 Mae'n gweithio, amser, a gweithio yn gyffredinol y ffianfwng i gael y parlymynau Scottish i gael y ffaith o Politych. Mi feddym Kenny Farkerson. Rwy'n gweithio'n cyllideb yn y Cymru o'r newid yn y gwaith yn Scotland. Mae'r cyllideb yw'r ysgolfodd yn gweithio'r politych yn y gweithio'r ysgolfoddd, ac mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mewn cwmhysgol, mae'n cwmhysgol yw'n gweithio gydag i chi i gyd i gydag i chi uncaf panelau ar unrhyw cynnig o ddweud y mewn ddechrau. Rwy'n credu ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o'r schedule. Rwy'n gweithio i chi i chi i chi. Rwy'n gweithio ar y dyfodol, rwy'n gweithio ar y ddweud, y ddych chi'n gwneud y glenn, rwy'n gweithio ar y ddweud. unsiwn iawn i chi. Yn du'r phir Llyfrgell, nawr mae'r hynny yn ei ffrindio o wahanol o'r Maesffol Llyfrgell. Mae'r ffrindio yn ei ffrindio yn maesffol. Dw i ni'n gwneud mai'r meddwl. Dwi wedi gwneud i ffrindio i chi ac yw archifolio. Rwy a'r ffrindio diddiogol! Ff неc eich ei wneud i chi. Yn wneud i chi, dwi'n nhw'n gwneudio'n ddiogel. Iech chi gen i gwneud i chi. Ond wedyn yn fan hyn maeswar i'r ffrindio i chi, of our panel. So today we have, on my left you're right, Professor Peter Jackson, Peter's chair in global security at the University of Glasgow. He's also Executive Director of the Scottish Council on Global Affairs. Very interesting new organisation. He's taught in many universities including Cambridge, Yale, Strath Clide and the Sir Bonn. mae'n edrych yn y ddiweddol yn y gyrwm yn y ffild o ddynodau ymwneud, i'r ddiweddol yn y gallu ddynodau a'r ddylchau. Dan ydym yn y ddodwch, mae'r ddynodau o'r prosiwf oedd i'r politiwn i'r ffrân oedd, roedd maen nhw'n grinogi, oedd iawn i'w raddolaeth i Lleidwyr ar gymyo, ac yn fglwyd wrthwng populidol. Mae ydy'r beiddoedd ymdilygedr yw'r drwng llwyr Rhaidysol. Mae'r raddolaeth ddy changgwent ymdilygedr. A yn fan byw, dr Samantha Mae yn yr ymdilygedr ym eich bod yn ystafell ar gyfer ymgyrchu a'r relasiadau ynghylch i'r Un Berlin. Mae'r edrych yn arddangos chi oedd wirddurysu'n traditionally, oed i'r llwyr chyrwchio i'r lleydd, sydd yn cael ei wneud o'r ffraeg yn sicr ac mae'r gwahau'r gweithio'r ffraeg yn ei ddweud yn ymweld y lleidio'r rhai o'r religiwn, ymgyrchol, ymgyrchol, efallai yn y cwestiynau ymgyrchol ysgolol. Felly, dwy'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Felly, rwy'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio, yw'n gweithio'r gweithio, a gyda'r rhywbeth, ac ydych yn fawr o'r clerwysu o ysgrifennu am yr hyn o'r amser. Ym nifru yw'r cymryd yw'r llyfr? Rwy'n ysgrifennu fydd y rhai panlwys ymddir yw'r cyfgrifennu o'r cyfeirio eich parwysgol. Dwi'n ymddir yn fath i ddweudio'r cyfeirio'n cyfyrdd cyllidol, Peter. Dderbyn y gall. A gweithio ar y cyfyrdd, mae'n llwyddo i'n meddwl yma. Something in my mind that I think may be developed later on is that they are all men and it's very interesting looking around political landscape in Europe, I suppose, that women who have been in power recently have tended overwhelmingly to stick up for democracy. a dyna'r ysgol y gallwch ar ôl yol a ei unHEi'r all gweithio'r cofnod am y dyfodol, sy'n gweld yn cymryd yn y gallwch yn ei ddweud iŷn. Dweud weithio'r cyfrifiadau ar awdurdodau ac ar ddiwedliadau, yn ddwygiad Genæтировaeth Cyflomurol Cater Shot i'w sefydrech, yn rywfawr sefydrech, yn gyntaf'r hynny o'ch ddwygol cyflwyngurau ymddorg, sy'n gyflym horsyddiais cyflwyngur, yn meddwl cy Libraryll, nid o'r sefydrech cyflwyngor cyflwyngor cyflym, ac nid o ddweud sy'n plant o'u amlwg â'r cyflwyngor a'i aerygansol, a'r panndig o'r ddechrau drwy coeniedig a'r Llwyr. a yn y fwy ffawr all hanes y bwysig y peth honno yn gwneud i'n mwyaf datnodol. Rydyn nhw'n yma'n nhw'n mynd i ymgyrchion ymddangos ymddangos yn teimlo i ddefnyddiadau, bai ychydig iawn yn ymddi'n nhw'n mynd i chi hyn yn ei sch requested. Felly ddim mae ydych chi'n zygweld i fynd ar ôl y mae'r prydol Caerdy Lle Bref. Dŵr ar ychydig iawn. Efallai efallai eich symhau reunionu aeth yr anwr rhaid i fynd i'r pandemig. Ond dyna fel y gallu'n ddweud. Felly, y ddim yn meddwl am gyfnod ag yn bobl yn ystod agonnius sydd yn angen ond ei gŵr. Felly, mae'n rhai o'n meddwl ar gyfer o'n meddwl sydd sydd yn meddwl sydd mae'n meddwl, sydd yn meddwl, ond mae'n meddwl ar gyfer y dŵr, ond mae'r meddwl iawn mae'r meddwl yr holl. Ond ym yn cyfodol, oherwydd mae'n fyddiol... Ond pethau cofnodd Cepedd i'r wyf yn ffordd, ond gyda'r yr ysgrifenned Dresversell yng ngodraeth yr Roedden y Prif Weinidog yn anodd y byddai'r llyfrn yn yngyrch, yn y Llyfrgell. Mae'r ffwrdd agresif yn gweithio. Mae'r ffwrdd agresif yn Ym Llyfrgell a'r Ysbryd-Marchurau, ac mae'r ffwrdd yn dweud ym Mwrdd. Mae'n gweithio'r ffwrdd yn tynnu. Mae'r ffwrdd yn ymlaen, mae'r ffwrdd yn ymllun yn ymlaen ymlaen, mae'r ffurell yn ymlaen, mae'r ffwrdd yn ymlaen. Mae'n gweithio'r ffyrdd. Mae'r rai o safair o'i bod ni'n gweithio gyddon ystod yn gwybod sydd yn bwyfodol i'r optimisticauol. Mae'r cyfnod yn gyffredin i'r Prifysgog? Mae'n接下來u fod yn cael ei wneud o'i fflushaf yn ei wneud y peth oedd yn gyfrofiwr. Mae'n ysgrifiannig hwn dda wedi'u gwneud, y fferylau ac mae'n griff phrwladig. Pwtyn yn ystod, y maedden nhw'n rhoi'r amser yw'r cyntaf gan y dyfodol, a'i gael'r cyfnod gyda Macron yn Febryd a'r byd. Roeddwn i'n ddweud fel ymddangos chi oherwydd Selensgi, y Prif Weinidol. Roeddwn i'n ddweud bod yn ymddangos chi yn fwy o'r cyffredin iawn gyda'r Llywodraeth Menysgub, o'r cyffredin iawn, o'r cyffredin iawn, o'r cyffredin iawn, i'r cyffredin iawn. hefyd wedi cwestiwyr i siarad ar моedd yr aeith yn cael y gwladheidio. Bydd y cwestio exercises cyda chi, mae'n bwysig i chi'n cael rhai o rai o gyd. Ac mae'n cael llydydd ar y sgog, a mae'r pwnnigau yw o ran y cwestiwyr yn gallu eu mlu. A dwi'n fawr iawn i gael fanio'r meid ei lefyddiol. Felly mae'n cael ei wneud i mi yw, ei gael i'w wneud i'r Eugraen, a'n gallu i ddim yn wych oherwydd yn gorffwyr ar y drefn. But I'd very much, again, I've spoken for a good while in terms of introduction. It's about being the outsider, presenting yourself as the outsider, a kind of anti-establishment to the, not necessarily within the political system, but to the order. And this kind of non-PC taboo breaking image is quite good for the media as well. And that's one thing it kind of picks up on scandals and kind of events and things that kind of have resonance in the media. But the maleness of it really needs to be focused on as well. Samantha, what would you add to that? Firstly, thank you all for being here and I'm absolutely delighted to be here. I agree with both of my fellow panel discussions about what they've said so far. And I think what's coming through is there's not really a single definition of what is a strong man. But there are tendencies and the masculinity is something that I would actually like to focus on. But it's not just the gender. Gender is interwoven with race, sexuality and a host of other things that weaponise gender, race and sexuality. Strong men tend to say they are speaking and acting on behalf of the real people. And the real people in this sense becomes exclusionary group. The real people are ultra-nationalists in the US context or Western Europe context. The real people are understood to be white, they are understood to be heterosexual, able-bodied and usually masculine. Women, when they are talked about, the real people, the real women are viewed as positively as mothers of the nation. Whereas the other, so it creates the other, this idea of us versus them and the real people versus the non-real people. The other is often racialised, gendered and seen as sexually aggressive. So let's think about say Trump's idea of when he spoke about Mexicans as bad hombres, they're male. They are also criminals and rapists. And they're therefore coming to rape and harm the women, the real women who are white and Christian. And in the short answer to the actual question, is it a threat to democracy? It's certainly a threat to liberal, plural democracy. So it really depends on what you think democracy is as well. But I'll leave it there. I suspect the reason this topic is on the agenda for the festival politics is Russia and Ukraine. So I think we should spend a bit of time looking at that. So look, you've got a particular focus on Russia. To what extent is the war in Ukraine a consequence of Putin's personality, his character as a strongman? I think it's immensely relevant. There is a sense in which the Russian elite believe more or less the same things, generally about the world. And they have a sense of grievance about the world. But I think if we look through Russian and Soviet history, then the character of the leader really matters. All of the communist leaders be they Stalin, Lenin and Kristof. They had quite a rigid ideology, but their effect on their countries was actually very different. There were certain continuities and a lot of those things are relevant now in terms of brutality and terror and those kind of things. But I don't think that we can confidently say if there had been another leader that this would have happened. Because a lot of the people within Russia themselves, even in the elite at the time, don't seem to have been prepared for it and it was prepared in a very small group of people outside the normal channels. After it happened they fell into line. But it does come down partly to his psychology. That is within the court-border conduct of Russia's strategic culture, which Peter might want to talk about as well, in terms of how Russia has traditionally seen the world. That dictates aggression and suspicion towards the West. Subordinate status for Ukraine, those kinds of things. But actually in terms of invading it, that doesn't necessarily follow and wasn't necessarily predicted from what Putin had done before. And we don't really know an awful lot about his psychology in terms of people who said he's ill. He doesn't look well to me, but I wouldn't want to speculate about that. Boris Yeltsin looked very ill for a very long time and lived for eight years after he stopped being president. So we can't really hope for that. He's been secluded, he doesn't see anyone. It's also partly to do with how he governs and who he listens to and the fact that you can't really bring bad news to him anymore. So he has no real accurate information about how his military is doing or possibly even about his society. And it's an open question at the moment. Does he even know much about the conduct of the war? We focus very much on the Ukrainian side. This happens to Russia. A base was blown up in Crimea the other day and that looks very bad for Russia. It does in military terms, but does Putin see it that way? I don't think we know. I don't think we even know if he thinks that this. It hasn't gone quite the plan, but he is looking at a longer game as well, which is about settling scores, trying to get Russia back into, back noticed. I don't think that's going to work for him, but it doesn't. It means that it's basically a combination of the culture of the elite and his personality. But I think the latter really dictates timing and the actual evolution of what's going on. He's taking personal charge for a few decisions here and there as well. Peter, how important is an accurate understanding of Putin's personality? How important is that at this point as we look to the conduct of the war? More importantly, how it could possibly be brought to an end? What the end game is and how important Putin's personality is to that? That is, I suppose, a question that doesn't cause me to be very optimistic. Because I do think that Putin saw this moment as a moment to assert Russia's dominance over a part of the world that had long been considered part of the Russian world or the Monslav. I don't know the Russian word for this, but there is a term, isn't there? Luke, the Russian world, the Russian sphere. I think he saw it as a good moment because he saw the West as being divided with the politics of Brexit in the UK and in the EU as being weakening both parties. I think he saw also problems in the United States and saw Biden as an old and weak president. He also saw the future and he thought, if I don't act now, Russia may not get a better moment to reassert itself. I don't think he wants to rebuild the Soviet Union, but I think, and I think I'm drawing on Luke partly in saying this, he does look back to an era even before the Soviet Union of Russian Greatness and thinks that that's Russia's birthright, it's Russia's rightful place in the world. It was a moment where energy prices were high as a result of the post-COVID global recovery being probably more robust and popular. Russia also had a large war chest of foreign exchange reserves at the time, which is, I think, not as large now as some people say. I think if I don't act now, I'm not going to be able to achieve this aim. Part of that aim was also, I think, to try and challenge that order that I mentioned, that rules-based liberal capitalist order that's at least from the post-cold war. It hasn't gone to plan, but now, partly because I think Putin realizes a lot of his grip on power is to do with his image as a strong man, as someone in control, as someone in whom Russians can have confidence that if Russia is humiliated in Ukraine the way it's been basically since the beginning of the war, that this is a threat to his personal place and personal grip on power. This leads me, unfortunately, to be quite pessimistic about an end game in the foreseeable future that allows Russia to cease its special operation with some level of dignity. If it's thrown out of the Crimea, as well as the Donbas, and this is, I think, what most Western observers are anticipating or at least hoping for, well, this is a massive humiliation for Putin's regime. Sorry if I've gone on too far. No, that's good. Samantha, one of your specialities is where politics and religion combine. In Russia we've seen an alliance between the Orthodox Church and Putin. How important is that for the strong man to be seen as, in this case, a cross behind him? I think it can feed into that romanticized nostalgia of great times before of Tsarist Russia or a moral value that gives legitimacy to what these strong men are saying that isn't part of the established political norms. So if you're going away from the established political norms like strong men tend to do, you need some other form of legitimacy. Here's some interpretations of religion, and I am saying some interpretations of religion because there are various ones that can help sustain that legitimacy. We can see in not just Trump's presidency but also the Republicans turned towards the so-called Christian right which has helped to legitimise many of their policies. So I think it's got an awful lot to say and has repercussions on an awful lot of other things. I think it also feeds in to say the current attack on reproductive rights of women within the United States that aligns with some of the so-called Christian rights. I'm progatifs but also feeds in to this idea of threat and the politics of demographics which is where we get gender and race coming back into it again. There is a fear that the once nostalgic brilliant past is now threatened by the other and this return to religion is a return back to these traditional past glories and values that are threatened by whoever the other is and the other is constructed based on the particular environment and context. So what am I trying to say here? In terms of the demographic, the politics of demographics for instance, I'm going to use Modi in India. Modi has in India, there's this idea of love jihad, the idea that the Hindu majority are threatened by the Muslim majority because Muslims are having more babies than Hindus. So love jihad is this preposperous narrative that sexually aggressive Muslims are trying to get with Hindu women who are pure and part of the real nation to overrun the demographics and take over India. And this has repercussions in the US as well in terms of reproduction rights in that there's this idea that white America is being overtaken by people of colour, whether the Latinx or blacks or Muslims, which is the worst. It's not, that was me lying by the way, just in case anyone takes that off context. Just transcribing that. Exactly. And this attack on reproductive rights has so little to do with religion but much more to do with the demographics of trying to keep America white. Because if we want to stop abortions, the best way to do it is to stop people getting pregnant, not to stop the health of women, which I by the way propose that that means that all men should have temporary reversible vasectomies rather than attack my body, thank you. Good point. This is so interesting, Samantha, because my son was in North Carolina, I was there too with his basketball team and they were staying with families from the same church and it was an evangelical church. And three of them had to go to church on one of the Sundays we were there where they were made to pray for the success of the anti-abortion legislation that was before the Supreme Court. So here these three kids from the west of Scotland never even thought about these issues probably seriously being forced, at least you know, being pressured to pray for something. And that really gave me some insight into the kind of network behind the Make America Great movement in Trump, sorry. No, no, that's good. As our American ambassador on the stage. Canadian. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh God, what a terrible faux pas. Forgive me, forgive me. I'm interested, Peter, what you make of the North American right. See what I did there. Learning lessons from the strong men from the rest of the world. I'm looking particular at Hungary. The CPAC, which for those of you who are not familiar with it, is a kind of a conservative conference of the American right. It's a kind of a travelling circus. One of them was held in Budapest this year and there was a large number of people from the American right there. And Orban in Hungary has been the inspiration for much of the policy programme of people like Ron De Santis, the governor of Florida and potentially a future president of the United States. And some of his policies, particularly the one that's called Don't Say Gay, which is like an American section 28 about what you can and can't say in schools about questions of sexuality, was just lifted from the Orban programme in Hungary and implemented in Florida. I was just wondering what you made of the transfer of ideas and the idea that the European and global strong men were importing ideas to the American right. I think it's really interesting because so much of the kind of wider movement that's based on cultural conservatism, nostalgic nationalism, which I think has come out already quite a lot, and racism, frankly, and I'm happy to have that recorded, is ironically drawing on a global network. The anti-globalists have a global network of kind of an exchange of ideas and political tactics and strategies that they share in Steve Bannon jets around being, for all intents and purposes, a cosmopolitan elite, going to Hong Kong and all over Europe and the UK, basically sharing ideas, sharing strategies, and that's kind of a really interesting irony. His ideas and the vilification of George Soros, really interesting part of this as well, especially in Hungary, where I think in 2017 there was an election in Hungary where there was a picture of George Soros plastered around Hungary with a grin on his face saying, don't let him keep smiling, vote for Orban. There's this kind of weird paradox in that there's a global marketplace of far-right, racist, hyper-nationalist, backward-looking in some ways, I suppose, ideologs. Very interestingly, even though they will often invoke the past, they use social media incredibly effectively, and that's part of the skills that are transferred through this network. They use social media very effectively to speak directly to their audience. I find it really interesting, but again, more than a little depressing, especially from, I'm from Western Canada and where I'm from is the most conservative part of Canada, hands down, and a lot of people that I'm still friends with on Facebook were part of, I don't know if you've heard of the trucker's convoy that traveled across Canada and shut the capital down for, and I'm part of their conversations. I don't intervene in them. I'm an observer or a stalker, you might say, and it's a bit crazy, but they are influenced by the imagery and the tactics of Make America Great, which in turn is, Nigel Farage is one of the first people with whom Trump met after the, this is a real network. Luke, I'm interested, the people that you study on the American left, on the left of politics, are the bogeymen, and I noted the Santas in a speech earlier this year, if we're looking for a definition of who the right hate. He talked about the horsemen of a left-wing apocalypse, and this is quite good to tick them off with a critical race theory. Fauci and dystopia, which take to mean over-each your government or things like COVID, uncontrolled immigration, big tech, left-wing oligarchs, so a great phrase, Soros-funded prosecutors with all the dog whistle around that, and transgender athletes, which is quite a list, but the left in all those forms, a provocative question, is the left doing itself any favours in resisting the strongman agenda? That's a big question. You started actually by saying that one of my expertise is left-wing populism, and we haven't talked about it, and there's good reason, because they're not as popular, they're not as successful. There are examples, there's regional specificities in Latin America, but in Europe and elsewhere they are not quite as successful. There are many reasons for this, and it's partly to do with the anti-imperialist of Latin America, but one really general thing you can say about the left across, and this includes the communist left, across time and space, where it has been most successful is where it downplays doctrine to some degree and engages with identity. Sometimes that's a minority identity, et cetera, but it engages with a question about national identity and doesn't shy away. We have these discussions in Britain about whether Labour Party should use the flag and whether it should tie itself up with Britishness or Scottishness and that kind of thing, but generally speaking, particularly the communist left was very doctrinaire and leninist, and where it was successful, electorally, and it actually shied away from that a little bit in, let's say, Iceland, a country that people don't know about, but Italy, the strong communist party there, and where it's been successful in Europe, to some degree, in Spain and France is where it's actually junked a lot of the traditional left-wing slogans and taken on new colours and new media and those kind of things. I'm thinking of Podemos in Spain and Unbald France, La France, Tsimise in France. They speak about patriotism. They speak about having a strong national identity and their national traditions, and this is a difficult balance for the left. Again, I'm thinking, it comes straight into my head about Milirban's kind of mug in 2015 about the Labour Party supporting restrictions on immigrants. There are some things that are kind of inimical to the left-wing position and probably should be in terms of, for the left, it's a question of how much you deal with these identity issues and the realities of people who are kind of left behind and again we've talked about groups who are struggling. There's all kinds of reasons for this. A lot of the strongman impetus comes from the defence of people who feel that they're losing out whether or not they are. There's always this silent majority that isn't actually silent and not always the majority, so that's sometimes a bit of a myth. So I think it's dangerous ground for them sometimes. I think the challenge for the left is always to keep true to some of their values. You don't suddenly, as a left-wing ago, we're going to restrict all immigration or we're going to support racism or those kind of things. But it's about actually tackling some of those issues and not having kind of reflex, sloganistic positions which I've studied the left. It's sometimes, and the left is in knots now about NATO. And Ukraine's a good example. When I say the left, I'm not necessarily talking about social democratic centre left because they've always been kind of Atlanticists. But some of the more populist kind of radical or far left have traditionally, and they've been kind of a little bit negligent towards Putin. They say, well, we don't like him, but actually we're more focused on American imperialism. But it's actually getting away from the... and we can talk about this in questions, but NATO is a reason for what happened, but it's not the main one. It's not about security, it's about empire, it's about... And again, I'm taking Peter's point, it's not about Putin marching his troops across Europe and reconstituting the Soviet Union. It's about, from their perspective, they see what they're doing as defensive. It's like we're taking back things which were taken from us. And it's not necessarily like Central Asia. Ukraine is special to them, and I'm not saying that it should be. The Ukrainians definitely have a voice in that and should about being the younger brother. But I do think sometimes the left doesn't help itself. But if we're talking about democracy generally, this is always this dilemma of how far you go to meet the strong men. And you can try and ban them. That quite often doesn't work, actually. Although there are many examples of where strong men should have been stopped at the word go. Hitler, Mussolini and Trump were kind of co-opted and people thought we contained them. Boris Johnson, not really strong men in the same way, but remember Dominic Cummings was saying, look, he's going to be a disaster, but as long as he has the right people around him, it never works. So that kind of thing doesn't work. But traditionally if the left tries to ape the right and kind of says actually we're going to become anti-immigrant, you know, we're going to really go there, then the electorate goes, actually we want the original, not the fake. We'll go for the people who really mean it. So it's a real dilemma of actually trying to engage with the reasons and when you come up with voters who are anti-immigrant, it's not shutting them down. You obviously have to have a position on racism. But it's understanding why they feel that way and trying to persuade them that actually the solutions aren't in necessarily the impacts of, let's say immigration, maybe misconstrued or are real but actually stopping people from coming to this country is not the solution. But that involves a long conversation and it doesn't really fit the kind of politics that we sort of quite often in which is send them to Rwanda, that kind of stuff. It's immoral. And I think actually you should start by saying it's immoral because that's a short. With the practicalities of it, once you get into the practicalities, people are going to say, let's send them back, just don't, you know, so that's the difficulty in this kind of thing. The left is sometimes treated as well, which I've reflected a little bit. I was much more fuller into it than I was expecting to think of it. So, Anthony, one of your specialities is the Muslim world and I was wondering whether or not the trajectory of the strong man in the Muslim world was different to what we've been talking about when we were talking about the Western. You mentioned Modi in the Hindu context, but in the Muslim world and especially in the Middle East, what are the characteristics we're talking about and what are the differences, what are the similarities? As I said sort of earlier, the way that strong men manifest themselves really depends on the context. And I personally don't like the Muslim world because we've got one world, we all live in it. So there's different ways that the strong man can manifest in places like the Middle East or Muslim majority countries because there's very few states that are actually Islamic states. Most are just Muslim majority that are secular and based on very similar systems as our own. What we do see, however, is obviously where strong men in the non-Muslim majority world tend to isolate Muslims as one of the main threats in Muslim majority states then they create a different kind of other. And often it isn't things like choosing a different religion. It's often internal. So Sunni dominated states may target Shias rather than target a different faith. So I think that's one of the things that comes out. If we're looking at Turkey and Erdogan, for instance, going back to the demographics of the politics of demographics, Erdogan argued that Sunni Muslims should have lots and lots of children to make sure the balance against the Shias. So there tends to be an oversimplication in Western Europe of what Muslim peoples are as one homogenous group that all gets on against the rest, which is far from it. Even within the UK there's such a diversity of Muslim communities. And I think that's where the strong men within Muslim majority states kind of end up targeting other interpretations of Islam rather than other faiths. But it also tends to be genderedised as well. That masculine strong man, the nation is muscular. And that weaves into a similar pattern that we see across whether it's in the Muslim majority world or elsewhere. This idea of the male strong protector that obviously needs to protect us vulnerable women. And this leads to another ironing paradox in that if women need protected, who do we need protected from? We know for instance in the UK right now the levels of aggression and violence against women are ongoing. There is a genuine grievance here. There is something genuine going on. But it's not caused by the other. If we look at the statistics, women are most likely to be harmed whether sexually, psychologically or physically by people they know. It's by their family members, by their friends and their colleagues. Not by the other. But the other creates a very useful scape goat. So there is genuine grievance. But nobody is addressing the real problems. They're putting it elsewhere. And as I say, the irony is that when, whether it's in the Muslim majority world or elsewhere, when they project this idea of men need to be a strong protector and women need to be protected, we often need to be protected from the very people who say they are protecting us. Good point. I'd like to bring it to a far more personal. I've been covering politics for 30 years. And I'm not particularly interested in politics, I have to say. I'm interested in people. But politics is a wonderful lens through which to examine how people work. And how you take an ordinary person, you put them in an extraordinary position with extraordinary power. And how their thought processes work, how their instincts manifest themselves and what they do. And it's endlessly fascinating because people are endlessly fascinating. And in the context of our discussion on the strong men, something that's at the heart of all the people we're talking about from Modi to Erdogan to Trump is, and like it or not, charisma. There's a personal appeal, and charisma's very difficult to define. The minute you know somebody's got charisma, but it's very hard to explain why they have it, but you can tell in a second whether or not they have it when they walk into a room. How important is that that, I'm going to call it a quality, personal quality, in what we're talking about here? Well, I think probably in order to be effective, first of all, within a movement, you have to have charisma. And then that charisma has to translate slightly outside the movement in order for the movement to grow and gain power. And I think probably it is difficult to say with certainty, but I think it can be overstated, Kenny. I mean, I don't find Vladimir Putin very charismatic, but apparently in person he can project real menace. Real seem very threatening, and people attribute that to his past as a KGB officer, and he was, I think, the head of the FSB for a while. But that's a different personal quality than the ability to take hold of a room and paint a picture of a vision of the future that you're offering and get everyone in that room behind you. And I've rarely seen it in person at that level. Bill Clinton. I was at a kind of a small town rally in Maine of all places for Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton spoke, and there was a room, maybe about three times the size of this, and everyone in that room felt a personal commitment and stake in Bill Clinton's vision. And then I thought, how dangerous that can be. But I don't see it in Putin. I don't really see it in Erdogan, but I could be wrong. I haven't seen them in person. So I don't know what's tricky. People like Mussolini had it. Hitler was this kind of very unassuming figure until he got up on a stage, and then he transformed. It was a famous line from Anthony Eden's memoirs where maybe it was Halifax's memoirs where he thought that Hitler was one of the doormen and went to hand him his coat when the first time they met in Munich in 1938. And yet put him in front of a group of thousands of people, and he was this diabolical charismatic figure who just had a genius for figuring out what people wanted to hear and for identifying the weaknesses in his enemies. Sorry, I haven't answered your question. No, I'm glad you mentioned Clinton because if I may allow the Chairman's prerogative to tell the story that Joe Klein, the great American journalist who wrote Primary Colours, he wrote a book about Clinton, and the introduction he described following Clinton on the first primary and being away from home for many months on the trail. But when he was on holiday once, Clinton was coming to where he lived, the city he lived in, so he took his son along to listen to Clinton speak. And Clinton clocked him at the back of the hall. And at the end, before he did anything, he came back and he knelt down to Joe Klein's son and said, I'm the reason your daddy has been away from home all these months. And so it's my fault you haven't seen him very much. But let me tell you, he talks about you every day. And now you can say that shtick. You can say it's insincerity, but what it is is a very, very acute understanding of how people work. I just want to add a bit about personality and personal. And again, I hesitate with this word qualities in what we're doing. People have got to either want to identify with this person or see something in a very common good in that person. I kind of agree with Peter in that it might not necessarily be an innate charisma, but it is a skillful use of... The strong men have a skillful use of understanding what a certain segment of the population wants to hear. And social media has been fantastic at that because there just really isn't the censorship and the established norms that are usual around traditional politics. And I think that's one of the things about strong men. They claim to speak common sense. When they do speak, they're very thin on details and very seldom actually provide any evidence. But to a certain segment of a population, they project themselves as just speaking the truth and common sense that seems to appeal to certain segments. And as my colleague here, Professor March, said, the silent majority might not even be the majority. Pippa Norris and Richard Ronald Engelhart have actually pointed out that those who vote for so-called strong men tend to be of a certain generation. There's a generational gap that the older the generation, the more likely they're going to turn to more conservative values, the idea of nostalgia appeals much more so that the idea that back in the day when things were good, no people respected their elders and politicians were noble. And in return to this idea, so they're not actually the majority in Western Europe. We've got an Asian population, but they are a population that votes. So the majority of the voting population. The younger generation is very active in online protests and maybe demonstrating for me two new movements, but they don't translate that political action into voting. So I don't think there's necessarily a charisma, but a really skillful use of understanding which audience they want to talk to and translating that in a common sense language that defies the normal political civilised language of politics. That's a good point. Before we go to the audience that I'd like to go round the panel asking, is there an antidote to the strongman? How can conventional mainstream liberal politics and democracy protect itself, improve itself from strongman politics? Or is this no politics? Is this not a blip? This is politics as we know it now. You don't think of me? OK. I think things go in cycles. I don't think it's inevitable, but there is a trend. I think there's been a degradation of democracy worldwide over the last 20 years. I was looking at something from Freedom House, which is an American institution that measures democracy. It's something like 20% of the world now lives in countries which are completely free. In 2005, I think it was 46%. The number of people who live in outright dictatorships is around about 40%. It's stable. It's the ones in the middle that are democratic, authoritarian, prone to slippage. Also, the kind of takeovers of democracy that happen, we think of coups sometimes. We think of Allende in Chile and things like that. That happens, but I think research shows that democracy dies slowly and then suddenly. It happens without you knowing it. Putin's one example because where we are 22 years into his office is not necessarily where we thought he was going to be at the beginning. He actually came to speak at the Scottish Parliament in 2003 and I took a student visit to him. He was charismatic in a way. He held the room without notes for ages, whether it was true or not, it's different. It happens slowly. That's why things that happen with Trump, that's a long period of time, is why things like party gate matters. It's not trivial. Democracy is about things which are quite precious, which is, and quite rare. It's about making sure that the two sides, or sometimes more, respect each other and it's not when a winner takes all. That involves compromise. That involves forbearance. I've got some rules, but I'm not necessarily going to take them out on you. If I can impeach the president, I'm not necessarily going to do that. All of those kind of things are quite precious. I think there's a lot of work on this and no one is actually really quite sure, but it's a tricky game because it's kind of from the top and the bottom. It's on the top. It's making sure that democracy works and can work better and that rules are respected and when there is backsliding and things and when there are shortcuts, those things are picked up on. That is important. Again, we should be worried about it, is the title. There's a lot of things to worry about, maybe in the cost of living. We don't think about kind of arcane rules and things, but observance of the rules and the spirit of the game is important and we have to protect that because we're a friend of mine who's a scholar of the far right the other day and he said, and he lives in Georgia and he was like, it's nuts here and I want to leave. You do not believe how bad it is where, and he said, for example, he said my son is quite flamboyant, he might be gay, he's nine. I don't care, but he's brought up in a situation where people think he shouldn't exist and the politicians are saying things and it's part of the same thing. So we've got to stop that sliding. But on the other hand, there are issues which are rocking democracies from the bottom, so it's looking at the top and making sure that the mechanisms work, but it's trying to address the kind of things that are causing this resentment. And again, immigration might be a shortcut to other things, but it's the fact that democracies are getting polarised, there's economic buffeting, there's the effect of countries like China it's the fact of becoming much more complicated and much less able to deliver some of the things that our parents, our grandparents wanted and particularly for younger people who can't afford things as well. I remember again, just since we mentioned the personal note, I remember when, I don't remember much about university, which is a good thing, but I remember when we left some eminent person I've got, said, you are the first generation who will not be richer than your parents. This is 1993. We were like in the kind of bathing in the glow of the end of history and the end of communism and things, but I remembered it, and I think he was right. So I think the challenges are harder, but it's about making sure that democracies deliver socioeconomically, but also that the institutions function. But you said earlier, look, that you have to be careful about how much you move towards the strongman. I have a question about that, because surely, they are doing something not right, but effective. There's an effective modus of politics that people engage with. Are there not new rules which can be taken and put to the service of a liberal democracy in this new world, things that we can learn from populists? In terms of learning from their policy process. Just how they conduct themselves. That goes back to the left. Opponents can learn some things from them about what's the effect of communication and what drives the media and that kind of thing. I think charisma, again, there are these personal people who can connect, but it's largely a presentation. In Russia, you have no choice, but to think that Putin is charismatic about how you want to marry him, etc. You can work on effective communications and things, but I think ultimately it's about being true to your values and you don't compromise on, and it's a longer game, unfortunately. It includes not necessarily demonising your opponents, but trying to win them over as well. Even if some of that is not going to work. You won't be able to persuade a lot of Russians what they're doing is wrong in the short run. It's a longer game. So there's no easy answers on that, but it's about learning some of the media and the leadership text and taking on those, but finding a way in which you can integrate them into what you're trying to do anyway. Because, again, there's no way of winning that because the people who support that will support the original rather than the person trying to emulate it every time. Samantha, antidotes to populism in your sphere, in your world. It's hard. Absolutely with everything you've said, Luke. There needs to be several pronged actions here. The threat to our liberal democracy really depends on what structure and institutions we have in the democratic setting. Strong men can be more dangerous depending on the institutions and structures in which they're playing in. Strong men tend to, for instance, try to dismantle checks and balances particularly in law and legislation. If those can hold, we have some hope. Particularly within the legislation they have to push back because in certain circumstances law and the legislator are becoming a weapon and an instrument of executive power rather than justice. So we have to ensure those institutions and structures remain effective checks and balances. We also need to, as Luke said, actually attack and resolve some of the genuine grievances and articulate where those problems have happened in a more intellectual and robust way rather than just finding escaped goats. For instance, middle-class Americans, white middle-class Americans have lost out. They are nowhere near in the position that they were, say, 20, 30 years ago. One of my favourite kind of little anecdotes is if you look at the movie Robocop that was in the 1980s and their description of what Detroit would look like in the future was it would be terrible and it would be all downgradd. If you look at the film in the 1980s and look at Detroit today, Detroit is worse than the film actually depicted. Manufacturing has been desecrated but not because of Muslims, feminists and gays but because of neoliberal globalisation. We need to actually focus on what the problem is to find the correct solution and that's going to find time. For that we need engaged, educated, critically minded people and that critical mind is actually being dissolved with the use of social media and mainstream media. We try not to get all your news from Fox or CNN by all means have a look at those things but also have a look at a range of different ideas and this kind of comes back to what Luke was saying about compromise. Sometimes people say the very definition of politics is compromise. Who gets what when and how. It isn't just political parties because I'm kind of with you. I'm not interested in political parties. It's kind of boring politics. Politics is everywhere. It's in the power relations between us the fact that we're sitting on a stage of politics and we need to come back to this idea of compromise, of listening to each other and critically engaging because critically engaging isn't saying that we hate you. It's about making things better and raising ideas that perhaps not understood or even thought about. There's a reason why in the UK we talk about the loyal opposition because it's needed. It makes it better. I think what we understand as the strong man needs to be critiqued I don't think it's very strong to isolate yourself and pretend you and you alone can solve these problems and then start criticising any critics as enemies of the people whether they be academics, journalists or political opponents. It creates a lesser political environment and it's dangerous. So we need education, we need critical thinkers, we need strong and robust institutions and structures and we need to understand as a populance that progress is not unilinear. There was particularly at the 1990s and Fukuyama's end of history narrative that progress was one way that once you made achievements that you couldn't go back. We can't be complacent. This is rubbish. Of course there are ebbs and ties where sometimes progress is made and sometimes there's back clashes. Or alternatively if Norris and Ingleheart were right that the silent majority is actually a minority and is propelled by the baby Booner generation, maybe we'll be fine if we just wait for them to die. A lot depends on cohort theory. Peter antidotes and then we'll go to the audience. I think a lot of that's been covered but I would say one antidote the famous line events, dear boy events the COVID-19 pandemic didn't differentiate between authoritarian regimes and democratic regimes and we can see now that the Chinese government is having trouble with its approach to managing COVID and I think COVID contributed to bringing down Donald Trump I didn't think it's badly damaged Boris Johnson by revealing that he was not enforcing the rules he imposed on the rest of society and it did I think bring down Bolsonaro in Brazil so reality tends to be unforgiving but it sometimes takes time but there is hope I mean I was and am pleasantly surprised at so far how well the rules based order has held up in the face of the Russian challenge in the invasion of Ukraine it may not last, there's a crisis coming in most European societies over the price of energy but if it can hold then it's a sign that democracy may be a little more robust than it seems to us at the moment that's really interesting okay so we've got about half an hour left which is your time there's a young lady with a microphone at the back if I call you to speak if you wait for the microphone to come to you say your first name and please ask your question the questions I would most welcome are ones where you think we're talking rubbish we've missed out obvious things or our perception is flawed in very obvious ways or areas that you think we haven't covered that are important so feel free to let Lee be unleashed my panellists I'm going to take a couple of two or three questions at one time and then my panellists can pick up anything they want from I know you don't have to answer everything that's there but you can pick up something that you want to talk so we'll start right at the very front here with this lady here in the spotty dress what's your name madam my name is Ann you spoke very briefly only about the Middle East but I wonder if you'd like to offer your comments on MBS so what's your name Ann yeah MBS MBS yeah and there's a chap here as well we're going to go we're going to go Martin Martin so I'll time to remember my question alright don't worry focused ideology is that a threat to democracy because of the way it's exploited populist and strongman populist, wokeism alright right okay and as soon as we're doing the front row we'll have this ginger chap sorry so I'm Ewan my question was I don't know if you're familiar with the field of memetic warfare but how would you view the relevance of that in relation to the growing power of strongmen how important is the field of memetic warfare memetic sort of like you mentioned social media as an influence in the political right and CPAC visiting Hungary or Bolsonaro that would all be sort of defined as memetics and the link across a globe of these sort of social media focused right wing characters how relevant would you view that to the potential rise of a new right wing or strongman sort of leader thank you always good to learn a new word there we are that's one for today every day's school day panellists pick out something from that what would you think I'd start with wokeism because it's it's become this bug bear for some of the people I look at and to be honest if it wasn't that it would be something else it's not like it creates something it adds on to a list of already strong grievances and again a lot of the people we're talking about in this exercise are some of the things that have been mentioned it's a very strong conservative traditionalist counterreaction and in Russia it's almost entirely created it's created by Putin on the basis of an alliance with the Orthodox Church and the army and it you can pinpoint the moment in which it happened around about 2012 to the degree that it's known as the conservative term and what why did Putin do it is because he was losing the liberal part of the electorate and so he made a switch to go well I'm going to ignore them repress them, marginalise them I don't need them they're not going my way I'm going to kind of cultivate the traditionist and so it's it's the understanding of it it becomes in Putin's eyes and in many of these politicians it's a complete stereotype and that goes for critical race theory which there's lots of bands on it being taught in schools and it's not anyway it's a university subject as well as I know so it's and in the Russian discourse Europe is gay rope and it links back to the issue of gender gays are effeminate weak, Russian men the muziki, they are strong they protect their women they might beat them a lot but that's part family family's fine it's a way of covering up a lot of the issues how it relates to we might have a discussion about what is anyway it's a term when it came in I didn't really understand it but it seems because it came from the US and Americanism but it seems to be a reaction the reaction against it seems to be about a closure of a way of closing down people from saying what they really mean but the question is what do you really mean to say and it's sometimes a closure of things that maybe should be addressed in terms of racism, sexism I mean it's one of these things I think we're going to see this in Britain because the way things are going the education sector I mean badanog under Liz Truss and she's got a war on woke and in universities it's just the way we do things it's just a cultural respect there are issues with freedom of speech but I don't know, I speak for other people in universities but we don't have constraints on academic freedom some of our colleagues in my department say some pretty out there things about Russia and Syria but we have to kind of engage with them so it's a culture war it's a creation in my view and it's not really anything to do with the issue as it is Peter what do you want to take from the questions I suppose the pneumatic warfare to me anyhow this is just a technologically updated version of battles of ideas that are age old and we saw the Bolsheviks take advantage of what modern media they could in 1917 and it's whatever's out there but I think it does in a way I'll give me a pretext to illuminate one of my own bug bears which is this concept of a marketplace of ideas I hate that term because I think it's insidious because rather than ideas being based on evidence and being based on verifiable evidence ideas are what's most popular what you can sell and that is insidious and there's a chapter in my account believe it or not which doesn't use the term but basically talks about a marketplace of ideas tell people something simple straightforward something they want to hear tell them again and again and again until they forget whether it has anything to do with evidence based reality or not and that I think is insidious but the marketplace of ideas has just exploded with the internet I mean I remember Al Gore and the information is super highway and it's going to liberate people and set them free but we didn't think that a lot of the information travelling on the information highway is bollocks and as Samantha said I don't want to misquote you but we need to equip people with the tools to weigh evidence and to be able to say that's persuasive that isn't because that's based on evidence and that isn't and if I could just for the moment comment on wokeism I agree with probably 90% of what Luke said I don't think there are any woke ideas to which I object at all but I do object sometimes to the attempt to shut down debate and not to absolve themselves of responsibility to persuade and just label and shut down and cancel my daughter is a teenager and she lives in terror of me saying something that gets in the media and she'll get cancelled do you know what I mean and that I think is insidious but it's not really the principles at stake in being woke it's just the way it plays out and about sowing division and vilifying and that I object to but as far as you know people of different sexualities trans gender whatever I just want everyone to have love and be happy but the way to convince everyone else maybe have earned this room that that's the way forward isn't by shouting them down and labelling them as kind of retrograde monsters it's about exposing them to reality sorry what do you think Samantha do you want to pick up the MBS thing or what I skipped it it was Anne yes that asked the question thank you Saudi Arabia is interesting because obviously it's not a democracy and doesn't even pretend to be so with it's massive oil reserves and the wealth that comes from that it's operated on a system for a very long time where it's kind of gone in exchange for very low taxes no representation you know so there isn't this isn't a threat to democracy but it is a threat to human rights and a whole host of other things what I find interesting about Saudi Arabia is that it is almost manifestly everything we've been talking about it is except for anti muslim obviously it is anti shia it is anti homosexuality it is almost predicted itself as able-bodied women are treated in one way but what's really fascinating is that global network with other strong men particularly say trump which feeds into that irony Peter was speaking about these anti-global using global networks so Saudi Arabia does fit here it just doesn't really fit into the question about democracy because it doesn't even pretend to be democratic but it is a horrible example for human rights and minorities minorities and others are really under threat here and when the global networks and other strong men leaders praise Saudi Arabia then it threatens everyone so that I think that's a really nice example thank you very much for your question more questions and I'll go from the back any people on the backgrows the backgrower always the most interesting to go of any audience because they've usually got a good reason to be in the backgrows and then no back row hands fooling yourselves chopping the dark shut there what's your name sir? yes hello my name is William I wanted to ask the panel to what extent it thinks the west in general has been promoting a strong man politician in Ukraine in the face of Zylianski and what effects that can potentially have on the Ukrainian democracy very interesting thank you women there with glasses just here hi my name is Julian my question was about age and generation and particularly the comments that Samantha made about strong men being of a certain age or picking up votes from a certain generation and particularly if there are any links to the growth of the incel movement online and that particularly sort of appealing to young men is that these parallel movements that both tap into the same conception of masculinity are these the strong men of the future if you could tell a little bit about that that'd be great thanks thank you and then there's women there with the long hair that's you hi my name is Ellie so my questions around the future of politics asking the question of how do we deconstruct our political landscapes and the strong men within them and bring in key feminist thinkers to use an intersectional approach to tackle this issue and empower younger people to be educated and vote and I found it really interesting the point around young people protesting but not voting but is that because young people feel let down and like a vote in a broken democracy and they feel disenfranchised right very good question okay three there you first Peter oh what do you want from that pick something from that both cherries I don't I'm not going to speak about Ukraine because I think there are people here that know more about it than I do especially the pre February 2022 government in Ukraine the incel questions an interesting one because I think that there are kind of similar sources of grievance that are tapped into I agree with that I think it's part of a wider picture of you know this idea that men have been emasculated in western society in kind of in liberal western society and that men can't and it's partly I think part of a wider trend of groups that have been have held the whip hand and been dominant in society feeling threatened and feeling that their position is under threat which is I think a dynamic that's very clear say in Canada or especially in the United States about this idea that pretty soon white the white population of the United States will be a minority I guess 1946 or something it's projected to happen and that there is a sense of a wider sense of people in privileged positions being submerged or overwhelmed and this is a way of fighting back and it allows allows strong men politics to look to the past and to this past that in most cases never existed but they can recreate so they come from similar types of sources you know at this wider politics of grievance and the sense of being under threat I think that's a very good one but I'm sorry I didn't understand the very first part of your question about did you say something about heterosexual or did I miss it Intersectional Intersectional Well I probably would say from my own perspective in the politics of generations that I don't think people necessarily become more conservative as they get older maybe I seem to be moving more to the left as I get older but who knows however I do remember being in my 20s and looking at politicians shilling for my vote and not recognizing myself for my interests in any of them and I'm you know on Twitter especially I have a lot of people that I follow or follow me who are young and who are very frustrated with the drift towards the center left center in the labour party and feel very frustrated by that and talk about how could I possibly vote for the labour party of Kirstimer when you know it's no longer a true socialist party and I don't think this is a new phenomenon I think this is as old as time and if there's one lesson of the past 150 years of politics certainly in democratic regimes is that the right is much better at putting its differences aside and making coalitions than the left and the left tends to tear itself apart and when it does that it gets further and further away from power so I'm torn when I see these debates online you know on Twitter especially because on the one hand I see young people look to the future and they don't see a future that seems just and fair in any of the positions being outlined by today's political party certainly but on the other hand I see the fact that Nazi Germany is a great example had the left been united in the early 30s the Nazis wouldn't have got anywhere near power but instead the communists the KPD turned on the SPD and it was fratricide and so this is a dilemma facing young people they voted new labour finally in 1997 after I don't know what's going to happen this time I really don't history doesn't tend to repeat itself but we'll see did I answer your question? Samantha what do you want to William it's a great question but I'm going to leave it for my colleague here to answer which one? over the Williams question on Zalinski sorry Julian thank you for your question thank you for your question on incel which I find very frightening I think it's a very interesting question that you gave especially because it does seem to subvert the idea of that generational gap but I think what we have to remember here is that incel movement is a tiny tiny portion although frightening and it is frightening I think this has been bolstered by the strong man and the kind of rhetoric uncivilised political rhetoric that's come out particularly from people like Trump who has so many allegations of abuse against women and has it's recorded I mean we can see it it's in print it's on television the kind of comments he has made about women and I think that bolsters and legitimises the kind of person that will join the incel movement I also think it has been accelerated through social media that creates these kinds of corridors where you're not you know you don't expose yourself to critique and to investigation from an opposite side so I think incel has been really helped by social media's infallating but it's also part of a deeper problem we have about talking about what masculinity is there's a variety of different masculinities out there and the kind of traditional strong man I am the protector, I am decisive I am violent it's been undermined, right? that's not how most of us understand our men most men are just as fragile just as caring just as sensitive as women but what we fail to do is actually project a positive alternative masculinity for people and without that alternative I think certain men don't know how to negotiate their masculinity end up falling back so I think it's part of a larger debate that we need to be having but thank you for your question and the intersectional approach I've forgotten your name I'm so sorry Ellie, thank you I love intersectionality Kimberly Crenshaw was great for those of you who don't know what intersectionality is it's the idea that it's not just one part of our identity but the mixture of all of our identities we're not one thing we're not just a woman or just a man we're also a particular ethnic group we can be a mother and a daughter and a variety of different things at the same time our class matters you put them all together and then you get an idea so that's intersectionality and thank you so much and I think when you're talking about that generational divide it's really let down I was a generation before you guys and we were told that we've got the end of history we've got, we've managed it we've made it all we have to do now is manage the situation which left you with nothing to do you know this is it and it's been disappointing when young people have voted the results have not been what they have voted for whether that be the referendum on the EU whether that be voting for the Liberal Democrats your student fees are at rise you've been let down over and over again I understand why young people are maybe not going to the ballot box because it has failed and the idea of democracy is just not as appealing as it used to be we have legislator deadlock we have attacks on the capital it's not doing the job that we thought it would but I think young people still have to keep going because if you don't then we will end up with the kind of nostalgic outright racist misogynist homophobic kind of leaders so you've got to just keep going yeah sorry suck it up thank you for your questions and the hot potato is passed to Luke if I'm paraphrasing your question probably William it's basically that Zelenski is projecting himself as a strong man is that right to what extent is Zelenski it's a fascinating question it deserves a long answer which I won't give that said all the other questions were great and I'm harder for me so I'm glad I'm dealing with this one he is he's a great war leader and he's presented as a kind of hero domestically and not just by the states but think of the way Boris Johnson used him for his own popularity number of times now one of my students I did a course on populism the essay at the end was they could write themselves and one of my students said I'd like to write an essay about Zelenski as a populist and I'm like okay fine go for it I'm not that convinced but go for it and they did a good job and I was convinced by the end of it he's a great communicator he's got a lot of charisma and a lot of it's derived from his he's an actor and a comedian he can play as a TV if anyone wants to see how good he can be you can go on on YouTube and you can look at Vladimir Putin's May the 9th Victory Day speech which is tired old cliches it's just roll out the tanks all the kind of stuff about the great patriotic war that means a lot to the older generation but it's now kind of hollow and Zelenski does two of them and he does one dedicated to the memory of the Second World War and he kind of reinterprets it about Ukraine's part in it and then he says we're going to have another Victory Day which is when we beat you so he's a very clever politician he is not a we get the Ukrainian side a lot and there are dangers in that going forward they are so much better than the Russians at social media, they're much funnier they're quicker, they're less cliched and less extremist, the Russians if you want to see barking mad offensive stuff look at the Russian Embassy in London for a start, you know, genocidal frightening stuff so we've got to be aware of how that tilts our point of view and there will be questions to be asked and there should be questions to be asked about how the Ukrainians are conducting the war and already some Ukrainian generals are saying why was the south not dependent you know these kind of things that should be asked in the democratic society and what I would say and also Zelensky has said and this is likely, he said whatever happens we will be a militarised society we might be a democracy but like Israel in terms of very very very careful about our borders, very aware of defence those kind of things and I think that's the best case scenario in many respects loads of people have gone to sign up women, men, doctors, academics you know if I was there, you know if I was in the country I'd have to no choice about it all then probably to all but even then so it's a very militarised society and very invested now because of the atrocities they've suffered in in defending themselves and that has some dangers going forward what I would say is there are two things traditionally Ukraine has been much more democratic than Russia and part of that has been structural because it's been balancing between different regions and different Russians different languages, different regional identity and some of that may go depending on where the borders end up but they might lose a lot of the East we hope not but they will end up as more homogenous but there is something in Ukrainian political culture which again, Ukrainians aren't Russians and this is something that Vladimir Putin has never picked up on but their attitude to government is different and what we're finding out now and particularly people like me who mainly studied Russia is there's a whole history of Ukrainian resistance and they've brought down their own government numerous times and their whole attitude to power just while I'll end on in Russia it's the lust, it's the kind of thing you worship and Ukrainian vladda the word doesn't mean the same thing at all it doesn't have this sense of worship of power so there's much more sense of the seeds of a democratic society and what I would hope is if at some point Zelenski exceeded his brief would do what they've done to the previous leaders and vote him out she can't do in Russia almost at the very end I've got no more time for questions but what I'm going to ask is each member of the panelist is very briefly to identify something that we should all be looking out for a wary of an event, a person, a trend something that in the context of our discussion is something that's going to be on our horizons as we move forward from today and I'm going to spring it on Peter first that for me for me in any democracy the independence of the legal system the judiciary and the police is absolutely crucial that's where it starts always the first thing the Nazis did was the enabling act and that allowed them to dismantle everything else in the Weimar Germany Dominic Corral Good point There are threats now I mean more than we've seen but nothing like what's going on in other parts of the world but that's for me the first trigger Samantha I agree so I'm going to take it more to grassroots and what we all can be doing and I would say rather than shutting down those thoughts we don't agree with engage with them ask people why do you think that and what evidence and just allow a safe space so we can start a conversation and maybe get that compromise Related to what I've said about how democracy dies slowly and it's a similar thing defending values we should be worried about the death of democracy we've got a lot of things to worry about but it's one of the biggest things despite economics all of those kind of things values, compromise, trust, legal system all of these things are what makes democracy work and the strong men try to shut them down so we defend them with our lives hopefully not, but that's what it comes down to Thank you Luke Ladies and gentlemen that's the end of our discussion today I've learnt a lot from it I feel I'm far more able to look at this key issue of the moment with a little bit of subtlety and a few grace notes of thought in there I'm grateful to you for your very good questions Could you please show your appreciation for the panel Thank you