09/10/2016 Dateline London

Hello, and welcome to Dateline London.

Theresa May talks of capturing the centre ground in Britain

The UN envoy on Syria wants to escort al-Qaeda-linked fighters

out of Aleppo while Antonio Guterres, the former

Portuguese Prime Minister, looks set to become the next UN

My guests today are Eunice Goes, who is a Portuguese writer.

Jef McAllister, who is an American writer and broadcaster.

And Steve Richards, who is a British political commentator.

On the right of British politics, the party which created the climate

for Brexit, Ukip, has fallen into chaos,

while the Prime Minister Theresa May has moved to out-Ukip Ukip

by promising a tough line on European Union negotiations,

immigration controls and a better deal for those who feel let down

And how does any of that square with her intention of securing

the middle ground of British politics?

She has two weak opponents, the Labour Party and Ukip

in trouble, she seems to want to take over both.

I thought it was a very politically astute performance from Theresa May

Almost everyone in the UK, like in many parts of the world,

It seems to me it is a meaningless term, increasingly meaningless

in the fractious, factualised politics we have everywhere,

But what she did cleverly, she was known as a Remain figure,

albeit a reluctant Remainer, in the referendum campaign.

She had to convince her party that she would deliver Brexit,

They were ecstatic with excitement at her Brexit promises.

And also try to frame a wider message about her politics.

She talked in a way that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown never did

But Brexit looms, and talking to people in that conference over

the last few days, and others, it is clear to me that it will be

I think the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, is extremely worried

about when she triggers Article 50, what that will do to the pound.

Turbulence and fluctuations are the kind of words she is using.

She gave one opening speech at the Conference where she stated,

frankly, the obvious on Brexit, and the pound fell.

Some people think that Britain dropped from being the fifth biggest

economy to the sixth during the course of that speech.

And there was nothing revelatory or alarming.

And this big reform bill she announced was a logistic

inevitability, which she cleverly turned into a sign

That was the easy bit, and it is already difficult,

In terms of political choreography, it was brilliant and got

There was one other stand-out bit for many people in the week,

Marc, which was the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, saying that foreign

firms will have to tell us who their foreign workers are.

Apparently at the LSE some academics have been told that

if you were foreign-born, you cannot work advising

How do you think that will go down in the rest of Europe and elsewhere?

If Theresa May goes on and on to say she is not racist or xenophobic,

Everyone knows it is not right that the foreigners are taking

British jobs, they take them because the British

So by attacking and creating a climate of xenophobia and racism

she antagonises the people she needs to get a clean Brexit,

Merkel and Hollande this week said that Britain will be harshly

And it puts people who have lived here a long time,

Europeans like me, into real discomfort to live in a country

which was known for fair play, courtesy and tolerance,

which is now becoming a nasty country with the nasty party back.

The nasty party is creating a really nasty atmosphere across the country,

rising racist and xenophobic attacks across the country,

And some figures in the Labour Party say that it is perfectly reasonable

Actually, it is not natural to be worried about immigration and blame

immigration and migrants for all sorts of problems.

Most countries are worried, the Greeks and the Germans are,

but it is the role of responsible parties like the Conservative Party

and the Labour Party and some other parties to talk responsibly.

This has been going on for ten years, every time they talk high

on immigration, they just move the tone a few notches up.

Do we need to wear armbands or badges saying we are migrant

The comments of Amber Rudd are a licence for really racist

Steve sees this as within the narrow frames of what she has to do

within her party, good politics, but maybe not good statesmanship?

It gets her through the night, in a way.

I think it was very clever - she is the new face,

she has an appeal to the shires, she seems reasonable.

She is playing the Sanders/Trump card, populism on the spending -

we will now spend on social programmes again, which gets

a different swathe of the Labour and the Conservative voters.

It might buy her some time with the choppy Brexit waters.

But I don't think they have any idea how they will get through Brexit.

It is a mess, all the incentives for Europe are to be harsh and say

no, otherwise the European project falls apart if Britain gets

Britain needs Europe much more than Europe needs Britain.

3% of EU GDP is exported to Britain, 12% of UK GDP is exported to Europe.

This myth that you can easily walk away with what you want

without having to give something back is just not true.

Once the negotiation starts, Europe will have most of the cards,

but at the moment I think the UK Government thinks it will.

Some people were saying that the pound will

To make one point on immigration, one of the problems she has,

and people like the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, I think she is quite

But the referendum happened, and they can't ignore it.

There is no doubt that immigration was one of the issues

I think Theresa May is not that devious a figure,

although she played some clever games last week,

that she has to deliver the referendum, there is no doubt

that one of the issues was immigration.

If that means we are out of the single market,

What I find interesting, of course, immigration means out of the single

market, out of the single market means the pound and customs problems

The lack of preparation of the British Government is crass.

The Foreign Secretary has said, oh, I will help Turkey

What leverage would he have to help Turkey?

Do they provoke xenophobic acts against the British working

Jaguar's sales are down, apparently, in Europe,

because nobody wants to buy British cars anymore.

It is not xenophobia, that is a reasonable economic

I think there will be that pulling apart.

From my point of view, I am an American living in this

country, I have lived here for a long time.

I like the sense of Britain as an open country where I believe

that migration has been beneficial to the economy.

There is another wider point, which is internal.

For now, her speech was very astute and captured not the centre ground,

And also an economic policy, thinking already

Those MPs that created a lot of trouble for David Cameron

when he tried to be a compassionate Conservative, what do

Mrs May is a great supporter of taxation, she says

The state having a role, what will they say?

When they start to realise what it means, they will rebel.

The Conservative Party is the most undisciplined and rebellious party

This programme would be a slightly poorer place if we did not allow

people who are not British citizens to take part!

The person in line to become the United Nations' next

Secretary-General is the former Portuguese Prime Minister

And how can the United Nations, or any organisation,

rise to the 21st century challenges of Syria,

He is a socialist, Catholic, a former Prime Minister of Portugal,

he was the Prime Minister who took Portugal to the single currency.

For ten years he was the UN High Commissioner for refugees.

Where he has done a good job, according to voluntary

organisations, all the NGOs, in making the case for

He is his own man, he will not be bossed by anyone.

I think he would be a tremendous UN Secretary-General.

It is a tremendous job, but what a basket of problems.

Aleppo, Syria, the UN talking about perhaps escorting Al-Qaeda

We have to think about what is the job of the UN Secretary-General.

It is not God, it does not have power.

But it will have the ability to agenda-set problems,

it will have the ability to nudge countries to address certain issues.

Guterres has previously told the Americans they have to do more

about refugees, to support some countries to acquire independence.

He is the outspoken statesman that the UN needs.

Somebody who campaigned for refugees, human rights,

I think he has the ability and the profile to put the UN again

in the centre stage as an important actor in the world stage.

It is then up to the big powers of the Security Council

to do their jobs and to be less obstructive.

But I think he will do as much as he can to point them

Could he get the Americans and the Russians to kiss and make up

after the terrible things going on, including the allegations of hacking

This is the fundamental structural problem of the UN building

Unless the Security Council members really want to do business together,

the UN obviously can't find out a way to make them do it.

In the early Clinton era, when Russia seemed like it wanted

to join the world system in a constructive way, and China,

you could see the UN began to get momentum.

But Iraq, terrorism and everything else has made this all

I don't see anything for Putin to give up his current spoiler role.

He will not be a big power in the old Soviet Union sense,

but he is riding high at home because it looks like he is doing

He gets advantage by racking up elections in Ukraine

I would say that the choice the Americans make in a month

is probably more important for where the world order gains

or loses than the selection of the UN Secretary-General.

One hopes it will come out, I hope, with Hillary Clinton,

who believes in international institutions, development

Trump is expressing this Zeitgeist where we retreat into ourselves,

Donald Trump is not the only one saying that international

institutions are suspect, the EU, the UN, the World Bank, the IMF are

all going through difficult times, as is globalisation.

The problem of the UN, it is a 1945 Cold War institution.

The Security Council is blocking everything.

Since then sometimes Europe is at a disadvantage.

The solution is not there for Syria.

The solution for Syria is the new American administration.

The weak point of Putin is the economy, the Russian economy is

The only thing outside of the UN is for Europe to

Clearly the power lies in the presidential

election in the United States, not the UN.

That agenda setting without power is part of the mix at the moment.

The US under Obama found no way through in Syria.

He sounds great, let's hope he can make some kind of

contribution in an otherwise nightmarish situation.

Steve has brilliantly linked this into the

How far do his latest observations about women change the US

presidential campaign when similar comments in the past seem

In some cases he has been Teflon Trump, whatever your taste, people

who like him like him, people who don't like him don't like him.

Have I summed up the American presidential election? Very good.

But there are swing voters, people who have not made up their minds,

unbelievably, somehow, at this late stage.

It is not just the sexism, it is the crassness of the

I can do anything I want with them because I'm a star,

talking about grabbing women in their private parts

A Trump supporter on the radio said, we knew he was a womaniser,

it is ten years ago, do we care?

One of the interesting things about this campaign

we can do it, but temperament often gets through to viewers on

television, which is how many of us make up our minds.

The last debate which Hillary and Trump did, I think,

establish that he did not have much to say,

he is not a reader, he is not one for policies.

She kept bothering him with obvious softballs that he could not

Whether this next debate on Sunday, where it is a town hall

meeting and he has to talk to voters asking strange questions,

it requires a kind of maturity and gravitas, that is what has worked in

the past, a certain ability to connect.

You have to be able to take blows and keep moving.

I think it favours her rather than him.

He says he will attack about Bill Clinton

and the sex life and how Hillary has been behind

I think people will be pretty sick of it.

This antiestablishment, anti-elite feeling...

He said what he truly believes and feels, he is one like us.

And plenty of people will see themselves in Donald Trump,

Let's hope that some of those floating voters were truly

appalled by these comments, so that he was not fit for the office.

But it is probably just polarising opinion.

Those that are with him applaud him,

those against him were disgusted.

He said "These comments do not reflect who I am."

I agree with what everyone has said, but the problem is that we have been

completely surprised by the result of Brexit,

This presidential election is still very open.

To his supporters, it will not make any difference.

Let's hope it will make a difference on the floating voters.

We need a strong president at a time of a

particularly difficult situation and lots of problems.

It would not be a surprise if he were to poll in reality better

Because the opinion polls are ridiculed in every country.

The opinion polls in France are not even taken seriously.

They have shown their ineffectiveness in every election,

The very voters Mr Trump might appeal to,

particularly those thinking of leaning towards,

might not want to say that to a stranger?

I have never yet met a Frenchman who would vote for her,

If any serious Cabinet member who was 59 years old when he said

it, not a 14-year-old boy, 59 years old,

not that it would be right, a 14-year-old boy

saying it, actually, but it would be the end.

Like you, I would not be surprised if anything happens now

after the recent months in terms of elections.

But I can't see at the very least how this helps him.

You would have thought that amongst floating voters,

perhaps amongst his core support, good old Donald,

But surely those floating voters who have not come

this is exactly what we are looking for?

I can't see the mental process of a floating voter which turns

to him on the basis of anything that has

happened since that first televised debate.

In other words, in a close race it seems that in the last

couple of weeks the momentum, as far as it could be measured,

and this will contribute to it.

But I would say nothing surprises me any more.

I am interested in the constitutional mechanics.

We have seen the House Speaker, and the most

powerful Republican in the country, basically distancing himself,

disinviting Mr Trump from something this weekend.

We have seen another Republican from the west of the

Do you think that the party would like to somehow get rid

Is there any mechanism for that happening,

He can quit, but I can't and so what happens at this

The Republican National Committee has to meet and find a

replacement candidate, but whether that means that it is a state

process to get on a ballot, whether it means you can automatically

parachute in any Republican, I don't think so.

I don't think they want to get rid of him. They have made their

bed, they have done that with him since the beginning. He has done

unbelievable, outrageous things for a huge amount of time. He has said

things no American politician has ever got away with saying. He is

racist, he says a judge born in this country is Mexican because he is

against him in a court case, he called for

the assassination of Hillary Clinton.

But the Republicans have made their peace and will continue

to. Some people might say it is terrible, but they will not pull

Aside from this crass thing, we should not forget that Trump is also

the result of this anger of the impoverished middle class after the

financial crisis, globalisation, with the jobs are leaving. We have

Trump is a result of the Tea Party movement

and a big shift to the right of the party. The big line-up of Republican

candidates, one slightly more to the left of Trump than the other. They

are extremely right-wing. He is one-of-a-kind, but not so terribly

He is responsive to a certain climate created by

globalisation and the fear of it, the fear of foreigners...

It is all part of a pattern, post-2008.

We had to take into account that something had to be done...

That Hillary Clinton is seen as the inside

candidate, 25 years in Washington or whatever. Every single thing that

would in the past be seen as a plus, experience, I have done this

job and that, it is now a big negative to some people.

Like with Brexit, all the former and existing

Prime Ministers backed Brexit, they were thinking of having a rally

with all of them, which in 1975 when there was a European referendum

would have helped the pro-case, but they decided to scrap it because

they thought it would be so counter-productive, because they

As long as politics is juxtaposed between

insiders and outsiders, it is in a very dangerous place.

We are moving towards an anti-democratic culture,

where to be seen to be on the outside is seen as an asset, the

Where politicians fight each other, like

they did in the European Parliament, two Ukip MEPs, that is the type of

anti-elite politics that we will get if this continues.

We have about 30 seconds left. You do a one-man

comedy show, I don't think you can compete, to be quite honest, with

You just convey we are literally all at it, that is enough to

keep you in the theatre for eight hours!

On that happy note I would like to thank the guests and the three

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We are back next week at the same time.