02/04/2016 Dateline London

Hello and welcome to Dateline London.

This week, the woes of David Cameron and the winning

My guests this week are Annalisa Piras,

who is an Italian journalist and film maker.

John Fisher Burns of the New York Times and Rachel Shabi

who's a writer on Middle East affairs.

David Cameron, enjoying the sun in Lanzarote,

had to break off his Easter break to take charge of the Government's

response to what could be the end of large scale steel

It comes amid a litany of woes including doubts over Britain's

nuclear power future, if there is one, the European Union

referendum and the simmering rebellion against his leadership

How much trouble is Cameron in and can he save steel

The Steelers story is quite extraordinary. It is and it works on

so many different levels. It is a massive challenge because for all

the talk of him being this great, expedient pragmatist, he is quite

ideological when it comes to intervening, active government in

that he is against that. When Gordon Brown reluctantly nationalised a

couple of the banks during the 2007 and 2008 crisis. He was in

opposition then and he rushed out and said this is a return to the

1970s, government shouldn't intervene. That is when a lot of

people on the right were calling for nationalisation of the banks. Now he

has a dilemma. He hasn't got an industrial strategy. His Business

Secretary is against an industrial strategy. At the same time, you have

got China offering the add these vastly reduced prices. The instinct

of this government is that you cannot buck the market but the

market is wrecked. America is protectionist. It puts up tariffs

without hesitation. China is doing the same and will continue to do the

same with speed if it is produced here. So they have got to reconsider

their approach that you cannot buck the market and they have to work out

if they need an industrial strategy or not and they do need one and they

have to work of the relationship with China. George Osborne spends

half his life in China. He did a deal with nuclear power. He was

there recently doing various trade deals with great pride. It is not

reciprocated. China have said in the context of this crisis that they

will put up tariffs against EU Steve being imported. They are in a sort

of political crisis because this is a drama being played out every day

on the front pages of the newspapers. It is also an

ideological crisis. They have got to think about what their attitude

toward the state is in the context of intervening in industries. They

haven't really had to think about it since the banking crisis when they

were very much on the sort of you cannot buck the market, do not

intervene when they were in opposition. I am fascinated by this

idea because we have heard it for 35 years. The Washington consensus,

have you run an economy says the same thing. You do find that the

greatest capitalist power is doing precisely that by 266% tariffs on

steel imports into the United States. Where does Britain fit in

given that nationalisation is not an option. This is an interesting point

about not being able to buck the market because that only applies to

certain industries and certain markets. The new liberal argument is

very much about supporting and into raging certain kinds of markets

while allowing others to weather and there are two things going on. With

Cameron and his government, on one level, there is the self-inflicted

party eating itself because of the EU, the debate between people who

want to stay and people who want to leave and that is interesting to the

Westminster circuit but not big on that. There is a more important than

play out and the steam crisis has highlighted that which is

increasingly this government has an ideology and it is dedicated to an

ideology and it is seen as cruel and out of touch. You could say it came

to a head with George Osborne's budget where there was this

disproportionate and inexplicable and slightly creepy obsession with

punishing disabled people and it was quite clear that that was at the

expense of giving tax breaks to keep more wealthy in society. Then there

is his adherence to this obsession with the deficit, the target he

keeps missing. Every sensible economist says what would you do

that? Nobody needs to do that. It is completely ideological that he is

fixated on it and unnecessary. On top of that, this issue with an

industry that will affect 40,000 people directly. Hundreds of

thousands more entire communities. This complete disregard for that, as

though those people matter less, as though we do not need to pay

attention to that, that is starting to come to before and people are

thinking, this government doesn't care. The part about not bucking the

market that is obvious is that there is word overproduction of steam,

there is a recession and you could spend a tonne of money propping up

an industry which might in the end of field because, to put it at its

most brutal, steep production in Britain is not the way the British

economy is built and that is terrible for anybody in Port Talbot

listening but that is one argument. Absolutely and that is sad on the

human side. Some that exposes the cruel nature of this government

because, let's face it, this is not happening overnight, the trade war

between Europe and China has been going on for months and months and

we know we have evidence that the government, this Conservative

government, has voted against some form of protection that the EU was

trying to put in place on the mantle of America. Britain voted against it

and was leading the countries that voted against it. We have a number

of things here. We have the increasing evident nature of not

caring for part of the economy by the British government which is

getting more exposed. I feel we are going back to the idea of the Tory

party as the nasty party and they worked hard to get rid of that but

it is coming through again because it is what they are doing and the

contradictions and short termism of the David Cameron government. Do you

think the government has any action available? I am uncomfortable with

blaming the Tory party for lack of government action to forestall this

or mitigated because the lack of an industrial policy, as you describe

it, can be traced back at least to the Blair administration and really

do governments of the last 35 or 40 years of both parties. I reflect on

the ironies. When I was growing up in this country in the 1950s, the

declining years of the Empire, it would have been unthinkable for our

leaders to go cap in hand, petitioning to Bombay, Mumbai or

China. Now, we have so far run down our national industries that we go

as petitioners to the leaders of China and the leaders of India and

we look at an industrial landscape which has been blasted by the lack

of support and imaginative government policy and we have lost

almost all of our major industries. Which other major Western power can

that be said to be true? It is a dilemma. It is not that this

government is cruel or uncaring. That is a symptom. It might be a

consequence but it would be absurd to say that is part of their

thinking, we do not care about it. They are in agony is this weekend

about what to do and it is a dilemma in the sense that for the short

term, anyway, this plant, if it remains open, will be producing

speed no one can afford to buy because it is cheaply available via

the overproduction, deliberate overproduction, in China. Let's be

frank, it is common in the short term at least, a dilemma. As you

suggest, there has been no long-term thinking about British industrial

policy since 1979, or before that. That is partly in reaction to the

70s. Government shouldn't pick winners, markets should, that is the

thinking. In the United States, the Bush administration, you talked

about ideology, the Bush administration build out the car

industry. Not just the banks. Other governments which have a professed

ideology are quite happy to be more pragmatic when lots and lots of jobs

in Michigan and elsewhere are up for grabs. That is the real question,

whether this government will do the same for this industry. That is what

is interesting about this debate. It is not just this government, it is a

whole liberal doctrine that was back to Thatcher and passes through

player until they get to Cameron. It is not just this government but what

is interesting is that we might see a parrot and chip doing that a lot

of people are sent, hang on, this doctrine of yours that we cannot

interfere, but the market is best, it needs to do something, is going

to devastate and ravaged communities unnecessarily, affordably. Are there

alternatives to this mantra, this paradigms that you have been shoving

down our throats for 30 years? The conversation has shifted. We are

talking about alternatives. It cannot have escaped the notice of Mr

Cameron and Mr Osborne and the Business Secretary that all of the

sudden Jeremy Corbyn has seemed to be loony on economic matters but he

was able to sound credible on the need to rescue communities, on the

need to look at various options, including proportional or short-term

nationalisation. The fact is that, even as an instinctive free

marketeer, that there are tools available to this government and to

the Blair and Brown governments to use to help save our state industry

and other industries that they didn't use. There has been a massive

overreaction in the UK to what happened in the 1970s where

governments did subsidise some industries who produced things no

one wanted and as a result they have been scared to do anything. They

would intervene in any way at all. There was one brief exception, an

interesting one, when Peter Mandelson, and culture, ultra-new

Labour Blairite became president of the portrait as it was known then,

the Business Secretary, toward the end of the Labour government, he had

been in Europe for a long time and seen how other European countries

that have industrial policies, did pick winners, in inverted commas,

and briefly tried to do the same but he was only around for about ten

minutes before losing the job. He recognised them. Then Business

Secretary was Vince Cable. He was a social democratic Liberal Democrat.

He tried to do it as well but faced resistance. The current government

has downgraded any of that because they don't believe in it. This is

challenging that instinct, I think, in a way that will be interesting to

see how it plays out. It plays into the European debate in plenty of

ways but one issue raised about the EU debate and British membership is

the idea of sovereignty and when faced with massive world economic

factors, globalised trade, would trade organisation, I wonder what

degree of sovereignty and ignition actually has. That is a very

important point. If you want to rise above the British debate, this

proves that a country of 60 million like Britain cannot take on China.

But neither can the EU... The EU is the richest market in the world. 500

billion with an organised, central way of negotiating and making deals

with China. It has leverage. But they have 2 degrees and they don't.

This case is interesting because Europe was trying to do something

and was blocked by Britain. It was trying to protect British workers

and it was blocked by an ideological reticence. Now, which is even more

paradoxical, with Britain would like to do would make Brussels seem

socialist because it couldn't help the steelworkers ought the plant

because it would violate the free trade agreement to end the ban on

state aid. Italy is currently under investigation from the commission

and Italy is a model for Jeremy Corbyn because the Italian

government tried to help its own industry, it's Stephen makers, the

biggest in Europe, and they are being blocked by the European

Commission because it would be illegal. There are other things that

show how we are all interconnected and the idea of Brexit really

doesn't make much sense. We will not do Brexit this week.

Donald Trump goes from strength to strength, opining on everything

from criminalising women who have abortions to a future US foreign

policy which, shall we say, sounds somewhat robust.

Why has he come so far and could he end up in the White

Why did you think he has come so far? I think for those of us and I

can't speak for all of this, I think, you find him brute and rather

frightening in his pronouncements during the election campaign. It is

important to look beyond that to the constituencies to which he is

appealing. Anybody who has travelled to America can understand why there

are large sections of what we would call their working class and their

middle-class, at least they're lower middle class, who feared alienating

and angry. I do not think there are numerous enough to put him in the

White House. The numerous enough to sustain him through to the

Republican nomination, but to me the interesting question is, what would

a Democratic president, Hillary Clinton in all likelihood, or any

successor President do that will relieve that widespread sense of

alienation and anger that you find in the United States and you find it

almost everywhere but particularly in the increasingly impoverished

working-class and lower middle-class who have seen for 40 years or more

almost no advance, in fact quite the opposite, in their standard of

living. There are some people who say the American middle class, this

great engine of growth from the 1950s onwards that the American

modernity is finished. The idea that if you work hard, do the right

thing, you can make it in America, the land of opportunity. For tens of

millions of people, that is over. Yes and I think the elites who have

held the levers of power for the last 40 or 50 years have something

to answer for in this respect. How much do they care or think about

from their privileged theories in the upper east side and west side of

Manhattan where Bel air or where ever they are about what is

happening in Indiana? You haven't been there and I am sure we could

add 40 or 50 cities where the degree of devastation, of

deindustrialisation and sheer poverty and despair is frightening

when you consider that this is measured to be the richest country

on earth. This hollowing out of the middle class, the feeling that we

are all in this together is what we are told, but actually some people

are more in it than others. That is worldwide, at least in developed

countries, isn't it? The rage against the elites which is a

natural consequence of the decline in living standards and the economic

decline of the West is a common problem. In America, Italy, Europe

we have not really started to address what that means for our

democracies, for our politics, because what we are seeing now and

Italy has been a pioneer in this, is the triumph of populism, the Triumph

of the man who is anti-establishment. We have had

Berlusconi in Italy. He looks very much like Trump. He embodied this

rage against politicians, against the establishment and the

possibility of dreaming the stub of dreaming you could become a

billionaire. If you were only honest and pathetic and truthful, you will

somehow change this trend of things that are making people increasingly

angry and desperate. Does it work when people think the system itself

is corrupt? If people think the politics of Italy is clap, but these

dreadful parties, some are in cahoots with the Mafia, you need a

strong man, and it is always a man, above politics, something different

and I cannot keep bothered because I have a lot of money, that is the

theme. That is the reason why it happened before. It was a complete

disillusionment and mistrust of the political class. The root causes are

the decline of the standard of living and the decline of western

economies. That brings us back again to China. What is happening in the

world? It is an entire change of paradigms and we need to address

what this creates in terms of politics and how it is changing our

politics. What worries me about whether Trump can become resident is

the idea that it turns out that even though his chances of being

nominated by the Republican party have taken a dip in the last week

because of all the stuff he said in the last week, some of which he has

reversed because it seems too outlandish even for him, but the

party said about women who have abortions needing to be punished,

what he said about the relationship with Nato, the fact that he was

Japan and South Korea to develop their own nuclear capacity, the fact

is prepared to drop nuclear weapons on Europe and the Middle East has

caused a drop in the likelihood of them being nominated by his party.

What worries me is that we might be in some kind of dystopian reality

where the light of Trump never ends because he gave an interview to Fox

News to be released tomorrow in which he said that even if they

didn't nominate him he might still stand. He might stand as a

third-party candidate, in which case he is not going away. As the editor

of Private eye said, as a citizen I am appalled that as the editor of

Acer to recoup magazine, I am delighted. -- the editor of a

satirical magazine. It taps into something genuine which you can

Robin, Golden Dawn, it is anger about politics as usual because it

has gone wrong for many others. People feel detached and

disconnected and frightened. I think we have all underestimated the

effect of the 2008 crash. That is part of the context. Not of a lot of

editors write leaders saying it was a fleeting moment of great

significance. Look at what has happened politically since then. We

have experienced Trump here in the sense that two years ago Ukip won a

national election here. They came top of the poll in the European

elections saying the same kind of thing. We can protect our borders

against immigrants in the same way he is going to build a wall

splitting Mexico off. Offering the same kind of theoretical security in

this insecure world. The reason why I don't think he will become

president, even if he stands as an independent is, in the end, the

level of scrutiny you get in that situation makes it very difficult.

The important thing this week was abortion. He changed his mind within

24 hours, panicking at the reaction. Having changed his mind from being

pro-choice in the past. Yes, three changes of mind. When that happens,

this apparently personification of total security and authority starts

to fall apart when you start making these statements of the roof and

changing your mind. The spell he casts over a frightened, insecure

part of that American Electric start to go as well. We need to look

beyond. We can all indulge ourselves with fury and this may at the weight

Trump is behaving and speaking but we need to look beyond Trump because

I think we will come in November, be looking beyond Trump. There will be

a new president. It is overwhelmingly likely to be Hillary

Clinton. But we, in the West, led by the United States need to readdress

some of the basics of our economic and social policy and inevitably we

are going to have to look to some of the old gods of community, tribe,

nation, the discredited gods because the gods of globalisation and

secularisation seem to be feeling. When we look at the debate over

Europe in this country or at the Trump phenomena in the United

States. People are looking for greater security and they are

looking toward the old certainties and somehow or other we had to take

care of that and one of the aspects will be economic policies which are

more protective of our communities, particularly in this country, the

industrial community. I just wondered if you felt that this is

the Republican party bringing this up on themselves. They have been

very negative throughout the Obama presidency, posing issues is fine,

but because of the paralysis, the system doesn't seem to work and

Trump is an extension of that kind of situation. There is a case to be

made for that but it is too narrow to blame the Republican Party and

you could equally make a case against the Democrats who have held

power in the White House and in Congress for long periods of time.

They both represent the elites and that is what the anger is against.

That is the Bernie Sanders thing as well. They have cost more inequality

than has ever been in the Western world in these rich countries and

that is part of the anger. It seems to meet the media has something to

answer for. Absolutely. The fact that you are not taking Bernie

Sanders seriously is symptomatic of that. We have at there. That is good

for this week. We are back next week.

You can of course comment on the programme on