Stay in the Room Podcast

About Stay in the Room Podcast

Stay In The Room Because the people who leave are the ones who lose Political analysis at home and abroad — power, fragmentation, and the case for staying in the conversation davidpreston.substack.com (https://davidpreston.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Stay in the Room

Category

news · news

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

17 Aug 2026

Latest episode

8 Nov 2026

Latest episodes

24 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   8 Nov 2026

   The Bargain

   On a glacier, you rope up. Four or five people tied together several metres apart, walking across snow that may be hiding a crevasse. Nobody knows exactly where the holes are or who will step on one. That is the whole point of the rope: it doesn’t protect the strongest or the weakest, it protects whoever happens to go through. It only works if two things are true. The rope has to be kept close to taut, with no loops of slack lying in the snow, because slack is distance and every metre of it is a metre the falling climber drops before anyone feels the pull. And everyone else has to be ready to drop and hold. So the fast walkers at the front don’t surge ahead, and the tired ones at the back don’t stop. Everyone keeps the rope working, all the time, for a fall that may never come. Nobody gets their own pace, and nobody is quite comfortable. Britain is a roped party. The crevasse is old age: the day you might need help getting washed, dressed and safely through the day. The government’s own estimate is that around three in four people over 65 will need care and support at some point. That isn’t an even risk. The older you get, the likelier the fall. But nobody knows when, or for how long, or what it will cost. For most of my adult life we’ve walked across that snow with loops of slack at our feet and everyone arguing about who’s holding the others back. On 29 September a change was put on the table. At Labour conference in Liverpool, Andy Burnham announced that from April 2030 the state pension will rise each year by inflation or 2.5 per cent, whichever is higher, with a separate mechanism to keep it in line with earnings over time. The savings are to build a National Care Service providing free personal care for older people, based on need rather than ability to pay. The triple lock stays as it is for the rest of this parliament. He told the hall he accepted he might pay a political price. The government called it “a new settlement for older people”. Settlement is the right word. It has two sides, and it has a hole in it. What is actually on the table The triple lock has cost far more than anyone planned. When it came in, its extra cost over a plain earnings link was put at around £5.2 billion a year by the end of this decade. The Office for Budget Responsibility reckoned last year the figure would be about £15.5 billion. Inflation and wages have bounced around so much that the “whichever is highest” rule kept handing out rises bigger than earnings growth, and none of that lead was ever given back. That is what goes. Not the floor, which stays: a pension that never loses value to inflation and never rises by less than 2.5 per cent is still unusually strong protection. Not the link to earnings either, which the Institute for Fiscal Studies expects to hold over the long run. What goes is the ratchet. Under the old rule, every year that inflation or the 2.5 per cent minimum beat earnings growth, the pension moved further ahead of wages, and stayed there for good. The IFS called the change welcome, and calculated that had the new formula been running since 2011, pension spending this year would be about £9 billion lower. Here is the hole. The government’s own analysis puts the savings at around £15 billion a year by the end of the 2030s, about £11 billion in today’s money, and much more after that. But they are small for years before they are large, and the IFS has been blunt that stopping a future cost from growing is not the same as finding new money. The savings can help build up a care service. On their own, they don’t pay for one. The government’s answer is that the service will be fully funded, not through borrowing, and phased in as the savings grow and as staff and providers are found. Baroness Casey is due to report next summer on how and when. That is a commitment. It is not yet a costed plan, and the difference matters. Hold on to that distinction, because the rest of this piece depends on it. The two sides If you are drawing a state pension, or close to it, you paid in. Often for forty years or more, in jobs that wore your body out. The pension is not lavish: ministers put the full new state pension at roughly 30 per cent of median earnings, and plenty of people don’t get the full amount. Pensioner poverty is far lower than in the late 1990s, when close to three in ten pensioners were poor after housing costs, but the latest estimate is still around one in seven. I accept all of that, and nothing later in this piece takes it back. The deal still makes sense. What older people are being asked to give up is the ratchet. What they get is protection against the cost of personal care: help with washing, dressing, eating, getting safely through the day. That is the bill that turns a manageable old age into a frightening one. It won’t make a care home free. The government is clear that bed and board stay outside the service, with existing means-tested council contributions. But it takes away a large part of the exposure, and it takes away the part nobody can plan for. What younger people are being asked to accept is that the floor stays. They keep paying, through National Insurance, for today’s pensions, which rise every year and are protected against inflation. There’s no pot with their name on it. The state pension is paid for as it goes: each generation supports the one before, on the understanding that the next will support it. In return, the pension stops being ratcheted permanently ahead of their wages. It can still run ahead for a while, because the 2.5 per cent floor will sometimes beat earnings growth. The pension doesn’t fall back. It keeps rising, and earnings catch up with it. And they stop being cast as the generation coming for your money. This is not a swap where everyone gets back what they put in. An older homeowner who never needs care gives up the ratchet and never uses the service. A young renter on low pay, with no inheritance coming, keeps paying in with far less chance of building the security their parents had. The deal doesn’t pretend otherwise. It is a settlement about sharing a risk, not an exchange between individuals. That’s what a rope is. You don’t tie on because you expect to fall. You tie on because somebody might. I’m 55. I spent more than a decade working winter seasons in the French Alps, as a chef, a chalet host and a driver, to fund a skiing life I’d had since childhood. Brexit ended that. My vote didn’t save it and nobody compensated me for it. I live in a three-bedroom semi in Buckshaw Village worth about £225,000. The same house would cost a great deal more across much of the South East. I’m not one of the people the current arrangement has made comfortable. So when I ask younger readers not to take a hammer to the thing that will keep me upright when I’m old, and ask older readers to let the ratchet go, I’m asking it from the middle of the rope. It isn’t really about age The Resolution Foundation’s latest wealth audit puts the gap in typical wealth between people in their early thirties and people in their early sixties at around £310,000, more than double what it was in the mid-2000s. That looks like old against young. Mostly it’s about assets: pension pots and property, both of which have grown in value for the people who already held them. Place matters as much as age. In the same research, median wealth per adult is about £290,000 in the South East and about £110,000 in the North East. A pensioner renting a flat in Middlesbrough and a pensioner with a paid-off house in Surrey are both “older people”. They are not in the same position. What we have is inequality wearing an age label. Some of the old have done extremely well, and some of the young will inherit extremely well. But the Resolution Foundation found that only around a third of adults have received or expect a significant inheritance or gift, and that the typical age at which today’s young adults are projected to inherit is 61. For most people that’s well after t… Get full access to Stay in the Room at davidpreston.substack.com/subscribe (https://davidpreston.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   4 Nov 2026

   The Third Family

   The Third Family Two nuclear powers are weakening the rules, and Europe is being invited to do the same. Breaking them would cost it the only thing holding it together. In October, at Lubmin on Germany’s Baltic coast, the far-right AfD held a conference beside the idle terminal that used to take Russian gas from Nord Stream. One of its Bundestag members called for the plant to be restarted and hoped his Polish guest had no objection. Grzegorz Braun, leader of the Confederation of the Polish Crown, said his party wanted to become shareholders in the reconstruction. Then he borrowed a line from Apocalypse Now: “I love the smell of Russian gas in the morning.” Then the Wall Street Journal reported Washington’s proposal. Russian gas would flow back into Europe through the old pipelines across Ukraine, sold through an American intermediary to get round European sanctions, with the proceeds held in escrow and a lucrative opening for American investors. The administration, the Journal reported, is wagering that European resistance will prove “less rigid than meets the eye”. This project supports Ukraine’s right to defend itself and Europe’s security. It holds every source to the same evidence standard, including its own side. Two families Think of it as two crime families. The Kremlin has treated international law as optional since it seized Crimea in 2014; the Trump White House does it by deal. They threaten each other, trade with each other, and share a contempt for any rule that binds the strong. Some of the second family’s methods are reported; others are only alleged. Washington has kept up a naval blockade of Iranian ports since July. US forces carried out limited strikes near the Strait of Hormuz on 2 November, described as defensive. Plans for a renewed campaign have been drawn up; Trump says he has no immediate plan to launch one, while JD Vance writes to Tehran offering talks. In Poland, local reporting alleges that Trump privately urged the defence minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, to leave the governing coalition and side with the right. Kosiniak-Kamysz has confirmed the meeting but not the proposal. In Romania, Anne Applebaum reports in The Atlantic, the US ambassador to Greece pressed the case for American liquefied gas. The prime minister declined a contract because the price was not competitive. Within months a coalition party, whose leader the ambassador had been filmed dining with, joined the far right in a no-confidence vote that brought him down. Its leader denies any American influence. Nobody has shown cause, but the sequence makes Europeans nervous. Then there is the bill. According to the EU, as the Wall Street Journal reports it, the Iran war has cost Europe an extra 100 billion euros in energy. Reuters has reported protests over fuel prices and living costs this autumn in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Some of the parties seeking to capitalise on that anger want Russian energy back: Roberto Vannacci’s new party in Italy, Braun’s in Poland, and in Germany the AfD, which leads the latest INSA poll on 29 per cent. Put that together and a business model comes into view. The war has pushed up Europe’s bill, and Washington proposes Russian gas as the relief, through an American middleman. My own reading, not anything reported, is that American suppliers also do well while the shock lasts. What the figures show is the scale of Europe’s dependence: the energy analysts IEEFA expect the US to supply two-thirds of continental Europe’s liquefied gas imports this year. None of this needs a conspiracy, and families is a loose word: neither the White House nor the Kremlin is a single will, and Europe’s nationalist right is less coherent still. Moscow even cheers Polish parties that loathe Russia. But their separate actions push the same way, weakening the EU’s legal order, which stands between each of them and separate countries easier to bargain with one at a time. The trap Here is the argument at full strength. A rule-follower facing two rule-breakers is bled out slowly, obeying the law while its energy is priced against it and its streets fill. Push that far enough and Europe has to choose: keep the rules and lose, or break them and survive. Become the third family. Here is what would prove this piece wrong. If member states start buying Russian gas outside EU law this winter, or Brussels suspends its own rules to cope, then on the question that matters most this winter the choice is real. The hardest case is Poland. On the night of 30 October a group of judges elected by the current parliament suspended the head of the constitutional tribunal, a former minister in the nationalist Law and Justice government, and took control of the court. President Karol Nawrocki, who has refused to swear in five of the new judges, turned his plane round and pushed his way into the building. Donald Tusk is right on the appointments. In October the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission said the president’s refusal should not stop the new judges taking their seats. An older ruling, on a different appointment, sets the principle: in 2021 the European Court of Human Rights found that a tribunal bench including an improperly elected judge was not a lawful court. That does not settle the legality of what those judges did next, and his own side doubts it. The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights calls the legal basis for the suspension questionable, and Marcin Matczak, a law professor and fierce critic of Law and Justice, calls it non-existent. Tusk’s answer: “There is no other way.” And it started in 2015, when both the outgoing centrist government and the incoming nationalist one made legally questionable moves to stack the court. So Poland is the trap made real. A government defending the rule of law has stepped to its edge, and its opponents have the word they wanted. Dmitry Medvedev called it a constitutional coup. My judgement is that Tusk took a necessary risk. In Hungary, Péter Magyar won a two-thirds majority in April and used it in July to amend the constitution and remove the Orbán-era president, who could have referred his reforms to the constitutional court. Hard-edged, but constitutional, because he had the votes. Tusk does not. Overriding a presidential veto in Poland takes three-fifths of the Sejm, which his coalition lacks. Waiting for next year’s election could mean losing the court for good. But the price is real, and it will be paid on the street: anyone who wants to tell Poles they have been betrayed has just been handed a story. Why the choice is false Poland shows what bending the rules costs, not that Europe must break them. The EU is not a state. It has no army, no single sovereign and no general power to suspend its treaties and restore them later. Its emergency provisions work inside the treaties, not above them. It is twenty-seven countries held together by treaties and courts. Its coherence is the rule of law. The day Brussels deliberately sets its treaty obligations aside, Robert Fico, or a nationalist government in Warsaw or Paris, can say the treaties no longer bind them either. Breaking the law to save the Union would hand them the argument. And the law has more room in it than the trap admits, though it matters who is acting. Ukraine, as the state attacked, may defend itself and take countermeasures against Russia, and other states may help it, at its request and within limits, under the UN Charter’s right of collective self-defence. Whether countries not directly injured may take countermeasures of their own is contested, so EU sanctions rest on the Union’s own treaty powers. Europe is also a lawmaker. The ban on Russian gas, approved in January, phases out liquefied imports from the start of 2027 and pipeline gas from autumn 2027. That is law Europe chose to make. The frozen Russian assets show the same habit. The EU has kept them immobilised rather than seize them, and separately agreed a 90 billion euro loan for Ukraine, funded through EU bor… Get full access to Stay in the Room at davidpreston.substack.com/subscribe (https://davidpreston.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   30 Oct 2026

   Two Rooms

   The argument about Ukraine has split into two rooms, each sure the other is selling propaganda. They agree on more than they admit, and much of what divides them can be checked. This month I spent a few days in Slovenia, in the museums of Ljubljana and at Lake Bled. A year ago it was Dubrovnik. Both were republics of Yugoslavia, which Tito took down its own communist road after breaking with Stalin in 1948, outside the Warsaw Pact. Both declared independence in 1991, and their exits could hardly have been more different. Slovenia’s war lasted ten days. Croatia’s lasted until 1995, and Dubrovnik was shelled. What I took away from both places was not a thesis. It was a question. Whose story is this? Not Moscow’s, not Washington’s, not NATO’s. It belongs to the people who live there. Then I came home to an argument about Ukraine that mostly leaves that question out. This project supports Ukraine’s right to defend itself and Europe’s security. It holds every source to the same evidence standard, including its own side. Two rooms In one room sit Sarah Paine, the war college historian, Ben Hodges, who commanded the US Army in Europe, and Zelensky himself. In the other sit Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer and Yanis Varoufakis, most recently on Glenn Diesen’s channel. These are not schools of thought, and each room’s members disagree about plenty. Each group shares only its answer to one question: keep backing Ukraine’s fight, or push for a settlement now. Call them the deterrence camp and the settlement camp. The hosts differ. Diesen tends to state the conclusion and invite agreement. Steven Bartlett, who interviewed Paine and Zelensky, is warm rather than combative, but he put the other side’s case to both. Both rooms, though, have a word for the other. Paine says the argument about NATO expansion is a story Moscow made up. Diesen calls the people fact-checking him “war propagandists”. It helps to separate the tradition from the messenger. Diesen has a record: years as an RT contributor and a seat at Russia’s Valdai Club. Mearsheimer has no such tie, and his case about NATO has been public since at least 2015. The realist argument deserves to be met on its merits, whoever is hosting it. Here is what would prove me wrong. The most argued-over episode of the war is the peace talks in Istanbul in spring 2022, and each room has a story about why they failed. One says Washington and London stopped a deal. The other says Moscow’s terms made any deal impossible. If the documents put the decisive weight on either cause, that room’s account of Istanbul stands, and mine falls. Common ground Both think the post-1945 order is ending, the Iran war was a blunder, and Europe has no seat at the table. Hodges and Sachs say it from opposite ends; Moscow says the next round of talks will remain trilateral, without EU representatives. The most useful overlap is narrower. Inside Ukraine, both rooms predict that Russia will keep taking territory wherever the price looks bearable. Paine puts it down to imperial appetite. Mearsheimer puts it down to fear: no promise can be trusted, so land is security, and Odessa is worth having “if they can at some reasonable cost”. Beyond Ukraine, the predictions part company. Paine expects an empire to keep going. Mearsheimer expects a frightened great power to stop once it feels safe. The explanations point to different levers. You deter an appetite by making it fail. You might calm a fear with guarantees. What the record settles On October 28 Mearsheimer said Russia was making significant progress and would roll up Zaporizhzhia within a couple of months. The forecast cannot be tested yet. The claim about the present can. ISW’s assessment of October 16 has Russia taking about 100 square kilometres this year, with a net loss of 122 since September 1. As of that date, the map did not show the significant progress Mearsheimer was describing. He also says Russia is losing fewer men than Ukraine. Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian service have confirmed 282,993 Russian dead by name. UALosses, an open-source Ukrainian count, lists about 116,000 Ukrainian dead by name and 106,000 missing. The named-death counts point the other way, with nearly two and a half times as many Russian deaths identified. But the counts are incomplete, the methods differ, and neither includes the wounded. They cannot establish which side is suffering the greater total losses. He is right about something else. Ukraine is short of soldiers. By July 2025 prosecutors had opened about 203,000 criminal cases for unauthorised absence and 50,000 for desertion since 2022. Those are proceedings, not people: about 17,000 had been charged. The Prosecutor General no longer publishes the figures, citing national security. The deterrence room has its own soft spot: the hope that economic strain will end the war. The strain is real. Paine describes Putin wrecking his country. The central bank held its rate at 14 per cent on October 23. The 2026 deficit estimate has doubled to 3.2 per cent of GDP, and the draft budget gives defence and security 44 per cent of federal spending next year. It is not an economy that has stopped paying for its war, and none of these figures says how long it can keep paying. Paine herself expects Putin to keep going for as long as he lives. Diesen says the polls show most Ukrainians want a negotiated settlement. Wanting talks and accepting terms are different questions. In mid-October the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology tested one specific deal: withdrawing Ukrainian troops from the parts of Donbas they still hold, in exchange for American and European security guarantees. Sixty-one per cent called it completely unacceptable. Thirty-five per cent could live with it. Offered two statements, 78 per cent of one half of the sample chose the one saying Russia will not accept a settlement that leaves a sovereign Ukraine with a strong army, over the one blaming Kyiv for being too uncompromising. Whatever Ukrainians think about talking, most of them turned this trade down. What would Moscow accept? Sachs proposes neutrality and a ceasefire on the current line. In June 2024 Putin set out his terms: Ukraine was to withdraw from all of four regions, including the parts Russia does not hold. This month Zelensky offered a sixty-day ceasefire so Ukraine could hold elections. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov replied: “we do not want a ceasefire”. Public positions are opening bids. But on the public record, the armistice Sachs proposes is not on Moscow’s table. Then Istanbul. Sachs says Washington and London stopped a deal, and “everyone knows that”. Certainty is not evidence. Spring 2022 produced a framework, not a treaty: a neutral Ukraine, guarantees in principle, Crimea set aside. The hard parts stayed open. Ukraine wanted an army of 250,000. Russia offered 85,000. In mid-April Moscow asked for a veto over the very guarantees meant to protect Ukraine from Moscow. The accounts weigh the causes differently. Reports of the New York Times investigation into the drafts describe the guarantees as the most important sticking point and Moscow’s demand for a veto over them, and quote a Ukrainian official saying Kyiv’s team had no interest in continuing. Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko, who reconstructed the talks, decline to rank the causes. They point to Western reluctance to underwrite any guarantee, to Ukraine’s growing confidence once Kyiv held, and to talks that tried to settle too much too soon. They treat Bucha as secondary, because work on the treaty continued after it. They call the claim that the West forced Ukraine out “baseless”. So neither room’s account of Istanbul survives. The record does not show Washington and London killing a finished deal, or establish that Moscow’s terms alone made a deal impossible. It shows a framework with fundamental questions still unresolved, above all the guarantees meant to protect Ukraine from another Russian attack. Varoufakis calls Europe’s fear of Russia a “convenient fiction”. The Center for Strategic and International Studies found that Russian sabotage attacks in Europe quadrupled between 2022 and 2023 and nearly tripled the year after. Between April and mid-October this year, seventeen European public broadcasters mapped hundreds of physical incidents and plots, counting only those publicly linked to Russia by officials or news reports, and called it a very conservative estimate. The incidents are documented. Attribution varies case by case, and Russia denies them all, but CSIS judges Russian military intelligence responsible for many of them. An invasion is a forecast. The shadow war is a fact. Add it up and the evidence goes against several of the settlement room’s specific claims: on the map, on what Ukrainians will trade, on Moscow’s terms and on Istanbul. That is a narrower verdict than declaring a winner. The room is right about the guarantees in 2022, about Europe’s absence now, and about Ukraine’s manpower. What it cannot settle Evidence can inform a judgement about what Putin wants. It cannot establish it. Moscow’s own documents point both ways: demands to roll NATO back, and Putin’s essay insisting Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Nor do the map and the budget settle the deterrence room’s central claim, which is not that Russia is collapsing but that letting aggression pay costs more than resisting it. That is a judgement about the future, which no figure can make. Deterrence and settlement are not opposites either. Any settlement that holds needs something that deters the next war, and deterrence is meant to end in a settlement. The real argument is about the conditions: what guarantees, enforced by whom, and what Ukraine is asked to give up to get them. And underneath it sits the question I brought home. Evidence can tell us a great deal about what Ukrainians want, what the law says and what concessions would cost. What it cannot do is tell us how much weight a country’s own choice should carry against the claims great powers make on it. That is the argument worth having. Have it in one room. Sources and acknowledgements The specific claims rest on: the Diary of a CEO interviews with Sarah Paine and Volodymyr Zelensky; Glenn Diesen’s interviews with Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer and Yanis Varoufakis; ISW’s assessment of October 16; Mediazona and the BBC Russian service; UALosses; the Prosecutor General’s figures via the Kyiv Independent; the Bank of Russia decision of October 23; Reuters on the draft budget and Euronews on defence spending; the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll of October 8 to 16; CGTN on Peskov’s reply of October 12; reports of Yuri Ushakov’s remarks of October 28; accounts of the New York Times investigation; Charap and Radchenko in Foreign Affairs; CSIS; and the EBU-coordinated mapping of hybrid attacks. The piece builds on Foghorn and The Roundabout. It leans on the work of Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko, Seth G. Jones, and Mediazona’s researchers. The territorial, budget and polling figures are documented as attributed. The casualty counts are incomplete on both sides and do not establish a casualty ratio. The account of Istanbul rests on a reconstruction from interviews and on reports of the New York Times investigation, not the original article. That both rooms predict similar Russian behaviour inside Ukraine is inference. Get full access to Stay in the Room at davidpreston.substack.com/subscribe (https://davidpreston.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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