00:04:37.120before he went off to Manchester to be mayor, when he was first an MP, the state was spending
00:04:42.660about 34% of GDP. And now that figure is like 45%. And that is the root cause of all our
00:04:51.580problems. One of the lines I picked up from Pierre Polyèvre, actually, he likes to say
00:04:55.660the high house prices, the inflation, the debt, the unemployment, the regulations,
00:05:04.000These are all the symptoms. The cause is big government. The disease is big government. And it's exactly the same here. The disease, I'm afraid, is at a much more advanced state and the patient is much more in danger.
00:05:16.860So, I'm now unattached politically. I'm running our oldest think tank on the right, the Institute of Economic Affairs. That means I'm outside party and my party political glands have been cauterized in a painful operation.
00:05:36.520So I have to, you know, being neutral, I have to say I really hope that Burnham gets it.
00:06:05.720You can, as a Labour leader, much more easily than as a Conservative leader, reform welfare without being accused of murdering the poor.0.59
00:06:14.540You can introduce market mechanisms into the NHS without being accused of wanting to sell it all off to American corporations or whatever the current QAnon-level conspiracy theory is.
00:06:24.480You can build more houses on Greenbelt land because it isn't represented by Labour MPs, by and large.0.79
00:06:30.360You can even raise the state pension age
00:06:33.300because how many votes are you going to lose?
00:06:36.060The Tory vote is the last redoubt it has0.93
00:07:09.100Well, he really did not have any plan at all.
00:07:12.640He got in and immediately set up 28, I think, commissions to tell him what to do.
00:07:20.120He really was what he looked like, a slightly pudgy man who, in late middle age,
00:07:24.740wildly fancied becoming prime minister as a bit of a career change turned up in number 10 expecting
00:07:31.260to find someone there to tell him what to do found that there was no such person and hence that sort
00:07:35.820of fish on the slab expression he's had ever since and now andy burnham has just watched that happen
00:07:40.680to somebody else so is is he going to be in that category or is he going to have a a plan now it is
00:07:48.080possible, but he has a plan and he doesn't want to scupper the chances of getting a five-year
00:07:56.340mandate. He may well be preparing for an earlier election and then we'll see what he's thinking.
00:08:01.760That is a possibility. Another possibility is that actually we're just going to have more of
00:08:06.520the same, that he will fiddle around tweaking here and there while the economy continues to
00:08:12.000be pressed under the weight of big government. A big part of recovering as a country is
00:08:18.780like with anything, right? You have to acknowledge the disease, you have to get the diagnosis right,
00:08:24.100and then you move on to the prescription. People are quite shocked in this country when they
00:08:29.280realize how badly we fare internationally. We at the IEA did a survey quite recently where we said,
00:08:35.780compared to other countries, how rich do you think we are? Here are the rest of the world
00:08:40.440ranked by GDP per head. Most people thought we were about on a par with Switzerland or Singapore.
00:08:46.720The reality is that those countries have twice our GDP per head. We are actually about to be
00:08:50.620overtaken by Slovenia and Poland, right? So acknowledging that is the first step to recovery.1.00
00:08:56.620And I guess we'll find out whether Burnham is in that camp. One thing that Burnham has in
00:09:04.460common with Mark Carney is that they both became prime ministers, not through a democratic process
00:09:10.920of the general population, but through a process within their own political party. Carney
00:09:16.720subsequently went on to win an election. Are there any other similarities in terms of coming in? I
00:09:25.180mean, Carney was able to become incredibly popular because he said he would stand up to
00:09:30.460Donald Trump went to the electorate. They said, yes, you're the man for that. And they didn't
00:09:36.180quite give him a majority, but he was able to manufacture one. What about Burnham? Does he
00:09:41.660enjoy popularity or people just don't know him yet? And you mentioned an early election.
00:09:47.140It's a good question. So people, people are, he starts, he kind of looks the part a little bit
00:09:54.840like Carney, right? And he has an everyman quality. He's relatable, as they say. And that
00:10:01.640helps him. Also, and here I think the parallel is very strong, he can, like Carney, become quite
00:10:09.980popular simply by dropping the worst of his predecessor's policies, right? Not by doing
00:10:14.440anything positive, but just by not doing some deeply unpopular things that the previous guy
00:10:19.880was doing. So in our context, this would be things like the digital ID card scheme, the early
00:10:25.700prisoner release scheme, handing over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius and paying for the privilege.
00:10:33.540There's a bunch of very easy wins, reduction of jury trials, et cetera, where a bit like with
00:10:42.240the carbon taxes, he becomes popular by not being the previous guy. I would also make the parallel
00:10:49.420in this way. I think Mark Carney obviously was vindicated in his decision to call an election.
00:10:54.800That turned out to be spectacularly the right thing for him to have done in a political sense.
00:11:01.620But I think he was also right constitutionally to do that. He hadn't been an MP. He didn't have
00:11:06.720any direct mandate. And I think it was the right thing to do. I think both of those things apply
00:11:13.580in this situation to Burnham. So yes, constitutionally, he should do it. He'll
00:11:18.040want to do things differently. He won't want to be bound by Keir Starmer's manifesto.
00:11:23.980He needs permission. But also, I think he's only going to get less popular because he'll have been
00:11:30.820told how bad our fiscal situation is. A Labour government that can't hand goodies out, that
00:11:36.980on the contrary has to cut things, is never popular. So his best bet, I think, tactically,
00:11:43.460is also an early election. Now, I should stress, Brian, that I'm very much in the minority.
00:11:48.040in predicting this. The consensus in Brisson is that he's too far behind in the polls. There's
00:11:53.920no chance of an earlier election. Maybe. I mean, I'm not the guy to ask about internal labor
00:12:00.280dynamics. All I can say is if it was me, I would hold an early election. And even if that means
00:12:05.920sacrificing a couple of hundred labor MPs or a hundred in order to carry on as prime minister
00:12:11.420of some kind of coalition government, I think he'd still be right to do it.
00:12:14.400Well, one of my favorite sayings about politics is that voters are fickle, polls can change, and campaigns matter. But you're right. At this moment, it's a bit of a dog's breakfast for political parties and British public opinion polling.
00:12:29.040The latest one I'm looking at right now, it's Find Out Now.
00:12:32.920I don't know if they're a good polling firm or not.
00:12:36.160They've got Reform at 24, Labour at 22, Conservatives at 19, Lib Dems at 10, Greens at 14.
00:12:43.820Not dissimilar from other polls, though, from YouGov and the others.
00:12:50.440What has happened that Reform is outpacing the Conservatives now, your former party?
00:12:57.240Well, I mean, that's easily enough explained. The Conservatives were incredibly unpopular at the end of 14 years, partly because of a series of errors that they made, unforced errors, particularly on immigration policy, but also on tax policy, on net zero.
00:13:12.500Partly in their partial defence, I don't want to overdo this, but they carried the can for the
00:13:18.900costs of the lockdown, despite the fact that all the other parties had also been demanding the
00:13:23.060lockdown, as had the electorate at large. 93% of people wanted severer and longer restrictions,
00:13:29.980and yet they are now complaining about the impact of those restrictions in terms of higher taxes,
00:13:35.140higher debt, higher inflation, lower productivity, truancy, etc., etc. So to some extent,
00:13:48.620But you see, the way you just read those figures, in a way, Brian, is very, very telling, right?
00:13:55.640We have the same electoral system as you.
00:13:58.360And it is designed for basically a two-party system with a few extras, right?
00:14:03.000So we, like you, had basically a two-party system with a couple of smaller parties and then one sort of separatist party in one part of the country.
00:14:11.260And a first-past-the-post system works pretty well for that.
00:14:16.480When, as we've just heard from the figures you read, when we have effectively a five-party system, then you start getting freak results.
00:14:25.880And a tiny shift of 2% from one of those parties to another one can completely alter the complexion of a parliament.
00:14:32.160And so you were very right to say that voters are fickle in elections or uncertain, right?
00:14:37.400I mean, almost any outcome is possible.
00:14:41.960But with all of that, things are not going to get any better for Labour, right?
00:14:46.560Go now in your honeymoon before when people are still projecting their wishes onto you,
00:14:50.740when everyone still wants to imagine that you're on their side, before you've had to
00:14:54.380start choosing and making tough decisions.
00:14:59.820Burnham could become the Barack Obama of British politics.
00:15:02.840I mean, it's a big reason that Obama was elected when he was.
00:15:05.740people didn't know much about him they just knew they wanted change and they could say this guy
00:15:12.120embodies what i believe and he believes in hope and change and so do i and on we go nobody defined
00:15:18.960what that was he could be and uh you know like i say he was i mean he's been on quite a journey
00:15:28.560he was a blairite when he started and then he uh you know then he moved very much to the left in
00:15:34.660order to contest the Labour leadership. I mean, who knows, right? It is possible. But let me just
00:15:42.660make this point that Milton Friedman, who was one of our gurus here at the IEA,
00:15:47.960spoke here regularly, wrote often for us. He used to say,
00:15:51.940the challenge is not to get the right people in. It is to set the incentives in such a way
00:15:59.200that even the wrong people will do the right thing.
00:16:02.980Now, we have failed to do that in the UK.
00:16:05.240We have set the incentives in such a way that even the wrong people,
00:16:08.020even the right people are doing the wrong thing now, i.e. spending too much money.
00:16:12.680The lockdown and the furlough scheme and the grants and so on
00:16:16.860served to convince a chunk of the electorate that there really was a magic money tree.
00:16:21.740And no politician has been brave enough to disobligge them of that fact.
00:16:25.600So we've gone from spending, as I say, a third of the economy was state-controlled when Burnham was first elected as an MP in 2001 under Tony Blair. It's now closer to a half. And that is what needs to change.
00:20:00.340how close it is in policy to the other.
00:20:03.680If by the next election, I were to come back on your show and read you the two manifestos and try and get you to guess which one was which, you would struggle as anyone.
00:20:14.200So the difference between them is much more kind of tonal, right?
00:20:18.140It's much more gestalt if you want to be pretentious about it.
00:20:20.880It's not really, you know, they agree on backing off net zero.
00:20:31.040Reform is, it's kind of in the names, right?
00:20:33.600Reform is for tearing stuff down and saying the whole system has failed, the politicians are useless, the state has failed, we need a completely different approach.
00:20:40.660The conservatives are still small-c conservative in the sense of saying we want to preserve our country, our institutions, and the things we love.
00:20:48.380Although they might end up in a similar place, they are starting from different places philosophically.
00:20:56.900And then there's just the simple fact that one was in office and the other wasn't.
00:20:59.820so a a reform voter looking at the conservative manifesto will say well that's great but why
00:21:06.040didn't you do any of it you had 14 years and a conservative looking at the reform manifesto
00:21:11.400will say well that's great but this is completely unrealistic you might as well promise good weather
00:21:15.680every day you know how are you actually going to deliver that and and they've both kind of got a
00:21:19.680point right i mean i if it were up to me and like i say i'm not in in party politics anymore but
00:21:25.140If it were up to me, I would try, if I were in either of those parties, to have a grown-up, sensible agreement with the other, that each party should focus on the constituencies, on our ridings, where you are likeliest to do well.
00:21:43.160And actually, the geography of the two parties is very complementary, with a very small number of exceptions. The Conservatives are strong in southern, rural and suburban England. Reform is strong in northern England and Midlands England. Even in your ancestral Scotland and my ancestral Scotland, it's kind of fairly obvious, right? The Tories are strong in the borders and in Aberdeenshire and the northeast. Reform would be everywhere else.
00:22:08.780in wales i think it would be entirely reformed yeah i mean the geography is like really it's
00:22:14.220really obvious what you would do if they did that i think they would almost certainly form a majority
00:22:20.420but it's interesting that you said the difference is tone and of course stephen harper was able to
00:22:27.640work with peter mckay to bridge the canadian alliance and the progressive conservative party
00:22:33.620to form one unified modern conservative party.
00:22:37.440But right now, Pierre Polyev is in the wake of losing the last election just over a year
00:22:43.580ago, dealing with a lot of infighting among conservatives.
00:22:47.400And there are some that want to apply a purity test.
00:22:50.920And when you look at what they're actually saying the purity is, it's more about tone.
00:22:55.440Are you harsh enough in your criticism of the current government?
00:22:58.800um do you take the right stance in in terms of how you present as opposed to what you're actually
00:23:05.680putting forward and there's a real potential for polyev who i i know you know and like um
00:23:11.180that there could be a schism in the party again which leads to situations like you have in britain
00:23:17.920where you you know the the people proposing very similar things are quite popular but in different
00:23:23.320areas and wouldn't that would make it much more difficult for them to form government
00:23:28.140Well, it's interesting. I was talking to Pierre's predecessor, but one, Andrew Scheer. I was talking to him about the experience of the split and then the reunification of the Canadian right. He told me something quite interesting.
00:23:44.500He said when he was working, I think he was a researcher for Stockwell Day, or he had some position as a young man in politics.
00:23:53.300And he said one of his jobs was to go through the Progressive Conservative Manifesto and find things to attack as a reformer.
00:24:05.200And he said, with every page, I found that, yes, I could do that.
00:24:08.360But actually, I basically agreed with it.
00:24:09.780I could see where they were coming from.
00:24:10.960And he said, by the time I got to the end, I realized that it was inexcusable to keep splitting the vote, that our differences were so small that it was just not – we did not have the right to inflict a left-wing government on Canada because of these sort of vanity issues.
00:24:30.060And I think that was – I'm sure he was right about that.
00:24:32.180I'm not a Canadian, but that must have made sense.
00:24:35.880And in fact, when I asked Pierre, Pierre was in London, had a very successful visit in March. Everyone loved him, wowed the whole city. But I asked him the same question, you know, what would you, what do you most regret about that period of the two coming together, you coming from the reformed tradition?
00:24:53.880And he said, well, we should have done it five years earlier. You know, we were self-indulgent in both parties in not getting it. Now, whether that could have happened is a whole different question. But the logic definitely applies to Britain, right?
00:25:11.000If people are entirely driven by logic and reason, they will come to some agreement.
00:25:19.160If they're driven by ego and vanity and what you describe in Canada, the purity spirals, then they won't.
00:25:26.420And it's not for me to give advice to Canadian Tories.
00:25:31.620I actually felt much closer to it politically at the time than I did to my own party when I was a British Tory.
00:25:38.400I think it has a genuine radicalism and energy that the British Tories, being a little bit more kind of hierarchical and backward-looking, don't have.
00:25:54.240but i i would just caution everyone not to put ego or purity tests above you know not just their
00:26:05.160party interest but their national interest if they think that they're offering a better
00:26:08.360solution than the other side right um i think the canadian tory party is led by one of the
00:26:14.640outstanding politicians of his generation he may not poll as uh you know he can be he can be tough
00:26:22.560in what he says and that's reflected in the polls, but I don't know a better political strategist
00:26:27.280and I don't know a better economic brain. He is one of the great figures in the world on the
00:26:33.780right of center at the moment. And I just think it's crazy not to go with what you've got when
00:26:37.620you've got an asset of that kind, a campaigner of that kind. Take away that bizarre and unpredictable
00:26:43.960black swan event of the Trump annexation threats and he would now be a hugely successful prime
00:26:49.320minister. I would agree. But you're starting to sound like you like Pierre even more than Stephen
00:26:53.940Harper, who you've long admired. Well, I remember Stephen once told me that the one rule in politics
00:27:01.800is that every leader disapproves of his immediate successor. I can think of a lot of countries where
00:27:07.940that is true. I therefore have the unusual, possibly even unique distinction of counting
00:27:14.600as a friend every one of the four most recent Canadian Tory leaders, Stephen Harper and Andrew
00:27:21.580Scheer and Erin O'Toole and Pierre. But Pierre is the one who's going to turn things around. He's
00:27:28.620going to be a great prime minister. All right. We'll talk more about British politics, including
00:27:32.840reform and where they go from here when we come back. Quick break. But first, Daniel, I'm going
00:27:38.940to try and tempt you to buy some of our National Post Toronto Sun merchandise. Yes, we've launched
00:27:44.500merch store we've got hoodies hats tote bags mugs more shop the official post media store you can
00:27:50.280get your local newspaper uh swag as well show your support for journalism and you get to look good
00:27:56.720too visit postmedia.store to shop the collection today that's postmedia.store recently our company
00:28:05.260softball team lost the big game by one run then dale tried to console us with the quote
00:28:35.160I mean, that's why you're listening to this podcast.
00:28:37.600But if you're not in the loop with PostMedia's VIP political hack,
00:28:43.260then you're not getting even close to the whole politics story.
00:28:47.460I'm Stuart Thompson, Parliamentary Bureau Chief.
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00:30:15.040This is Tristan Hopper, the host of Canada Did What?
00:30:18.460where we unpack the biggest, weirdest, and wildest political moments in Canadian history you thought you knew and tell you what really happened.
00:30:25.940Stick around at the end of the episode to hear a sample of one of our favorite episodes from season two.
00:30:31.320And if you missed it, there are even more episodes from last season.
00:30:34.860So make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What?
00:36:03.140Nope. There's like two million of them, right? I don't think his supporters are ready for the
00:36:10.880gap between what he has promised and what he or anyone else could deliver. So I wouldn't be
00:36:15.340completely surprised in an event where his MPs were capable of forming part of a government or
00:36:21.700even the whole government, where he chose to remain party leader, but put someone else in
00:36:28.320as prime minister. It's a pattern I've seen again and again in Europe with these kind of
00:36:33.840populist parties. And it's a way for the leader to maintain his brand without having to enter
00:36:39.060into the compromises of the government. I'm thinking of another comparison to Canada.
00:36:45.220Preston Manning led a party that, when it was reformed, that was seen as,
00:36:50.440It's out there. Could we really do that? And yet, when Jean-Claude Chen decided that he needed to get serious, when the, I believe it was the Wall Street Journal or it was the economist that called Canada a banana republic because of our financial situation, when the lenders in New York started to balk at providing more money to Canada,
00:37:16.380Preston Manning had an incredible amount of influence on the direction of the government
00:37:23.300and had he not been there perhaps they wouldn't have gone as far as they did so you can have an
00:37:28.540outsized influence even if you don't take power and perhaps that's what Farage and reform do
00:37:34.200even if it's under a labor government if they apply the pressure correctly well all of that
00:37:40.700is true and indeed preston manning who i think is a very significant politician and underrated for
00:37:46.720exactly the reason you gave uh was at the reform conference two years ago giving his kind of
00:37:51.680benediction to the the british reform party um i think he was you know martin was very inspired by
00:37:59.960by the story of the the way the right came together in canada and i don't think it was a coincidence
00:38:03.880that he called his party reform i think he he'd studied what happened after 1993 in canada very
00:38:08.800very earnestly um of course if we tell that story through to the end it really was a victory for
00:38:15.460preston manning because you know stephen harper came from the reform party pf y liever has
00:38:19.080so it it kind of they they did end up in power um with policies that he would have recognized you
00:38:27.300know yes subject to all the compromises you have to make in government but basically the
00:38:30.620philosophy that he would not have disowned uh so i i think that's nigel's aspiration
00:38:37.940It's not just to nudge the conservatives in a different direction.0.69
00:38:41.880It's that the party that he has founded should in some way get a share of power.
00:38:48.440The question is whether he will be part of it if that happens.
00:38:51.180And, of course, the expectation is that he would and that he'd be prime minister and maybe he would like to be.
00:38:57.200But there's a little bit of me, you know, I've known him for a long time, that wonders whether he actually wants to take that level of responsibility off.
00:39:04.940do you see the two parties merging the way that ours did in canada or just cooperating
00:39:10.640in the short term just cooperating if that in the long term and for exactly the same reason
00:39:17.820as in canada i.e the electoral system i don't think they will have any option but to merge
00:39:23.060the the first possible system will do it for them i want to switch gears and ask you about
00:39:29.260brexit that was something that you spent an awful lot of your political career
00:39:33.480working towards. You were a member of the European Parliament for, was it 16, 17 years?
00:48:03.760Here's that clip from Canada Did What? Season 2 that we promised for you.
00:48:08.140In U.S. discourse, you often hear reference to what the framers of their own constitution would think about the state of their handiwork in the 21st century.
00:48:17.260Things like, sure, George Washington supported Second Amendment gun rights in the age of the musket, but what about an AR-15?
00:48:25.440Well, the neat thing about Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms is that several of its framers lived long enough to state that all their worst fears about the document had been confirmed.
00:49:30.220okay, well, we don't want that, and we don't want that,
00:49:33.160And that partly for political reasons, maybe, that now the cat was out, that everyone can see in the future and see what would happen if we did do this and that.
00:49:42.180And here's Blakeney, the socialist from Saskatchewan in 2005.0.98
00:49:46.760Right now, the conventional wisdom is that our splendid parliamentary system with a wise electorate somehow elects only fools and knaves.0.99
00:49:55.900Fools and knaves who appoint judges who are wise.0.99
00:49:59.160Somehow the judges are invested with superhuman wisdom.1.00