it s james in the studio in westminster. and it s chris in westminster too. so, the reason you were speaking to the labour leader, sir keir starmer, chris, was because he has made a big u turn today. yes. so this is on what he calls his green prosperity plan. this is the idea of throwing quite a lot of public money into kind of turbo charging what he thinks are the kind of industries of the future that might have a kind of green tinge to them. but they re also about, he hopes, providing the well paid jobs of the future, the industries of the future. two and a half years ago, he said labour would spend in government £28 billion a year on that. that was diluted in the summer of last year to £28 billion a year by the second half of a first labour term. so that would be sort of mid 2027, if they were to win the election and only if they thought it was affordable relative to their economic rules. last few weeks, quite frankly, they ve been in a complete mess about it and not rea
Have a different reaction to it. and get ready for a lot more gender talk. this is going to be generated by the clinton campaign from day one. it already is. and you re going to see a lot more of it. i thought the way he stood up to the guys and said we ve confided on battles because each one of you has earned your right to be there and asking him the questions, the tough ones. i think rand paul could have done a much better job today explaining to us why he should be the leader of the country. i remember last time around mitt romney came on he had a rather contentious interview with bret baier. shortly later on he came on with me and had another contentious exchange. nobody ever said it was about gender. romney was just getting flustered at that part of the campaign. but it seems like people see a thread here that they re trying to exploit on him. he doesn t like women. he s trying to beat up on the women. i ve pressed him very hard a number of times. he s got no problem with women.
Basically it was a talking over each other kind of thing. but do you regret it. i don t think it makes for good tv. do you regret shushing the one reporter and savannah guthrie s not exactly known for her, you know, aggressive unfairness. right. i think the question was unfair. do i think that i responded appropriately? you know, i would rather not have contentious interviews. i would rather do 30 minutes with charlie rose laid back in a la-z-boy chair. i know but we only get a few minutes. there s not a lot of time for niceties. you understand the position the reporters are in. i do. i m going to get to the woman thing in a minute. but the question some people are asking about you is whether you re ready for primetime because it s only going to get worse. you know it s only going to get worse. it s going to get more contentious. when you get up on that stage for those presidential debates you re going to get pounded. it s going to be ugly. that s the way the process work
Actually backfires on us. i think libya s an example of that. and i think had we toppled assad, isis would have been stronger. and i think our arming of the islamic rebels in that civil war has allowed isis to get stronger. their response is we got in too late. we started arming at a time when the wrong people had taken over. but the truth but let me make the comment that people you re criticizing say excuse me, let me ask the question. the people you re criticizing say we should have been arming those rebels. the decision to arm the rebels was not the wrong one. it just should have happened earlier while it was you know, the sort of doctors and lawyers and not yet the radical islamists. right. right. but the truth of the matter is that s incorrect. in 2013 we put 600 tons of weapons in there. there was no dearth of weapons going in there. the problem was we were putting weapons in there, saudi arabia was qatar was, but it was indiscriminate. and the weapons were flying to
And today our allies just don t trust us. our military is weak. iranian iranian hedge mommy is going forward. in iraq, in ways we have not seen. if we had a bush-cheney administration for another eight years, do you think we would not have seen the growth of isis and collapse of the middle east as we know it? no, i don t. because i think when president obama withdrew those last troops from iraq, he created a vacuum. isis filled that vacuum. if we had stayed there, supported the baghdad government and inclusive baghdad government that included kurds, sunnis, i don t think isis would have ever reached this point. i think it s because of that weakness. we saw these dictators fall. and there s a real question about whether that wound up being a good thing for america. i think we made a hideous mistake in telling mubarak who was our ally in egypt for 20 years to leave immediately when more intelligent voices were saying let s look for a