17/09/2016 Dateline London

Hello and welcome to Dateline London.

Could the US presidential election get any less inspiring?

Syria, and outside intervention in the Middle East.

Jeremy Corbyn is a week away from possibly being confirmed

as leader of the Labour Party - but with what consequences?

My guests today are: Thomas Kielinger of Die Welt,

Owen Jones of the Guardian, Mina al Oraibi, who is a writer

and broadcaster on Arab affairs, and Henry Chu of Variety.

Hillary Clinton is Sick Hillary, according to Trump supporters -

too ill to be President of the United States.

Donald Trump, Dodgy Donald to Clinton supporters,

is the Pinocchio of American politics, telling lies so often

that his nose is as long as the Mexican border.

Add to the mix leaked emails, allegedly hacked by Russians,

and this year's US presidential election at times is like

In the country of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan, why

are there so few truly inspiring ideals in this campaign -

How do you view it as someone outside the United States, but an

American? It is a big morass, no doubt, and part of that is the tone

that the campaigns have set, particularly the Trump campaign. In

the primaries, his MoD has been to disparage, coming up with belittling

nicknames and that kind of thing. We'll is a need to be careful when

we talk about inspiring, because whether we like it or not, Trump has

inspired a particular segment of society, those who have felt

themselves left behind, let down by previous administrations. He's doing

it with perhaps very inarticulate ideals and the easy slogan of making

America great again. But there is inspiration happening. On the other

hand, you have Hillary, someone who I think does have ideals when it

comes to the welfare of children and health care, but who fails to

inspire. So putting those two things together, inspiring and ideals, is

where we have fallen short in this campaign. Also, one of the problem

is that Europeans have, if you look at Reagan, he was treated like an

idiot cowboy, which he was not. He had a simple message - get big

government of your back, and it connected. Reagan and George W Bush

were in a completely different ballpark to Donald Trump. His

election would be one of the biggest disasters for the Western world

since World War II. You have the ultra-right movement, who are just

white supremacists. Then you have working class Americans whose wages

have fallen or stagnated for decades, and they have been

neglected by both the Democratic and Republican administrations and feel

aggrieved by free trade agreements which have not benefited their

communities and caused massive deindustrialisation. With Clinton,

you are loathed to be critical, not that I will tilt the US presidential

election either way! But Donald Trump should be a walkover, and he

clearly is not, and that is because Hillary Clinton is a bad candidate.

There is a reason a self-described Jewish senator, a set joined as

dairy man ran her so close. -- septuagenarian. That is the problem,

she doesn't inspire, because she is seen as very establishment and very

close to corporate America. Her opponent fails to inspire

African-Americans, so she does inspire a certain constituency. But

nonetheless, the fact that she is failing to galvanise younger voters

in particular, if Donald Trump wins, it could be because of her failure

to turn out Democratic voters while Donald Trump infuses his own base.

Also, people have no Hillary Clinton for so long. It is hard to be

inspiring when you have been around for decades. Donald Trump was known

in certain circles, but he was not a well-known figure in politics. But

those close to Hillary Clinton or who find her appealing do find her

inspiring. Not to say that she is a character is like that, but when she

does more interaction with ordinary people, they like. The problem is

that she has been around for so long and secondly, she has been staged

for so long. She has been in the public eye for so long. Shell is the

wrong word, but she almost has this image that she cannot connect with

ordinary people. These elections are not inspiring. And nobody is

presenting proper policies that people can rally around. Build a

wall? Exactly! Actually, Hillary's campaign does have detailed

policies, but they seem wonky shine they don't seem to have an inspiring

message at the core. They can sound very incremental. Polls have shown

that when Hillary was Secretary of State, she was an inspiring figure.

People thought she was striking a blow for women and she performed

well in that role. I think this comes down to sexism in some ways.

When she is a candidate, it is another thing. She is a staged

managed person, partly because she has been around for so long and

secondly because in American policy-making, unless you are

stage-managed the way she is, you cannot project yourself into

mainstream America. That gives rise to the profile of Trump. It is the

same with Jeremy Corbyn. He speaks to the ordinary. So you have this

strange idea of Trump, who is in many ways bizarre, but he seems to

be talking the regular language of the regular guy. And you have this

stage-managed woman who has been around for decades and is

overexposed. One of the things we heard in our Brexit campaign,

Michael Gove seven the British people are fed up of experts. One of

the adjusting things about Hillary Clinton is that her expertise is

being used as a club to beat her with. And Donald Trump's lack of

expertise is one of his big selling points. If you think of any other

field of human endeavour, you wouldn't go to a dentist without

dentistry experience. You wouldn't get in a plane with someone who had

never flown a plane before. But you would vote for a president somebody

who is untainted by politics, which suggests a bigger malaise than

anything we have touched on. There is a form of populism sweeping the

western world, going in different directions, left and right. With

Donald Trump and similar right-wing demagogues, it is a case of opposing

immigration, but also the aloof liberal elite. It is the oldest

trick in the book, the plutocrat who claims to be antiestablishment, that

America has been driven into the ground by these liberal

intellectuals who don't understand real people. What is astonishing is

that there has been a lot of sexism thrown at Hillary Clinton, but she

is dishonest. She said she got shot at by sniper fire in Bosnia, and the

e-mails as well. Then again, Donald Trump, different standards apply.

Yesterday, you could just set his tweets! Is a different standards

apply, but if you want to expose the dishonesty of a candidate, having

someone like Hillary Clinton is not ideal. It was a major mistake to

call the people on the other side a basket of deplorables, even if they

are racist and homophobes. Talking about ordinary people like that

suggests the disconnection that Trump can put his finger on.

Exactly, disconnection and the idea that there is a lack of respect for

the other side's opinion, lumping them all together. Anybody who gets

voted in has a different group of coalitions behind them. So the idea

that Hillary would throw them all together is deplorable, it shows

firstly arrogance and secondly a real disconnect from why people

would even think of voting for Trump. I agree with one, it baffles

me that somebody with inherited wealth who has used the system in

the worst ways possible can be seen as standing up for the people who

have been abused by the system. On the other hand, you have Clinton's

disregard for these people, or apparent disregard, and also the

image of, if you can't fix the system, it and start from scratch.

That is almost what Trump is saying he will do. There is an interesting

thing about the deplorables comment. Although it might sound like a

mistake to us, it was also a way to focus ire on those who are

supporting Trump and spouting deplorable things. And bringing up

to the forefront. The problem is, it is not clear... Anyone who supports

Donald Trump could be a deplorable. It is like what Mitt Romney did. He

said 46% of Americans will never win over, because there are dependent on

the state. Even if she says only one section deplorables, any Trump voter

might think, she's thinking me. That's the worst aspect of the

election campaign. It applies to Britain too. The Brexit people think

the Remainders were deplorable, and vice versa. We have a deep cleavage

in modern society. And how the American republic will heal itself

after the abuse which one side hurled at the other will be

something to watch. If it can. Let's move on.

British MPs reported this week that David Cameron's military

intervention in Libya created a failed state hovering

The Chilcot report analysed how intervention in Iraq was a disaster

But does Syria make the opposite case?

Is indecisive dithering in inter-Arab conflicts just

as likely to lead to bloodshed as botched military adventures?

My suggestion here is that Western governments are damned if they do

and damned if they don't. What are you doing about Bosnia, Syria? Then

if you do something, what are you doing about Libya? We remember what

people said about Benghazi. Intervention doesn't work. What is

the right thing for Western governments to do, to ignore these

things? Firstly, each country is completely different from the other.

If only it were so easy to say that there is one cookie cutter model of

how to deal with the Arab world or the Middle East, which there clearly

is not. People forget that Iraq was a completely different game to what

happened in Libya and Syria. To say that intervention in Syria was

wrong, yes, but what happened after intervention, it was like people

forgot that Libya had happened and we see where it is today. The same

with Iraq. Each is a different scenario. Secondly, it sounds like

stating the obvious, but these are complex problems that need complex

strategies. It isn't a matter of sending in boots on the ground or

not. There is Western intervention in Syria today. There are troops on

the ground, whether they are British or American special forces. There

are weapons from different countries, so there is outside

intervention. Worse than that, there is Russian and Iranian support that

has allowed Assad's regime to slaughter his own people. In 2005,

the world signed up to the responsibility to protect people

when they are being slaughtered by their own leader. If the world wants

to say there is no responsibility, that is one thing. But to give

expectation, speeches have been made to the Syrian opposition saying, we

will support you. The most infamous issue was this issue of the red line

and leading people -- leaving people to their own fate. Intervention

continues because there is a strategic interest for Western

countries intervening, and we can't deny that it is not out of

humanitarianism. If Western countries are getting involved, they

have the responsibility to remain committed, and that is not what we

saw in Syria or Iraq. In Iraq, things changed. In 2009, it was

beginning to steady. There was a change of attitude towards Iraq

that, we can leave it as it is, and a political disengagement which in

some ways is more dangerous and disengagement. I suspect people will

agree generally with the point that they are all different. If you are

going to get engaged, you have to do it with a proper plan beyond just

bombing people. You have to stay committed. But the degree of

commitment we see by Western powers in Syria is not sufficient to end

the conflict. So you have to have a commitment which is diplomatic,

whether big powers get together and finally resolve not to let it

fester. You have no unifying force on the ground, like you had in the

old days of camp David, where there was manic MPEG in and said that who

were willing to make peace. Nothing like that at the moment. So you have

a lack of leaders on the ground. You have a lack of ultimate resolution

of the big powers. So the commitment, while it is there, is

half-hearted. On Libya, it is easy to stick the boot into David

Cameron. Here is another example of his disastrous legacy. But almost

every member of Parliament voted for that war. The entire British media

supported it, and if you opposed it, you were portrayed as an appeaser of

a regime that the Western powers had recently been cosying up to. The

reality of that war is firstly, there was the talk of an attack

imminently on Benghazi. The House of Commons stated that that was

overstated. Secondly, that was within 24 hours of the air strikes.

The whole mandate for the air strikes evolved into a regime

change. And the consequences of that were attacks on black Africans,

which are not spoken about enough, the destabilisation of neighbouring

Mali, the rise of Isis, the disintegration of a state with the

biggest oil reserves in Africa, with only 6 million people, which should

be a prosperous and healthy society, and the West is utterly complicit in

that. Not just David Cameron, but in terms of what happened. It is a

lesson to be learned. Of course you can't compare all of these

situations, but we do have interventions and I find it

alarming, the Orwellian approach we have had to Syria, where we bomb one

side one year and another side the other year. Now we are going to

coordinate strikes with Russia, who have killed more Syrians than Isis.

Indeed, what you said about Benghazi was contained within the report. But

you can't do history in two separate ways and said, this is what happens

if we intervene and this is what happens if we don't. If we didn't

intervene in Benghazi and people had been slaughtered, there would be

another Commons inquiry to say, why did we let Bosnia happen again on

the doorstep of Europe? What is important is what happens

afterwards. So we did intervene. There was the no-fly zone and the

rest of it. As Mina pointed out, we then left it to its own devices and

left a power vacuum which collapsed. With Syria, it is a proxy war. It is

no longer about interests that are purely on the ground in that

country. And if you think that is bad, wait until relations with Saudi

Arabia and Iran get even worse, which is something we will have to

discuss later. Let's move on. Jeremy Corbyn, we are told, is very

likely to be re-elected leader If that happens, what

are the consequences? And given the shambles

within the party, is it very unlikely that Labour could win

the next general election, You are a strong supporter of the

party, but if you look at Owen Smith and Jeremy Corbyn, you would have to

say the chances of either of them becoming Prime Minister are slim. If

members had felt Owen Smith was more likely to become Prime Minister,

they would have voted for him. I am presuming they haven't by an

overwhelming margin. I like Owen Smith. He has come in for a lot of

attack during this campaign. There is a bitter divide within the Labour

Party which has manifested itself in ugly ways. But with Owen Smith, he

has proposed to overturn the EU referendum to stay within the

European Union. He ruled out joining Europe on the Schengen agreement. If

you go around marginal constituencies and start selling

that, that is probably more electorally toxic than anything

Jeremy Corbyn could be accused of doing. Now, what has to happen is

that there has to be give and take. The MPs have to accept the

democratic verdict of the membership. They have to accept more

say in terms of policies from the membership. But the leadership has

to give. That means may be allowing a portion of the Shadow Cabinet to

be elected, so the Parliamentary Labour Party can have some of their

own people in who they have confidence in. No talk of mandatory

deselections, because that would cause chaos. If you get boundaries

redrawn, you would have to do that anyway. At the moment, existing MPs

would have a claim if the new constituency is mostly the old one.

But the leadership has to have a strategy that reaches out to the

electorate. That means older voters who have been turning away from

Labour, self-employed people, middle-income voters. And people who

voted Tory. Indeed, and people who voted for the Green Party or SNP or

Ukip. The centre-left is crumbling everywhere in different directions,

so there is no easy solution, but they can come up with a coherent

strategy. I wonder if the Republican party is in a worse situation than

the Labour Party or if you can't decide. If the election were held

tomorrow, I do feel we would not see Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister, but

the election is not until 2020, according to the system. Let's not

forget that between now and then, supposedly the Brexit negotiations

should be completed and who knows where the country will be in 2019?

If bad things start happening, I don't think it will come down just

two who is occupying that bench on the other side. It may be that the

country has gone to pot economically. The Conservative Party

has internal difficulties as well, so who knows? In terms of Corbyn and

Smith connecting with people outside the Labour Party after a very

internal struggle, it is if many people just don't care. Owen's

question about a strategy, the problem with Corbyn is that he has

the Momentum movement behind him, which puts him on a pedestal like a

charismatic leader. And I think he replaces his personality image with

the strategy. He doesn't seem to be concerned about what happens with

the rest of society. I don't think that is fair. Momentum has been

maligned as a new militant. I know Militant because my father was in

it. The reality is that Momentum is a grassroots Democratic

organisation. You might think they are naive, but the way they are

portrayed as being these kind of aggressive revolutionaries who want

to nationalise your mother... Sun for non-UK viewers who are not

attuned to what is going on in British politics, one thing is that

you have political parties that are breaking apart, where leadership is

almost the popular strand. Do we like this person? But actually,

where our political parties going and how can elections be won at a

time when the 2-party system is so fragmented and it isn't a two party

system any more in the UK? It will be interesting to see who can win

elections. We saw the last election. We were all guessing what a hung

parliament would look like, and the Tories got a majority. So it is much

deeper than the Labour Party leadership contest. Owen, if some of

these differences are fundamentally irreconcilable, we know all parties

are coalitions, but it has been so bitter and personal and in terms of

summons of the Parliamentary Labour Party, some have said, I can't work

with you, Jeremy Corbyn, because I don't think you have got a hope.

That is difficult to solve. But it has to be solved, because they can't

split. The electoral system of Britain doesn't allow that. I have

heard it said that Labour like a couple where all the love has gone,

but they can't afford a separate flat, so they are stuck together.

The truth is, across the western world, the old social Democratic

parties are crumbling, leaving a vacuum which is being filled by new

movements on the left like Syriza in Greece, the Austrian Greens, or new

movements on the right like the National Front in France. And in

Sweden, there are new movements of the xenophobic right. In Britain,

because of our electoral system, we have the rise of the new left which

has not happened. That is what makes it unique. In Spain, the labour

equivalent collapsed in support. Part of that support has gone to pot

the mosque, but in Britain it happens within one party -- Podemos.

Part of it is that the Momentum people, I bring them up again

because they are a populist movement, they are fighting a war

against their own parliamentary representatives. I don't think that

is true. There is a sense that Jeremy Corbyn doesn't sufficiently

recognise the legitimacy of the members of Parliament of his own

party. He always plays of the support he has the grassroots

against his own party members in parliament. Unless he gets to accept

the legitimacy those accepted to Parliament, he has a problem uniting

the party. What would you do if you were him if you knew your members of

Parliament were hostile to you and you had a massive democratic

mandate? Talk to them. I agree, and he needs to reach out. Reach out and

ask the party to select the frontbenchers. They could not do all

of them because they would be surrounded by a hostile Shadow

Cabinet. He has to show the olive branch to his members of Parliament,

because there is a civil war going on in the party which he is largely

responsible for. There is a talk of a coup, it was not a clue, it was a

legitimate party rebellion. There are lots of problems with the Labour

leadership and I have happily gone into them over the last few weeks

and been criticised for doing so. But that was a time of national

crisis when the focus should have been on the Conservatives. And it

has not produced any results above from further acrimony. We have a

week to wait for the results of that. And we have the presidential

election coming up. Thank you all very much.

That's it for Dateline London for this week.

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The atmosphere through its tantrums yesterday. We have cleared the

thunderstorms, cleared the air and pitched