obviously a huge amount of correspondence about that, and particularly about, well three lines: one is whether we had any real interest in being there, national interest in being there;

Advanced Listening & Speaking

and secondly when the troops can come out. And this is one e-mail, it is a particularly pointed one, that says, it is from Debbie Connor, and the question is: "How do you feel about sending someone elses son to war when you would protect your own sons from going?" Prime Minister: Well it is a very, very heavy responsibility to take military action. And what has happened in the past few years, because Saddam Hussein was removed in, what, May 2003, but for the last three years we have been fighting a battle against terrorists and insurgents in Iraq who are trying to disrupt what is a democratic process there. And the only thing I would say to people is that the reason it has been really tough and difficult is because they are determined, those who are engaging in the terrorism, and the insurgency, and the banditry, and the indiscriminate killing of civilians, their determination is to stop the democratic process working. Now the reason for that is the same reason they are trying to stop it in Afghanistan, it is the same reason why you have got this global terrorism everywhere, and in my view defeating it in Iraq is an important part of defeating it everywhere. And whatever else has happened in Iraq, you have got a democratic process, I mean I met the leaders of all the main groups there, they have been elected by the people of the country in its first ever full democratic election, you have got Sunnis, Kurds, Shia all working together, and surely our job should be to support them in their struggle for democracy, because if they succeed then this global terrorism is dealt a worldwide blow. And they know that, that is why they are there trying to stop us. Sarah Sands: And have we made things better, or worse, do you think for the Iraqi people? Prime Minister: Well you know it is a fascinating thing, because one of the things I think sometimes happens is that we disenfranchise the majority of Iraqis. Not a single one of the politicians I spoke to in Baghdad, and they are all directly elected by their different groups, including the Sunnis who at first at any rate were very, very hostile to the political process. Not one of them said they wanted the days of Saddam back. Michael White: But what the coalition has failed to do is keep the peace on the streets, it has failed to create the necessary security in which this democratic process, which you rightly want to encourage, can flourish with any confidence. And even translators, people who work for the occupation forces and the foreign media, are now being targeted and killed. Now that is not your responsibility, but nonetheless you, and President Bush, and the coalition went in. People sometimes say to me: That Tony Blair, he is a liar, he lied about the WMD. And I say: No, I dont think he did, I think he believes what he tells us all on the television, but he and Mr. Bush were perhaps guilty of considerable naivety about the ease with which they thought they could bring about change in a society which had been under a dictatorship for 34 years. So, a bit nave, a bit over optimistic about what you could

Tony Blair 01

Prime Minister: Just on the point about the WMD, I mean one of the things that people can now do, because it was all published as part of one of the several reports into Iraq, is people can go and read the intelligence I got, you know they can actually read the Joint Intelligence Committee Reports, so in a sense people can make their own judgment as to whether Michael White: But it is all hedged with caveats, intelligence reports, it always is. You wont ever put out any dossiers again, will you? Prime Minister: Actually, as I have said before, we would have been far better just publishing the actual intelligence reports, because I think people would have said, well, fair enough. But anyway people can read those, and it is quite important to say that, because occasionally if people are really interested they can go and read what I received and then they can make up their mind as to what they would have thought if they had read the same thing. On the point about naivety, I think that what has happened in Iraq is that, and I think it happened from the assassination of the UN staff in August 2003 onwards, is that this terrorism, which I have a particular view on, I think it is an ideology, it is a global movement and it is not a set of disparate, disaffected people, it is an actual movement with a clear set of ideas and a clear set of aims. And what happened from that time onwards is that they moved into Iraq, joined up with various forces who were anti-democratic in Iraq, and their purpose is to destroy democracy. Now the charge if you like against us is, but you havent succeeded in defeating them. Well the only way of defeating them is to build a democratic process and then build the capability of the Iraqis themselves. And all I would say about that is there is another picture of Iraq today which you can also see, which is that Michael White: But we cant see it because it is very dangerous for the foreign media to get out and about in the key provinces, there was an American correspondent and a British one nearly killed the other day. Prime Minister: Sure, but actually of the 18 provinces it is in 4 provinces, admittedly the four most important where the majority of violence is. Michael White: Including Basra where things were calmer and are now worse? Prime Minister: Yes, but again it is interesting to ask why is that happening? Because people get the impression here from a lot of what is in our media, that all the people in Basra want the British troops to go home. They dont. Not a single politician again that I spoke to, including those with links with the Shia down south, wanted the British, or American, or the troops of the 25 other countries that are there, out precipitately. Now all of them want us out at some time. Sarah Sands: patrols in the way that they used to be able to, two years ago. There is definitely a change of mood in Basra

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: Well there is a change of tactics and those people who want to stop a non-sectarian solution to Iraq. Look, what has happened is you have got two extremes here, and again this is important to explain. Up in the centre of Baghdad you have got those people who are extremists connected with Sunnis who basically thought that they were going to be excluded from the political process, right? Actually what is happening is that the Sunnis are now coming into the political process, there is still fighting from the various extremists going on, but in a sense that part of the insurgency, or the terrorism, has somewhat changed its nature. It is now increasingly driven by groups of people who want to have a sectarian fight, and isnt related to the majority community amongst the Sunni. Now then what you have got down south is a different issue, which is some of the people connected with the extremes on the Shia side, who, as they have seen that the process is indeed inclusive, have started to fight in order that we dont have a non-sectarian approach, in order that these are the people that want to tip the whole country into civil war. Now we want to stop that. Michael White: Now I know you can talk for hours and hours on this without drawing breath, and you have meetings to go to. We want to move on with a spread of our questions. I have got Ian Dowling, one from Ian Dowling in Twyford, Berkshire, who says: "Why is this government procuring technology for the national identity register part of the national identity scheme, which many experts in the field say are centralised context-linking databases and an incredibly stupid way of developing a system of managing questions of personal identity, ID" And he adds: "If Mr Blair talks about ID, and not the National Identity Register, he is avoiding the question." So dont do that. And Geraint Bevan from Glasgow adds: "If this sort of system, the national register, was being developed in Germany in the Thirties, would you have advised German Jews to cooperate with it?" Prime Minister: Well two separate questions. One is a technical question. Michael White: technical and security. Prime Minister: Yes, yes. On the technical questions, look I am the last person to give a technical, as you know. Michael White: This is true.

Tony Blair 01

Prime Minister: To give a technical answer, but the fact is what you find in this situation, as in many others, is that you will find different experts with different views. We have tried to get the best view we can as to the right technology to set up Michael White: The experts making the money, the potential contracts out of it, tend to be more bullish. I have heard this story many times, that tax credits, the Child Support Agency, various others, big NHS IT schemes are in trouble, they are big schemes, they say, they are too big. The outside experts, with nothing to gain or lose, tend to be much more sceptical about all these schemes, and you have got trouble at the moment with all of them. Prime Minister: Yes, but you know again I mean we could go through each of those, because again the facts are, for example Michael White: It would be depressing to go through all of them. Prime Minister: Well you know if you look at the National Health Service IT issue, actually I was just studying it this afternoon, or this morning rather, because I thought I might get questions on it with the public service workers, actually there is a lot of it that is working perfectly well. But in any big IT change you are going to get problems that arise, and you could take something like the Passport Agency for example and how they managed to change their system and it worked a lot better. Michael White: they got going, yes. Prime Minister: Right. But my only point is we take the best technical advice, we dont just take it from the people contracting, we take the best technical advice possible and we do it according to the best way we can do it. But the idea of a national register is not unknown. I mean most countries have identity systems, and the whole point about the reason why I think it is important we go for identity cards and an identity database today is that identity fraud and abuse is a major, major problem. Now the civil liberties aspect of it, look it is a view, I dont personally think it matters very much. Most people have some form of identity today, it is not Michael White: It is the central database which worries people, isnt it, Sarah? Prime Minister: You have got to have all sorts of controls on that, and we will have it. But these arent things, you know a system of national identity is not unknown in the world today, and the only thing I would say to people is dont tell me I have got to try and tackle these problems of identifying illegal immigrants, people coming into our country for organised crime purposes, or people trafficking, fraud on the National Health Service, fraud on the benefits system, and then when the overwhelming evidence is the best way of giving yourself the best chance, not perfect, but the best chance of dealing with it is an identity system, but I cant do it. Because otherwise identity abuse today is a major,

Advanced Listening & Speaking

major factor. It is bound to be in a globalised world, and the whole point about the technology, as I understand it, is because you have got biometric technology that was available for the first time, that is far more secure and far less easy to defraud. Sarah Sands: We talked about intelligence in relation to Iraq, both over-reliance on intelligence and quality of intelligence, and this is obviously a domestic issue as well. Here is an e-mail from Jason Moore, who says: "We are constantly being told to rely on the intelligence information regarding security and terrorist threats in this country, yet such intelligence is proving to be wrong or mis-informed time and time again. What happened at Forest Gate, which is one mile from where I live?" Prime Minister: Well first of all we dont yet know, and I think we should be very, very wary of drawing conclusions. But my view again is absolutely clear. I support the police 101%, and the Security Services. I think if they have a reasonable piece of intelligence that they think that they have got to investigate and take action on, they should. And you can only imagine, if they failed to take action and something terrible happened, what outcry there would be then. So they are in an impossible situation, and my view is, you know I know Andy Hayman, and Eliza Manningham-Buller, the people who front up our services very well, they are absolutely top rate professionals, they should be given support in getting on with the job, and I wouldnt draw any conclusions from Forest Gate at the moment frankly. Sarah Sands: Are you concerned about the sort of Muslim backlash if you do get things wrong? Prime Minister: I am really not, because I think it is a real mistake to think that your average person from the Muslim community is any different from anybody else. They know perfectly well there is a problem, we know there is a problem with terrorism, you know we are coming up to the 7/7 anniversary, we know there is a problem with terrorism. You have seen today I think a whole series of people arrested in Canada for example. You know right round the world this is a problem. Sarah Sands: successful operation though, there is some sort of concern about competence Prime Minister: Yes, but I think, well first of all, as I say, I wouldnt draw any conclusions about this particular Forest Gate incident at the moment. Michael White: The house in Forest Gate is not as big as Iraq, and they have searched it for two or three days, they appear to have drawn a blank, however honourable the motives. Prime Minister: Yes, but lets just wait and see, there may be a whole series of things that they need to look into in relation to that. But my point is very simple, if

10

Tony Blair 01

they get information, and they think that information is reasonable, and these are people expert in this field, then my view is that their duty is to go and make sure that they do everything possible. And I think the Islamic community, like everybody else, recognises this will happen. And you know if it didnt happen they would be getting slammed in the opposite way, if anything turned out to be, you know to go seriously wrong and someone then was able at a later time to say well here was a piece of information, why didnt you do it? So I just think part of the modern world I am afraid is we have to live with a greater degree of precaution on the part of our security services and our police, and one of the reasons why I think it is so important at every level to defeat this terrorism is that this threat is real, it is out there, and it is in every major country in the world now. Sarah Sands: But we do need to be accurate, dont we? Prime Minister: Of course we need to be accurate, but I mean we need to take precautions, and that will mean acting on information, without waiting until an event actually unfolds. And the real problem, the reason why I feel so strongly about this terrorism and why I think that you know a large part of our own opinion in the west has just got this wrong - but this is just my view - is that the point about this terrorism is that they are prepared to kill without limit. That is the difference. And I have got in trouble before for saying this, and so let me choose my words very carefully. Every single person the IRA killed, or Loyalist gunmen killed, that is equally wrong. You know any death through terrorism of innocent people is absolutely wrong. But the difference with this global terrorist movement we have now is that they killed 3,000 people on the streets of New York, you know they killed over people on the streets of London, 200 people in Madrid, but if they could have multiplied any of those numbers by a factor of ten, they would have done it, and that is what is different. Michael White: Indeed. You hold your monthly press conferences in this very room and I have heard you say that several times. Now terror on a different scale here, but nonetheless distressing. Joanne Sinton, she says: "I am a Labour supporter yet I feel let down. Why? Well I live in Grimsby and like many other towns we decent ordinary citizens have come to the end of our tether, mindless thuggery, vandalism committed by yob culture" She then describes how local people tidied up their different neighbourhoods, planted trees and tubs, and then: "Along came idiots and destroyed the lot. My question is when are you going to realise that harsher penalties are needed for mindless of thugs, irrespective of their age." And just to complicate this - she doesnt say this - but we read in this mornings papers the prisons are full and there wasnt enough anticipation that new prisons would be needed, contracts to build them. So she is feeling let down in Grimsby.

11

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: Well first of all, because we are expanding the prison places, and we have expanded them, I dont know, by thousands in the past few years. Michael White: And you let people out early because there isnt enough room. Prime Minister: No. Actually people are staying on average in prison longer, the sentences are longer too. There are early release schemes, there always have been parole schemes, but I dont think that is really the basic point that she is making. I totally agree with her, and that is why we have introduced the antisocial behaviour laws and measures. Now what needs to happen in any area is, what I have done is I have given the new powers to the police, and local authorities, and others, and we have given the resources because we are increasing both numbers of police and community support officers, and in the money we put towards policing, and it now is for the local communities, with the police and local authorities, to sit down and work out the best way to use these powers. But for example, it is not just antisocial behaviour orders, you can disperse gangs of kids, you can take away the money and the assets of drug dealers in local communities, you can shut down houses and evict the people where the house is used for drug dealing, you can close Public Houses where there are constant fights, you can have fixed penalty notices for vandalism as well as having to go through a laborious court process, and what is more I have said to people we will introduce further powers if people want them. Now obviously what is happening to her is very, very wrong, and in her community. But I could take you to other communities now that have used these new powers and resources and have made a real difference to peoples lives. I mean just up the road from here I saw myself around the Kings Cross area how they managed to get rid of the drug dealers, and the vandals and so on, and you know this has been done by using these new powers. Michael White: So the perception that we have got a rising problem of violent crime, not crime overall, but violent crime, particularly at the moment it seems knife crime, is that a misperception, is that the media Prime Minister: You know the facts as well as I do. Michael White: Well I dont know, no, because we get conflicting versions, dont we? We are told by one set of figures that crime is falling, and others, much more alarming and very important categories like youth crime is left out of some of the figures. Prime Minister: Yes, but the figures, whether on recorded crime or on the British Crime Survey overall show that crime has fallen. However, the point that I have long since learnt, there is no point in debating statistics with people about crime, because if you are a victim of crime, or you are living in fear of crime, the last thing you want to hear is me telling you crime has gone down by X percent, because you dont feel that, and you dont think it. And I think there is, and this is the whole reason why I wanted to start this debate about civil liberties and the

12

Tony Blair 01

law, because I think this is the heart of it, there is an ugly side to todays crime that I think is definitively different from when we were growing up. I think organised crime is far more viscous, I think the issue of drugs and crime make for a sort of sense of lawlessness that is far more profound than before, and I think you have just got a general disrespect on the part of certain groups of people. Michael White: But a lot of our e-mails say, yes but you are endangering civil liberties carelessly, you a lawyer of all people are doing this, and you know we can tackle crime but we dont tackle crime by behaving in ways in which are wrong and without due process. Prime Minister: Well this is the debate I would love to have in the country over the next few months, because I think there is a fundamental issue here. Because I am quite sure, based on the experience I have had in government, you cannot solve some of these law and order problems unless you are prepared, quite profoundly, to change and rebalance the system of criminal justice so that you have more summary justice, more summary powers, more ability for quick and effective action to be taken, even if it will cross the line that most people normally think of as there in terms of civil liberties. And my view is that you can decide that you are not going to do it for civil liberty reasons, decide it, but then dont say to the politicians and all the rest of it, you have got to deal with this problem, because you cannot deal with it in my view by the normal processes of the law, you just cant do it. The way the world has changed means that the only, and this is why we only started to get any action on antisocial behaviour when we introduced the power to get Antisocial Behaviour Orders, summary powers for the police, and the ability to take swift action. Otherwise the scale of change in community, family life, economic and social life is just too great, it is too profound. Now that is the debate I want to have with people, because what I get, you know one of the things that is very frustrating for me is, I get people saying to me why arent you doing this, this and this in relation to law and order, and then why I introduce the legislation in Parliament, you know in debates not often reported, everyone is opposing the measures. Sarah Sands: One last question: Tessa Jowell is flying the St Georges flag on her car. Will you be, and will be, and will you be recommending that the rest of your Ministers do so? Prime Minister: I know this is a difficult question, because I just heard about Well I will certainly be supporting the England team very strongly. I will have to reflect on the best and most appropriate way to do that. Sarah Sands: Inaudible. Michael White: Some of our questioners are saying you shouldnt do it, you are the Prime Minister of the four home countries, it would be quite wrong.

13

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: Well I think that is rubbish. Michael White: So you might do it? Prime Minister: Look, I think how you express your support is another matter. But I think the idea that it is wrong to put the England flag up, I mean why not? I mean it is the flag of England, I mean it would be completely absurd. I am sure that if Scotland were in the World Cup Michael White: the adjoining building. Prime Minister: And yes, he is perfectly happy to support the England flag too in terms of when they are in the World Cup. I think, come on this is just ridiculous, I mean why cant people support the England flag, of course they can. Honestly, I dont understand that one at all. Michael White: Let us end on an elevated note. Robert Page, writing from Birmingham: "Does the Prime Minister have a vision of a good society? If so, does he think he might share it with us?" Prime Minister: Well I think I do, I hope I do. My politics is based on the view that you should have the maximum opportunity for everybody, regardless of their background, class, race colour, religion, and that should be matched however, matched however by responsibility from all, which means, which is why I am strong on the law and order ticket, I think that in the end it is our job to try and create opportunities for people, but I think the only way you can make a society, a good society, function is if those opportunities are matched with responsibilities as well. And I think the whole of my politics is really based on the idea of escaping the sort of left-right division that I grew up with, whereas the left always talked about opportunity, and the right always talked about responsibility. And any sensible basis for community life today means you have both. So there it is.

14

Tony Blair 02

Interview with the New Scientist

Interviewer: Prime Minister, can I ask you first of all about your own personal take on science. You were at school, you presumably studied science at some stage? Prime Minister: I am afraid I always, and I am very open about this, that I was very poor at science at school and I have actually become a lot more interested in it in later life, and I have also started really to regret that when I was younger I didnt engage with it more fully and learn more. Interviewer: Why didnt you? Were you turned off science at school? Prime Minister: Yes, I found the basic concepts difficult to understand, if I am honest about it, and it is actually only in later life I have started to think about it more and look at it more, and also as I have become as a political leader really taken with the importance of science to the countrys future, and that is really where I come to it now. So I dont pretend any scientific knowledge but I do I think understand its importance to Britains future. Interviewer: So tell me about that. How do you see science now, what are its virtues? Prime Minister: I think it is to the future of the British economy as important as economic stability almost, it is almost that important. The future for the British economy is about science, it is about being at the cutting edge of the knowledge economy. If we do not take the opportunities that are there for us in science then we are not going to have a successful modern economy, because the truth is we will be out-competed on labour costs, you can export capital and technology anywhere, it is our human capital that is most important and it is at the cutting edge of science that that human capital can be most exploited for the countrys future. And we have got to give the country a great deal more confidence about science and its place in the future, and that is the reason why I am doing this lecture. And I first talked about this a few years back when I gave the lecture about Why Science Matters, and everything that I have seen here and round the world has only increased my sense of its importance. Interviewer: For many scientists, I think many scientists get into science with a view to discovering something in the universe, finding out truth if you like. Do you have a view on that, do you follow scientific discoveries in that sense at all? Prime Minister: Yes I do, but I follow them obviously from a more practical application. And one of the reasons why we have more than doubled the science budget in the country, why we have introduced the research and development tax credit and so on, and why we encourage so much now the link between the academic and the business world is because Britain has traditionally been very

15

Advanced Listening & Speaking

good at invention and scientific discovery, not so good at its commercial exploitation, and obviously for me the two of those things go together. Interviewer: There is a kind of dichotomy here in the sense that you do have a group of academic scientists who are interested in, as I said, discovery, and you have a world of business science as well, pharmaceuticals being the most obvious one in this country. How do you bridge that gap? Prime Minister: Well it is a very good question. I think that you need a certain amount of pure research, and you also need to have the excitement and creativity that comes around scientific discovery. But if you also have universities and research centres sufficiently attuned to what is going on in the private sector, then hopefully discoveries are being made, discoveries that have a real utility. And if you look at the differences that will be made in healthcare in years to come through genetics, but also just through the development of technology, if you look at the environment now on climate change, which is a massive area for technological and scientific development, and bioscience, these are areas where we should be the lead nation in these areas and we have got a lot of strengths in science but we have got to build those. And in particular I would like to see a situation where science is far more important in schools, that we are getting high quality science teachers into schools, that people can see there is also a link, and this is the reason for setting up for example specialist science and technology colleges so that you have actually got businesses that are interested in taking forward science, getting involved in how science is taught in the classroom. Interviewer: Taking teaching as an example, this country is in a bit of a pickle with its science teachers I think, in particular with physics and chemistry teachers. Let me explain why, though you probably know. We need inspiring teachers in order to inspire kids to go into these subjects, at the moment that is not happening. How do we fix that, how do we make that happen? Prime Minister: Well one of the things we are doing, we have got this new centre in York which is the Science Learning Centre which has been a really great innovation, so you can get science teachers to come in and have some residential time learning about new scientific developments, and then there is going to be a series of regional science centres. I visited one in County Durham just the other day, where you will get schools that will have a specialist science application and then other schools in the area can come in and the pupils get taught in that environment. We are also giving incentives for people to become science teachers, and we are also finding that those people studying science who are engaged with enterprise as well, we have increased that from 3,000 I think in the late 1990s to something like 24 - 25,000 today. So there is a lot that is going on and I think we should look at this as something that you build up over a generation.

16

Tony Blair 02

But I would also like to see groups of some of the leading as it were entrepreneurs in the scientific field, both academics and business people going into the schools and giving kids a sense of excitement, not just about scientific discovery but actually about the huge job opportunities there are in science today. In environmental technology we have gone from a few years ago 150,000 people employed in the field to almost half a million, and these people are going to make money. So I think it is important, and certainly this was the tendency when I was at school, was people saw science as something that you know "the boffins" did, business was something the hard headed person does. Actually when you visit universities today or you see some of these leading edge technology firms, there is an interaction between the business and academic world and we should be intensifying that. Interviewer: So I am interested, isnt there a conflict of interest in some cases here? For example the IPCC Scientific Committee - that is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - has been criticised for being political, these scientists on that committee. Prime Minister: Political in the sense of? Interviewer: Of representing views other than the data if you like. The question is do you need pure scientists or is there a danger by bringing scientists and business too close together that you lose your impartial data, you lose your impartial scientists, or actually is that an idea that is past its time? Prime Minister: Well I think the truth of the matter is the more enthusiasm and inspiration you get around science, and in fact people realising there is a career, there are practical applications of science that are immensely exciting and that can be very rewarding, I think that generates support for the whole field of science and in that you will find the pure. The companies for example in the bioscience area know they need the pure research as well. So I think there are difficult issues to do with conflicts of interest from time to time but I think that pales into insignificance frankly given the huge boost that comes from science, from people saying look here is (for example) the challenge of climate change and this is how we should be developing the practical ways of meeting it. Interviewer: If you look at the amount of GDP which Britain spends on research and development, we are considerably lower than many of our European countries and obviously a lot lower than the US, we see China and India doubling their spend on research and development. The contribution that is missing is not from government, it is missing from industry. How do you convince industry itself to pick up the challenge here?

17

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: Well this is where I think you need to present them with a vision of the business opportunities for the future and it is one reason why, quite apart from the obvious reason of protecting the climate, why we have taken such a lead role on this climate change issue. I think it is right, government has made a big extra investment in science, we arent doing as well as we should, on the other hand there are improvements happening now and as I say I think the research and development tax credit is worth about almost 2 billion now. And you have got industries like the pharma industry obviously which are big investors here. But one of the reasons for doing the speech is to say this is the future economically for this country and to create a sense that when people are moving into science and research, they are moving into an area that is going to have a big economic payback for the future. So I think over time this is something we can put right. Interviewer: You have been in power during two extraordinary occurrences, I am thinking here of the refusal of people in the UK to accept genetically modified crops, you were also in power when parents started refusing to have their children vaccinated with the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. This is all about risk and the publics perception of that risk. I am interested to know what you take away from those two occurrences. Prime Minister: Well the first thing is to be very careful about the media and its reporting of these things because the reporting of MMR frankly was disgraceful. There was absolutely no real scientific basis for the allegations that were made and it has caused a great deal of difficulty. I think GM is a different issue, although I did my best to make the case and I think at some point we need to return to the whole issue here. But I think there is also something else that has happened, as well as MMR and GM you have also had stem cell where the outcome has been rather different and more positive. Now I think we have got to learn some lessons from that and the lesson that I learned is that you start with the public good, you know that is the important thing. And the bizarre thing about the GM debate, because I used to have this debate with people and I used to say to them, "you do understand a lot of the drugs that are now being produced, that are helping save lives, are the product of the same type of science, so how come they are going to save your life here and somehow we have got this sort of Frankenstein food idea when it comes to GM crops?" There is something that doesnt match. But I think funnily enough if we had started on the GM debate through medicine and then looked at the other aspects and made this an issue to do with the public good rather than what it seemed to be I think to some people, which is here are these American companies, they want to come in, and the term genetic modification, as I said to some of the scientists the other day, could only have been invented by those opposed to it rather than those in favour of it because the concept is one that strikes people as scary.

18

Tony Blair 02

But actually this is why you also need the scientists to be engaged fully in proper public debate, and the other thing I want to do is to say the public actually should have confidence in science, and the scientific community has to interact with the public in order to explain things because people once they have it explained, there is nobody I have ever been through these debates with that once you have explained it they at least say well I have seen there is another point of view. Whereas if you have a debate by way of headline it is a pretty hopeless process. But you are right, I took a lot of lessons out of that. I think the MMR thing really was a case of very, very irresponsible media reporting, but I think the difference between stem cell and GM was the difference between starting from the proposition of how do we help people - the positive and right way to construct the debate - and how do we help some commercial interest - which is the wrong way to start it. Interviewer: And I think you are right, I think you have hit the nail on the head. I would say that even in MMR to some extent it looked like the government had an agenda other than the public good, it looked like it had the agenda we must get this triple vaccine into as many children as possible, and I think one could have been more open and straightforward and possibly, immediately Wakefields paper came out, said OK we are pretty certain that MMR is safe but we are going to find out and we are going to have this study. Prime Minister: Yes, it is terribly difficult because if we were debating these issues in the New Scientist that might be a very good way of doing it, but there are one or two other newspapers who have not quite the same quality of objectivity. And my worry was that if we gave it even a prima facie credibility, before you knew where you were people would have assumed it was credible. Look, I think you have got to try and learn the lessons from this, and actually to be fair to the scientific community what they have done more recently in taking the time themselves, and I think there was a paper published just recently that I think will have laid most of this to rest. Interviewer: There have been several just in the last year, year and a half. Prime Minister: Yes, but part of the trouble is that the publicity you give to laying the scare to rest is never the same as the publicity of the scare. But anyway. Interviewer: Lets talk about stem cells. You said recently that if America doesnt want stem cell research, we do. And I am interested in why you think George Bush is so wrong in his policies in America. Prime Minister: You want a Bush story out of this, do you? Interviewer: And why do we want it so much? Do you see no ethical problems with stem cell research?

19

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: I think we have taken care of the ethical problems. There obviously are ethical issues to do with it, but I think that if it is the case that done properly and in a controlled way, and we have got all sorts of procedures around it, the fact is it can benefit peoples lives enormously. But I think that we have approached that in the right way, just in the same way frankly, it is a different type of ethical issue but there are ethical issues about animal testing and you have to get those right and we have got actually the toughest regime in the world now. But on the other hand I have seen myself the experimentation that has been done in order to show how you can save lives through the treatment of heart disease for example and this is something that is right to do. Interviewer: I want to change tack slightly now. The world is now kind of very reliant on science, not just for discovering the universe but also in terms of culture, culture is shaped by scientific findings and as you say our economies are as well. So at a time when science is revealing more about us, about the universe, about human nature, the way we work, what makes us sick, what makes us well again, these are expressions of the power of rational thought, but we seem more and more to be moving away from rational thought in certain areas, whether it is using alternative medicines or fundamentalist religious beliefs. I wonder if you see any kind of a shift in this direction and whether you know what is going on. Prime Minister: Frankly I dont. I think that most people today have a rational view about science and my advice to the scientific community would be you know fight the battles you need to fight. I wouldnt bother fighting a great battle over homeopathy, I mean there are people who use it, people who dont use it, it is not going to determine the future of the world frankly. What will determine the future of the world however is the scientific community explaining for example the science of genetics and how it develops, or the issue to do with climate change and so on, and I think in these regards I think most people are prepared to be very rational about it. I think however that there is a dimension that concerns and frightens scientists, never mind people, because as the science progresses there are so many possibilities. As I say I start from not merely admitting my ignorance but protesting it, but you know when I was over in California recently I was seeing some of how genetics will develop in the future and it is immensely exciting, but it also will raise in time a lot of issues about how much you want to control through the science of genetics, how we look, how we are, how we live. In time to come I think there will be massive questions around this because obviously the possibilities for extending peoples lives very considerably, for all sorts of changes, some of which may be cosmetic in nature and therefore raise particular concerns and worries. This is why I think the scientific community in a way as it is coming out into the business community now, I think it has got to come out into the public and into society as a whole and engage in a very strong and deep dialogue with wider society. And I personally think people arent antiscience actually, I think there are various people who will exploit various issues,

20

Tony Blair 02

or drive various issues at people, that may be true and we have talked about some of the newspaper campaigns, but actually in the end I think as the stem cell debate showed in the end, and animal rights too, people in the end do actually come to a fairly rational point of view about it. However, I do think they will be quite staggered at some of the scientific advances that are going to be possible and I think it is important that the scientific community is out ahead of people getting that through this headline or that headline and actually engaging with it. Interviewer: I am interested in your views on creationism because this is one of the pet hates of the scientific community, as you probably know, and there has been some suggestion that some of the academies that have been set up are teaching creationism in British schools. Do you have any comment on that, do you think creationism is a good thing, a bad thing? I would argue that it is certainly not science. Prime Minister: No, and I dont suppose the people who teach it or preach it would say that it is. But again this can be hugely exaggerated. I visited one of the schools in question and as far as I am aware they are teaching the curriculum in the normal way, and actually what they are providing in fact, which is far more important, they are providing the first disciplined high quality teaching that most of these kids have ever had. So as I say I think that if I notice creationism becoming the mainstream of the education system in this country, I think that is the time to start worrying. But it is really quite important I think for science to fight the battles we need to fight. That is why I would say getting into a huge argument with people who use homeopathic medicine, I wouldnt bother going down that path. When MMR comes up, or stem cell, or GM, yes that is the time to have a real debate. Interviewer: Can I ask you about one of the fights that I think you believe in fighting, and that is the fight against climate change and I am just interested to know where you go from here, what is the next step in your view as far as climate change? Prime Minister: The next step is internationally to get an agreed framework with the major countries. I set up this process, which is the G8 countries Plus Five, and the Plus Five are China, India, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa. And the basic point, because the G8 has the major European countries and also America and Japan, the basic thing is to get the big countries of the world together and agree a post-Kyoto framework, the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, get a post-Kyoto framework with a binding set of agreements in it. And what those agreements will do is effectively incentivise private business and industry to go after the scientific and technological solutions. They are out there, they just need to be developed and brought to market, and getting the right carbon price and so on is absolutely vital in doing this. So that is internationally, and nationally we should be world leaders in this area, lets give ourselves world leadership, lets be the people who actually are developing this stuff.

21

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Interviewer: How do you do that? Prime Minister: Well you do that I think not just by the amount of money that we are going to devote for example into research into renewables, which is now several hundred million pounds, but also in explaining to our own business and academic world there is going to be this opportunity here. You know in time to come there is going to be a fantastic opportunity. And for example, and this is a more controversial thing, but if you develop the new nuclear power stations and so on, again which will be a major development, and what was fascinating to me when I was at the European Summit last week is that at least half the countries around that table are thinking about the next stages of nuclear power, and how we have got again some expertise here so we should develop it. These issues to do with clean energy, clean coal, renewables, energy efficiency, this is going to be a vast market that opens up. So what we should be doing is from government driving it with seedcorn money, and in the business and industry and academic world saying to them look here are the opportunities and giving a sense of direction for the future of British industry, which I think would be really exciting for us. Interviewer: You dont think there is any place for what some people have described as an international Manhattan project, get the world together in a coordinated way to try and Prime Minister: Yes I do think there is a case for that, and actually if this European Institute of Science and Technology, which the Commission want to set up happens, that will be one forum in which that will take place. And yes I think there is room for cooperation internationally and there is also room for our own endeavour.

22

Tony Blair 03

PMs interview with Downing Street website

Anne McElvoy: Hello and welcome to Question the Prime Minister where you, the public, get to put your questions to the Prime Minister in the wake of The Queens speech. I am Ann McElvoy Will Hutton: And I am Will Hutton. Anne McElvoy: And we have been sifting through the questions that you have sent in via the Number 10 website and picked out some of the best. Will Hutton: Importantly they are not random. What we have tried to do is to organise them by the weight of the emails that you have sent in and organise them by priority and importance. Anne McElvoy: Well Prime Minister there has obviously been a lot of reaction to The Queens speech and questions arising from it, so I am going to start with one of my own. Many questions on Iraq and you spoke yesterday of finishing the job in Iraq, but in the US the administration is now being forced to admit grave mistakes in the mishandling of the situation after the war in Iraq. When are you going to be similarly candid in admitting our role in those mistakes, and what do you consider finishing the job when the head of the British Army says that we are now part of the problem in Iraq? Prime Minister: Well I dont think he was saying that we are part of the problem, looking at the British presence in Iraq as a whole. What he was saying is that if there are areas in which the Iraqis are capable of handling their security, and we are still trying to handle it for them, then that causes resentment locally which is actually something I have said myself. But our strategy has got to be to build up the Iraqi capability for their armed forces and as that capability increases then our role diminishes. And we are doing an operation in Basra at the moment where we are going through bit by bit of the city, putting the Iraqi forces properly in control, making sure that the city is returned to the charge of the proper authorities and that is about half way through, it is working well. If it works well for the other half then obviously again we are able then to reduce the need for our presence on the streets of Basra. Now as for the mistakes, I have to say my own view of this is very clear. You can debate forever and a day whether for example on the disbandment of the army or debaathification you could have proceeded more slowly and we could have a large debate about that, but the principal reason there is a problem in Iraq today is that people are deliberately giving us a problem. You have got al Qaeda teaming up with Sunni extremists, you have got Iranian backed Shia militia and the problem that we have, which is the problem of terrorism trying to displace democracy, is not a problem that is arising by accident, it is a strategy, it is a deliberate strategy, it is the same strategy as the Taleban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And so in this situation our challenge is to make sure that rather

23

Advanced Listening & Speaking

than being defeated by these extreme elements we empower the Iraqis to build up their own capability to take them on. Now one of the things that isnt much noticed about what is happening in Iraq today is actually bit by bit in the provinces across Iraq the Iraqis are increasingly taking on responsibility for their own security and that is what needs to happen. Anne McElvoy: But there is terrific violence in Iraq, did you under-estimate that when you went to war? Prime Minister: Well I dont think we under-estimated the fact that after 30 - 40 years of Saddam it was going to be a very big job, but yes I do think, as I have said before, that we under-estimated the degree to which you were going to get outside elements that were going to come in and try and foment trouble. Will Hutton: I just want to build on that and just go a fraction wider into the whole way that you are dealing with this from a political point of view at home as well as abroad. A number of emails have come in very concerned about the politics of terrorism, the politics of fear, a concern that actually if Britain and the west want to win this argument then we have to practise what we preach. For example there is Phil Rogers saying The Queens speech says that the government will put victims at the heart of the criminal justice system, wouldnt you be better to put justice at the heart of the criminal justice system, a sense that you are tilting the balance. Here is another from Moira Grant. "I teach A level politics, my students are bright kids, the political leaders of tomorrow, ask repeatedly why your government is sacrificing civil liberties which define our liberal democracy and is clambering on the defeatist authoritarian band wagon. These students are Thatchers children but even they have moved on. Dont lose them." Prime Minister: I think these are perfectly legitimate concerns incidentally, but here is the problem from my point of view. I dont think that you can tackle low level antisocial behaviour through the normal process of the courts, that is why we have introduced new antisocial behaviour measures which give summary powers to the police and local government to tackle it. Where they are being used they are making a difference. You go a few miles up the road from here to Kings Cross you see a place transformed from where it was a few years ago by the use of these measures. So when we talk about liberty, there was a tremendous transgression of the liberties of ordinary decent folk living in that area when you had drug dealers and prostitutes and pimps and all the bad elements running their local community or running parts of the street in their local community. So I am trying to change the law in order to change with the times and you know if you take terrorism today, look here is the problem. We are having, as the Head of MI5 said the other day, to go after not just a few but hundreds of people who potentially could be terrorist suspects. If we simply had the old laws we would be unable to chase them up and deal with them in the way that we need to. Those most recently arrested for example over the events in the summer

24

Tony Blair 03

that people will remember, and obviously I dont want to say anything about that case, but we used the new laws in order to do that. So the difficulty that you have today is you have these new threats, organised crime for example operates in a far more viscous transnational sophisticated way than ever before. If you dont change the law to keep up with the way that organised crime, antisocial behaviour, terrorism is changing then your danger is in the name of liberty and in the name of justice you do an injustice to the victim, to the people or the potential victim. Anne McElvoy: Can we just move on from there Prime Minister. Lots of emails on the balance of liberty and security from Franco Cavazza and others. No mention of 90 days maximum detention in The Queens speech yesterday, will you reintroduce a Bill for 90 days? And in the light of comments from Lord Carlile, your own independent scrutiniser of security legislation, he says he sees no evidential basis for such a move. Have you seen such an evidential reason for doing so, and why wouldnt you settle for a lower figure? Prime Minister: Well we will bring back I think before Christmas proposals that will be based on an analysis now of what has gone on over the past few months and how we make sure that we have the most effective laws to deal with the terrorist threat we face. Now the issue to do with the number of days of detention will be part of that. We will look at that, depending on the evidence. I have supported the 90 days before and that was on the basis that particularly the police handling terrorism for us thought that that was what they needed, but we have got to look at it again. And I just want to make two points about this. The first is insofar as we can proceed by way of consensus on laws on terrorism the better because I think it kind of brings the country together. Now I suppose there will be always people who oppose any sort of tightening up of the law against terrorism, but I think if it is possible to reach a consensus we should. But secondly, it does have to be based on the evidence and it does have to be based on our analysis ultimately because we are the people responsible for taking the decision of the best way to protect our people. Anne McElvoy: You didnt use the words 90 days in that reply, is that because you are thinking that you might actually bring forward a Bill for a lesser number of days as the maximum? Prime Minister: No it is just because I dont want to get into a position where as it were I am trying to pre-condition this rather than actually wait for the proper objective analysis by the people who look after these things and deal with these things on behalf of the country. And you know I think we dont want to get into a situation where this issue to do with 90 days is seen as a piece of politics, it has got to be seen as part of the protection of the country. So if the evidence is there we should do it, but it is important, and I think people want to see a strong evidential base for any terrorist laws that we bring forward.

25

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Will Hutton: Does this mean Prime Minister that you are unhappy about the quality of the evidence that the Metropolitan Police put forward in support of this in the first place? Prime Minister: Personally I am not but I think as a result of, you know you hear people continually say well you know we didnt really get the evidence properly and so on. The evidence for me was clear and there, and incidentally when people say you know we have provided two sides of A4 and all the rest of it, well not as I remember it, it was a detailed document giving case examples, both actual and hypothetical. But on the other hand we have had further experience now over the last few months, havent we, so it is sensible to look at that, to look at recent experience and to say well what is the right way forward now. Now I am not saying we wont bring back the 90 days, all I am saying is I think it is important that we try and proceed so far as possible by consensus and it is important also that we make sure that anything we propose we give as solid and evidential base as possible and try and take account of some of the criticisms that were made.

Anne McElvoy: Personally you still favour 90 days? Prime Minister: Well I mean I favoured it then and I havent changed my mind. But in the end I think all the way through what you are trying to do is to balance the fact that as I say I am ultimately the person who has got to take responsibility for this, with the desire also to try and make sure that the country feels this is being done, as it should be, on the basis of what is right rather than on the basis of whatever politics there is in it. Will Hutton: Just this balance of liberty and proper reaction to what you describe as a new environment, although many would argue that Britain has had hazardous environments in the past during war, in fighting terrorism against the IRA, where previous governments have tried to preserve long standing balances in Britain between liberty and state power. But here is one on ID cards from Tobias Robbins and it reflects a number of emails. "The cost and danger to my privacy and to the security of my personal data which, having an entry on the national identity register would far outweigh any benefit" says Mr Robbins. "How does the Prime Minister justify preventing me from holding a passport in the future merely because I take reasonable precautions about protecting my information?" Prime Minister: Well here again you go to the nub of the issue which is what does liberty entail in todays world? And the reason I think it is important that we do identity cards is first of all we are going to have to move to biometric passports, you know 80% of the population has a passport, 70% of the cost of the identity card is the biometric passport. We are going to be obliged to do that, along with all the other European countries in the years to come. What secure identity gives

26

Tony Blair 03

people, it doesnt merely give the state the ability for example to check who is here lawfully in this country or not, or give us a greater ability to do that, it also allows the individual greater security of their own identity since identity abuse and identity fraud is a major aspect today. And when people talk about the information government is going to hold, the basic information, I mean the biometrics will be your finger print and your iris scan, but the information is the same information as you have on the passport. This idea that the government is going to be taking peoples individual private confidential information is just not true. And when you look at what is happening in the rest of the world, I had an analysis given to me the other day and I hope we can share this with people in the next few weeks which showed that virtually every major country around the world is taking advantage of the new biometric technology to not merely update their passports, but where they have already got identity systems to change those in line with them. Will Hutton: But what concerns Tobias Robbins and other e-mailers like Keith Wit, is who will have access to data held, under what circumstances, what steps really to keep the data safe? Prime Minister: Obviously all the normal protections will apply, but the important thing about this data is that the data that you have in your passport isnt fantastically confidential to people, and the key for this thing is not actually the data about you, it is the fact that you have the biometric data of your fingerprint and your iris scan, that is the data that matters and that data is peculiar to you. Will Hutton: But who has access to it and how will citizens know that it is absolutely ring fenced and that only appropriate people will have access to it? Prime Minister: Because in the laws that we have put through on this, there are only certain people that are allowed access to it and that access, as I say, it is your actual biological data. And I think the confusion that people have here is they kind of think well you know the taxman can go in and get this information also, there is no information other than the same information you get in your passport, the key thing is the biometrics that are there and the reason for that is that this new technology, the biometric technology, and this is why the whole argument has changed, gives you a far better and more secure way of identifying people. And people will have to do this for passports in any event. You will find a situation where over the years to come, in America for example you wont be able to go unless you have got a biometric visa. Anne McElvoy: I think we should move on Prime Minister to the environment, a huge number of emails on this. One very good one here from Sandra Grafton which is representative. "While I applaud plans to cut CO2 emissions, why is the government shirking addressing the problem of increased cheap flights? Please reassure me that a popular decision will be made to tackle this and that the government - and we know how much you like being unpopular - will the government restrict Ministers from taking unnecessary flights?"

27

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: We actually do try to do the latter. In fact, I dont know, I will have to check on the figures for this, but I think for Ministerial travel it is actually down, not up, over the past ten years. But look Ministers have to travel like everyone else has to travel for work. My own judgment about this is that there is a role for green taxes but lets be very clear about this otherwise we end up having a completely unrealistic argument. We are 2% of the worlds emissions. Now we are part of the European trading system, we want an international framework and agreement that imposes obligations on everybody including and in particular America, China and India, these are the big emitters now and in the future. It is important we take measures here in Britain to give leadership in this debate but there is absolutely no point in us stopping people taking cheap flights in Britain if everywhere else they are taking cheap flights. Will Hutton: Would you include and press for the inclusion of European airlines in the European carbon trading emissions system which would make them have to pay for the carbon and raise fares on cheap flights? Prime Minister: What we have said so far on this is that we believe in the next round of this that aviation should be included. Exactly how and on what basis you price it is an open question, but it is a big debate in Europe, there are many different voices. Will Hutton: Is the British government going to push for the inclusion of airlines in the carbon trading system? Prime Minister: We already are doing that when the system develops in the years to come, what we havent yet worked out is exactly how you would do this and what the right mechanisms are. But aviation emissions are obviously going to be a major part of emissions going forward, all I am saying is this will always be a balance between the measures that you take here to give leadership and not, to put it quite bluntly, clobbering your own people when you are not part of a wider system in which everyone else is participating. But what is the good news on this? The good news on this is that I think the international climate, I was going to say, international climate on this has changed. I think people now understand this is a major issue, I think the Stern report, I have been amazed at the number of world leaders that have raised this specifically with me and said this is obviously a major and important piece of work. And the key thing is this process we began last year when Britain had the Presidency of the G8 where we put the countries and we added to that the five others, that is India, Brazil, China, South Africa and Mexico, and if we can get agreement in that framework that is a big, big step forward. Will Hutton: What about roads and transport, there are a number of questions just staying on transport, a number of people concerned about the introducing of road pricing, congestion charging. Here is Alan Walsh: "What measures will the government adopt to ensure that our roads dont become the preserve of the well off?"

28

Tony Blair 03

Prime Minister: Well again I think this is an indication of where the tensions are in this because people will feel well if you are moving to greater taxation in respect of transport is it the poorer people that end up losing out? Now what we have tried to do, and I think this is true with the congestion charge as well, is probably tax more the more expensive and certainly the cars that consume more fuel. I think in time to come road pricing is where this debate will move to. I think once the technology is available I think, again not just here but round the world, people will try and combine the concept of protecting the environment with how you manage your transport. Will Hutton: But compensating the poorer for the use of roads, they wont be able to pay these high tolls. Prime Minister: Well that is where I think you need to, you know in any system that you have got of road pricing or indeed of taxing vehicles now, we already have got a differentiated system that tends to tax the larger cars that consume more fuel than the smaller ones. And I think there are issues there to do with poverty, there are also issues to do with how you use the taxation system to incentivise green cars. You know for example one of the things we are looking at at the moment is things like biodiesel and so on, how you give greater incentives to people to use these types of more environmentally beneficial fuel. Anne McElvoy: I want to bring up something else Prime Minister and it is an email from David Stocker, it is about the religious hatred measures that the government has introduced and apparently wants to go further on. "For millions of atheists like myself all religions are based on nothing but fairy stories. Why should those who consciously choose to believe receive protection in law from criticism that challenges or denigrates their belief", and I think that relates to comments by Ministers in the wake of the BNP leaders vindication in the courts that you could say that you hated a religion if you so choose? Prime Minister: I think that I actually, although I am not an atheist I have some sympathy with what he is saying in the sense that I think we have got to proceed with care here. Religious hatred is actually you are inciting something that is going to be harmful to the community. I think you have got to draw a very clear distinction between that and someone saying I dont like religion, I disagree with people, and I dislike this particular religion even. I think you have got to be very careful of getting into a situation where you are actually stopping people expressing what are perfectly legitimate views about whether religion is a good way of life or not. I think there is a big difference though between that and inciting religious hatred which is an attempt, and obviously these are matters of judgment in each individual case, but which is an attempt for example to stir up hatred say against Muslims, or against Jews, or against Christians. Anne McElvoy: The Chancellor said he would like to see the law tightened up, it seems that you dont quite share that view.

29

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: I dont think he was saying that, I think he was saying look in the wake of a verdict such as this it is important then to go back and have a look at it again, make sure there arent loopholes that are being used. On the other hand I think this is an area where you should always proceed with care. Will Hutton: A big piece of legislation is going to be on pensions in the next parliament and that was obviously in The Queens speech. There are a number of emails on the principle of the compensation for those occupational pensions that went bust, there has been Ann King, Frank Bramley, Mike Biggs, Michael Marsden, Dave Allen. But one here from Kenneth Malloy which quite simply says, and they are all in the same spirit: "Why doesnt the government put in place a proper compensation package as recommended by the Pensions Ombudsman and by the Parliamentary Administration Select Committee for the 125,000 people who have lost their pensions. You talk about it, there are warm words but action on the ground is not coming through." Prime Minister: Well we have put in place a scheme and we are paying out hundreds of millions of pounds under it. The trouble with the Ombudsmans decision is that it is an enormous cost. We would have to be stepping in, and I cant remember exactly what the figure is, but it is billions, and you know it is not my money, it is the governments money and we have to take it from somewhere. And so we actually have introduced a scheme which is the first time any government has ever done this which I think will compensate people over a particular age as they near retirement. It is true and it is deeply unfortunate that there will be people left out of that scheme, but it is perfectly simple, it would be great to do it but the cost is phenomenal and you know you cant simply ignore that consideration. Will Hutton: But what the emailers say is that actually although the headline cost is high the actual cost is up to a quarter of that, and even within the framework that is devised people are complaining, and in the spirit of this email exchange to No 10, we know these emails have been invited, and here is one, this man has waited for 6 years to learn what the settlement is going to be. At the moment he is 65 and doesnt know, colleagues have retired without knowing, so that even within the framework of the policy people are ignorant about what their payout is likely to be. Prime Minister: Right, that is a perfectly fair point but we have only just introduced the legislation and set the scheme up and we have actually now made it more generous than it was going to be. We will be paying out quite a lot of money, I cant remember the exact amount but it is hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds. And he is right also in saying that these figures seem enormous but then they are spread over a significant period of time. However the trouble is even taking account of that, if we were literally to compensate up to 80 or 100% for all of those 125,000 people it is an awful lot of money. I can certainly find out for those people that have emailed in and get back to them on what is likely to happen and how quickly, I just dont know the details offhand. But part of the

30

Tony Blair 03

delay has been that it took us a long time to get this agreed, a long time to get it off the ground and it will take some time to get the money out to people. Anne McElvoy: This is your last Queens Speech. An email from Oliver Camwell: "What has been your greatest disappointment in your time in office?" Prime Minister: You know I say it is a bit of a dangerous thing to talk about really. Anne McElvoy: Oh go on. Prime Minister: No, I sometimes say, it is like when people say what is your greatest mistake and I say that is for me to know and you to find out. But I think the only thing I have ever expressed frustration, to put it like this, I think the most difficult thing is the pace of change. You know the world changes very rapidly around us, you take decisions in government and then to actually drive that thing all the way down to the ground takes a long time and that can be frustrating. Anne McElvoy: Well thank you Prime Minister, that is all the time we have for the public questions. But just a quick follow up from each of us. Yesterday you spoke of a heavyweight and a big clunky fist who was going to succeed you as Prime Minister and knock out the opposition and win the next election. Did you mean Gordon Brown? Prime Minister: I thought you were going to get to that at some time during this interview and I have decided to say nothing more about it. Anne McElvoy: But is he the clunkiest fist around on the Labour benches? Prime Minister: Because will say anything Anne, as you know. Anne McElvoy: But you said it yesterday, we didnt bring it up, you did. Prime Minister: Yup, and people will always interpret these things but I think I have said all I want to say on it for the moment. Will Hutton: I have been struck going through these emails, there is an email here from a coroner, some of these are quite obscure but nonetheless they are important. Paul Mathews, Coroner for the City of London, just making the point that there has been some consultation but there is no mention of, there is even a draft Coroners Bill but there is no mention of it in The Queens speech. And other emails are about bus services where people are really concerned about the quality of bus services outside London, and again lots of consultation and talk but absolutely no manifestation of action. And then of course there was that exchange we had on the pension compensation. And there is a sense that the government wants to say it listens, there are extensive consultation procedures and there is a certain amount of frustration that has been ventilated in these emails about exactly no change, and in some sense you know we are going

31

Advanced Listening & Speaking

through this exercise but actually that will be no change either after it. What is your response to that? Prime Minister: I think my response is to say that you will always have things that you have still got to do and some things are more difficult to do than others, but if you take for example the pensions legislation that we are going to do, that is a huge thing that is going to happen, that is the long term future of pensions. If you look at the changes that are happening in the school system at the moment, it is a huge thing. You know climate change, this will be a different and new approach actually setting out in legislation what we are going to do. You know the Coroners Bill is something that we will return to in the course of the year but again there are issues to do with how we actually manage the reform process there, which is difficult. Will Hutton: But it matters to the people surprisingly. Prime Minister: Of course, absolutely, and bus travel certainly does matter and we will be publishing proposals on that in the months to come because the real complaints people have is that outside of London there is not sufficient regulation now. Will Hutton: A disaster. You know one or two emails here from a man in the north east of England giving in some detail his local bus services, and he is saying Prime Minister do something. Prime Minister: But I think people on that, I am not sure about the issue to do with coroners, and again I can get back to people on that, but on bus travel I think people will find that there are proposals done on that over the time to come. But you know one of the things that you learn about the job is that it is never done. Will Hutton: But it is expectations really Prime Minister. You said expectations are a degree of responsiveness, but then you find that actually because of the complexity of government or because there is not enough time in the legislative agenda or for whatever reason you cant do it, you then get a disaffection about the political process and there it is in these emails. Prime Minister: Well sometimes you do and sometimes you dont. Sometimes you listen and you consult and you come forward with proposals and then you move forward on that basis, and as I say pensions is an example. I mean I have done a 180 degree turn on relinking the basic state pension with earnings, I said 10 years ago we werent going to do that, but we listened to people, we commissioned an independent report, we are now going to implement it. Will Hutton: Well we are out of time. On behalf of both of us thank you for taking part, and most of all I would like to thank the public who sent in over 500 emails that Anne and I have religiously gone through and we have tried to reflect the burden of your emails in your questions to the Prime Minister. So thank you.

32

Tony Blair 04

PMs conversation with Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson: Hello, my name is Bill Bryson. I write books and I am sitting in a very grand room in 10 Downing Street where I have been invited to have a conversation with the Prime Minister. We were just talking about science and teaching science that is of interest and importance to us both. And one of the things that I have been saying all along since I became involved in science is that obviously you need, on one hand you need to be training physicists and chemists and you need to be teaching science seriously in any society in order to create new future generations of scientists, but at the same time it seems to me that one of the great failings of education everywhere, be it in America, wherever I have been exposed to it, is that people like me and evidently you who are not naturally drawn to science are left out. Certainly in my case I was dead bored by science in school. How do you deal with that, how do you without trivialising science education, how do you convey to the average student, somebody who is going to do humanities, that science is really worth knowing and following, understanding? Tony Blair: You see I think you do it by dramatising the role of science in our progress and showing people how certain of the major things that we take for granted today were born out of scientific analysis and discovery. I found science difficult because I couldnt get hold of the basic concepts, and you know I am one of these people who unless I can get the first principles, the rest is a foreign language, and science for me was a complete foreign language from the beginning right the way through. And I think that sometimes what is necessary is to kind of make it a lot simpler for people at the beginning and then they can get a handle on the complexity of some of the ideas at a later time. But you know the way to give young people a real sense of what science can do is to show them how much of the modern life they take for granted was born out of people often saying things that seemed completely contrary to conventional wisdom at the time, and yet over time became clearly established. Bill Bryson: What started the whole idea for me when I decided to do the book was I was struck by the fact that I have always enjoyed taking my kids to the Science Museum, and I always watched programmes like Horizon and Equinox with great interest and you are naturally drawn to science, I mean science is all about us, you know we are all chemicals, so chemistry ought to be innately interesting to us, and yet somehow schools are failing to do that. I dont really know what the solution is. Tony Blair: I think part of it is we are trying to attract more people into science teaching and that is obviously important, but part of it is as well to get the people who are engaged in active science prepared to go into schools and tell children

33

Advanced Listening & Speaking

about it, and also recognise today that many of the most successful business people are people who came out of a scientific training and the link between the world of academia and the world of science and business is stronger today than it has ever been. You know bioscience, environmental technology, these are things where also people can get some sense that they are going to be able to change the world. You know I think people kind of think of science, they are going to be stuck in a laboratory somewhere doing these very arcane and complex experiments that no-one is ever going to take notice of. And yet you know if we look at an issue such as climate change, it is apparent that unless science and technology unlocks this for us then we face a very difficult, uncertain, possibly even disastrous future. Bill Bryson: It is interesting what you say about being prepared and being trained for certain things, and a lot of people in business will have studied sciences in school. And it is something that has often struck me about this is that it does seem like an awful lot of people do things that they didnt study that in university, they studied something else altogether. I just happened to be reading an archaeology magazine this week and it said that 85% of people who did archaeology at university are not archaeologists, they are doing other things, and I think that is actually a good thing, I really do. Perhaps the proportion is a bit wrong, but I do think it is something that isnt really noticed here that people have a great deal more flexibility. I think in the States, where I come from, you tend to train for a particular career and then you are locked into that. Tony Blair: What did you train for in fact when you were Bill Bryson: Well I was a terrible student, and it is a sad admission to make now that I am a Chancellor at one of your universities, but what I wanted to do was grow up and go out and live, and I wanted to get out of Iowa and go and travel and I suppose I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to write in some way. And so there wasnt any training for that. And I did go to university, I took a four year course that took me seven years to graduate because I kept dropping out and going to Europe and hitch-hiking around, and I married an English girl and all those kinds of things, so I took a long time to graduate. And I think I changed my major at six times in order to finally get through. So I am not a model. And I keep telling my children this, you know I got away with it but actually you do have to be a little more focused about it. But I also do think that it is a good thing that people can do one discipline and then end up going into something else altogether, and I do think somehow life in Britain makes it easier for people to do that. Tony Blair: I think the other thing that will happen quite soon, and this was one of the reasons why it was important to make the changes we did in universities and how they are financed, I mean unless you keep your universities up to the top mark the whole time then there is a global market in university students today, and I think I can see a situation in 10 or 15 years time when kids coming out of school will choose a range of universities almost worldwide. And one thing that is

34

Tony Blair 04

really important for us is to keep not merely the standards up of our top universities but also the sense that kids will tend I think now to do more than one, you know they may do a degree and then they may go and do something else for a time, and they will go in and out of academic study. Bill Bryson: There is something that I think has changed slightly in the time that I have known Britain. I first came here in the early 70s as an American. I had no intention of staying but I just got here and found I liked it a lot. I stumbled into a job in the NHS working in a psychiatric hospital, met a student nurse, you know kind of fell for her, fell for Britain simultaneously and I was allowed to stay. It was quite easy in those days as long as you were doing some kind of worthwhile work. I got a work permit and every six months I had to go to Croydon and just essentially to the satisfaction of the immigration people that I was still gainfully employed, and then I was allowed to stay on for another six months. And I do think there is something wonderful about that, people being able to move and spend time in other countries, and it seems as if it is getting more and more difficult. Tony Blair: Yes it is a very good point. Look the problem that you have got as a policy maker today - and I want to speak a bit about this in the next few weeks actually - but there are two sides to the migration coin and one side is immensely positive, it is bringing in talent from outside, it is people who come in with energy and creativity and have an impact then on the host country of a very positive kind. And actually all major countries today if they are open economies, as we are, and free market economies then you will have people continually coming in and out of the country and it is a positive thing. The flip side of the coin however is that with that comes problems as well, you know you get organised crime gangs, you get people trying to come in as illegals, and then that starts to cause difficulties, puts a lot of pressure, and then if you are not careful people end up in a situation where they view migration as a problem rather than as an opportunity for the country. And I think how you put the right rules in place that allow you to draw in the talent and minimise the problems is probably the toughest thing any policy maker faces certainly in any major developed country today. Bill Bryson: And how do you do that? Tony Blair: Well I think you need rules, you have got to have rules that our system puts in place that gives you the best chance of being able to identify people who are coming, tracking them when they are here, making sure that people obey the rules, making sure that you dont have people coming in claiming asylum when they are not really asylum claimants and all this type of thing, at the same time as making sure, and this is why we have introduced a new system now that those that you need for your economy can actually come in, and it is a very, very difficult balance and every country around the world is facing it, and I think if you

35

Advanced Listening & Speaking

went to the United States at the moment you would probably find migration a major issue there as well. Bill Bryson: Oh yes absolutely, no question about it. But it is a strange thing, you know at a personal level it is a very strange thing because I have spent an awful lot of time at dinner parties in Britain where the person sitting next to me has been talking, sort of railing about immigration in this country, and I always have to stop and say: "But you do realise you are talking to an immigrant." Tony Blair: You are not what they had in mind. Bill Bryson: Precisely. But I think there is a danger and I think if you are an immigrant like me you do sometimes feel as if you are being caught up, swept up in something, people are trying to close the gates in a way, in a way that I think is negative. Tony Blair: Yes, but I think it is all part too of the broader issue and science and technology and innovation are all very much part of this. But in the end for an economy like ours to succeed in the future it has got to be open, it has got to be an open economy. We have got to be prepared, for example in the City of London today a large part of it, probably the largest part of it is owned by foreign firms. Now 10 - 15 years ago that wasnt the case. Are we prepared to say well that is fine? My answer would be yes, if the jobs are here, we are generating the income here, the fact that the ownership of some of our major city institutions is foreign doesnt to me matter. I think in relation to science for example if we want to make this country a centre for bio-science, for environmental technology, you have got to be prepared to have people coming in from outside in the same way that an economy like California for example has transformed itself from you know waves of migrant workers coming into it. So I think it is basically a positive thing and a plus, but it is becoming harder and harder at the political level to make that case without also being very clear about the rules you put in place to get some of the dangers diminished as much as it is possible to do. Bill Bryson: I just saw a statistic in The Economist that I found slightly arresting, and that was I was surprised to see that 400,000 EU born and presumably EU trained scientists are now working in labs in the United States. That is quite a large number. And I just wondered if that sort of outward flow of talent was of concern to you and what you could do, or what we as a society can do to tempt them back. Tony Blair: Yes it is and it is one reason why we are more than doubling the science budget and we are investing in our own science education, we are trying to establish this closer link between business and science because a lot of what these people do is they go to the US and they are working in very much cutting edge research that is then going to have a commercial exploitation of it, and it is also important that in our universities we are able to pay good salaries to the top

36

Tony Blair 04

people. It is as simple as that. This is really what I mean by saying it is a global market now in the university sector and in research and we have got to make sure we are attracting the best people in. Bill Bryson: There is a long history here of Britain doing the inventing and America doing the exploiting, you know everything from radar to computers, you know all kinds of things. How do you legislate against that, what can you do? Tony Blair: I think that what you have got to do is to encourage and develop that link between the university and the business sector. You see up in your place, the Durham business and science cooperation is now way, way further developed. Bill Bryson: Yes, and that is very important to them. Tony Blair: Yes, and I remember when I was opening one of the new centres there, it must have been a year or a couple of years ago now, and the link between business and science at a place like Durham University is way in advance of what it was a few years ago, but you have got to encourage that still further. People who develop great ideas have got to have the venture capital, the entrepreneurs who are willing to come in and exploit it, you know you have got to get that synergy between the business and the academic world. Now I think we are making progress down that path but we need to do more because otherwise we will be in the situation where again we have great ideas and they are not commercially exploited. Now the other thing we have tried to do is change our tax regime on capital gains tax and other things to make it far more profitable for people to exploit their ideas here, but you know you are right this has been a big problem over a long period of time. The other thing we should do is use public procurement more. You know public procurement is something like 150 billion a year that we actually do public procurement in this country through the public sector, central and local government. If we were using at least some of that to encourage start-up new science and technology businesses it would make a big difference. Bill Bryson: I dont mean to keep going on about education, but there is one thing that I notice when I am walking across campus, as anywhere in Britain, Durham not least where I spend most of my time in the higher education role, is at how white they are. One of the things that is striking about Britain in the 21st century is that it is a very multicultural nation, which I think is a wonderful thing, but the university campuses tend to be still overwhelmingly white. Tony Blair: You mean in the electorate? Bill Bryson: No, no, in their student body. Tony Blair: You mean students too?

37

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Bill Bryson: And I just wondered what role government could have in that. I know that it is a matter of great interest to universities, they want to try and redress that, to get the balances changed a little, but I dont think they really quite know how to go about it and I just wondered what role government could play in assisting that? Tony Blair: I think there are two aspects to this: one is our own indigenous but ethnic minority population which over time I think will change in terms of more of the kids from that background going to university; but I think the other thing is I say attracting in overseas students, which we are doing now, but it is important that our universities remain absolutely up there. I mean we have still got 5 I think in the top, is it 50 in the world, but you know we need to keep that. It is not easy to stay there. And you know if you look at the American university system it has developed probably better than any other university system in the world. Bill Bryson: No, it is absolutely true, and higher education in this country is a real story, it is not often realised, as you say, but it is the only country in Europe that has any universities at all in the top 30 rankings, and 2 in the top 10. Tony Blair: Is that right, are there no German or French universities? Bill Bryson: No, and I dont really know exactly why, but there is a certain commitment to quality here that is still very important. Tony Blair: But of that top 50, Bill, how many would be American? Bill Bryson: Overwhelmingly, and it is quite striking how America dominates the list, and I think a big, big part of that is because we have this great tradition of giving, and you know the endowments that these universities have, you cant begin to compete with them. Tony Blair: Well the endowment thing is one thing, I mean I am looking now at how we get a similar endowment system going here. Actually there are universities beginning to do it here, but you are absolutely right, this is critical to the way American universities have succeeded, and you see it also means that although people will talk about the fees in American universities being very high, and they are very high, on the other hand the endowments give them the chance to mitigate the effects of that for large numbers of their students very positively. Bill Bryson: Well having gone through the system in both countries, you know I have got four kids and they have been educated in both countries, including at university level, I would urge you not to use the American model too strenuously. It has obvious successes and that is why you get all these American universities dominating all the lists in any kind of measure of quality, but you also get a system that is just a kind of, it wastes a lot of money. A figure that I read the other day that sort of knocked me back on my heels was that the average private four year university in America now spends $2,000 a head recruiting each student. That is how much it costs. It has become so

38

Tony Blair 04

competitive and there is much more of a sense of them being a kind of industry, a very productive industry. Tony Blair: They are very productive though, arent they? Bill Bryson: They are, but there is also something, I dont know, it doesnt seem as if it is always about academics, it seems that it is more about success. Tony Blair: It is difficult, it is a very difficult balance, because exactly you know when we were talking earlier about Britain may be great at developing the invention but America exploits it commercially, the trouble is if you want to change that you have got also to have one eye constantly on what the world of business is pushing you towards and I suppose it is a difficult balance. I think the other thing that will happen is that China and India will start to develop, in fact already are, but I mean in a more international sense develop top quality universities. Bill Bryson: We have talked a lot about education generally, but I wonder if we could just touch on a place that has personal relevance to both of us - Durham. To be Chancellor of anybodys university is a huge honour, but you know I am from Iowa, there was nothing in my background that would ever have suggested to me that one day I would be gowned up like the Archbishop of Canterbury leading a procession through a mighty cathedral, because all of the graduation ceremonies are at Durham Cathedral. So just in terms of honour it is inexpressible how complimented I am by it. But it is also such a wonderful interesting experience, I get access to all these you know first rate minds and fascinating people, you know the people I sit next to at dinners are always, you know they are so smart and they are so interesting, and then the students are nice and really motivated and just kind of it is thrilling to be around because they are so young and fresh and full of energy. In just every way it is a completely delightful thrilling experience, and then not least Durham is such a magically beautiful historic town. Tony Blair: It is, it is beautiful, it is where I was brought up and my father was a lecturer at Durham University. Bill Bryson: And you cannot walk ten feet in Durham without somebody pointing out to you a Blair site, that this is where you were educated. Tony Blair: Probably the pubs! Bill Bryson: But your presence is still very powerfully felt there, and of course your constituency isnt far away. Tony Blair: My constituency is literally just south of the city, yes. Bill Bryson: Do you get back to Durham at all?

39

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Tony Blair: Yes I do, I go back to it fairly often. It is a little bit more difficult for me just to wonder around but I used to, even after I became a Member of Parliament I would go and spend a lot of time in Durham City and also up in Cathedral Green because it is such a fantastic place. Bill Bryson: It is, it is. Tony Blair: Very beautiful. Bill Bryson: And as I always point out to people it is the only university in the world that is on a world heritage site, so that is quite The other thing that always strikes me about world heritage sites in Britain, because of course you know I have an interest in heritage too, is that there are 26 world heritage sites in Britain but only 4 of them are natural, 22 of them are man-made, or humanmade, and I think that is something that doesnt often get noticed here. The thi ng that is fantastic about Britain, it is not sort of what nature gave, it is what people gave and what people have done to the landscape and the things that have been created from Stonehenge, to Durham Cathedral, to Hadrians Wall, you name it. And I just find that something that I admire more than I can tell you. Tony Blair: Yes, but we probably dont make enough sometimes of the heritage that we have, because it is remarkable, particularly up in that part of the world. But anyway I am glad you are enjoying it. Bill Bryson: I am having a fantastic time. Tony Blair: And thanks very much for coming in and talking to me today. Bill Bryson: Well it has been an honour to meet you and thank you very much for inviting me here. Thank you.

40

Tony Blair 05

Christmas interview with Chris Evans

Chris Evans: Hello, it is Chris Evans here and I am in Downing Street in the White Room about to interview the Prime Minister. I have got a blocked up nose, so I am just going to blow that and then I will be ready for him. I just hope he is ready for me. So Prime Minister, Christmas is just round the corner. When does the Prime Minister officially knock off work and what happens next? Prime Minister: It is pretty much Christmas Eve normally, but you will probably get some calls on Christmas day. The trouble is things dont stop happening just because it is Christmas, so you are always, something may happen, there may be an issue that suddenly arises or there may be some disaster that happens somewhere in the world so someone gets on to you. Chris Evans: So how off work can you ever be? Prime Minister: You are more off work than people think sometimes. If you can get some space at a weekend and lets say nothing terrible happens then you know you can relax a bit with the family and so on. But it is always coming at you, there is always something, it is very relentless, there is always something that is going to happen or a phone call that has to be made. But you know there are times we can get a bit of relaxation. Chris Evans: Now this is your tenth Christmas here in Downing Street, how different is Christmas now compared to how it used to be 11 years ago - if you can remember? Prime Minister: I think it is just the sheer busyness of the job. There is nothing that quite prepares you for it. When you are Leader of the Opposition you become a lot more busy than just an ordinary very busy Member of Parliament and you are probably busier than most, or certainly a lot of Ministers when you are the Leader of the Opposition. But when you become Prime Minister it is suddenly that just absolutely everything stops with you. So if there is any disagreement anywhere in the processes of government or there is anything that happens that people need an actual decision taken on, it is with you. So the last Christmas that you have before you are actually Prime Minister is the last time you dont have that feeling always there at the back of your mind that something is going to happen, someone is going to Chris Evans: Now somebody somewhere may be experiencing their last Christmas not being Prime Minister for quite a while. If you had some advice for them, what would you tell them to enjoy?

41

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: Just enjoy being actually free for the last time Chris Evans: Put on a Santa suit. Prime Minister: Yes, or you know the fact is it is easier to go and have a good relaxing time with your family and so on. Chris Evans: OK. Now is Christmas Chequers for you? Prime Minister: Yes, Christmas we spend in Chequers. Chris Evans: And it has always been like that for 10 years? Prime Minister: It has always been like that. Chris Evans: Now is that out of choice or do you have to spend it there? Prime Minister: No, you dont have to, but it is kind of easier to do and it is slightly nicer for the family to be out there. The thing with Downing Street is, as you will know just being in it for a short time, is that people are in and out the whole time and you know when we are in the flat in Downing Street basically people are running in and out with messages, it is just there is a sort of degree of lack of privacy that is difficult. Chris Evans: Now I asked you that question because I have been doing some research because of our chat, and I understand there are some rules, some surprising rules that you and others before you in the office of Premier have to adhere to. For example I understand that you dont get allowed a front door key to No 10. Prime Minister: No, that is right, you dont have a front door key. Chris Evans: Now when you become Prime Minister, as I say there are other rules. Is there somebody who briefs you and says right, OK, this is how it is going to be? Prime Minister: Well I remember the very first time I came into No 10, the first person who calls you Prime Minister incidentally is The Queen, because when you go and you do the ceremony of kissing hands, she is the first person Chris Evans: How does that feel? Prime Minister: Very strange. When I did it she just remarked that the very first Prime Minister she had had as Queen was Winston Churchill and that was actually before I was born. It kind of made you realise how young I was actually when I first came in there. And then what happens is you go back from the Palace, you come into No 10 and they have this tradition where the staff and all the people who work in Downing Street line up on either side of the main corridor.

42

Tony Blair 05

Chris Evans: We have seen that scene in Love Actually, that is the scene isnt it where he shakes hands with everybody? Prime Minister: Yes, that is right, and you go down. And I remember at the time, because the other lot had been in for 18 years and some people obviously were rather upset that they were going, so I would kind of wander down the line and some people obviously were rather upset that they were going, so I would kind of wander down the line and various people would be in tears. Chris Evans: Grimacing .. in tears and grimacing Prime Minister: And so by the time you got to the end of the line you kind of felt guilty about the whole thing. But you then go into the Cabinet room and the Cabinet Secretary is there, and you know as he said to me: "Well you are in charge now, so what would you like to do?" Chris Evans: There you are, and off you go. And yet there is one rule which is to do with presents, because you get given presents all the time, as most world leaders do, people who are important, I even get the odd present, but you are not allowed to keep them. Prime Minister: No, you dont keep them. They all go into a big, it is up to I think 150 or something. Chris Evans: 140, that is what I heard. Prime Minister: And what happens is that often you get, I sometimes dont even, I mean I shouldnt really say this or at least not specifically tied to countries, but sometimes you wont even know the presents you have been given until you read in the list that is usually published in the papers about all the gifts that you have had. Chris Evans: There was one specific present off Bryan Adams, it was a great guitar and you thought I really want this, and didnt you have to buy that then? Prime Minister: Yes, and then you pay for it, yes. Chris Evans: You have to pay for that out of your own pocket? Prime Minister: Yes. Chris Evans: And you have got that guitar? Prime Minister: I have, yes. Chris Evans: Any good?

43

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: Yes, no it is good, it is a Fender (phon), it is good, very good stuff. Chris Evans: Now what about the effect of being Prime Minister. Being Prime Minister must make you many things that you werent before. Has it made you fitter, are you fitter now? Prime Minister: I am probably physically fitter than I have been since I was at college, just because I have found there were times that to be physically fit is a necessary part of doing the job, it kind of relieves your stress when you are exercising and all the rest of it, and it is just the physical strain, particularly nowadays because you travel so much, you travel within the country, but you travel outside the country and for every single Prime Minister or head of government it is just the whole business to do with the international side is just so much bigger than it was even 10 years ago, never mind 20 years ago. Chris Evans: You have got to keep your energy up. Prime Minister: Yes. Chris Evans: Are you an expert on body language now for example? Prime Minister: I kind of like to think I always was a bit, you know it is part of Chris Evans: Well there is all this talk about body language, isnt there, not only in your game but in other peoples Prime Minister: What does it mean in the end? Chris Evans: Well you [inaudible] cross your legs and you think oh he is not liking what I am saying here. Prime Minister: Well you can usually tell when you are with another leader and the meeting is not going too well. Chris Evans: But have you read books on body language and that kind of stuff? Prime Minister: I have never read books on it, no, but I think its your basic intuition, particularly as a politician because it is a people business. Chris Evans: You feel it? Prime Minister: Yes, you kind of feel it. Chris Evans: And what about power naps, you must power nap because you must be so tired all the time, have you become an expert in power napping?

44

Tony Blair 05

Prime Minister: No, it is something I have always wanted to do and I really, really admire the people who can do it. When Jim Callaghan was Prime Minister apparently he used to be able to go to sleep for just a period of 10 minutes at a time and he could do it in any set of circumstances, but I find it very very hard indeed, in fact hard to impossible. If I have got something up my mind is turning on it, but it is a great thing if you can do it. Chris Evans: So you have not acquired that skill? Prime Minister: I have not, no. Chris Evans: OK, now I have witnessed you make many speeches, both live and on TV, and they are great. Even people who dont like you admit that you are brilliant at communicating as far as your speeches are concerned. What in your opinion makes a good speech? Prime Minister: That is a very good question. Chris Evans: we get asked this question the whole time, so you are the king of speeches, give them a tip. Prime Minister: Make people laugh a bit, because you have got to relax your audience. The thing that an audience always wants to feel about its speaker is that the speaker is in control, the audience dont want to feel that they are having to work really hard. It is like in your job actually, they need to know when they are listening to you that you are doing the work and they are not having to do the work, you know what I mean, so they are not kind of embarrassed and wanting you to do something else, you are kind of leading them through it. Chris Evans: Giving them pointers maybe. Prime Minister: Yes, exactly. But I think the other thing is always to understand the three or four points that you want to make, and sometimes when I make a speech and it is a sort of off-the-cuff, not the big prepared big set piece occasion, but sometimes I will kind of say, if I am making a lot of speeches in a day and I have to go to a place, I will say there are three points I want to make, and at that stage I havent thought of the three points, but I know that the discipline of putting up those things will concentrate my mind and it has got to be clear to people. I mean my first attempts at public speaking were absolutely terrible really. Chris Evans: Almost like a stand-up comedian going out for the first time, the most frightening experience one could imagine. Prime Minister: I think, I just dont know how people do that because I really couldnt.

45

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Chris Evans: And have you ever given a speech where you were going to say something else but you get such a good reaction to what you have just said you think I am going to leave it there actually? Prime Minister: Yes. Some of my staff would say and the opposite sometimes occurs where you go on forever because you are not getting the good reaction. Chris Evans: Now we havent got much time, so lets be quick now because I have got a couple of questions I want to get in. One day soon, or otherwise, you will cease to be the man here at No 10 and the job will fall into the hands of someone else, whomever that might be, so if you had to brief them what would you say to them? Prime Minister: I would say you have got to live with all the media stuff day in, day out, but dont get obsessed by it and just realise that you are there to be knocked and all the rest of it, and that just happens and dont get overly fussed by it; know what it is you really want to achieve and focus on that the whole time and dont get side-tracked; and above all I think realise that it is a tremendous privilege and honour to do it, and however difficult it is know that it is voluntary and you know for you to be in the position where you actually are the Prime Minister is a fantastic thing to have happened in your life and you should never feel anything other than an acute sense of privilege in doing it. Chris Evans: OK, back to Christmas now. Very quickly, it is the No 10 office do this week, it is on Wednesday, what time does it start, is it any good and do you go anywhere afterwards? Prime Minister: I dont go anywhere afterwards except up to the flat. I think it is, what is it, 7.00 oclock the thing this week - Wednesday? - yes. And it is good, yes, because actually everyone, but Wednesday evenings are always an easier time because it is after the Prime Ministers Questions and you can relax a bit more. Chris Evans: Because you have got 7 days until the next one. I have just got to choose my questions carefully now. Out of all your colleagues, who reminds you most of Santa? Prime Minister: I havent the faintest idea and I am not even going to guess that. Chris Evans: OK, well you wont like this one then, who reminds you most of Scrooge? Prime Minister: Oh definitely not. Chris Evans: OK, we wont go there. Now is there any Christmas cheer between the various different political parties? Do you get cards off the other guys?

46

Tony Blair 05

Prime Minister: You do occasionally get cards from people from other political parties and there is a certain amount of people working together, and should be in fact. I mean one of the things that should happen is that on certain questions and certain issues parties should be prepared to work together. Chris Evans: And they do? Prime Minister: And they do. And when people see Prime Ministers Questions they see a great sort of debating joust where everyone tries to knock lumps out of each other, but actually behind all of that there is a certain amount of working together and I certainly have always felt that if I had a problem that I think is something that really requires everyone to work together on, that you can approach the other party. And you know you are not always successful with it, but most people, believe it or not, want to try and do the right thing for the country. Chris Evans: OK, this is my final question. Christmas time at the end of each year for many is a natural time of reflection when the noise of the whole world seems to quieten just for a few days. Now I find reflection ends up sometimes being contemplation, so reflection of the past and contemplation of the future. You have had your dream job, what are your hopes and dreams for the future? Prime Minister: I think the single thing for me that is most important is that whatever I do afterwards it has a real purpose to it, that it is not just about doing a job. This is a position that once you have occupied it you have done something that has what I call a real life purpose to it, now you may do it badly, you may do it well, some people like you, some people hate you, all the rest of it, but you have got a real motivating life purpose. And certainly in anything I wanted to do afterwards I want to have, it would be a different purpose but similar in its motivation. Chris Evans: Prime Minister Tony Blair I have enjoyed talking to you. Thank you for letting me into the White Room. Merry Christmas for this year and also for next year, wherever you may be and whatever you may be doing. Prime Minister: Thanks Chris.

47

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Interview with Lord Coe

Seb Coe: HI. I am Seb Coe, I am Chairman of London 2012, the Organising Committee that is charged with staging the Games in London in 2012, 64 years after the last opportunity we had to do that, and I am about to speak to the Prime Minister to bring him up to speed with the progress that we have made since Singapore, 16 - 17 months ago. It is 2012 days, that is 2012 days before the opening ceremony on July 27 2012. I just think it is barely conceivable that it has only been 19 months since we were in Singapore. Prime Minister: It is incredible to think back on it and realise what a monumental thing it was to have won the bid, and then the amount of work that has actually been done from then to now. But I think it has been a hugely energising and motivating thing for the country, it is interesting that so many people still support it and whatever, I think that people will stick with it and realise that it is a tremendous showcase for the country. But then actually what is happening around the site itself, and the development and regeneration that is going to happen, I mean it is a reason all of itself for making this worthwhile. Seb Coe: Yes it is a very good point because I had the, it is difficult sometimes to explain visually to people how much work has already taken place in the last 14 months. I was lucky enough just a few days ago to fly across the site in a helicopter. It is a site about the size of Hyde Park, it is for all intents and purposes levelled, there is Stratford International Railway Station in the middle, which is going to form the focal part of the transportation system. We can move 250,000 people an hour by rail in and out of the Olympic Park, and we have got at this very moment, there are 450 people working on this on site, and 8 drilling rigs and it is a big complex project but we are making very good progress. Prime Minister: The idea is to make this as environmentally sustainable as possible, and as I understand it the concept is that when we build it we try and reduce the carbon emissions by 50% or try to get even further than that. Seb Coe: Yes, and we can do that by working with Building Regulations. Sydney raised the bar on this in 2000, they really did come to the table for the first time with an Olympic Games with a Games that was really based on some very sound environmental and issues of sustainability We think we can raise the bar again in this and we can do things in for instance the Olympic Village, we will be in the Olympic Village and at games time it will be zero waste. We are working to reduce carbon emission all the time by the way we design. One of the things actually that is often overlooked of course is that because the Olympic Village has to serve both Olympians and Paralympians, when that Village gets handed on - to targeting key workers, nurses, doctors, young professionals.

48

Tony Blair 06

Prime Minister: That is right, as it is redeveloped, we are going to fill the key worker housing. Seb Coe: Yes, 30 - 40% of that will be targeted towards key workers, which is very important, as you know, well know, in that part of London. But because the Village has to serve both, Olympians and Paralympians, it will built to some of the highest standards ever, that has ever come together in a construction project in terms of accessibility. So there will be some things that we are able to do over the next few years that will never have been witnessed at an Olympic Games, and fits into the public agenda at the moment. Prime Minister: Yeah, I think that if it is clear that, as it were, you have not just got the greenest Games ever, because obviously the technology is changing and we can use the building regulations and you get significant reductions in carbon, but also if we are able to showcase within the development of the Olympics and the way it is run some of thing the things that are possible now for people to do if they make the right choices and decisions, I think that that cutting edge example of sustainability will be important as well. Seb Coe: I think that is true. And what has been interesting is that when we started out in this whole process, the first feasibility work that was being done in 1997 about London or the UK bidding again to stage a Games, I doubt whether probably one letter in 5 or 600 was dealing with anything related to the built environment and some of the environmental issues. Our postbag at London 2012 now probably has as much environmental and sustainability content as almost any other area of interest at the moment. Prime Minister: People are getting in touch with you and saying well how are you going to make sure that this is being done in an environmentally responsible way? Seb Coe: Exactly, and every time, we use public forums a lot of the time to get some of our messages across and bring people up to speed, particularly locally, about what we are doing, and some of the disruption that there will be in their communities, but so much of the questioning is about the environment in which they want to bring their children up and have their families in over the next 30 40 years. And that chimes in very closely of course with what we said in Singapore, that this wasnt just bidding for 60 days of glorious sport and then moving ahead as normal. Prime Minister: I mean the regeneration afterwards, there will be facilities but then there will be houses, and I mean several, there will be thousands of people who obviously will be employed in constructing it, but then there will be an aftermath as well, wont there, there will be an immediate legacy where there will be further construction and we are looking at how many homes and so on for people? Seb Coe: Well that again is for local boroughs and obviously government to think about. But for instance we are building an Olympic Village and the Village will cater for 10,000 Olympians, 4,500 Paralympians. It is a private construction

49

Advanced Listening & Speaking

project and we will lease the Village back during the Games and then afterwards the commercial market will then sell them out, but as I have said 30 - 40% of that will be targeted towards key workers. So there is a very, very strong legacy there, but alongside that, if you were going to hope that people would come into a regenerated area they are also going to want to come into an area where the rivers are clean and they have got greenfield sites and all that sort of stuff. So in essence we are leaving the largest urban park behind anywhere in Europe for the last 200 years. It is a complex project and the regeneration occurs at so many different tiers, alongside world-class facilities, but world-class facilities that we want to be able to return in a sensible way to the community. So for instance the athletics, the Olympic Stadium will be 85,000 seats at Games time, but the thinking at the moment is to reduce that to about 20,000, to have a tracking field legacy, but also a community base that allows local communities to use to perhaps have a centre of excellence for schools sport, to be able to use creatively the undercroft of the stadium, to have other sports use that facility at the same time and not leave communities just only barely able to press their noses up against facilities. Prime Minister: But it is also true, isnt it, that around the country now there are all sorts of events that are going to tie in with the Olympics. I mean they will be doing things up in Glasgow I know, but also in different parts of the country to try and get everyone involved and making people realise that this is an important activity for the whole of the country and not just for London. Seb Coe: It is vital. And you would remember from working with us during the bid process, you know we always made the point that yes of course this is the London Games but it is a UK-wide project. And we have just talked, we have talked about sport and we have talked about regeneration, but of course there is a cultural Olympiad. We go, next year we go to Beijing, we get 8 minutes in their closing ceremony, which gives us an opportunity - 4 years out - to start telling the rest of the world what we are going to do with the Olympic Games. And that is the point when really the Cultural Olympiad kicks off for four years, and we want communities the length and breadth of the country involved in a celebration over the four years of the fact that we will be having the Games, and that will be in many of the cultural platforms. Prime Minister: Yes, once the Flame really passes to us after Beijing. Seb Coe: That is the big intake of breath, it is our turn next. Prime Minister: It really is then, because even now, and for the past couple of years, there has been a focus on Beijing, what is happening there, there have been events around it. So I think that is also important to emphasise that you know after the Beijing Games conclude in 2008 there will then be a 4 year period in which we are as it were the Seb Coe: Centre of attention?

50

Tony Blair 06

Prime Minister: Yeah, the centre of attention, the representative of the Olympic spirit and which we can then use also to galvanise interest and enthusiasm in this country and outside. Seb Coe: Yes, and there are formally and legally things that we can only do after the Games in Beijing have been and gone. But for instance in 2010 we will be launching our Volunteer Programme. We need probably 70,000, maybe more, volunteers. And to tap into the point you have just made, they are not all going to come from London, we dont want them all to come from Lond on, we want the UK being reflected. Prime Minister: So volunteers, I mean if people want to volunteer they will be able to do that from different parts of the country? Seb Coe: Yes absolutely. I mean interestingly by the time we got back from Singapore, I think within sort of 3 or 4 months we had got about 70,000 hits on the website. Just a few months ago we celebrated the 100,000th volunteer who had actually registered with us. Now they are not all going to be appropriate or applicable at the time and we have to go through a very detailed process of making sure, because some of those tasks are quite complicated, you know there is security, you know they are involved in venue management, but it is a great opportunity for the whole of the UK to get involved. Prime Minister: Well it is interesting you know just going around different parts of the UK, already you will visit schools or you will see youngsters doing sport and some of them obviously, because it is still five and a half years away, are contemplating the prospect that they will be there. I mean it must as an experience, it is like none other I assume that you will ever have in your life? Seb Coe: It is difficult to describe. I was recently in Australia and I went to the Olympic Park in Sydney where some of our youth Olympians are preparing for the Australian Olympic Festival that is about to start. And I sat chatting to some 12 year old gymnasts who as far as they are concerned, five years is just round the corner, I mean they have got the great opportunity of doing something I dont think they ever dreamed of being able to do in their own backyard. And when I thought about an Olympic Games at the age of 12 and 13, it never occurred to me that I would be doing it in front of a home crowd, it was always I would be in some remote part of the world. And interestingly I spoke also to some headmasters the other day, some head teachers, and we have no, we will get the numbers and we will look at it in quite a scientific way, but they are beginning to report to me that they are getting a lot of requests from youngsters and parents in the schools to be able to expose some of the youngsters to Olympic sports that they may never have even witnessed on their own, Olympic sports I have never seen before. But of course we need to field full teams in 2012. And they are also noticing, they are

51

Advanced Listening & Speaking

beginning to notice, it is early days, but some of the truancy figures and things like that are beginning to change slightly, certainly since Singapore. Prime Minister: I was just thinking back, you know we were talking forward to this about Olympic memories and so on, it is an amazing experience and you reminded me of my going to the Athens Olympics, which was the first Olympic Games I ever attended. And the thing that is most extraordinary is that you get a sense of the scale and the spirit of it but also everywhere I went I saw its transformative impact on the city, but also the country, and the incredible impact it had to present, you know in this case it was Greece and Athens, to the whole of the world. You know that is your moment in international terms and I found it the most convincing argument I have come across as to why it was for us to try and do it. Seb Coe: I know you are right because I recently went to Barcelona, which was an extraordinary Games. But in Barcelona the Mayor and the political leaders and the cultural leaders in that city now openly refer to Barcelona as having two histories: the history of Barcelona pre the 1992 Games; and then the history afterwards. And I was shown projects that are still, that have only just started, that simply would not have started had the Games not come to Barcelona in terms of regeneration, the fact that before 1992 the average person living in Barcelona could not actually even access their own beaches. They took three to four square miles of derelict wharf land, they built the Olympic Village which is now a very very nice part of the city to live in. Some of the urban planning projects that were built into the Games have delivered in a way that I dont think anybody dared believe was possible in Barcelona. And Sydney was the same. The Australians will tell you that actually they came of age in 2000 when the Games showcased them. Prime Minister: Well that is the thing to aim for. But you know I have reflected back, just to go back to where we started, I have reflected often on the extraordinary events in Singapore and with all the difficulties and challenges there are, I havent for a single moment regretted going for it, and indeed in one way I am more convinced than ever that it is just one of the most important things for our country, for its sense of itself and its own pride and culture that will happen to us in the years to come. So good luck with it Seb Coe: Thank you. It is a long road but we will get there.

52

Tony Blair 07

Interview with Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry: Hello and welcome to this podcast. I am Stephen Fry. I am sitting at the moment in the Pillared Room of 10 Downing Street, London, on a sunny winters day and I am going to be speaking to the Right Honourable Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, about all kinds of things - history, culture, life at the top. So Prime Minister I want to get all the questions out of the way that everybody asks when they come here, and that is you stand in the lobby and there is a picture of Robert Walpole, and then you go up the stairs and every succeeding Prime Minister flashes past you as you leap up the landings. Do you feel their shadow over you? Prime Minister: Particularly the ones from Disraeli and Gladstone onwards are the ones that you recognise. I mean I confess when I go down the staircase and you see all the pictures and then you get to the drawings of the ones. Stephen Fry: Yes, Lord Pelham, and Lord Grenville, and Lord Liverpool and Lord Derby. Prime Minister: And those are the ones you find more difficult to identify. But yes it is an enormous thought that you have got all these extraordinary people who came before you. And of course the one picture that is sort of taken out and put just before you get to the staircase is Churchill. Stephen Fry: That is the big one for everybody, internationally and nationally, and I suppose the Cabinet room itself which looks, if I may so, a little bit like a Ramada business room where they have the pencils and everything, but that is as it should be. Prime Minister: Well I dont know that it is as it should be, I am afraid, I think that is quite Stephen Fry: Oh dear, well you will have to apologise to Ramada personally, but you know what I mean. After all it is a business conference room, I suppose that is what Cabinet is to some extent. Prime Minister: Yes it is and it has got this table that is designed especially so that you can look at the faces of all the people around the table. It is designed in a sort of slightly oval shape. Stephen Fry: And that is of course when you walk in there as a tourist, as I have occasionally been lucky enough to do, you know that is where Margaret Thatcher sat when she went round the Cabinet asking whether she should stay, and you know it is where Chamberlain went round when he asked Halifax and all the

53

Advanced Listening & Speaking

others whether or not they should proceed with Munich. Some quite big things have happened at Cabinet level. Do you again find it nerve-racking to have so many, because it is a lot of seats. How many is a full Cabinet meeting, do you know? Prime Minister: It is about 21, 22 when you add in all the different people. But no the interesting thing about it is obviously it is a room where many historic things have happened. I remember when Sinn Fein first came to see us there, and you know this was just after we began the peace process in Northern Ireland and of course they pointed out that this was the room in which Lloyd George had sat with the Irish politicians of the time and tried to broker the agreement that of course eventually led to the partition of Ireland, and they were sort of musing on the sense of history, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness. And Mo Mowlam, who was with me, said "Yes" she said, "and just behind you is the window where that mortar that you fired into John Majors Cabinet came in through the window." Stephen Fry: Yes, I was going to say someone should have said that. And if there was a thing to be said by someone at that time it would have been Mo Mowlam. Prime Minister: Yes it was and everyone took it in reasonably good part. Stephen Fry: But that actually brings me to quite an interesting point about being a politician. Sometimes people ask me, for no apparent reason as far as I can tell, whether I have ever thought of going into politics, it is a bit late for me now of course. And I always said no, and the reason I said no was that I like being able to speak my mind and my observation of friends of mine who went into politics, and people I have met who have been in politics, is that charming as they can be in private, and charming as they can be round a dinner table or in any other circumstance, the moment a camera or a microphone is in front of them they have to, and it is not their fault, it is not through some sort of disease, they have to retreat to a kind of blandness, they cant actually say what they think, they cant even make a light joke without offending a quarter of the population. Does it frustrate you? Prime Minister: Yes, I think all politicians find it very frustrating, but the point is that you have to live with a certain discipline, otherwise what happens is that your remarks get either taken out of context or what happens is that you, you know maybe you want to communicate one thing, and politics is about communicating things to people, you want to communicate one thing but you lapse into humour or irony, and never try to do irony, I have tried it once or twice and it has never worked, in front of a camera or a microphone and what happens then is you give a completely different, you know if that is the only thing that is picked out. I mean part of the problem in politics today is that, and I remember Bill Clinton explaining this to me and saying you know you may - you, that is the political leader - may do 100 different things in a day but the 30 seconds that people see of you on the evening news is what you have done that day so far as they are concerned. So if you make a remark that is maybe a bit off-line and that is there then you might

54

Tony Blair 07

have launched a new education initiative, tackled a particularly knotty crime problem, you know done whatever you have done for peace-making or otherwise in the world, but actually that is the 30 seconds that they see and that is what you have done. Stephen Fry: Yes, I can see that. And also another part of that is the kind of damned if you do, damned if you dont aspect of politics, because it is a divisive system, politics generally, from the moment you arrived at No 10 you are obviously aware that most of the population, the voting population, hadnt voted for you, though it was a good majority, so you are always going to be hated, or disliked, or distrusted by a certain number of people. But also if you stick to your guns you are going to be called stubborn, if you cede to public opinion you can be called weak and just at the mercy of polls. Margaret Thatcher herself said that if she walked across the River Thames on the water people would say: "Huh, she cant swim". In other words you have to get used to the fact that you are going to be disliked, and now you see that is another reason I could never be a politician, it is a huge weakness of mine is I want to be loved. Prime Minister: Most of us do. Stephen Fry: Yes, do you, and do you mind knowing that so many people dont? Prime Minister: Yes of course I want to be liked, and yes I do mind, but I also think it just really does come with the job now and I have got over it over the years, just as well otherwise I couldnt have stayed doing what I am doing. But it is also that you, I think the most difficult thing in fact, and this is a whole different study, is that there is this interaction between politics and the media today that is very difficult because the media is highly, highly competitive, it is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and I think what that does is it puts an enormous stress and strain on the way that the public debate politically happens. And what I think is really the point now is that the modern media works by impact effectively and the biggest impact will come from scandal or controversy or pictures that make a visible impact. But if you try to have a reasoned policy debate, unless it can be translated into one of those mediums then it is actually quite difficult, and this is not so much a criticism of the media because they operate within this culture today and that is just the way it is, but you know what it means is Stephen Fry: But it means that you are then of course open to the criticism that everything is released by an initiative, a soundbite, impact politics; on the other hand if you didnt do that then you would be seen to be presumably either way behind the times, or inexcusably dull, or indeed hiding from them. Prime Minister: Or worse in a sense if you are a politician, you would have something to communicate but never be able to communicate it because you would never express it in sufficiently newsworthy terms. So a lot of it is about how you manage, and this is where this whole business to do with spin and spin doctoring comes in, is that in the end you know any organisation that wants to

55

Advanced Listening & Speaking

get its message across in the modern world has to realise that it operates through the medium of the press and television as they are, and therefore if you are not acclimatised to the world in which they are working then it is really not much use for you. Stephen Fry: Yes, and not only in the press and television but of course the medium that we are using now, which is a mixed media, we are recording obviously but it is going into a strange place. It is arguable that whatever you may have done in your Premiership you will never ever be as influential as two Britons - Tim Berners-Lee and Jonathan Ive, Tim Berners-Lee who invented in the early 90s the worldwide web, all the language and the protocols that still guide it to this day, and Jonathan Ive, the chief designer of Apple who gave us the Ipod, through which many people will be listening to this. In other words it is a totally different world here now inside, it is the bite-sized mob-sowed (phon) as it is called, the little thing that happens on your mobile, it is the flashing across of text messages and internet chat which you can do on your phone which is different from, I dont expect you know about all this because you havent had time to immerse yourself. Prime Minister: No, I am going to have to at some stage, but it does make a huge difference to the way you conduct politics. And in fact the American political system is gearing up to this, or has geared up to it now in a big way, but I think you have got to conduct politics in a different way, you have got to find the medium through which you can have a detailed policy discussion with people, you have got to accept that not everyone is going to be interested in the same subjects and therefore you have got to tailor the manner of your debate to what those who are interested in this particular debate, you know the medium Stephen Fry: This is really interesting. And in fact this is all about the fact that Britain on the one hand is part of a global world which is more global, if I can say such a naff thing, than it has ever been, but it is also more divided than it has ever been, it is more segmented, we are segmented as units in the marketplace and we are culturally segmented. And that, hand in hand with the growth in the internet, has been an extraordinary growth of a kind of sectarianism in this country that I never thought I would see again in terms of the difference between the liberal consensus, which has given us things that I heartily approve of and would thank you for, like gay civil partnerships and equality in that sphere, and a general liberalisation of much of the moral temperature of the country if you like, hand in hand in that there has been a rise in the impatience and intolerance of churches in particular, their fight to regard themselves as a separate part of society, you have the faith schools and their own views about stem cell research, about homosexuality, about divorce, about all kinds of other things. And so it is like fracturing, it is lots of little fracture lines, it is one earth but rather as global warming has done to the lakes, it has cracked it up. Prime Minister: Well I think one thing that is happening is that as a result of that you have got a different type of political engagement where you do have to

56

Tony Blair 07

engage with people through issues. I mean Make Poverty History was an interesting example, Stop Climate Chaos and the whole climate change debate, but these are organisations that are operating in a completely different way with particular types of audience. I think the political parties increasingly will regard themselves as what I call stakeholder political parties where you have a series of stakeholders in your project but they will be interested in different aspects of your programme. And if you take a young person and their political interest today, there is no point in my view in the Labour Party or the Conservative Party, any political party, engaging those young people at the level of thinking that they are as interested for example in National Health Service reform, which people tend to get to somewhat late in life, as they would be for example in the environment or Africa, or you know career opportunities in new technology industries which is something that they will have a particular you know fascination for. And therefore this fragmentation I think is meaning that the world of politics has to operate with different mediums and different points in time. And the other thing I think that is happening is that you dont necessarily have quite the same broad consensus as you used to have in society. Stephen Fry: But do you have a cultural one? There has been a lot of talk about Britishness, in politics there is the whole issue of the West Lothian question, as I believe it was called after Tam Dalyell, in other words the idea that devolution to Scotland has meant that essentially there is something rather unfair about the idea of a Scottish MP having a say in English affairs, and when they have their own parliament shouldnt it be a complete devolution? Is a unitary United Kingdom still on the cards with this kind of breakdown into devolution and also I am sorry it is two questions - does British mean anything any more, should we actually just say English, and Scottish, and Welsh? Prime Minister: I think the British set of values that people share does mean something, I think they are distinctively British. I personally think the United Kingdom is still a very meaningful concept for people. I mean I like to think of myself as British, even you know though people will obviously think of themselves as British and Scottish, or British and Irish. But I mean I always think you know from my own situation, my dad was born in England, my mother was born in Ireland and both were brought up in Scotland, and I was born in Scotland and lived all my life in England. Now I dont know quite Stephen Fry: And I am sure ones loyalties, I feel myself Norfolk before I feel myself England, and England before I feel myself Britain and so on, that it is possible to have multiple identities. Prime Minister: I think if you were looking for a sort of more mature consensus about issues to do with liberty and freedom today, I mean I think there is a particular type of political philosophy, and this is where I am as it were, which is I would be very liberal on say gay rights, you know the equality agenda, ending

57

Advanced Listening & Speaking

discrimination against people for whatever reason, but probably less liberal than a previous Labour generation would have been on law and order issues, or antisocial behaviour, you know people who commit violent crime and so on. What is quite interesting is that in the 60s you would have had a consensus which was a sort of gathering liberal consensus in both spheres, both in terms of personal lifestyle, you know the sexual revolution and all the rest of it, and in relation to you know traditional civil liberties arguments in the criminal justice system. I think what is interesting today is that it is what I sometimes call for shorthand a sort of pro-gay rights, tough on law and order position, which I think is something different from what you would have had a generation ago. Stephen Fry: I think it is, I think that is unquestionably true. And do you feel, as we wind up I think, that over ten years Britain has become a better place to live? Prime Minister: Well you will always find people who will say well actually I am worse off, and in any country of 60 million people over ten years that would be so. I think that overall, I think in terms of our feeling of ourselves as a country, and I think the winning of the Olympic bid really symbolised this in a way, we are more comfortable with the notion that we are a country that is more diverse, that is more plural and also more tolerant. Stephen Fry: Is that just, there is this big debate about multiculturalism versus integration and that suddenly people say well there has been a terrible mistake, we have had 30 - 40 years of believing in multiculturalism is the God before whom we must bow, and now we realise that that has divided Britain in a way that is completely unacceptable and we should talk more firmly about integration, we should be unashamed about making sure immigrants learn English and so on. Prime Minister: I think it is a bit of a false argument really because the truth is multiculturalism grew out of a desire to prevent discrimination, but multiculturalism was never about division or difference, it was always about diversity. And therefore I think that you need to balance your belief that people should have the right to live with their own separate religious faith or cultural identity, with the duty to integrate at the level of certain key values that people should share in common and that are part of being British. And I think if you look at most countries in the world, and you know America I think is a very good example of this, for all the faults that people sometimes talk about American society, I think it is a great thing that you have got people who will you know when the American National Anthem is played, or the American flag is there, it is very much less a nationalistic thing than something that is to do with the values that bind them together and a pride in their country. And I think we have got something of the same spirit in Britain today and I think that is a good thing and it means that people are very comfortable, whether they are Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, whatever their religious faith, also thinking that at a certain level the values of tolerance and respect for other people and you know the basic common articles of decency that make a society worthwhile,

58

Tony Blair 07

those are things that people share in common and they are in the end I think quite, you know in the way that Britain as a country has developed they are very specific and British values. Stephen Fry: Yes, I would endorse that. I think that is more or less true. I wonder if you ever get a sense when you meet, in the extraordinary position you have, so many world leaders, so many people from other countries. What is it that they want? What do they want to see in London, what do they regard as being quintessentially British? Is it still the old things like Buckingham Palace or do they actually want to go and see where the Beatles first crossed Abbey Road? Prime Minister: I think the great thing about the country today, and you can see this with why London is such an exciting place to be and so many people want to come here, is that yes they certainly want to see the tradition, and Buckingham Palace and the Changing of the Guard and all the rest of it, and Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London, these things are great traditional icons, but in fact what they also love about London today is the sense of dynamism, and modernity and you know the fact that there are so many interesting places to go and see, and the museums and the theatres. Stephen Fry: And you can eat there now, you can eat in London finally. Prime Minister: Well the fact is you have got from all parts of the world you have got people who have come and given something to this country as a result of their bringing, of importing their own influences and cultures, and I think that is a fantastic thing. And the thing for a country like Britain, as I always say, is to be really proud of our history but not living in it, so you are proud of your history but we are a country today that should compete on its merits, as I put it, in other words that we should never think that because we are Britain as it were we have got some God-given right to be anything in the world. On the other hand we can be immensely proud of the history of the country, of the values that we have developed over a period of time. Stephen Fry: I was going to say the greater instinct - sorry to interrupt you - but the greater instinct these days is not to be proud of the fact that we are from Britain but to be apologetic, history has become through a kind of, I hate using the phrase political correctness, but you know what I mean, it is the story of the subjugation of the poor and the masses, it is a story of the evil of empire, and history has become self-laceration and apology. And I am sure you have had pressure to apologise to this nation, that nation, for something that you were not personally responsible for, the government is not responsible for, I am not responsible for. I refuse to apologise for slavery, I wasnt there, and I wouldnt expect a German to apologise to me for the massacre of my ancestors in the Holocaust, and there were some, but I really dont expect them to apologise to me, it wasnt them. And it seems to me just psychologically bizarre that the world has become this

59

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: Yes it is difficult, it is difficult when you are the Prime Minister because if you have something like slavery, and you know we are marking the 200th anniversary of the law abolishing the trade in slaves, the interesting thing is that you know if you dont as it were express regret for what has happened people think it is somewhat callous, and if you start getting into apology territory they say well what on earth Stephen Fry: Yes, what are you doing apologising, it becomes a Prime Minister: It goes back to what you were saying about not being able to win Stephen Fry: You cannot win. Now I know, and I can reveal a secret here unless it has changed, that you have got work to do and I know that these days red boxes contain laptops, dont they? Prime Minister: Not mine. Stephen Fry: Doesnt it? Oh I know some Ministers have a little laptop Prime Minister: You are quite right Stephen Fry: You dont? Are you really not interested in using computers, you dont? Prime Minister: It is something that when I leave I am going to have to devote a lot of time to. Stephen Fry: Do you keep a diary incidentally, I know that is a question you get Prime Minister: No, I dont. Stephen Fry: But I suppose there is a diary kept of every day and every days work, which is your working diary, and if you wished to remember, if you wished to write your memoirs you obviously would have access to that. Prime Minister: I know, but I often wish I had the discipline to keep one Stephen Fry: And you are going to have to learn who Jade Goody is, well yes you know that because there has been a recent scandal about it, but you are going to have to find out all about this bizarre world that has erupted in the British cultural scene since you left, that of reality television and the peculiarity of the way people behave now. I think you will find it very interesting, I have always thought there would be a good drama about the Prime Minister is in many ways so in the world but not of the world. It is a bit like running rugby, football, but never being able to play a game of it, you know. I am not saying you dont live, obviously you live, you eat, you laugh and have a life, but it is going to be fascinating thing for

60

Tony Blair 07

you to go back into the world. Who knows, presumably you have no plans as to what you will do, lecture and talk to people? Prime Minister: No, I mean you know the trouble is when you are doing the job you are so much in it, you know you dont have time really to think ahead, but as the time approaches I will have to, so I will. Stephen Fry: Yes, reform Ugly Rumours. Prime Minister: I think that would be very bad news for music in general and popular music in particular. Stephen Fry: Well it has been a real pleasure talking to you Prime Minister, I am very, very pleased and I hope it means you havent lost out on lunch, it is lunchtime, and thank you very much for giving us a moment to share your thoughts. Prime Minister: Thank you.

61

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Interview with Richard Hammond

Richard Hammond: Hello, I am Richard Hammond and I am in the White Room at No 10 Downing Street where I have been invited to chat with Prime Minister Tony Blair about road pricing. 1.8 million have signed up now to a petition to complain and object against it and I am here to put some of those views to the Prime Minister and find out what he thinks. We are obviously here to talk road pricing, the issues of, which you will be aware quite a lot of people have got opinions on. And I thought, if you dont mind, probably the best use of our time is for me to just put forward some of the objections, some of the points that people have raised and to hear from you directly your thoughts. But just before we get to those I just wonder, the motorist, because you talk a lot about, your government at the moment talks a lot about the motorist, who is the motorist in your eyes, who do you think it is we are talking about? Prime Minister: I mean most people have to use their car, most people want to, but actually even more than that most people have to and they have to use it, you know that is why I have always been absolutely in favour of choice rather than forcing people in any particular direction. And you know if you are taking your kids to school, or if you are going to work, at least if there is not very good public transport, or if you live in a rural area you need your car. Richard Hammond: So when we say the motorist, it is not that sort of Mr Toad issue, because if there was a scale there is sort of me on one end, because I am a self-confessed anorak, even Prime Ministers are familiar with as an anorak, but at the other end of the scale it might be, because I still reckon that even if you dont use your car, if your meals on wheels are delivered in them then effectively you are a motorist in that you are affected by Prime Minister: But also I think sometimes what people forget, I mean when you become Prime Minister, right, for security reasons they stick you in the back of the car and you are driven. But before, even when I was leader of the opposition I drove my kids to school in the morning and I couldnt possibly have done without a car. So it is not a problem, that, for me at all. The issue is, I mean I wish I wasnt having this debate, but the reason I am having it is that I can see a huge problem looming up ahead, I mean it wont be me who solves it incidentally, which is one rather nice thing about this debate, I can be quite objective about it, but the amazing thing is that there are 6 million more cars on the road since we came to office, almost 7 million actually from 26 million to 33 million I think it was, someone was telling me, and over the next 20 years there are going to be I dont know how many millions more.

62

Tony Blair 08

Richard Hammond: There are issues surrounding congestion and what this whole thing Prime Minister: Yeah. Richard Hammond: You have said that it wont be you that has to solve it directly because you wont be here doing that job, but somebody will. Can we get round then to that debate? Prime Minister: Yes. Richard Hammond: Do you mind if I just put forward Prime Minister: Yes, no absolutely. Richard Hammond: Because there are 1.8 million on the petition. Prime Minister: Quite so, you have got to take notice of that. Richard Hammond: And did you feel surprised by the response to it? Prime Minister: Not terribly, because I went through the fuel protest, so I was well aware of, you know people care about this because it is a major part of their lives and it is a major part of their expenditure, so you know you start messing around with the motorist at your peril, and that is why I say to people you know I dont do it because I think oh this would be a good argument to get into. Richard Hammond: So when we are talking about the motorist we are agreed then it is pretty much all of us in one way or another, which is just this word that sort of demonises the role, but it is something we all do directly or indirectly. Prime Minister: Yes. Richard Hammond: Can we talk then, one of the things that people have raised a lot - fairness. A lot of people said as motorists we are already taxed because we have to have a tax disc on the car before we can use it on the roads, the duty on fuel now is 60, 70, nearly 80%, it rose between Prime Minister: Well I think it is less now, to be absolutely honest, as a result of getting rid of the fuel duty escalator Richard Hammond: And it is also yes because it is a specific amount isnt it, as opposed to a specific percentage, it depends rather on the price of petrol but it is a significant chunk of when we buy petrol is in fuel duty, but at least that depends upon what sort of car you are running, so if you are a businessman in your Bentley it doesnt really matter, you will use a lot of petrol, but hey you pay a lot of duty, you can afford it, but if you are motoring on a budget you have probably got a small cheap to run car so you dont use as much fuel, so you

63

Advanced Listening & Speaking

dont pay as much duty. But road pricing affects all of us the same, the bloke in his Bentley just as it would somebody dropping their kids off at school and commuting into work as a nurse. Prime Minister: Well it depends what you do. You see the important thing about this debate is to understand not just why we are having it from the policy point of view, which is what do you do about congestion, you know how do you make your road network more effective for the amount you are going to have of it, because it cant possibly keep pace with the number of cars that are going to come on to the road. So that is one debate as it were. But the other issue is really this, and it is very similar to the arguments about the electronic patient record in the Health Service, or identity cards, or whatever else it is, the issue is you have the technology now to be able to you know put a system in place where you are incentivising certain types of behaviour or not, and the question is you know you can decide to do this in a number of different ways, right, you could have all sorts of different ways of deciding how to do road pricing if you want a national scheme, and incidentally the national scheme is not what the Road Traffic Transport Act is introducing, it is just introducing these local experiments, but if you wanted to introduce a national scheme, and that as I say is some years in advance, you can decide to do that in whichever way you want, including taking account of income, where people live, whether you then amalgamate all the other taxes and get rid of all those and just have one single tax if you like. Richard Hammond: What, so you might get rid of the tax disc, you might get rid of tax duty on petrol? Prime Minister: Well one way you could do it is to say instead of having all these different taxes, right, because you have got your road tax and you have got your fuel duty and all the rest of it, you just have one thing which is the way that you raise the money, right, and you can raise it in all sorts of different ways. Now the reason why this debate is going on here and going on in other countries is because you will have the technology that allows you to do that, but how you decide to set up that system, that is a matter for policy makers in the future to work out. Richard Hammond: But could you guarantee though that there would be a commensurate job in the other ways in which we are taxed as motorists if something like road pricing came in? Prime Minister: Well this is the point Richard, you have got to take a policy decision. You could decide you were going to get rid of all the other taxes and just have that and you could decide that it is going to be revenue neutral. Now all these are policy decisions that you take in the future. The only issue at the moment is do you want to investigate this technology as a way of dealing with the problem both of congestion and of how you raise money for transport, do you want to do it or not? And you may decide at the end of it you dont want to do it, but all I am saying at the moment is because you have got this additional

64

Tony Blair 08

dimension of congestion, as well as all the complexities of how you tax people in relation to transport, is it not sensible at least to investigate it? Richard Hammond: But as a means of solving congestion then, because you are saying that you will pay more, wont you, under the schemes to travel at peak times, at rush hour, than you would in the middle of the afternoon? Prime Minister: Well if you did this, again there are a plethora of different ways that you can do it, but one way that you could do it, which is where you can pick up on the feasibility study from 2004 on this, is that you could charge very low amounts when you are travelling in the non-peak times and higher amounts when you are travelling at the peak times and you can do that if you want, or you might decide not to do it, but that is one way of doing it. Richard Hammond: But that sort of gets rid of, or it sounds like it might get rid of rush hours because it would stop us using it, to save money, because it is more expensive to drive, but why do we think there are rush hours anyway, because that is when we need to get to school and work, you cant drop the kids off at 6.00 in the morning and let them sit in the sports hall until everybody else arrives? Prime Minister: Correct. But then that is the question of whether over time you actually want to take some of this and improve, you know this is where for example if you want to do it on a local basis you could decide that you are going to put X amount of money in say to school transport, right, which is raised in this way. Do you see what I mean? There are all sorts of different ways you can do this. Richard Hammond: But it still wouldnt solve the problem of if in the morning you have got to get to work, say you are a mother, you have got to drop your kids off at school and then get to the hospital where you work as a nurse, or an office or whatever, and you have to do it in time and you have to do that in the rush hour because that is that is when, nobody says I want to travel now because there is more traffic. Prime Minister: No, that is absolutely correct, but you see again you can find all sorts of ways of taking account of that. You know you can decide for example, I mean you dont have to decide that you are going to treat all journeys in the same way, even through rush hour. Look the point that I am making is this. You could decide to use this technology in any way you want to do it. You know the first question is do you want to investigate its possibilities; the second question is, you can then decide, whatever policy considerations you make, and the important thing about a debate like this is you can see from the fact that 1.8 million people signed the petition, is that government is going to take a decision on this, and I suspect before you ever get to an election the electorate will want to know well what are the different parties proposing on this? Do you see what I mean? So the idea that you are going to come forward with some policy that is going to sort of, it is not going to happen like that. The idea is to engender a

65

Advanced Listening & Speaking

serious national debate about what the options are so that people can study them. Richard Hammond: And if people then continue, as they are now, to say we dont like this particular option, will it happen? Prime Minister: Well as I say this is years in advance, but having gone through the fuel protest, I think it is highly unlikely that you will find politicians in the future putting something forward if people just are completely rebelling against it. On the other hand, you know it is important people know what the options are, because doing nothing I dont think is an option. Richard Hammond: So lets go through, just keeping going through these objections, because that is why so many people have said they dont like it. Lets talk about another issue that has been raised, and it is a broad one - privacy. You have said we have got the technology now, and the technology, I think you are talking about satellite tracking so that journeys can be tracked and recorded, when and where and on particular roads, and people have said well I dont want that, I dont want my journeys recorded. Prime Minister: Well again you can work out what way you want to do it and for example at the moment you will have tolls on certain roads for example that can be done reasonably easily, you know the question is would you be able to construct a system, and this is one of the issues, could you construct a system where people were sure that it was being used only for one specific notion, which is in order to charge you, rather than used for anything else? Richard Hammond: This is as in the data itself being protected once it was gathered, but you see I think it is easy to get carried away with that one, to think that is the big concern, and clearly yes you would worry that that information might be misused, but one, I dont really imagine the government, any government, is ever going to sell off that information to double glazing companies so they would know when we are in and can ring and sell us some windows, so I dont think that is the concern. Isnt the concern more just the principle, that the information is gathered rather than what is done with it? I am not a spy so what I do isnt very interesting, I am not worried what people might do with the information. Prime Minister: I agree that is going to be a big part of the debate, is there a way that you could make this work that people wouldnt think you have got a sort of big brother satellite system tracking your every movement. Richard Hammond: But you have. Prime Minister: Well except that if you ended up with, I mean look I dont know because the whole point about the technology, it is like this thing to do with the box in the car or not, is that necessary or not necessary, nobody knows at the

66

Tony Blair 08

moment. It could be, at the moment you have got a tax disc on your car, it could be that you could simply have a chip on the tax disc. Richard Hammond: But you are only talking then about the nature of what is, this is an awful emotive term to use, but I am going to say it, its a bug, it is saying here I am, so it is something that can be logged into and tracked by a satellite, isnt it, whatever form it takes in the car. Prime Minister: The question is if it is information that is simply limited to the amount that you pay, I mean if the technology develops so that you could do that in a sufficient limited, particular and secure way, would people find that acceptable or not? I dont know. Richard Hammond: I think they are indicating, and maybe they are indicating that they wouldnt, and I certainly wouldnt, and it is not to do with the information, is there anything that could be done with it, is useless, who wants to know when I take my kids to school or when I go to the office, it is not interesting Prime Minister: would they? Richard Hammond: Well it is the principle though. To make the system work surely it has to be identify our car, identify the journey and identify the roads used in the time, and I am not comfortable with that information being collected centrally. Prime Minister: But do you need all that to be collected in that way? I dont know enough about the technology but surely if for example you are going through now to do, you know you are going through a toll, and some of these tolls, I think you were telling me that some of them you know you can literally just identify on the car and they know whether you have gone through it or not, that information is not kept centrally in the way that you are describing. Richard Hammond: But it must be. If you are talking about a system that charges for using particular stretches of road at particular times in a particular car, then it has to identify the time, the road and us, and therefore our journey. And many of us I think say I dont want on principle that information I dont want to live in a country where that information is gathered about us Prime Minister: Well you know if people in the end think that you cant do this in a way that is acceptable to them, it wont fly. Richard Hammond: But there is a principle here, certainly you have had the best people in the country no doubt making the report in the first instance that makes these claims about the way congestion is going to go, I still have personal doubts because I just imagine, if you were to buy a car in the future and not be able to get it out the end of your road because of congestion and simply sit there in a queue, why would you bother doing it? There is a self-righting element I imagine. But if your experts say that it is going to rise in the way that it is, I am sure it is.

67

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: Yes, but the point you are making again I understand, which is to say look in the end the market will go where the market goes. Richard Hammond: Well if you cant move anywhere in a car, why would you use a car? Prime Minister: Right, but then the trouble with that is that it depends what your alternative is, and this is the point, which is why I find this so difficult. Because part of what you need to do is to raise money to invest in a better public transport system, because the best way of reducing congestion is if you have a better transport system, and so for example we were talking about school buses a moment or two ago, but I could name you about five different city schemes for metro links and so on, and light rail systems, and transit systems and so on, but you have got to raise money for all of these. And my point is this, that the trouble with transport, which is what makes it unlike virtually anything else, is that the lead times for building those systems are so great that you wouldnt necessarily get this self-correcting mechanism that you are talking about very quickly. Richard Hammond: Doesnt it also happen with transport, as perhaps you have experienced recently, that whenever issues like this are raised there is a very impassioned resonse almost immediately, it is not just from enthusiasts like me as an anorak who collects cars Prime Minister: the guy who went through the fuel protest and the country came to a halt. Richard Hammond: And also, in not very long, will kind of have his freedom back to a degree because you will be able to move around with the rest of us, rather than being burdened by the role. Prime Minister: Yes. Richard Hammond: And at that point you will find the same surely, wont you find that the thought of having to be tracked, have your movements tracked, is somehow I would say the thin end of a wedge because you then might think there is a conspiracy theory coming your way, but there isnt, but it does feel like the thin end of a wedge because a country in which we have to account for our movements to that extent, it is only a small step from that to thinking well what is the tag in the car, it is only like an electronic tag on an offender who wears that in order to prove that they are keeping to the terms of their parole, well we are rather using something similar on all of us to make the system work when we havent committed offences, we are just going about our lives? Prime Minister: Of course, but if you cant find a suitable answer to that question, you know if you cant, if the way that, because as I say there is no technology that can allow you to do this at the moment in a satisfactory way, and the reason we are doing these local schemes where you know you will need local consent to do these local schemes anyway, is to see if there is a way, and we are not the

68

Tony Blair 08

only country developing this type of thing, and when you cant get an answer to your point, I think it is going to be very difficult to sell this. But I wouldnt rule out the fact that if you could find an answer to it there was a satisfactory way that people didnt feel that the notion of differential charging for th e time of day you took your travel and so on, in other words you were trying to deal with this issue of congestion, if there was a way you could find round that, then I think people would at least look at that if the alternative was higher taxes for more public transport. Richard Hammond: But we can all appreciate, we are not stupid as a people, we can grasp the concept that if you have more cars than you have got room for, we all lose out, and so clearly yes ultimately congestion has to be resolved. But equally a system like this of road pricing, to make that work in any way it has to rely upon identifying us and the journeys we take for it to happen, and therefore that is one of the principles on which we are objecting. Prime Minister: Yes, no I totally understand that. And what I am saying to you is that I agree you need to find a reasonable answer to that, otherwise people will rebel against the system. And as I have just said to you, I think this is a classic example of something that you wont be able to introduce unless people think well I can see that is fair. OK? However the point that I am making is, look I wont be taking this decision, but I am simply saying this is a debate you need to start having in the years ahead because otherwise what is the alternative to dealing with this congestion? I mean if we swap seats for a moment, and you come into my seat and I am sitting in yours, what is the answer to the congestion? Richard Hammond: Oh if I came here with an answer to congestion I would be Prime Minister: Prime Minister Richard Hammond: Running for office, yes we would be sitting in opposite seats. So I appreciate that. But what if we continue to object at this level, what if we continue to object on the grounds of privacy as well as expense and unfairness, and that doesnt go away, and this particular way of tackling congestion we respond to it the same? Prime Minister: Yes, but you know the great thing, Richard, is we live in a democracy, and the fact that you guys have petitioned in 1.8 million, you know politicians sit up and take notice of that. Richard Hammond: But it has to count in terms of action, something has to happen otherwise you will just shout at 1.8 million of us and nothing has happened? And where our contribution to this debate cant, as the public, when we say we dont like it, you are still saying it will count? Prime Minister: Of course it will count. You know we are in the business of politics of going out and winning support from people.

69

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Richard Hammond: But will it count in a way that means that this for instance, this plan, doesnt happen? Prime Minister: Well you want me to rule it out now when the debate has just begun? Richard Hammond: No, no, but if the debate continues and you reach the point that it becomes crunch time Prime Minister: Well as I said to you, I think this is a classic issue where if you cannot persuade people, you know although the danger often is in these arguments is you find there are two points of view, but the poll tax is a good example, in the end it didnt matter whether it was the right or the wrong policy, the public just werent buying it. I mean I wouldnt personally as a politician try to engage in that type of kamikaze politics, but what I do think is, and this is my insistence at the moment, I am not closing the door on the debate, I am not, I mean someone else may come along and close it, in which case you will be very happy, but I think it is a debate you need to have. Now I agree with all the points that you have made, the one that gives any sensible person pause for thought is this privacy issue around it, you know it is how much information do you want, what is it going to be used for, what is really going on here? And I think you need to find a way of answering that question, you know. But there may be ways of answering it, and one of the things that will happen with this technology as it develops is that you know there will be all sorts of different ways of doing it, but in the end with an issue like this, if you cant take people with you, you know they will just close the door. And politicians are in the business of trying to win elections, not lose them, and that is why it is Richard Hammond: Well no doubt then it is a debate that will continue until a decision is made, and we will continue to have our input into it, as will the politicians. Prime Minister: Yes, yes, and that is the sensible thing. And one of the reasons why I think it is good that you know we are doing this, that we have had the petition thing, is you know let it all hang out, let the debate happen. Because sometimes what happens is that both sides adjust, you know we may adjust, you may end up thinking well there is merit in maybe this way of trying to do something like this, but not in that, you know. Richard Hammond: Well we shall see what happens. Prime Minister: At the moment you are not yet persuaded. Richard Hammond: I have to say. But thank you for talking to me and thank you for letting me join in the debate.

70

Tony Blair 09

Interview with Simon Schama

Simon Schama: Hello, I am Simon Schama and I am lucky enough to be sitting in the White Room of 10 Downing Street talking to the Prime Minister about, guess what, history, why it matters now, past, present, how they are mixed up and how they shape the way we think of ourselves as being British. So I did just want to start with a slightly general question about, you know, how history might be seen by kids as boring old stuff and by a lot of other people as a luxury, rather than a necessity. And I have spent a lot of my life persuading people that if you want to understand about now, say being British, you need to understand about then, and I wonder what you thought about that? Prime Minister: Yes, I totally agree and history was always, along with English, my favourite subject at school so I always really enjoyed it, yes, and always wished I had read history rather than law at university. And I think it is fascinating, provided you can teach history in the right way though, I think sometimes when, I mean you obviously have to know when all the Kings and Queens came, and I cant remember now. Simon Schama: No, not at all. I think you can drop the occasional Egbert actually some of them Prime Minister: But you know you had to learn that, and I did. But actually what is far more interesting is to look at the economic and social and political trends over time, and also then to study particularly, I mean I didnt actually study this history at school, but I am particularly interested in 20th century history, late 19th century history, the build-up to the First World War, between the wars, afterwards. Simon Schama: Have you been to Gladstones house? Prime Minister: I havent, I have been past it on many occasions. Simon Schama: You have got to go, of all the places that breathe the soul. Prime Minister: Really? Simon Schama: You know because he, like you, talked a lot about ethics and religion and how you could do that. It is utterly wonderful. But ask for, I think they will give it to you, ten minutes alone in the library. The books are still arranged on the shelves the way he arranged them and they tell a story. It is quite wonderful. Prime Minister: I mean he used to sit down when he was Prime Minister, they tell me, in Downing Street, and, I mean, my authority for this I think is probably Roy

71

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Jenkins biography, but would spend a couple of hours reading a book on theology or something. Simon Schama: Yes. You look amazed does this never happen to you, Prime Minister? Prime Minister: I think yeah Simon Schama: He was editing theology and he was editing Latin stuff actually while he was Prime Minister, and he did also have a volume of business, possibly not as heavy as yours, but a fair volume of business too. No, he has in the room the shelving the way he wanted and the axes to go and, you know, do his tree chopping, so it is stunning, and railway tickets, I mean it is an amazing, it is full of his ghosts actually. Prime Minister: Someone, I cant remember who it was now, once played me a recording of Gladstone. There is a recording of Gladstone. Simon Schama: Yes there is, a rather high voice. Prime Minister: Yes, and there was a slight northern accent to it, which is fascinating to hear it. Simon Schama: Yes. So running on, we have got a number, fortuitously and wonderfully, of commemorations really, in the line in which we think that history might help us get a grip on now. You can either treat commemorations as acts of piety, which is fine if we are talking about the dead in the war, or they can be moments to reflect on, well in the case of the Act of Union or the case of the abolition of the slave trade, allegiance, really. But do you think actually, lets take that commemoration, the Act of the Union, that when it actually happened a few weeks ago, a month ago, was an occasion just to sort of hammer the life of the Union an occasion or simply hot air to be shared, or do you think actually there has been, or it is a good moment to reflect on the virtues of the Union? Prime Minister: Yes I think it is a good moment to reflect on the virtues of the Union because I think the interesting thing is that although the Union is 300 years old there are very modern reasons for its existence today, and I also think in terms of, I mean I look at this country very much in todays world, as being you know a small country, in fact, 60 million people, limited geographical space, the early 21st century, you know the fact that we have the Union between England and Scotland, and indeed the United Kingdom, it gives us collective strength that I think we otherwise wouldnt have. And I think it is worth then reflecting back on as a result of the Act of Union how much we then benefited, intermingled and indeed inter-married over the years and so on. So I think it is a very useful time to look back and reflect. Simon Schama: One of the other anniversaries, the Treaty of Rome, now do you think, sort of, the European identity we have makes it harder to keep the Union,

72

Tony Blair 09

or harder to defend the Union, because a Scot would say - well Denmark, why not actually? Prime Minister: It is an interesting question but I think that all the time what you are trying to do is to use your alliances to achieve collective strength to achieve a greater power and influence in a world where today you will have China and India, within 20 years, I mean each of them with a population, what, 20 times the UK, each 20 times the UK, whose economies will, in time, surpass those of America. Now I think that our ability to still project power, weight and influence depends on those alliances and unions. And so my point is if you take a sort of secessionist view and you split apart in the Union, or you split Britain apart from Europe, you just weaken your collective strength, or the strength you get from being part of that bigger collective. Which is why I say the Union is actually to the benefit of England, never mind Scotland, and why it is in the interests of the whole of the UK to be a strong part of the European Union. And I just have a, partly based actually on a reading of history, I have a completely clear view of this today after 10 years in office, which is that we have two great alliances, one with America, one with Europe, and you keep both of them strong and you dont give up either because you know if you chart our history over a long period of time from the world super power with an empire through to the modern day, well the question is how do you through that very changing set of circumstances for our country still maintain the maximum power and influence, and particularly in an interdependent world you need that power and influence to get your way, so how do you do it? The answer is you do it through alliances. You give up those alliances, or put them at risk, or place them in jeopardy for reasons to do with what in the end is a very narrow mentality, you know it is just Simon Schama: I take the point. I mean weirdly the reason why I deeply am a passionate defender of the Union is I like ethnic messes really, I like to be mixed up, I dont want things to be kind of boiled down to their hard little nut -like tribal allegiances. But it is sort of hard in the end to bring reasoned argument if it is just going to be a matter of tribal sentiment. Prime Minister: Yes it is true, but in the end what is the sentiment? And I think you have got to distinguish between patriotism and pride in your country and then a feeling of grievance against some other institution you are part of that is the cause of all your problems. I mean this is why I am as against Euro-scepticism as I am against separation within the Union, they are just to me old-fashioned emotions. Indeed one of the reasons why I think we have been able to take forward the Northern Ireland peace process in the way that we have is that over time it is not that the border doesnt matter, either to those in the Irish Republic or certainly to a significant number of people in Northern Ireland, but it is just that over time people start to appreciate, well we can have a relationship across this border.

73

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Simon Schama: Yes exactly. It is the recognition of kinship within a political boundary, even if your kin have differences and arguments I think actually. Prime Minister: Yes, correct. Simon Schama: That is really, one does wish that would apply to the Middle East, but all sorts of other things intervene. Prime Minister: But in time they should get there. I mean the most striking thing about the Middle East is that in the end Israel, and Palestine, and Lebanon, to take the three countries where there has been conflict and destruction in the past couple of years, they have a huge common interest those three countries. If you leave aside their political and ethnic and religious differences they have got a complete common interest in having a strong economically prosperous common area between them. Simon Schama: That is right, but another kind of sentiment is the intensity of purist religious faith which came along. Did you actually think, this isnt a question I thought I would ask you, but when you took office actually that you would be dealing with fundamentalist religion? I tell you, when I was growing up as a kid our history teacher, a fantastic man, it was confusing because he looked just like Voltaire, but he said: "Well boys, we dont know what the rest of the 20th century has in store, but we do know that two things that are on their way out as political forces are nationalism and religion." How wrong - so much for history - how wrong can you be? But that has become which is why it is nice this week to reflect on the abolition of the slave trade which we are commemorating and remembering, because that was a moment. I was very struck by reading some of the early literature about how inconceivable it was without actually the force of evangelical feeling, without Christian feeling. And I was trained, old lapsed Jew that I am, to believe that anything else actually is the real answer - class interest, the sugar trade declining, which it wasnt except the sense in which slavery and the slave trade were a violation of Gods ordinance, that actually we are all entitled to saving grace, including professors and Prime Ministers. And it is wonderful to reflect on that as something which was benign and indispensable. Prime Minister: Yes, I think that is very interesting. I think the two interesting things about the slave trade and the abolition are first the point that you make that it was actually intervention of individuals in the history, it is the sort of refutation of the Marxist analysis that we are all sort of, or one version of it, that we are all kind of predetermined in what we do, or that it is all to do with class and the forces of production and so on. This was very much about individuals, as you rightly say, taking a very strong view. And the second thing is the length of time it took because of the seeming reason of the argument against doing it, which prevailed in many quarters over a long period of time and with people thinking, you know people who were not necessarily, incidentally, badly motivated

74

Tony Blair 09

or badly intentioned or motivated by reasons of profit, and this is a very interesting thing to me about discrimination generally, that I think what is fascinating, and this is where I think history can help you learn the lessons of how political change comes about. Because I think for example in relation to the discrimination against women, or gay people, or people from ethnic minority backgrounds, there was a time when conventional wisdom, absolutely solidly, would have said these things were absurd examples of political correctness, that they didnt understand the proper world, and there was massive resistance to doing any of these things. And yet now we look back in the year 2007 and say well how could people possibly have thought the opposite? And I think it is a very interesting example, the abolition of the slave trade, of how, by the combination of particular individuals, and by people refusing to accept that what is conventional wisdom today must be conventional wisdom tomorrow, that this progress was made. Simon Schama: It happened, we still, I mean it eludes me, you remember what the majorities were like at the end - they were huge. When Fox got up in introducing the resolution in June 1806 he got a majority of 114-15 or something, and then when it carried after he had died the following year was 283-16. It was gigantic. And every time Wilberforce, 1799 I think was the last time, what had happened between was the war - it doesnt quite explain it, every time Wilberforce introduced it he was, I mean he got closer but it was knife edge or blistering defeat. So something really weird happened in that the great and good I mean it was very interesting, there was a change of Solicitor Generalship and Samuel Romilly became Solicitor General and he gave the most vitriolic attack on people who could conceivably call themselves Christian and countenance something so iniquitous, detestable and inhuman. So there was, exactly as you say, a kind of change in the threshold of embarrassment in some way actually and in shame. Prime Minister: And I think because people rehearsed the argument, and rehearsed the argument, and rehearsed the argument and then finally you know just bit by bit this happened. I mean actually something very similar happened in an issue less important but in the 1790s over the debtors prisons and so on when they imprisoned people for debt, where there were attempts made to change the law and then the law didnt quite work and get through, but then eventually it did because people said well look OK, now we are, and you know bit by bit the airing of the argument made the change. I think this is interesting more generally too. I think what is fascinating as well is if you look back at the Second World War and the period before the Second World War, I think one of the things that is most instructive and most difficult for my generation and younger to comprehend is how and why it took so long for people to wake up to Hitler. Simon Schama: Yes. Yes.

75

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: It is incredible when you read what was going on in the 1930s, and this is why I think history is so fascinating, I mean you have always got to draw, you know you can overdo the lessons of history, but one of the things that is really interesting to me is when you go back and you read the debates at the time, when the facts were there about what was happening to Jews in Germany or Austria, and you know people were still saying well you know Simon Schama: Well it didnt happen, and this isnt really an explanation but it may be a stage towards it that everything was sweetness and light and there were perfect liberal democracies and suddenly there was Hitler. There was the spectacle of all sorts of hideous tin pot dictatorships, including the Italian one, which people got used to and shrugged their shoulders, because it is none of our business and it doesnt matter and life is hard out there and he makes the trains run on time and so on. The danger really is ordinary people actually becoming routineised really, becoming kind of calloused in what would otherwise be their sensibility. I think that is probably how people, not many people saw what was happening in the slave forts off the coast of Africa, much less the way the auctions took the horrible scramble, teeth being yanked open, all they thought about and saw was prosperity coming our way, houses going up in Bristol and Liverpool. So it is very odd. So it is as you say sort of an extraordinary, the most remarkable thing a moral politician can do is to actually lower that threshold of shame and embarrassment to sort of make people, sensitise people to something which ought to shock them. That is sort of what Churchill did but he did it by a sort of fatalistic, ominous, grandiose, magnificent rhetoric saying the end is nigh and you had better sort of get used to it really. Prime Minister: But even in the late 1930s we were still facing a situation where people were basically saying Simon Schama: Yes, a far away country which we know little Prime Minister: People forget here, I mean when Chamberlain came back from Munich, I mean Downing Street wasnt closed off in those times. Simon Schama: He was mobbed by cheering crowds. Prime Minister: I think I am right, I remember reading somewhere, it may be false that he actually had to go out late at night. Simon Schama: Because there were so many people. Prime Minister: Yes, in order to, because they wouldnt disperse until he did, and these are interesting lessons I think. And also I think if you look at the Sudan today, for example, you know there is something appalling going on but can you get everyone to wake up about it?

76

Tony Blair 09

Simon Schama: How do you think we can, or it is impossible, or we have done all in terms of making people feel Prime Minister: No I think, I mean I think actually the world should be far more Simon Schama: I know you were in Comic Relief but did you actually see some of the little films? Prime Minister: Yeah Simon Schama: They were very good actually. Billy Connolly wonderful, a desperately sad movie, a little tiny bit of film about Aids actually in Kenya, but there was a Darfur film which was beyond shocking actually. Prime Minister: Yes, which we should be doing something about. But you know it is only if it comes into, and I think this is really the point too, that part of this you have got two things happening with the way that the modern media treats these things: on the one hand, I know politicians are often, and understandably and rightly in a way, alarmed at the degree of what we say is the sort of CNN, BBC determination of the agenda, right if they put the horror of what is happening in a particular part of the world front of the news for a couple of weeks, public opinion will be roused, the trouble is they have to decide to do it, and they decide to do it here, but they dont decide to do it there or whatever so there is a sort of arbitrary nature in the way that the salience of issues is decided; but the second thing is that actually you should have with the modern communication, the ability to see what is happening and in fact you should reduce your ability as a public opinion to say we dont know about it because Simon Schama: Exactly I think that is historical story telling, but actually weirdly the story telling of an image and what happens around an image can actually do that. In the anti-slavery movement it happened, if you go back to a shelf of books every one will have that famous image of the brooks where bodies are packed in like sardines, so there is no little, that image was pinned on vicars walls actually, it was absolutely everywhere, you couldnt go almost into any selfrespecting Methodist, Baptist house without seeing that image. Equally if you think about you know the burning child in Vietnam, that one image I bet, we dont know who she was, but it did actually somehow concentrate peoples minds, they could not get it out of their head as a piece of atrocity and futility I think really. So that may be doing it but it is not an easy call. Let me ask you on one other anniversary that we are remembering this week the Falklands War actually. I want to ask you a naughty question which is just if you had been Mrs Thatcher - theres a thought! - would you have done it? Because actually I tell you why because we have been talking about the complications of allegiance with the Treaty of Rome and with the Act of Union and both of those presuppose a kind of reasoned sharing of allegiance in some way, and the Falklands was an act of unequivocal assertion of British sovereignty. Do you think you would have done that?

77

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: Yes, yes I am sure. When I look back, I mean I was much, much younger at the time obviously but when I look back yes I have got no doubt it was the right thing to do. But for reasons not simply to do with British sovereignty but also because I think there was a principle at stake which is that you know a land shouldnt be annexed in that way and people shouldnt be put under a different rule in that way, and it is interesting because it was, we actually lost more people I think in the war in the Falklands Simon Schama: 266 people, astonishing Prime Minister: Than we have lost in Iraq or Afghanistan. Simon Schama: It is astonishing, it is amazing. Prime Minister: It is astonishing. Simon Schama: And it was a scary gamble actually. Prime Minister: That is for sure. When you look back on it and you talk to the people who were there at the time, and as I say I wasnt even in Parliament at the time, but I think it took a lot of political courage actually to do that. Simon Schama: But you wouldnt claim, by way of collateral, that the end of the military regime it clearly wasnt an aim but it was obviously Prime Minister: No, but it is interesting, if you wanted to see it, there may be some parallels in what happened in Kosovo later, although it is a different set of circumstances, but also in the end the military intervention in Kosovo brought down Milosevic. And the interesting thing is that when you stand up to that type of dictatorship, and Galtieri as it was at the time, the consequences then are severe for that dictatorship. Simon Schama: Especially in a Latin American Republic really masses of muscle flexing Prime Minister: Yes absolutely. Simon Schama: And it is a very, it is interesting because although it is always looked at as if it was simply to do with the question of British sovereignty, and obviously that was the principal reason because it was British territory, but nonetheless even if you take it apart from that, it was perfectly obvious there was only one way you were going to get it back, and that was by military action, and it was perfectly obvious also that irrespective of the debate about the Falklands it was completely the wrong thing of General Galtieri to do and it was right to make it be reversed. Simon Schama: Yes, one doesnt know how wars are going to turn out really Alas, we are coming to the end at last of the conversation, but I do want to ask

78

Tony Blair 09

you one other. Do you ever get the chance to enjoy history for fun as it were, and if so Prime Minister: Yes I do, I actually read more than you might think. And I often do it by way of biography for example which is an interesting way to take in Simon Schama: What have you enjoyed? Prime Minister: Well recently actually I have been reading Jenkins biography of Churchill. Simon Schama: That was wonderful. Prime Minister: And actually all Roy Jenkins biographies are fascinating. Simon Schama: You must Mr Balfours Poodle is wonderful about House of Lords reform fabulous book Prime Minister: Yes, that is very interesting. Simon Schama: It is a fabulous book. Prime Minister: But I also read Simon Schama: Dilke. He actually wrote an amazing book, which was a very early book of his, about Charles Dilke about the Irish very early, it was very, very good. Prime Minister: But I also read a lot of history about the early church and things which I find fascinating. I think it is one of the most interesting stories is how Simon Schama: How that happened, I mean again a very sudden moment. I give Gibbon which is an incredible difficult thing to do, to my students at Colombia really, and I say the only way you are going to get it is to actually read it out loud, and then they love it, they actually love the kind of musical weird operatic cadences Prime Minister: I tell you who is wonderful to read as well, and Macauley, whether you agree or you disagree with some of the Simon Schama: The gorgeous sonority of it. Prime Minister: I think as an example of how well the English language should be written, I think it is virtually peerless, I would say. Simon Schama: Yes. One last question then, Macauley really in his marrow was an optimist. Are you?

79

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: Yes, I would say I have to be in my job, but yes I am. Simon Schama: And I have to be in mine, surprisingly. Prime Minister: Yes I am, and I think if you look back there is much to be optimistic about. And I think what is interesting is that when people advance materially and when they are able therefore because they are not solely concerned with survival day, by day, by day, when they have the chance to reflect on the human condition they basically reflect in a way that is I would say less inclined to discriminate, more inclined to be in favour of principles of justice and equity. And you know it is, I think a fact, but you will tell me if I am wrong, that no two democracies have ever been to war with each other. Have they, or not? Simon Schama: No, damn, you are giving me homework and I think you are absolutely right. And Prime Minister as we end, a shaft of light, I have to tell you everybody out there, has come across the room. And they said actually of the vote when slavery was abolished actually that when the MPs got up suddenly a great burst of sunshine appeared behind the Speakers chair. Prime Minister: That is a good thought. Simon Schama: So on that note of sunny radiance we can close, thank you so much for the conversation. Prime Minister: Thanks.

80

Tony Blair 10

Interview with Bob Geldof

Bob Geldof: Prime Minister I am thrilled that you have finally caught up with the modern world and decided to do something called a podcast. Prime Minister: You are not about to ask me to explain the technology, because otherwise I would fail. Bob Geldof: just explain that language is one of the worst words in the English language. So I have listened to some of them and I think they are a bit brown nosey, a lot of them. Prime Minister: Inaudible. Bob Geldof: And it is an artificial sort of conversation because we are in this very grand room and surrounded by a load of people. But some of them have turned out to be really interviews and things like that, so it is hard in 20 minutes to get a conversation going because normally in the pub it takes about 15 minutes and a couple of pints to establish a rapport even with your mates to find out what you are going to talk about, except that people associate myself certainly, and I think, and here is where I am brown nosey, a clear success of your administration which was things African. And whenever I am asked, especially at this sort of end of era sort of moment what I believe the successes of the Blair years were it is clear that it is for me personal inasmuch as that it is Africa, and what people dont really consider is Ireland where I could never have imagined 15 years ago that my country, or my island, would be at a sort of level of peace that would have been incomprehensible, I wouldnt have accepted that. So I think they define it for me, this period. But we will talk about Africa I think uniquely, if you dont mind, simply because so many people have joined in. We were talking downstairs before this that there was a window which just coincided with your Premiership which I think, you know I called them the politics of values, at the end of the Cold War, between then and now, we were able to say to Africans you know here is the bargain, if you introduce accountability and transparency we will help fund infrastructure and grow your economies given these values that we have. I think that is over. Do you think we missed something? Prime Minister: You think that people have moved on from the politics of values now? Bob Geldof: I dont think people have, I think that the circumstances have, I think that it is defined by China. The Commission for Africa, we missed, that is 2 years ago, 3 years ago, we missed how important this growing phenomenon was.

81

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: Right, but I think, you see the key to this is the difference between, and in my view in a sense the false difference between the politics of selfinterest and the politics of values. In other words countries would see the pursuit of particular objectives as something that they did because of their strategic interests and you know your concept of the politics of values really came about because people were saying well actually now there is a new dispensation and really what we have got to do is to implement a foreign policy based on values rather than simply one based on self-interest. Now I think that although it is true that there can be at least a short term clash between self-interest and values, I think the single most important thing, and I think this is very important in relation to Africa, is that long term I am sure our self-interest is best served by the values based policy. And I think that although you are absolutely right in saying that with Chinas emergence as a dominant force in Africa because of its need to purchase commodities in order to fuel the necessary growth in development of the Chinese economy, although I think you can say at one level that that has superseded what was happening there maybe even you know 10 years back, nonetheless I think for China as this process continues it will realise that it has a real interest in stability, in the growth of greater democratic accountability, better governance, the exploitation of natural resources and assets not in a way that in the end leads to either conflict or economies that are distorted. Do you see what I mean? Bob Geldof: I do see what you mean, but if our values can be summed up in like democratic values which we believe to be universal values, but they may turn out to be parochial concerns because the Chinese have endlessly said we dont accept those values. I was there in 1983 and had an argument, you know this was soon after Mao died and everyone still wore Mao suits, about this and they said we just dont accept that notion of rights, we dont accept it, we dont accept this notion of democracy. And if they are the values we were in part say look in exchange for these we will fund you, and it is a pathetically minimal amount, and the Chinese then come and say forget about those values, well undercut their loans, well undercut their deals, that means at the end of our values we then have to go along with their political gestalt (phon) if you like, but it doesnt stop people emigrating towards us. I mean the Spaniards are considering building a tunnel through to Africa, that is how close Europe is to Africa as you know, and they will probably start in the next two years, certainly there will be mass migration towards us, there will still be political instability but we will have nothing to say, particularly Europe. Prime Minister: We didnt have an argument though about why we should actually up our commitment, in other words, I mean again I totally accept what you are saying which is in a sense if a new player comes on to the continent and says look our first preoccupation is to make sure that we buy the commodities that we need, your political system is a matter for you but here is what we can offer you. I think because, one, that in the end is self-defeating for those countries because they wont succeed if they dont get proper systems of governance; and

82

Tony Blair 10

two, that in the end because it wont succeed it is ultimately self-defeating for China as well. Bob Geldof: What do you call proper systems? The Chinese will say that south east Asia developed with high levels of corruption, we have got 15% of our economy is lost through corruption, your proper system of government is one that we reject, and if the Chinese say well lets look at the people who are funding this, that is the Chinese, the south east Asians are booming, why dont we go with that model? Prime Minister: I think you know from my conversations with the Chinese leadership I think that their attitude is more that at this stage of Chinas economic development, I mean this is their argument, at this stage of Chinas economic development a political system such as the one that we have in Europe is not sustainable in order to keep China together, in order to make sure that for example the western agrarian part of China can catch up with the eastern seaboard and so on. And I think those are all arguments one can debate but you kind of see the force of them. However that same leadership would say to me, but the direction will be ultimately towards a political development that is more open and more free. Now I think in relation to Africa it is not that the Chinese go into Africa saying we dont care what the governments are like, it is that their priority is so urgent in relation to commodities and resources that they simply, that is what their people need in order to grow their economy. Now my point is this, that in a way what that argues for is us being able to increase our commitment to Africa in order to make sure that whether the Chinese are going in there and supporting or buying commodities or whatever, there is still the support coming from us to help those countries in Africa develop their political systems and systems of governance in the right way, because in the end that is all that will save them. I mean if you take a country like Nigeria, if they dont adopt the proper systems of governance, they wont succeed in the end. Bob Geldof: I understand that, but if Africa is vulnerable to our predations if you like, if America, and they will, take 25% of their oil from Nigeria and Angola within the next 10 years, the Chinese are extracting whatever they can at whatever price to fuel their huge economy, the immediate price of that is huge political instability for example in Darfur where they almost refuse to intervene overtly certainly, I know there is stuff behind the scenes. But what is alarming for me is that the American response has been that to set up AfricCom (phon), I mean as you know like there were three military areas dealing with Africa in the past and in the last couple of months they have set up you know one military unit that just deals with Africa. And again my problem is, one, is that the correct response; the second thing is what has Europe got to say about this? We remain utterly silent and yet it is us who will be affected directly and immediately by this. Meanwhile we allow this new scramble for Africa, America and China over the coming years to play out whatever their ideological or security or economic interests are.

83

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: Well I think my response would be it makes the case in this G8 this year all the stronger for going back and making sure that we keep to the commitments we have got. If we are then making a big commitment ourselves to Africa, and not just in terms of aid but also you know for the killer diseases, for conflict resolution, for building up the African Peacekeeping Force, which Europe could do very easily and really help and support that, that to me is Bob Geldof: But it is not doing it. I mean you know this endless struggle for the tiny, tiny amount. Prime Minister: Right, but isnt that the reason why you have got to sustain the pressure in order to get them to do it? Bob Geldof: But we have had 10 years where you know one of the most powerful governments in the western world - yours - has been pushing this agenda, expending political capital and we are at this wonderful moment where the United States contribute zero, 0.17%, one-seventeenth of a cent. Prime Minister: Which is probably more than they did. Bob Geldof: It is three times more than they did, and fair play to him, but when you talk about expending more to ensure this in our own self-interest, and I agree with you, this expanding continent, and the Chinese, whatever the price, are doing it. What alarms me is that as a coherent entity Europe has got very little to say about Africa and seems to contribute nothing to the forward thinking and indeed seems reluctant to even, it seems to us psychologically as far away as possibly Africa is to the Chinese. Prime Minister: Well we would be smart to change, is my point. Bob Geldof: But you have had 10 years to change them. Prime Minister: Yes, but I mean I think in a sense for Europe, I mean OK this has been a priority for our government right from the very beginning, but you are right, the challenge is still there to convince the rest of Europe that they have got to Bob Geldof: But they are very cynical, arent they, about it? Prime Minister: I think the difficulty with Africa is that in order to convince people that something needs to be done you have to point to the horrors, and there are real horrors. Bob Geldof: Yes, I agree. Prime Minister: And the problem is then you point to the horrors and everyone says after a time, well it is hopeless then, so people dont see that actually in Tanzania, or Mozambique, or Angola for example, or Liberia, or Sierra Leone or many other countries there has been enormous progress. So people kind of think

84

Tony Blair 10

well is it worth it?But I think the other thing in Europe specifically that is changing that the Europeans havent yet really thought through the consequences of this is that Sudan, Somalia, difficulties in Chad as a result of that, think of the issues that are going to land, well they are here now actually on our doorstep in Europe if we dont help those countries sort themselves out. And I think the other problem with the European perspective is that, and this is where I think the Europeans should coordinate strongly with the Americans, if you take the Sudan the truth is it is only ourselves and the Americans that have been really pushing hard the notion of getting tough action on the Sudanese government. It is only tough action, or threatening tough action, that has got any prospect of getting the Sudanese government to change tack. Bob Geldof: But we wont get anywhere because the Chinese, the Russians will block it. Prime Minister: Well I think it is possible to get somewhere but it has been a long process. But I think we are getting to the point now where we will pass a new UN Security Council resolution on Sudan if the Sudanese government dont do this. But I agree, it has been a big battle. So what do you do? You redouble your efforts and you try to bring home to people, as I say, this concept that our own self-interest ultimately is harmed if we dont take in a sense pre-emptive action to stop Africa descending into chaos. Bob Geldof: Why do you think, this is a bit of a soft ball, but it is nonetheless interesting, why do you think this country ran with this issue specifically, you know at every level of society and pushed it? Do you agree that it pushed it through globally? Prime Minister: Yes absolutely, but I think without unduly flattering you, I think I am looking at one of the reasons. Bob Geldof: Well that is what I was trying to get you to say, about time yo u got round to me. Prime Minister: Yes, but I mean there are times when people individually make a real difference and I think this was one of them. Bob Geldof: But I dont mean that, I mean everyone joined in, Band Aid, Live Aid, Live 8, all that Make Poverty History. Prime Minister: Yes but I dont think it could have been done without the Bob Geldof: But politically did you really make them or did people really, I mean your contemporaries in office who are now all moving on, did they really take it seriously, will it get to them, did you have to squeeze and use political capital a lot? Prime Minister: Yes certainly to get the G8 deal at Gleneagles, yes.

85

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Bob Geldof: And will you now, I mean it is the last G8, there is probably mixed emotions about that, but will you have to spend, expend remaining political capital to get Gleneagles still on track at this G8? Prime Minister: Yes I think you will have to keep people up to the mark the whole time and to make the right arguments for them and also to keep that civic society spirit and commitment there. Because I think one of the reasons why we were able to make a big push from here was that we managed to link up with the broader civic movement who also made demands that were realisable and achievable, I mean they were the top end of what was achievable. But part of the problem you often get in politics is that a pressure group will come together and just place a series of demands on government that you kind of, in the end you know you just cant meet them, they are too colossal for what politics will stand. But actually this was at the very outer edge of what was possible, but it was possible, we got the commitment. And I think the interesting thing too is that here in this country, I think partly because people have a keen appreciation of our empire and colonial history, and also in a funny way in Britain people are quite ambivalent actually about the empire, I mean they accept that as a time gone by but they also take a certain amount of pride, I think justifiably, in there were aspects of the British empire that you know were systems put in place that were commendable. And so I think you know there has always been quite a strong link between this country and Africa. I remember when I was younger my father used to go and teach in Sierra Leone at the Freetown University, every year would go and spend some months there. And so I think that those roots also were there and were not there in quite the same way as some of the other colonial powers who just look back on their history of exchange with Africa without a great deal of pride. Bob Geldof: In the past there have been sort of massive movements, civic movements of people. In no way am I comparing it to the anti-slavery movement, but what is kind of different now is this thing that people go on about, the sort of celebrity thing. You have always used, I mean used is the word but I dont mean that, I dont mean exploited, but you have used that. What is that, whats happened now that you have seen, I mean I get the question, I always say well it is a celebritisation of politics rather than the politicisation of celebrities you know. Prime Minister: Well I think the blunt truth is having well known people that people are engaged with and feel they know because they like their music or like their art in some way, they can have an influence on people provided it is done in the right way. I also think there is this which I always say to people when they complain about celebrity getting involved in these issues, I mean what would you prefer, that they didnt? I mean they dont have to. Bob Geldof: Its a bit naff though isnt it?

86

Tony Blair 10

Prime Minister: I dont personally think so provided people do it in the right way and know about it. I mean you have been going to Africa for how long, 20 years? Bob Geldof: 25 years. Prime Minister: 25 years, so it is not as if you Bob Geldof: But I think they accept that, I mean droning on ad nauseam you know, what they dont accept is my music unfortunately, or my shorter friend Prime Minister: But you know whatever there is about it, I mean that is the way the world is today. Bob Geldof: I read a really interesting thing, I cant remember by who, I had to do something last week where I was sort of speculating about this thing, and in a world of mass individualism where there is the status of individualism, cars, commercial goods, clothes is available almost to anyone, the only way to achieve individualism is through celebrity, which I think is Prime Minister: I think the other thing about you know celebrity and so on is that it is just there with us now because there is so much media, there is so much you know everybody has got their favourites. Bob Geldof: Are politicians celebrities now, are you a celebrity? Prime Minister: I think you kind of, the fact that you are so well known and people feel they know you because they have seen you so much, I mean I am under no illusions that when I go to a place and everyone is kind of pleased to see you, it may be nothing to do with that they agree with your politics at all, in fact they may totally disagree with them but you are kind of a well known person. And I think it is just the way the world is and you know people expect to know an awful lot more about people than they ever used to. Bob Geldof: But in a couple of months you will be a celebrity rather than the Prime Minister wont you? Prime Minister: Or a former celebrity Bob Geldof: It is interesting because obviously you arent, I mean I know you enough to know you are not the sort of person who can just do the celeb circuit, I mean you will make a wedge I hope, but beyond that you are quite, I have met a lot of people in your position and you are very comfortable with power which is just as well if you are leader. You know dont you need a job where you can exercise that? Prime Minister: I think you need a life purpose. I always say to people you know some people could perfectly easily say well I am just going to sort of relax, I cant, I mean you either are that type of person or you are not.

87

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Bob Geldof: Sure youre a young man Tony, for Gods sake. Prime Minister: Well I am young enough I certainly hope to be able to do something, you know to have another objective, another purpose after I finish. Bob Geldof: I want to finish though by just like, it has been a short 20 minutes, but if this world that you are now going out into, as opposed to the cloistered world of politics, and I always feel that probably when you get to the top of the gig in democratic politics you are probably very frustrated by the ultimate impotence of democratic power. Has that frustrated you, did you feel that there was a certain impotence, this constant negotiation with everything? Prime Minister: Well there is a constant negotiation with everything. For example you may decide here that you are going to make this or that change in the National Health Service, which I was talking about earlier today. Right, you can decide it but you have then got to negotiate your way through all the obstacles that there are, or we can decide we want Gleneagles to be about Africa. Bob Geldof: Is that the odd frustration and becomes, you feel an impotence and then you are attacked for that? Prime Minister: You feel the limits, not impotence but you feel the limits of what you are able to do. But you have got to get used to that because otherwise you are being ludicrously idealistic about it. And I think within the limits for example of what we could do in relation to the G8, you know I kind of look back on that and think well we had a summit in which Africa dominated the summit and we got everyone signed up to an agreement. And I have sat through numerous G8s in which that didnt happen. Now does that mean that everything that you wanted since then has been done? No, so you carry on negotiating and you carry on driving it. But I think the important thing about politics is in a sense not to let your idealism be driven out by a cynicism that comes from the fact that there are limits to what you can do, on the contrary it is the idealists job to carry on pushing at those limits and that is why as I finish the interesting thing for me is that I am as idealistic as when I first started. Now I may have taken the wrong decisions or the right decisions, I mean leave that to another judgment, but I still believe in the power of politics to change peoples lives and I think the fact that you have to continually negotiate and compromise your way through politics does not mean either that you dont achieve things or that it isnt a worthwhile activity even to be agitating for the right thing being done. Bob Geldof: This world that you are going out into, it is wildly different to 10 years ago. No doubt we count on you, and that is a lot of people who were behind what was achieved on the African issue over the last 10 years, to really nail this G8 and the European Summit, I mean really nail them, whatever is left, whatever ounce of capital political is left this is the one we have to do or else Gleneagles will not be realised by 2010, that is the unfortunate fact. But having said that it is

88

Tony Blair 10

a world which is with regard to things African going to be dominated by America and China, with Europe almost watching on the sidelines. Will you stay engaged and do you fear this new world where Russia is taking the turn that is beginning to be viewed with some apprehension, do you go out into that world with a certain fear and will you be engaged in trying to you know shake that world? Prime Minister: Yes, I mean I want to stay engaged, certainly on Africa but on other things as well. And you know at the G8 this year I will spend whatever capital is left trying to get the right result and then be outside the next one with my placard. Bob Geldof: What songs do you know? They are usually crap songs placard songs. Good luck. Prime Minister: OK, thanks Bob.

89

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Interview with Bertie Ahern and Patrick Kielty

Patrick Kielty: I am Patrick Kielty and today you find me in the Terracotta Room apparently of 10 Downing Street overlooking Horseguards Parade where I have the privilege and pleasure of sitting down to talk to Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Prime Minister Tony Blair about their historic peace deal in Ireland. First things first, Prime Minister thanks for having me. I think we can say it is changed times. The last time anybody called Paddy from Northern Ireland was this close to a sitting Prime Minister in Downing Street I think John Major had the glaziers in for about a week afterwards, so thanks for that. I suppose we are here to talk about how the north was won in essence and it is quite historic for me because I think it is unique in world politics that you have got two sitting Prime Ministers who have been in office for ten years, have been across a process for so long. You have seen everyone off, which I think is unique, they have come and gone, you know from John Hume right the way through to David Trimble. We now have a government up and running, the magic question: How in the name of God did you manage it? Where do we start? Prime Minister: I think we had an opportunity, which is the first thing, you have got to have an opportunity in these things and I think there was something to do, I think this is one of the under-estimated aspects of this, there was something to do with the way that Ireland had changed, the Republic of Ireland had changed, which was very important in terms of you know when I was growing up as a kid you know people in Northern Ireland were kind of, especially from certain parts of the community, would kind of look at the Republic of Ireland and they would say well we dont want to, you know look at its economy and so on and so forth. And I think one thing that happened was as you approached the millennium there was a sense of real change going on in the Republic of Ireland, there was also frankly a new government and in a way a kind of new way of doing things, also coming in after 18 years of the previous government with us. So I think the opportunity was there. I think obviously the fact though, as you rightly say, that myself and the Taoiseach were able both to form a close friendship but also to work at this for ten years that made a difference too so you were able just to keep going. And an important thing about a process like this, I dont know what Bertie thinks about this but certainly what I have learnt is that you have got to keep it going the whole time, never let it stop, even if it is in difficulty never let it stop. Patrick Kielty: Has it sunk in for both of you what you have actually achieved, because I thought, like you guys, that there were many things I would do in my career, but sitting in Downing Street discussing a peace deal between Ian Paisley

90

Tony Blair 11

and Martin McGuinness wasnt one of them. Has it actually sunk in, the magnitude? Taoiseach: Well I think for us we sat together last week watching the business being formalised in a very peaceful, and calm and dignified way. Patrick Kielty: Martin and Ian coming down the stairs and Westlife playing in the background, which of course must have been nice for you Taoiseach? Taoiseach: Definitely, one of their number ones. But it did roll back in our minds all the years, and as the Prime Minister said, just the consistent effort through the ups and downs, and a lot of downs, there is no doubt about that, they probably were swinging the balance of it. But every time we went through a stage and we had another intensive engagement, which was a few times a year, it almost seemed as if it was ongoing but every time we had a few big engagements we did make incremental progress, we didnt get the big step but every time and the consistency we were going forward. Yes we had a few knocks back but I think overall we were always pushing forward. Patrick Kielty: Why chase it in the first place because if you look at any political handbook - stay out of Northern Ireland. Now that is probably Rule No 1 and you know I was born in 1971 so I know no different, most of your adult life you have actually seen this taking place. I think it is fair to say that whenever Bob Geldof and Bono, who are both Irish, decided to solve Africa instead of Ireland that puts in context how difficult it is, so why chase it? Prime Minister: I think that it was because there was a kind of historical opportunity with the changing world, and maybe I was sort of crazily optimistic about it but I just felt it could be, because I thought that the relationship between Britain and Ireland was going to be completely different and because I thought also to have a dispute and conflict of this nature running on through into the 21st century there was something so unbelievably pointless. But of course the other thing was there was leadership in both sides of the community and that was important, one shouldnt under-estimate the impact of David Trimble and then Ian Paisley, of John Hume and Seamus Mallon, of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness of course. Patrick Kielty: Well if you name those people, compromise is a word that is very much banded about when you do a deal like this, but to me I honestly believe, and I am not sure what your opinion on this is, that it is not about compromise, most deals, and especially in Northern Ireland, are about making both sides believe they are getting what they want. Now is that fair on this deal because essentially for me it is keep the map blue and make everything else appear green. Taoiseach: Well I think Patrick there were horrendous difficulties of the past where an enormous amount of people were killed and injured and I think for the island of Ireland, not just Northern Ireland, the idea that we could go on decade after decade, as we did from before you were born, from the late 60s, and just have

91

Advanced Listening & Speaking

that blight on top of us all, including the people of Northern Ireland, was just a disaster. So I think it wasnt did we decide, could we have taken other priorities, from my position and I think from someone on the island of Ireland every day, it beholded us to make an effort to try and change the lives of people and we were lucky, we were lucky that there was a British Prime Minister in office that didnt say you know I think this is a very important issue but I just happen to have 99 others. That was the changing point. And it is a compromise but it wasnt a compromise out of nothing, the reality is why are the parties together today? They are together Patrick Kielty: They both believe they are getting what they want. Taoiseach: No they are not because they have been able to move away from the fields that they were in, the difficulties of intransigence on one side and believing in armed conflict on another. Those issues have been resolved, the underlying issues have been resolved so therefore what divided them was not there, so it wasnt a question of conquer, it wasnt a question of victory or defeat, it was a question of being able to move into a new patch together and I think that is the essence of what has happened. Patrick Kielty: The next stage of this deal, I think one of the things which is important about this is when a process happens very quickly and there is a momentum then you appear to get credit for it. If this deal had been done, the 94 IRA ceasefire, the 98 Good Friday agreement and you guys were doing your lap of honour then, there would be I believe more credit for it than has actually taken place. And do you think because this has dragged out and it has been so start-stop that the public actually appreciate what has been achieved? Prime Minister: I think they kind of do now actually in a way, but I think the point about a process like this is that the agreement that you get at the beginning, in this case the Good Friday agreement, is only a framework, you then need to implement it and you need to be able to, you see you need the time because the division is so great and the distrust is so great, and in some cases the sectarianism Patrick Kielty: Do you think it is about trust, is that what it is? Prime Minister: Yes it is, but it is about in this sense, when you were saying earlier have people got what they want, I think I would put that in a slightly different way, I would say that they are now able to pursue what they want, which is still different, I mean Unionists are still Unionists, Republicans are still Republicans, they are able to pursue what they want but within a framework that seems to them both equal and fair, and I think that is the important thing. Because you are not going to suddenly make Unionists of Republicans or Republicans of Unionists, on the contrary. Patrick Kielty: But at the same time you have Ian sitting down you know serving you tea and biscuits, I am not sure whether they were jaffa cakes, whether they

92

Tony Blair 11

were orange in the middle or not, but it all seemed very cosy with him and Martin last week. You know one of the things I want to ask is how difficult was it to deal with Ian Paisley compared to David Trimble because I always find the problem with free Presbyterians is that they actually have principles, whereas a Catholic will tell you whatever he wants, you know the French, the Italian, the Irish, you know whatever you want to hear we will tell you that in order to do the deal, whereas with Ian it is right or it is wrong, you know they are God-fearing people. So how difficult was it when he was injected into the equation? You are smiling Taoiseach! Taoiseach: Well I am but I dont think we would have found David Trimble or Seamus Mallon or any of the people there easy, I mean I think we have had some of the most horrendous arguments and fights that I think I ever had in politics with some of these people, I dont think anybody would ever easy. Patrick Kielty: Which one? Taoiseach: Well all along the way, but it was all in the balance. I remember spending long nights where it was heated debate and people fighting over things they really believed in. But in fairness to Dr Paisley, in recent years obviously in earlier times he didnt speak to me, he wouldnt shake hands to me, he didnt engage with me and that was his position. But as we moved on and you know as the Prime Minister I think brought around a realisation to him and to his party that we were really going to cement the obstacles as he saw them and that we were making progress, I think he opened up his mind that we could find a real solution. And I would have to say, having said many hard things about him in my political life, and not long ago when I was back at school what I used to think about him, but he has been a rock in the last few years, he has moved forward in a way that has allowed us to bring the underlying principles of the Good Friday Agreement into reality. He is not the only one but he has played his part. Patrick Kielty: OK. John Majors government was the first government, British government, to say that you couldnt defeat the IRA as such. When you cant win a war is that enough reason to sit down and talk? Prime Minister: No, I dont think in itself it is but I think what is sufficient reason is if you can find some common ground of principle. And I think this thing to do with principle and compromise is again a very interesting reflection on this process. Patrick Kielty: How much did you have to compromise yourselves to do this deal? Prime Minister: I think quite a lot at various points, and I would say at the very beginning this was why it was very difficult right at the very beginning, is that people had to compromise because you see the problem is when the divisions go very deep and when the distrust is very great, what happens is that people get into a situation where they wont commit, or they will commit 50% but they are not going to commit the next 50% until they see the other side start committing.

93

Advanced Listening & Speaking

And therefore until you get the space within which that culture of minimum compromise gives way to OK lets start anew, start afresh, you know it is very hard. Patrick Kielty: Well that is not quite what I am getting at. To me it is the case that one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter and as someone who lost his father in Northern Ireland you know Iraq is just IRA with a q on the end. 3,000 people died in Northern Ireland, 3,000 died on September 11, so whenever my father, you know the killers were being released as part of the Good Friday agreement I felt that was a necessary evil, I felt that peace in my country was worth that and so I was happy to see the process move forward. But for a lot of people it wasnt, and what do you think makes those families different from say a family who had someone killed in the tube bombings in London? Prime Minister: But you see this is where I think that you do have to lead people out of this in the end. Look I still talk to people now, and lets be under no dou bt at all you will find people in Northern Ireland and in the Republic who will say everybody has sold out, you know there is no principle at the heart of this. You will still, there were politicians in the recent elections in Northern Ireland running on that basis from both sides actually. But this is where in the end you have to give a lead to people and simply say look there is a basis upon which people can live in peace together here. But I think the interesting thing about this, and it is one of the things that I have come to learn about it, is that principle is absolutely right and it is fundamental to achieving peace, but those who kind of hoard it, you know the concept of principle without opening up to what is necessary to live together and make progress. Patrick Kielty: You are preaching to the converted here. Prime Minister: Yes, but I mean I think it is an interesting, because when you look at different conflicts around the world, not least I think the Palestinian issue, you know there are lessons to be learned from conflict resolution that we have learnt in Northern Ireland. Taoiseach: But I think we always took into account those people who had lost loved ones and what we were trying to do, whatever side that they were from, or if they were from no side, just innocent members of the community, that we had to be sensitive to them because in many cases because of the troubles in Northern Ireland and so many incidents happening there was not full investigation, there was too much pressure on the authorities and the ordinary public had that fierce sense of sadness that continued on far longer maybe after something in another country and we always tried our best to carry them with us and explain our position, but that was always I think one of the difficult things, it was always a difficult thing to do. Patrick Kielty: If you look back to 1973 and there have been a lot of innocent lives lost in Northern Ireland since then, Sunningdale, the deal that was on the table,

94

Tony Blair 11

people would say that that deal was more pro-Unionist than this deal. Why do you think that Ian said no and walked away from that deal and why is he doing the deal now? Prime Minister: Well I think the basic reason for him is and always has been that when it wasnt clear that everyone was committed to the democratic process then there was always a reason to say no. Patrick Kielty: It is back to good Free Presbyterian principles, right and wrong. Prime Minister: Yes and I think to be fair, I think he has had his integrity through this. I think then the question for him, which was a question obviously of leadership for him but for the Unionist community, and I think the length of the time of the process in a way helped this, was well OK if they are prepared to commit to the democratic process, are we prepared to share power? Patrick Kielty: How much does vanity as opposed to legacy come into it? Prime Minister: You are not seriously suggesting politicians are vain in any way Patrick, are you? Patrick Kielty: I wouldnt do it, as someone who works in show business talking to two politicians nothing is further from my mind. I am thinking though when a prize is at stake the first thing I would do if I was walking into negotiate would be you could be the man, you could be the man to change this. And there is a certain pressure of not necessarily vanity but legacy which maybe means that compromise comes a little bit quicker? Taoiseach: Well I dont think we could ever be accused of that since it took us ten full years and as you said at the start yourself, Prime Ministers dont normally have that length of time. So for us it was could we make Northern Ireland better, could we make the island of Ireland better, could we make relationships between Britain and Ireland better, and I think along the way as I said every step of it we tried to make a little bit of progress. I dont think we ever stopped and said well you know because we have made this bit of progress everybody applauding us on the street, because that was never the case because I think people were always saying well why didnt you get more done? So you know for us it was just where we see peace, a satisfaction for us that there were less people being killed, that there were less activities going on, that we were moving away from a dreadful past. They were the satisfaction points, not anything else. Patrick Kielty: Prime Minister you are leaving, Taoiseach you are staying. Now are you wise in the head? Prime Minister: You are looking at him and not me Patrick Kielty: I am looking at him, yes this is a radio broadcast, the listeners can take from it what they want. Because ultimately when you secure a prize this

95

Advanced Listening & Speaking

great is it not a case of taking the curtain call and walking away, because sometimes when you do the right thing it comes back to bite you in the backside and for you particularly I think Scotland devolution, that was something that was a Labour policy which has now kind of come back to haunt you in a way politically from a Labour point of view; from a Fienna Fall point of view you have now created peace and Sinn Fein are now the new gentlemen of Irish politics, do you worry about their influence in the new Ireland ? Taoiseach: No, we in Fianna Fall a long time back as a political party recognised that by bringing Sinn Fein in from the cold and trying to end the armed campaign and bringing peace to Northern Ireland, that that was ultimately going to help Sinn Fein, that was a price we had to pay. And for myself you know I will stay at this, I have fixed the time that I will stay around and I will stay at it as long as that. But for us, I think for Tony Blair and for Bertie Ahern for ten years all we wanted to see, that something that had gone on literally for hundreds of years, that we at least could bring it to this point and hope that it would never go back, we can never be certain but at least we tried to create the circumstances that Northern Ireland for the future will go on to be a normal society with normal politics. Patrick Kielty: OK, very quickly because we have to wrap up. This deal I think is your baby, Taoiseach, are you looking forward to bringing the baby up with Gordon Brown? Taoiseach: We have to continue to make this happen and it will not, I will say this Patrick, whoever is carrying this forward the issue will be that it will have to be tended to carefully, it will not just be allowed to float out there and just happen. It didnt happen by accident and it wont be brought to conclusion, total conclusion, without it being looked after. Patrick Kielty: Prime Minister, any advice for the Taoiseach for working with the new Prime Minister? Prime Minister: No. I am sure he will do it fine, he will do it great, as he has done with me. But he is right in saying it has got to be managed the entire time. And you know the curious thing about these situations is, and I found this when we negotiated the Good Friday agreement when we were locked in that ghastly castle building for days and days, and actually I kind of didnt, after a time the whole thing was sort of surreal in the way the negotiation was happening and I was hardly aware at points that it was this great historic event because it was just meeting, after meeting, after meeting. And actually sometimes the best thing to do, you know when you are very busy like us and you are focused on something like this is you worry in a curious way less about the great sort of history as you do Patrick Kielty: Getting the minutiae right? Prime Minister: Yes and just getting on with it.

96

Tony Blair 11

Patrick Kielty: OK well look I think that is pretty much time, today is not a day for speak bites but I can see a man behind me and I can almost feel a hand of security on my shoulder. So thank you Taoiseach and thank you Prime Minister.

97

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Global Cool podcast transcript

Presenter: Hi. I am Lucio and I was asked to do the 10 Downing Street podcast at the Global Cool reception which they are holding at the moment, nothing to do with Cool Britannia even though there are a few pop stars down here, like Perry Farrell and K T Tunstall, there are actors in the form of Josh Hartnett, leaders of business and industry. So what are they all concerned about and what is Global Cool about? Prime Minister: Good Evening everyone. It is wonderful to have you here in Downing Street and can I say a big thank you to all the organisers of Global Cool, and to say I think this is just a wonderful initiative that I hope will inspire people the world over. It is a big ask, mind you, to get a billion - it is a billion, isnt it? to sign up to making a change in their own lives. And the reason I think this is so important, it is not just obviously the importance of the issue itself and all the recent evidence is that climate change is happening, it is happening very fast, it is having a serious impact already and it will have a far more serious impact in the years to come if we dont take action to reverse its impact, and I am afraid simply keeping the emissions level stable is not going to be enough, we are going to have to reduce them significantly over time. That is going to require very radical action, it is going to require radical action obviously by governments. We have a process under way that we began at our G8 summit in Scotland in 2005 which is called the G8 Plus 5 dialogue and that basically brings together not just the main European countries and America, North America and Japan, but it also involves Brazil, and India, and China - very important, and Mexico and South Africa. And the purpose of that, because that accounts for around about 70% of the emissions, is to try and make sure that in advance of the expiry of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012 we have a framework of agreement to move us forward. And I hope this year under the German Presidency of the G8 and in the G8 Plus 5 we will get an agreement internationally to the principle of a stabilisation goal, to the principle of a cap on (phon) trade system and to major technology transfer which is going to be vital for the poorer countries to be able to grow themselves properly but grow in a sustainable way. So it is a huge programme we have got internationally. Here in this country we will meet our Kyoto targets, we have got a whole set of measures that we are going to be publishing soon in the Climate Change Bill which David Miliband, he is the Minister at the back there, is taking forward. And the final part of the jigsaw, because you have got to do things at an international level and in the end you know we all know without an international agreement this thing wont be done, we need to do things at a national leve l, but as I always say to people actually if we shut down the whole of Britain, which we dont want to do, but if we did the increase in Chinas emissions over the two

98

Tony Blair 12

year period would actually make up the difference. So that is why we need the international agreement. We need however to show leadership at a national level, and incidentally I think there are some interesting things happening in the US at the moment. I think there are a lot of states in the US who are now taking this issue seriously. Britain signed an agreement with California, the state of California, just a short time ago. I think what is interesting is a lot of the Mayors in various American cities are actually getting a good radical agenda on this and finding that, you know because people always worry, you know well everyone says OK we like it in principle but in practice it is going to stop us growing or affect our living standards. Actually people are finding when they are taking radical action as political leaders then they are getting a good response from people. But the final bit of it is the mobilisation of individuals. You know I learnt something through the Make Poverty History campaign, which I know some of you probably were involved in as well, which was a massive civic society effort worldwide to get behind the idea of radical action on Africa. Now in the end it has to be a set of political decisions that are taken, but the one thing for sure is that we would not have taken any of those decisions, we have still got to implement them all, but we would not have taken them had it not been for the fact that there was that great movement of people behind it. And therefore you know Global Cool is really about making sure that we get the same type of individual people, movement as the ballast and the infrastructure if you like, underneath those people who are going to have to take the decisions, but saying yes we want you to take radical action here, in fact we are demanding that you do, and actually if you do that you know it is kind of good for you politically as well, which occasionally politicians think about. So it is a very, very important thing indeed. And really the interesting thing as well is, when we publish some of our proposals in the next few weeks, one of the things that we will be looking at is how we allow people to see what a carbon footprint they have got, and also see that the measures that you are asked to take sometimes are not quite as drastic as people think. You know energy efficient light bulbs, as indeed we have in Downing Street, I hasten to say, can make a big difference. If actually every household in the UK I think has 3 energy efficient light bulbs - is that right David? - 3, then you would be able to make up for all the street lighting in the whole of the UK. So you know there are sort of simple things that we can do and the whole purpose of Global Cool is to mobilise that passion that people have for doing the responsible thing for the environment with a sense you can actually make an impact, you yourself, and you dont just have to wait for others to act, you can act as well and I think it is a great part of creating a global community today. So I would like to thank everyone who has been involved in this and to say how delighted I am to see everyone here in Downing Street, and please, this is a social occasion as well, so have a good look round and see whatever, they have

99

Advanced Listening & Speaking

got the silver out actually, but preferably leave that. And you know from me, through you, to all the people who are organising this, thank you very much indeed. It is a wonderful, wonderful sign that with all the problems and challenges we have in the world there does actually exist the collective will to deal with them. Thank you. Lucio: So Perry, tell us about your new project and song and what people can do if they want to get involved in Global Cool? Perry Farrell: Well they can definitely get on the internet and easily find Global Cool on the internet once they are there. These guys, I am inspired by them. I will give you an example of what they do that inspires me. When a private citizen goes on to Global Cool they have operators standing by. You just let them know how you expend your energy and your bills and they will try to re-adjust and reconfigure the way that you expend your energy. They will save you money, you will be going green, you will be saving the planet from global warming and saving yourself money. That is just one of the little things. Presenter: So you have had from the Prime Minister Tony Blair and Perry Farrell on this podcast so far. Coming up we are going to speak to K T Tunstall and also find out what Hollywood A-lister Josh Hartnett is doing at Downing Street. K T Tunstall, people have basically got to go to the Global Cool website, they are hoping to get a billion people to sign up to this. K T Tunstall: Yes. Presenter: That is going to be quite a lot of work. K T Tunstall: It is a lot of work, but you know how many people log on to Myspace, how many people log on to websites and how global gigs, and podcasts, and websites are now and it is not unusual for one website to have millions and millions, if not hundreds of millions of members. So it is possible, it is possible. But basically the idea is that as an average westerner from an industrialised culture, we pump out 15 tons of carbon each per year, the idea is to get a billion people to reduce that by 1 ton and thus over the next 10 years reduce output by 10 tons. At the moment we are putting out 26.5 billion tons a year, so it is a massive problem, but literally changing your light bulbs to energy efficient light bulbs you will cover a ton. That is all you need to do, there is more that you could do but that would do it. Lucio: The Prime Minister said that you know if Britain was to switch off in two years time, China would have replaced all our carbon dioxide. It is not really that fair though for us in the west to kind of look down on countries like India and China that want to give their citizens the same standard of living that we get and tell them maybe they shouldnt do it, in the way that we do.

100

Tony Blair 12

K T Tunstall: Well I think you have said it, you have hit the nail on the head. We cannot be condescending, we cannot be patronising and we have to understand that if they have the option to industrialise with fossil fuel and it is cheaper and quicker, why wouldnt they? So that is why it is so important to inform people about that and make sure that there is a more inviting opportunity for them to invest in renewable energy. I am about to say something very interesting which is I am going to green my crib, Global Cool are going to come round to my house, I am about to totally renovate my little flat up in north west London and I am going to get solar panels, and I am going to get green efficient appliances and use non-toxic things. You can now like use sheeps wool as insulation, the stuff that the knitters dont use, you can put in the wall. So it is really exciting the amount of stuff, and the other thing is keeping it fun, it is a massive and very you know ultimately quite depressing issue, but you know if you go to a festival, the feeling you get of having a communicative you know inspiring experience, at Glastonbury for example, 120,000 other people, it is such a buzz, and if we could actually do something with this many people I think we would all find the new drug really. Lucio: Josh, welcome to Downing Street. Josh Hartnett: Thank you. Lucio: Now tell us about Global Cool and tell us about your involvement with it. Josh Hartnett: I have been looking for some environmental agency that could actually effect real change that I thought had a shot at actually making a big difference, and these guys, their policy, the way that they are working is I think astronomical, they are working in all different areas of raising funds, and creating awareness, and working with politicians, working with actors, working with whoever they can to get the word out. And I just think it is a real shot that these guys could make a major difference in the way you know in our current environment and the way that we live in the next few years. Lucio: We always hear a lot about America and American politicians not really pulling their weight, especially in Europe, we like kind of look down on you guys with regard to the environment. Josh Hartnett: Well I am not an American politician. Lucio: Are political attitudes in the States changing do you think towards the environment, towards carbon emissions, do you think your fellow country people are taking it more seriously now? Josh Hartnett: Well I dont think it was ever the people of the country that had a problem with making a change, I think it was always a political issue on the highest level. And you can see now that states like California, and states like Minnesota, are making change in their policy and without having to rely on the federal government to do anything, because we had to kind of by-pass the federal government. Right now we have got an administration that doesnt believe

101

Advanced Listening & Speaking

that there is a problem, or if they do they are not changing policy. So state by state we are changing, you know the people are making the change, and that is what Global Cool is about, it is about people making the change. Lucio: And what changes have you made or are you planning to make? Josh Hartnett: Personally? Lucio: Yes. Josh Hartnett: Well I drive a hybrid car when I am home, otherwise I walk because I live in New York. I unplug everything these days now that I am working with these guys, because I didnt realise that so many of the products that we use have a standby and are constantly sucking energy out of the walls. I didnt realise that, I thought if it was off, it was off, and that is something that I just learned. I grew up in a very environmentally conscious family so the changes that I have made have been minimal but I think have been effective because I have always been on that anyway. Lucio: David Miliband, what do you make of Global Cool, do you think that really the beautiful planet is dependent on individuals, politicians and business working together, is it achievable? David Miliband: Well the short answer to that is yes, the future does depend on government, business and individuals, and yes it is achievable. But I am personally encouraged by the way in which people are following the science, the science says this is an urgent problem and I see people in government, in business and movements like this among the population at large saying we have really got to get to grips with the problem. Lucio: A lot that we hear about at the moment is about China and India and other countries that are developing and their carbon output. We cant really stop these countries wanting to achieve the standard of living that we in the west have, can we? David Miliband: I think that is absolutely right. For a country like India, where I was last week, 350 million people living on less than a dollar a day, we cant say to them you have got a choice, either you develop or you help protect the environment. Development is a non-negotiable. What we can say to them though is you can either have a high carbon path to development, which is threatening to you and to us, or a low carbon path to development which can help all of us battle this global problem of climate change, and that low carbon path to development, that choice of hydro-electric power, of solar power, of wind power, of wave power is feasible if we in the industrialised world are willing to help finance it, and that is what we have got to do. Lucio: Do you think that industry will accept being taxed on carbon, or will accept the real cost of carbons?

102

Tony Blair 12

David Miliband: Well I think that it is self-defeating to pollute in the way that we have for the last 150 years and believe it has no economic or environmental cost. It clearly has that cost and I think that putting a price on carbon is absolutely essential to making sure that we dont cheat ourselves of our future. And that is why I think the businesses that succeed in the future will be those that do anticipate this revolution and get ahead of it, and I think there are great British opportunities in this to make sure that we are ahead of the game, not behind it. Lucio: Prime Minister, what do you think Global Cool can achieve and why did you invite them to Downing Street? Prime Minister: I think what Global Cool can achieve is to say to people you can make a contribution too, you know governments have got to act, countries have got to act, the international community has got to come together and find an agreement and in the end that is the only solution that works. But individuals can help by doing something themselves, but also by being part of a movement like Global Cool which will kind of mobilise people in the same way that Make Poverty History mobilised people. So that is what I think the big benefit of it is. Lucio: I am Lucio that is pretty much it from our podcast at the Global Cool reception here at Downing Street. If you want to sign up for the campaign you can get it at: www.global-cool.com. They are after a billion people to sign up and individually make a difference to change the planet.

103

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Eddie Izzard Podcast

Eddie Izzard: Hi. My name is Eddie Izzard and this is a podcast where I am going to go to Brussels for the European Council and to try and find out what sort of goes on there and maybe talk to one or two people. I have been told that I probably wont be able to get to talk to Heads of Government, or advisors, or whatever because they are all running about doing business and they dont want to talk to me because I am just an idiot comedian. But anyway this is what we are going to try and do, I am going to try and talk, I should be able to talk to Tony Blair so I hopefully can illuminate, put into my kind of words what goes on with the European Council, what people are doing over there, and so this is the podcast of that. So I am now sitting in a Ford Extender, it is a people carrier, that is what it is, and you would expect it to be a big glamorous car that was going woh, woh, woh, woh, but it is not really, there is no woh woh in this. Right, this is the noise, I am now at RAF Northolt and just getting out of the car. There is the sound of a jet plane in the background, it is probably the plane we are getting on. Oh, dont forget my bag. Thank you very much. So we have come in a very, very flashy Ford and I am going to get on the plane in a minute. Morning, Afternoon. Oh, it is quiet in here, in an ante-chamber. Now I am going straight out the door, it is like the gap between the last bit and this bit is about two seconds because we were not supposed to have gone in that room. Eventually we will be in Europe and this podcast will make sense. So I am on the plane, Airforce One, our Airforce One, which is kind of bijou, a little bit bijou, no Jacuzzi, no shower, no big bedroom, kind of nice you know but kind of just a little bit squishy. Anyway so we are just waiting for a certain Prime Minister to turn up. Very interesting. We are now watching the RAF ground staff and they are instructing the car with the Prime Minister to come to a halt, oh but he has come to a halt somewhere else. Kuh, wouldnt you know. OK, so now you have got Tony Blair here coming up the stairs, getting into the aeroplane. Prime Minister: Eddie, how are you doing? Eddie Izzard: Hello, how are you? Prime Minister: I am fine. How are you? Eddie Izzard: Have you just had lunch?

104

Tony Blair 13

Prime Minister: Yes. Eddie Izzard: Good to see you. I am doing a podcast. Prime Minister: So what happens then? Eddie Izzard: I dont know, I am just saying that we are in a plane and we are going to take off, we have been waiting for you. Prime Minister: I am sorry about that. Eddie Izzard: No, it proves you are real. So we are going to Brussels. There are four of these a year, yes, these meetings? Prime Minister: Yes. There is absolutely necessarily two, but there are usually four now. Eddie Izzard: And it is the 25 headed monster? Prime Minister: That is right, soon to become 27. Eddie Izzard: Yes, I am looking at that, I keep looking on the BBC website. You dont do websites, I know, but the BBC website, which is designed to be impartial, very good stuff on Europe by the way, and Austria is just coming to the end of their thing and they are going to hand over to someone else. Prime Minister: To Finland. Eddie Izzard: So a six months rotating thingy, and this is the Council of Europe, not the European Council, yes? Prime Minister: No, this is the European Council. Eddie Izzard: This is the European Council, not the Council of Europe. And there is a Council of Europe and the European Council and they are different, and it is crazy. I mean why couldnt they call one Steen (phon) or something, the European Council and the Council of Steen. Dont you think, isnt that crazy? Prime Minister: The one you need to worry about is the European Council because that is where the leaders turn up. Eddie Izzard: The European Council Prime Minister: It is not that the Council of Europe is not immensely important Eddie Izzard: There is not a huge amount of stuff to discuss today, and there is football.

105

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: The last time I was at, at the last World Cup there was a European Council going on. Eddie Izzard: this one. Prime Minister: Well it happens usually in June you see, so you usually do find that it overlaps. But I remember at the time because every so often, you know for some reason though it went on for two or three days, which is longer than normal, and the leaders would go out of the room, you know go and watch, and then they would come back crestfallen or they would come back pleased. Eddie Izzard: OK, We are now on the plane, just coming into land in Brussels. Oh there is a little castle there. We are about 50 foot off the ground, and there is the control tower that looks like it has gone stingray, and we are going to touch down in three seconds, two seconds, one second. A very long second, there we go. So we have landed in Bruxelles. So we are just taxiing round now and I have just realised there is a Republic of Poland plane, and there is a Lithuanian Airlines plane, and there is a Romania plane, and these are all the guys, they must be all the Heads of State. What is that on that side? We have got the Spanish plane, we have got the Deutsche plane, the German plane. What is that one next to it - the French plane, Francais, the Hellenic, that is the Greece plane, the Grecian plane, the Portuguese plane, the United States of America, there is an American plane. Are the Americans here? Maybe the Americans got lost. Right, we are getting off now. Noisy as hell. That is the sound of getting off the aeroplane. So I am travelling with the PM it seems, and we are getting into a gorgeous, gorgeous big long bus with Quality Comfort written on the side. We are now in a lift, we are in a lift in the European Council. It is an exciting lift. God it jumps the floors, that went 20 - 35, 50, tall buildings. Participant: And number 70.

Eddie Izzard: Oh really? So we are now on Floor 70 which is three floors up. So but you have to walk fast here. Got out of that car, Ive been running around the corner. Does everyone have their own room? Deutschland, yes the United Kingdom. This looks very Belgian. I am looking at a fantastic view of bits of concrete. Official: So this is a red pass which gets you into what is called the Red Zone, where only very important people, Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers can go. Eddie Izzard: A VVIP pass. Official: You will be surprised how many VVIPs there are.

106

Tony Blair 13

Eddie Izzard: We are now in the European Council room, which I dont think I am supposed to be in. Official: Hello. Eddie Izzard: Yes, we are doing a podcast at No 10, a No 10 podcast, so I shouldnt really be doing this but I am just coming in to have a look, just in oral terms, and then we will have to go. Talking to the Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett now. And now we are going. To recap, I was just in the European Council rooms, a great big oval room, it is oh about the size of squash court with less roof, maybe two squash courts, maybe a tennis court, it is about the size of a tennis court with no net, a big oval table and just Heads of Government and Foreign Secretaries go in there, and then there are loads of translators and so I snuck in there and just had a word, I said hello to Margaret Beckett, you didnt even hear her on the tape because I was holding this tape recorder to my chest and it looked like, you dont want to think what it looked like. So there were security people looking at me like grab him, hit him with sticks. So anyway I am out now and a Dutchman I may say has followed me up, he is just following me around, and he has gone in for a chat with Tony Blair, he has just gone into a room to have a chat, and meanwhile football is in the other room and I am missing the game so I am going back to the football now. of the England-Trinidad and Tobago game, in Dutch. the Dutch Prime Minister just popping in to see the United Kingdom Prime Minister, they are just going into a room, it is sort of a small room and they are going to have a chat, and they are having a chat because they want to have a chat about stuff. So that is chat in the background. They speak very good English. Oh how can I do this We have just won, we have just won. I would like to feel we have won the World Cup, but not quite yet. Right, so we are now just waiting, all the Heads of Government are lining up and doing a big photograph which is called in the parlance of politics the family photo. I think it is more like a school photo. Does anyone know this, has any leader ever gone from one end of the back row and just run all the way round to the other end? That is the Dutch Prime Minister. They have finished the family photo. We are going to talk to the Dutch Prime Minister, OK we are going to talk to the Dutch Prime Minister because he was upstairs talking to Tony at the time when we won our two goals, well not two goals, scored our two goals against Trinidad and Tobago. So now we are we will talk to the Dutch Prime Minister. Can I ask you a couple of questions because you were in earlier I am a comedian but I am just talking about what is going on here because people in Britain, and probably people in the Netherlands as well are wondering what

107

Advanced Listening & Speaking

exactly happens. But you were in talking with Prime Minister Blair and the football match was on in the background. Is it easy to do politics and watch football at the same time? Mr Balkenende: Of course it is not easy but the interesting thing is that when I entered the room it was nil-nil and I could see the disappointed faces, and then I talked just a minute with Tony Blair and then suddenly there was the first goal for the British team, so the whole atmosphere changed. And that was really great to be there as part of it. Eddie Izzard: And so once the atmosphere changed could you get what you wanted to get out of him? Mr Balkenende: Well in any case let us say the effect it was of that goal at that moment, that was good for our discussion. Eddie Izzard: And did you discuss what is going to happen if you both get to the final? Are you going to allow England to win the World Cup? Mr Balkenende: We will have that discussion later I think. At this moment we are both happy with the beautiful goal. Eddie Izzard: Absolutely, OK, thanks. And good luck tomorrow Right, so that was the Dutch Prime Minister, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, and now they are going to go and eat so I am going to go and grab something to eat and then I am going to go back and do sleeping. OK, it is Friday morning, up early, which is earlier than I wanted it to be because there is an hours difference and it kills you. Anyway, so I got up early and I have been working away on this article about this, which is going in the Guardian Saturday, so it is probably online somewhere. So that has taken a bit of time. And everyone is in the Council room doing their stuff, so we cant actually get to talk to anyone because I crept in last night, I cant creep in again. So we have just heard that the conclusions have been agreed, everyone has agreed stuff and they are heading out of here and there is going to be a press conference, so we are now going down and Tone, the Prime Minister is going to give a press conference at the doors and then we are just going to run out and jump in cars and run away. I think that is what is going to happen. Prime Minister: We have left open what is the right way forward. There is no doubt at all that Europe is going to have to change its rules because we have gone from being a Union of 15 to a Union of 25, and then 27, and then with other countries coming in, perhaps the Balkan states in the future, Europe needs new rules. But what form those rules will take, I think that is an open question and we are right to reflect on that and in the meantime get on with the things like illegal people trafficking, and energy policy, and economic reform and progress that I think probably most citizens of Europe worry about more.

108

Tony Blair 13

Eddie Izzard: We are just standing in the doorway here and Tony Blair is doing a final, what do they call it, they call it a doorstep I think, a quick sort of chat to the press to say what went on. You can probably hear him talking in the background, and I am just trying to sum up here. I am just going to walk out the door and then there is just craziness outside the door with motorbikes and cars, and as soon as he stops talking, everything moves very fast, it is a crazy fast moving thing, which is understandable. And there are people around me who are pointing and things, and obviously stuff is happening, and no-one quite knows, I cant quite be sure, there are people with green passes, and blue passes, and yellow passes, a lot of security. I feel like I should get out of the way of where I am. We are going. OK, we are leaving, this is the noise of leaving. So everyone runs and jumps into cars now, and then we drive with screaming blaring noises all over the place. checklist here at the front of the plane. Sit right up in the cockpit here. The engine is going up, power going on, and now they whack it on full power. We are going along about 100 knots, 120, 140 knots. Take-off. And is it still fun to go in a convoy? Prime Minister: Some of the countries that you go to have a really amazing way of doing these convoys. Actually the British bikes are the best that there are. Eddie Izzard: The British bike riders who zoom ahead? Prime Minister: Yes. The trouble is, because you are kind of cutting through all the traffic and of course everyone else late so it is not great. Eddie Izzard: But I have heard in other countries they just block off whole roads. Prime Minister: Yes they do sometimes. Eddie Izzard: So we dont do that in Britain, we actually have outriders who go ahead. Prime Minister: I think. Eddie Izzard: It must be fun being a bike rider, wouldnt it? Prime Minister: Our bikes are fantastic, our police bikes are amazing. Eddie Izzard: It was interesting on the football thing. I dont know if I said this yesterday, I think that you have to, I think the citizens of Britain would expect you to do politics here because you know it is taxpayers money, and also watch the football at the same time. I dont know about the Scottish and the Welsh, they are not care about it, but the English citizens certainly would, so I suppose you have to do both at the same time.

109

Advanced Listening & Speaking

Prime Minister: Yes, and you can. I mean I had to miss some of the match because there was one of the discussions that was crucial we had to be there, and my first priority has got to be to do the job that you are supposed to do, as much as I would to watch football. Eddie Izzard: I understand that. The Dutch Prime Minister went into that room with you and then suddenly when he came out we had won 2-nil change in the dealmaking when we score goals? Prime Minister: I was actually, that is right because I had to see the Dutch Prime Minister because we are trying to get an agreement on something together, and he came in right in the middle of the football, just before Peter Crouch scored. So I was watching the screen and negotiation at the same time. Eddie Izzard: And does it change your way of confident about negotiating once we have scored a couple of goals. Prime Minister: Yes, you kind of feel more relaxed about everything. Edide Izzard: On a serious, vaguely serious thing, does stuff get done at these European Council meetings? Prime Minister: Yes. I mean you prepare a lot before the meeting, nobody just walks into the meeting without masses of work done beforehand, so you reach certain conclusions. For example what we did about the constitutional treaty, or things to do with regulations, managed migration and so on, so there were a whole series of things from that perspective. But then you have got the issue of the other conversations you have in the margins, or the corridors as people call it. So basically in a summit like that I will probably speak to 8 or 9 different leaders, talking about different issues that I may have with their country. So it is an opportunity where you kind of cut the deals you need to, or get the understandings you require. For example I had breakfast this morning with the German Chancellor, so that gives you a chance to go through the of the things that are important. Eddie Izzard: You have done a whole bunch of these European Councils. I think this one was quite easy comparatively, nothing huge to go on. Prime Minister: Yes it was, yes. Eddie Izzard: Have there been hellish ones? Prime Minister: Yes. Eddie Izzard: What is it? I have read there are people in the corridors haranguing people and saying change your mind. You know is it like school, is it just like a high powered school?

110

Tony Blair 13

Prime Minister: No, it is not like that at all, it is like any very, very tough high powered negotiation, which is what it is, but it is better to negotiate than fight, which is what we used to do before. Eddie Izzard: Yes, I know. Prime Minister: Of course because you are also dealing with countries interests and sometimes the interests clash and then the question is how you find a way through. You know some people go into the sort of Brussels cauldron and they get sort of irritated or depressed by the constant negotiation and haggling and all the rest of it, but my attitude to it is it is just part of the way you do business internationally today.

Eddie Izzard: So, in conclusion, what have I learnt? I have learnt something, I have learnt that everyone who goes to the European Council, there is a lot of hard work, there is a lot of running about, there is a lot of sorting things out in meetings, people to get together, there is a lot of boring bits, there is a lot of translation of stuff into 20 languages I believe it is. Everyone seems to work pretty damned hard. It is very tiring, but I think it works. So I like it, you know this is a good and positive thing, yes. So if you want to read more about this stuff, people say there is not enough information, there is tons of information, maybe too much information, you can go back with the information. The BBC site is very good, you can look up stuff there about Europe, and there is a government site, they are all going to be linked on this. So anyway thanks for listening and I hope it has been vaguely illuminating.

111