The Ben Shapiro Show - July 14, 2019


Daniel Hannan | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 59

Topics
Brexit negotiations and Labour/Conservative divisions culture war identity politics unemployment in Chatham Docks
Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Guests
Daniel Hannan
Mentioned
Brexit Donald Trump Jeremy Corbyn Boris Johnson Leave Daniel Hannon Betsy Ross Stalin Hitler The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Angela Merkel Castro Martin Luther King Arnold Schwarzenegger Herbert Butterfield Frederick Douglass Winston Churchill Margaret Thatcher Colin Kaepernick Thomas Jefferson and 28 more
The Secret Plan | Ep. 816 President Leeroy Jenkins | Ep. 817

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour

Words per minute

193.66

Word count

11,710

Sentence count

779

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

12

sentences flagged

Hate speech

19

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Daniel Hannan is the President of the Initiative for Free Trade and a UK Member of the EU Parliament. In this special, he talks about his views on Brexit and why he thinks it s a bad idea to be part of the European Union. He also discusses the history of British Euroscepticism within the EU, and why it s important to have a strong sense of identity within a group of people that can sustain a nation-state. He also explains why he doesn t think the EU should be as big as it is now, and what he thinks about the current state of trade relations with the other 27 countries in the EU. And, of course, he s a big fan of the president of the UK's Prime Minister, Theresa May, who has been trying to negotiate a deal for Britain to leave the EU for years, but it just isn t happening. He's not alone in his opinion on this matter, and he's not the only one who has a problem with the EU's current policies and the way it's being run. This is a must-listen for anyone who wants to understand what s going on inside the EU and what s happening outside of it. In this Sunday Special, Ben talks to the man who's got it all wrong, and tries to make sense of what's going on in the world, and how the EU is really trying to do things the way they want to do them. and why they should do them and how they should be doing them. It's a must listen, and it's important to understand why they don't get it right and why we should do it the way we do them the right and not the way that they do them right and how to do it for the sake of the British people want them to get it the right way. Thanks so much for stopping by, Ben, it's great to have him on the show, I'm a fan of Ben Shapiro, and I'm glad he's a good friend of the show and I hope you enjoy it! Ben Shapiro Thank you for coming on The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special. - Ben Shapiro: . - The Daily Mail The Weekly Standard Music: "Good Morning America" by The Good Morning America by Fountains of London - "The Good, the Bad, The Good, The Bad and The Bad, the Good, and the Ugly" by John Singleton

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Britain, in the end, was not prepared to become a province of a country called Europe.
00:00:04.000 We want to have the best and closest relations with our neighbours.
00:00:08.000 They will remain our friends and our allies and our suppliers and our customers.
00:00:12.000 But we want to live under our own laws, just like any other country. - Hey, hey, and welcome to the show.
00:00:22.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special with Daniel Hannan.
00:00:25.000 He's the president of the Initiative for Free Trade and a UK member of the EU Parliament.
00:00:29.000 Daniel, thanks so much for stopping by.
00:00:30.000 It's great to be here.
00:00:30.000 Thank you, Ben.
00:00:31.000 I'm a big fan.
00:00:32.000 Well, thank you.
00:00:32.000 I appreciate it.
00:00:33.000 So, let's jump right in.
00:00:33.000 Back at you.
00:00:35.000 Obviously, what's at the forefront of every person's mind when they hear your accent is what is happening with Brexit.
00:00:41.000 So, what is sort of the latest there?
00:00:42.000 Well, first of all, I'm the only person in this conversation who doesn't have an accent, right?
00:00:48.000 What's happening with Brexit?
00:00:48.000 Look, what's happening with Brexit is that two years ago there was an election during which every major party promised to uphold the referendum result.
00:00:58.000 It's now clear that one of those two parties didn't mean it.
00:01:00.000 The Labour Party have done everything they can to frustrate it.
00:01:03.000 So we've had years of Postponement and delay, and it is making people crazy.
00:01:08.000 And one of the things that is infuriating is you hear people saying, Brexit has divided the country, Brexit has made you all mad, Brexit has set people against you.
00:01:15.000 Brexit hasn't happened! 0.59
00:01:16.000 I mean, do I need to spell this out?
00:01:18.000 The thing that is dividing the country, etc, etc, etc, is exactly the opposite.
00:01:21.000 It is the refusal of members of parliament to do what they promised and honour the result.
00:01:25.000 So there have been a lot of folks who have been uttering the word Brexit.
00:01:28.000 President Trump obviously says Brexit a lot.
00:01:30.000 I don't know that very many people know exactly what Brexit is, what drove it.
00:01:34.000 What is the history of Brexit?
00:01:35.000 Why is it happening?
00:01:36.000 Why did the British population vote for it?
00:01:38.000 If the European Union were just a club, if it were just a trade association, if it were a group of neighboring countries wanting to do things together, there'd have been no referendum, there'd have been no argument, right?
00:01:48.000 You'd have to be crazy to have a problem with that.
00:01:51.000 The problem was that the EU didn't stop there.
00:01:54.000 It wanted ultimately to become a country called Europe.
00:01:58.000 And one by one it acquired all of the attributes and trappings of a nation-state.
00:02:03.000 It has a flag, it has a national anthem, it has a passport, a parliament, a president, a supreme court, external borders, representation at the UN, developing military capacity, a criminal justice system.
00:02:15.000 What it doesn't have is a sense of nationhood.
00:02:19.000 It doesn't have a sense of shared identity or affinity among the people that can sustain these organizations.
00:02:25.000 So Britain, in the end, was not prepared to become a province of a country called Europe.
00:02:30.000 We want to have the best and closest relations with our neighbors.
00:02:34.000 They will remain our friends and our allies and our suppliers and our customers.
00:02:38.000 But we want to live under our own laws, just like any other country.
00:02:40.000 So how did the EU make this shift?
00:02:42.000 Because originally it was just supposed to be sort of an economic bonding together, wasn't it, the European Commonwealth?
00:02:47.000 Well, there were always people who wanted a federal state of Europe, right from the start.
00:02:52.000 But the real shift came at the beginning of the 90s, when the Treaty of Maastricht was passed.
00:02:57.000 And that was when it stopped being the European Economic Community and became the European Union.
00:03:02.000 And that was when it acquired the flag and the trappings and attributes of statehood.
00:03:06.000 And that really was the birth of modern British Euroscepticism.
00:03:10.000 Up until then, there'd been a tiny remnant, mainly of the trade unions and the far left, who'd always been against it.
00:03:18.000 But Euroscepticism was not a thing until the early 90s.
00:03:22.000 And as the EU has gone further and further towards political amalgamation, Britain has gone in the other direction.
00:03:29.000 How is it allowed to progress so fast?
00:03:32.000 I mean, it really did progress pretty quickly.
00:03:35.000 one of the only countries in the EU that maintained its own currency and therefore was able to survive the economic crash in a way that was better than the rest of the EU and a lot of the pressures that were inside of the EU.
00:03:45.000 Why did things escalate this quickly inside the EU?
00:03:48.000 It's become, I think, almost a religion for them.
00:03:51.000 So it began, of course, from good motives, right?
00:03:54.000 I mean, like almost everything in politics, we're not dealing with evil people.
00:03:58.000 We're dealing with people who have good intentions but have made miscalculations.
00:04:02.000 And the good intention behind the EU was the only way to stop wars in Europe and to get everyone to get on is to kind of pool the institutes of their statehood, to have a bigger sovereignty that covers all of the old ones.
00:04:16.000 Some of them look to the example of the US.
00:04:19.000 The big difference, of course, is that in the U.S.
00:04:21.000 people were already starting with one language, with basically compatible religion, with the same legal system, and with a sense of shared identity, which of course is not the case in Europe.
00:04:30.000 And so you can't, the way I'd put it is this, if you want a democracy, You have to have a demos.
00:04:36.000 You have to have a unit with which we identify when we say the word we.
00:04:40.000 It's what my friend Roger Scruton calls the politics of the first person plural.
00:04:45.000 You've got to have that sense of community.
00:04:47.000 And if you take the demos away, then you're left only with the kratos, only with the power, the power of the system that has to compel by force of law what it can't ask in the name of patriotism.
00:04:58.000 Because there is no common patriotism.
00:04:59.000 Because no one really feels European In the same sense that somebody might feel Hungarian or Swedish or Portuguese.
00:05:05.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about sort of the particular driving force behind Brexit.
00:05:10.000 Was it immigration?
00:05:11.000 Was it economic?
00:05:12.000 First, let's talk about being an adult.
00:05:14.000 Part of adulthood is having to do things that you really do not want to do, like red-eye flights, working late, visiting in-laws and getting life insurance.
00:05:21.000 But another part of adulthood is learning to delegate what you hate.
00:05:24.000 And while you can't delegate a visit to the in-laws, you can certainly delegate life insurance shopping.
00:05:28.000 PolicyGenius is the easy way to shop for life insurance online.
00:05:31.000 In just two minutes, you can compare quotes from top insurers and find your best price.
00:05:36.000 Once you apply, the PolicyGenius team will handle all the paperwork and the red tape.
00:05:40.000 No sales pressure, no hidden fees, just financial protection and peace of mind.
00:05:43.000 PolicyGenius doesn't just make life insurance easy, they also help you find the right home insurance and auto insurance and disability insurance.
00:05:49.000 All types of insurance.
00:05:50.000 So, if you need life insurance, but you don't want to deal with all the legwork, head over to PolicyGenius.com.
00:05:55.000 It's the easy way to compare all the top insurers, find the best value for you.
00:05:58.000 PolicyGenius, delegate what you hate, especially if you hate getting life insurance.
00:06:02.000 Also, listen, I know you don't want to think about death, but just do it for five seconds.
00:06:05.000 Go get your life insurance over at PolicyGenius.com.
00:06:08.000 Get it taken care of.
00:06:09.000 Be an adult.
00:06:09.000 PolicyGenius.com.
00:06:11.000 So, let's talk for a second about what exactly was the driving force behind all this.
00:06:15.000 So the EU is gaining power, they're obviously issuing a lot of regulations, and it seems like the media coverage has focused in on one specific area of European integration, and that is immigration.
00:06:24.000 The idea that there is this open immigration movement, particularly springing from Angela Merkel in Germany.
00:06:29.000 And this freedom of movement inside the EU where people could basically settle where they want and move across borders freely.
00:06:34.000 How much of Brexit was driven by immigration concerns and how much of it was driven by economic pressures or over-regulation from Brussels?
00:06:43.000 Well, we had quite a lot of polling data on this, including a massive exit poll on the day of more than 12,000 people.
00:06:48.000 It was a really big data set.
00:06:50.000 And so we don't need to speculate.
00:06:53.000 We asked, and the answer was the top issue for people was sovereignty.
00:06:56.000 The top issue was the principle of wanting to live under their own laws, to hire and fire the people who pass those laws.
00:07:03.000 Immigration was an issue.
00:07:05.000 It was one of many areas where people wanted control back.
00:07:08.000 But it was not the issue in the way that you would think if you rely on reports from the New York Times, the Financial Times, The Economist or the BBC.
00:07:17.000 In fact, I will give you a general rule of thumb, Ben.
00:07:20.000 A heuristic, as we might pretentiously call it.
00:07:23.000 If any Brit says to you, Brexit was all about immigration, I guarantee that you're talking to someone who voted Remain.
00:07:30.000 Because leavers know that that wasn't really the issue.
00:07:31.000 That the issue was democracy, of which immigration was one subset.
00:07:35.000 So with that said, when looking at the media coverage of this, the media basically covered this as a xenophobic backlash to immigration.
00:07:44.000 Of course.
00:07:45.000 And they also suggested this was part of a broader global populist uprising of which President Trump was a part.
00:07:50.000 Yes.
00:07:50.000 So those are two separate claims.
00:07:51.000 So much, much easier to dismiss your opponents than to engage in any self-analysis, right?
00:07:56.000 So, I mean, there is a parallel universe somewhere where the media and indeed the bureaucrats in Brussels might have said, oh, I wonder why they voted leave.
00:08:04.000 I wonder whether we might have played that a bit better.
00:08:06.000 I wonder whether other people might not like us.
00:08:08.000 Maybe we should be a little bit more flexible.
00:08:09.000 But of course, nobody likes to do that.
00:08:12.000 Nobody likes to question whether they got something wrong.
00:08:14.000 It's always more tempting to say, bunch of xenophobes.
00:08:17.000 It was all about not liking different races or not liking immigration.
00:08:22.000 And then you don't have to think.
00:08:23.000 You don't have to question yourself at all.
00:08:25.000 And that's now sort of built up this head of steam.
00:08:27.000 I mean, it's become almost an article of faith among the Romaine media that There was a spike in racially aggravated crime. 0.99
00:08:37.000 This turns out to be absolute rubbish. 0.83
00:08:40.000 There's a police kind of hotline where people are encouraged to say, I'm a victim of hate crimes. 0.94
00:08:45.000 There was a spike in the 96 hours after the vote.
00:08:48.000 Which turned out to be a lot of people complaining about the Leave campaign.
00:08:52.000 And yet this is now solemnly reported everywhere as the spike in hate crimes that followed the referendum.
00:08:57.000 And even to question that, it's now taken on kind of canonical force.
00:09:00.000 Even to say there was no spike in hate crimes, people are more pro-immigration than they were before the result, Britain is more pro-immigration than almost any country in Europe, you know, the number of cases referred for prosecution has fallen.
00:09:12.000 Even to say those things, As well.
00:09:14.000 What is it you like to say?
00:09:15.000 Facts don't care about your feelings, right?
00:09:17.000 These are hate facts.
00:09:18.000 Simply to recite the facts is to open yourself to the accusation of being a xenophobe or a racist or whatever.
00:09:24.000 So you mentioned the Remain media.
00:09:26.000 Maybe you could give sort of a breakdown as to how the media works in Britain.
00:09:29.000 So I famously was unaware of how the media works in Britain based on my labelling of particularly the BBC.
00:09:36.000 So I knew that the BBC is state funded.
00:09:37.000 I knew that the BBC leans left.
00:09:39.000 I know that there are Publications like The Guardian that obviously have a large online presence and lean left.
00:09:44.000 But what is the breakdown in media in the UK and how does that impact things like the Brexit campaign?
00:09:49.000 Right, so the newspapers are fairly balanced in terms of the numbers of titles left to right and pro to anti-EU.
00:09:56.000 And by the way, that second fissure has now become the dominant cultural one in Britain.
00:10:00.000 Really, really weird thing.
00:10:02.000 People are much more likely to self-define as leave or remain than they are as Labour or Conservative or left or right.
00:10:09.000 But the broadcast media are overwhelmingly one way.
00:10:13.000 There is no Fox.
00:10:15.000 There's no plurality, right?
00:10:17.000 And by the way, I'm not someone who says Fox is always fair and balanced.
00:10:20.000 I don't think any medium can be.
00:10:24.000 You're not.
00:10:25.000 We've all got our point of view.
00:10:25.000 I'm not.
00:10:26.000 We all bring assumptions to the table.
00:10:29.000 But the best you can have in a world where your bias is my accuracy or whatever, the best you can have is pluralism, right?
00:10:38.000 It's to have a cacophony of lots of different interpretations.
00:10:41.000 And then out of that, people can kind of gauge what they think is true.
00:10:43.000 When it comes to the broadcast media in the UK, that simply doesn't exist.
00:10:48.000 There is a single way of looking at the world, which is soft left.
00:10:52.000 It's not violently revolutionary left like Jeremy Corbyn, but it has a number of fixed assumptions.
00:10:59.000 Immigration good, Israel bad. 1.00
00:11:02.000 Welfare good, austerity bad.
00:11:06.000 It's created a climate where if you say something else, it sounds jarring.
00:11:10.000 And that makes life much easier if you're on the left.
00:11:12.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about the differences between sort of left and right in America versus left and right in Britain, and the divisions that are now increasing between Labour and Conservative Party as the Labour Party moves incredibly radical.
00:11:23.000 First, I want to ask you one more question about Brexit.
00:11:25.000 And that is, now that we've had this Brexit vote, what's the holdup?
00:11:30.000 So the EU obviously is attempting to leverage Britain into staying.
00:11:35.000 And basically revoking its own referendum, which seems to me pretty good justification for the Brexit campaign in the first place.
00:11:41.000 I mean, if the complaint is that the EU is taking away your power.
00:11:41.000 Of course.
00:11:44.000 Was undemocratic, right?
00:11:45.000 Anyone now doubt that, right?
00:11:45.000 Exactly.
00:11:46.000 Exactly.
00:11:47.000 Exactly.
00:11:48.000 Basically what happened was that when the Conservatives lost their majority, or when Theresa May lost the Conservative majority in 2017, there was then a majority in Parliament that was saying quite publicly, We will not leave except on terms laid down by the EU.
00:12:04.000 We are not prepared to walk away from the table.
00:12:08.000 Imagine any negotiation, right?
00:12:09.000 Imagine you were buying a house or a car and you said, listen, before we even start talking, I want you to understand that I will not walk away from the table.
00:12:15.000 What's the other guy going to do, right?
00:12:17.000 And that's basically what happened.
00:12:19.000 The British Parliament said, we will leave only on terms that you, the EU, agree.
00:12:23.000 At which point, of course, the EU said, oh, well, in that case, here are some much tougher terms.
00:12:26.000 And if you don't like that, stay.
00:12:28.000 Of course they did.
00:12:29.000 I mean, I kind of can't blame them for that, right?
00:12:32.000 Ultimately, I suspect that may mean we will need another general election.
00:12:36.000 thought specifically on this issue.
00:12:37.000 Because if Parliament will not leave on time in the way that it promised to when it triggered the whole process, you have to change the majority in Parliament. - Okay, so a lot of the media coverage was suggestive of the idea that the Brexit campaign was led by a bunch of people who are anti-free trade.
00:12:54.000 These are a bunch of people who are interested in cutting off trade ties with the EU, that they were economic isolationists, that they were sort of Trumpian in their approach to tariffs.
00:13:02.000 You're obviously the head of a group that is free trade.
00:13:04.000 That is so the opposite of the truth.
00:13:08.000 In all of the material that we put out, we would say, here are three reasons to vote Leave, or five reasons to vote Leave, or ten reasons to vote Leave, depending on how long the pamphlet was.
00:13:17.000 Always, one of them was, free a trade with the world.
00:13:19.000 This wasn't something we sneaked out in the small print.
00:13:22.000 I mean, we were absolutely clear about this.
00:13:24.000 And that is a big difference between the Trump campaign here and the Brexit campaign in the UK.
00:13:29.000 I mean, sure, of course, necessarily there were some similarities, because they were both kind of anti-establishment, and they both played on a sense that the elites had failed.
00:13:37.000 But as I understand it, a big part of Donald Trump's shtick here was, we don't want free trade with China.
00:13:43.000 Whereas a huge part of the Leave campaign was, we do want free trade with China, and with America, and with India, and all the other places that we don't have because the EU is too protectionist.
00:13:52.000 And one of the huge advantages that I hope will come out of Brexit is deep, comprehensive free trade between the UK and And the US.
00:14:01.000 We're already each other's biggest trading partners.
00:14:03.000 We're already each other's biggest investors.
00:14:05.000 Of course, because of the affinities of language and law and all the rest of it.
00:14:09.000 But up until now, we haven't been able to sign a free trade agreement.
00:14:13.000 And what I really hope is that when we do, it's not just going to... Donald Trump says it's not just going to be a trade.
00:14:19.000 You can imagine how he puts it.
00:14:20.000 He is going to be a beautiful, incredible freedom.
00:14:22.000 No one does trade.
00:14:25.000 Do you know what?
00:14:26.000 This time, It really could be true.
00:14:29.000 All those superlatives of his may on this occasion be justified because if we did a trade agreement where we just said whatever is legal in your country is automatically legal in ours and vice versa, right?
00:14:41.000 So you get away from all the common standards, all the common regulation, all the bureaucracy, all the cartels, all the corporatism.
00:14:46.000 And you just say, if a drug is approved by the FDA, that's good enough for us.
00:14:50.000 If a guy is qualified to work as a trader in the city of London, he can automatically work on Wall Street.
00:14:55.000 Think of how that would bring down costs, remove regulations, work for the little guy instead of for the big corporate.
00:15:00.000 And that would be a different way of doing trade.
00:15:02.000 So for American viewers, obviously we've been focused in on Brexit, but there are some other issues in Britain that have obviously taken center stage.
00:15:09.000 One of those has been the radical move to the left of the Labour Party, which is now led by basically a communist, Jeremy Corbyn, and an anti-Semitic communist at that.
00:15:17.000 What happened to the Labour Party in Britain, which used to be of Tony Blair and is now of Jeremy Corbyn?
00:15:21.000 It's absolutely extraordinary.
00:15:24.000 When you say basically a communist, I mean, this is a guy who regrets the outcome of the Cold War.
00:15:29.000 And I'm not saying that as a political slogan, I'm saying it as an observable fact of his political development.
00:15:35.000 This is a guy who at the last election was asked, would you ever have been on our side in any conflict?
00:15:42.000 Not raising the bar very high, that, right?
00:15:44.000 I mean, you aspire to lead the country.
00:15:46.000 When would you be on the side of the country you aspire to lead?
00:15:49.000 You have to really think.
00:15:50.000 Because this is a guy who's pro-IRA, pro-Hamas, pro-Hizballah, pro-Castro, pro-Chávez.
00:15:55.000 Even in the Falklands War, you'd have thought if there was any regime on the planet that someone on the left would have hated, it would have been a fascist junta that locked up trade unionists and murdered left-wing activists, right?
00:16:06.000 But of course, as soon as they were all with us, no, no, no, we couldn't criticize it.
00:16:08.000 So we had to really think.
00:16:10.000 And you could see the process going on.
00:16:13.000 And then like a little boy who gets the right answer in class, he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, the Second World War!
00:16:18.000 And I was thinking, yeah, after June 1941, when Stalin switched sides, then maybe you would have been on our side, and not because it was our side.
00:16:27.000 Actually, do you know what a really funny thing that I discovered?
00:16:29.000 His father, who was a communist at that time, did exactly that.
00:16:34.000 So he was against us when the Nazis and the Soviets were on the same side.
00:16:39.000 And then he switched when Hitler attacked Stalin, like almost all British communists did. 0.79
00:16:45.000 It is, by the way, an incredible cultural victory for the left.
00:16:50.000 This massive act of amnesia that we all forget that Hitler and Stalin were on the same side for fully a third of the entire war.
00:16:59.000 So, how did this happen?
00:17:00.000 How did Jeremy Corbyn end up at the head of this Labour party?
00:17:03.000 I guess the short answer is, from the 80s, Labour began to expel the hardline Trotskyist militants.
00:17:13.000 And the rules were changed under the previous Labour leader because there'd been a scandal in the selection of a candidate in a seat in Scotland.
00:17:22.000 And the then Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said, well, let's open the doors so that more people have a say over who the MP is and who the leader is.
00:17:35.000 And basically these kind of probably 200,000 people who were really on the fringe left, the proper Marxist left, came flooding back in, or flooding in in the cases of the younger ones.
00:17:46.000 And although 200,000 is tiny in a nation of 65 million, it is huge for a political party.
00:17:51.000 And so even if Jeremy Corbyn were tomorrow to be hit by that proverbial bus that is so lethal and is always running over political leaders in our imagination, the same electorate would pick another Corbyn.
00:18:04.000 I mean, I can't tell you how strange this is, how outside our experience it is.
00:18:09.000 I mean, we've had a fairly moderate party of the centre-left compared to almost any European country.
00:18:14.000 You know, it wasn't revolutionary, it wasn't Marxist, it was born out of non-conformist churches and the temperance movement and brass bands and working men's libraries and it was all about building up the working man and spreading opportunity.
00:18:28.000 It was not A violent revolutionary party.
00:18:31.000 Unlike most places, you don't have to look too far to see a different model.
00:18:37.000 And suddenly we have got a doctrinaire Marxist who I won't say that he is himself an anti-Semite.
00:18:49.000 I always think he looks like a rather scruffy Reform rabbi actually when you see him. 1.00
00:18:53.000 But he has opened the door to some unbelievable people.
00:19:00.000 I just think this is really interesting.
00:19:02.000 People denied it for a long time.
00:19:04.000 They couldn't bring themselves to admit that Labour had a problem with anti-Semitism.
00:19:09.000 Which is totally new.
00:19:10.000 I mean, of course, Britain, like every country, like the US, like France, has had some anti-Semites down the years, but we have never until now had them infiltrate one of the main parties.
00:19:18.000 This is completely unprecedented in Britain.
00:19:21.000 And I think the reason that they got away with it for a long time is that there's this kind of funny jejun view out there now, especially to young people, that right-wing means intolerant and left-wing means nice.
00:19:36.000 And therefore, since anti-Semites are intolerant, they can't be on the left.
00:19:41.000 As I don't need to tell you, Ben, of all people, that is such a falsification of history.
00:19:45.000 The guy who invented the word anti-Semitism was a socialist.
00:19:47.000 The guy who invented the word socialism was an anti-Semite.
00:19:50.000 In the late 19th century, this wasn't common to the whole left, but it was a very, very natural thing. 0.93
00:19:57.000 To have revolutionary socialist parties who said, capitalists and Jews are the problem.
00:20:02.000 They're grinding down the working man. 0.86
00:20:03.000 In 1920, Hitler says to his party members, how, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?
00:20:09.000 And nobody thought it an odd thing to say in those days.
00:20:11.000 It's the strange cultural victory of the left that these phrases now sound so jarring.
00:20:17.000 Because how can you be a nice lefty and think these things?
00:20:21.000 They did, for a long time.
00:20:22.000 Not all of them.
00:20:23.000 Of course, there was an honorable pluralist tradition on the left.
00:20:27.000 There were lots of Jewish socialists and all that, right?
00:20:29.000 But going right back to Karl Marx, there was this other tradition as well of seeing anti-Semitism as an extension of anti-capitalism.
00:20:39.000 And that is what's come flooding back in to the Labour Party.
00:20:43.000 This idea that we're against kind of Rothschild taking over the world.
00:20:47.000 And it is not something you find on the right.
00:20:49.000 It's something that is almost exclusively now on the left.
00:20:51.000 So let's talk for a second about the left's moves on multiculturalism, which seem to me to have some ties to anti-Semitism in Europe.
00:20:59.000 I mean, having visited Europe, the making room for folks who really despise Jews, and by this I mean Some radical Muslim immigrants who have been unvetted, the radical rise in hate crimes against Jews in places ranging from France to Sweden, which in many cases is linked undeniably to a rise in an unvetted population of radical Muslims coming from a part of the world where Jews are particularly hated.
00:21:24.000 Does that have any linkage with the Labor Party's move on anti-Semitism?
00:21:29.000 Are these unrelated?
00:21:30.000 It's a really interesting question.
00:21:32.000 I think that the left in Britain and in the U.S.
00:21:35.000 And in Europe, has now got itself into this strange obsession with a brand of identity politics that is really about imagined hierarchies of privilege or imagined pyramids of oppression or whatever you want to call it.
00:21:50.000 And it's an incredibly kind of pre-enlightenment way of seeing the world, that you are defined by the caste or the race that you're born with.
00:21:59.000 And you guys, in some ways, are ahead of anywhere else on this.
00:22:05.000 But our Labour Party has got into it.
00:22:06.000 And so it has good categories and bad categories.
00:22:10.000 And generally, if you're an immigrant, you're in a good category.
00:22:15.000 What's happened and why the door has been opened to anti-Semitism on the left is that in this imagined hierarchy of oppression, the left can no longer tell itself that Jews are an oppressed, you know, discriminated against, wretched minority that suffers from penal laws and all the rest of it.
00:22:35.000 Success of the State of Israel and the success of Jewish people throughout the English-speaking world in particular makes it difficult to maintain this imagined pyramid in your mind.
00:22:46.000 And so with the sticking up for the little guy thing as they would see it, suddenly Jews have found themselves on the wrong side of the imagined pyramid. 0.71
00:22:54.000 And I think it's probably, that's the linkage if you like, it's the beginning of this This re-emergence of racial identity politics.
00:23:02.000 So do you think that it's left-wing anti-Semitism that is leading to the left's hatred of Israel, or do you think it's vice versa, or do they feed each other?
00:23:08.000 Because one of the things that is obviously notable about Europe is the entire European attitude toward Israel, which is extraordinarily hateful and terrible overall.
00:23:18.000 There are some exceptions, but it seems like there's pretty broad agreement that Israel is the bad guy across Europe.
00:23:24.000 Where is that coming from?
00:23:25.000 First of all, every country sometimes deserves criticism.
00:23:27.000 Yours does, mine does, Israel does, right? 0.97
00:23:29.000 Of course.
00:23:29.000 So I'm not saying that you should never criticise Israel or any other country.
00:23:34.000 But you're right, there is a disproportionate focus on a pretty tiny strip of land which, compared to its neighbours, is doing pretty well, you'd have thought, in terms of human rights, democracy, inclusiveness, etc.
00:23:48.000 Where does that come from?
00:23:50.000 I mean, a lot of American friends and a lot of Israeli friends of mine say it's anti-Semitism or it's anti-Americanism, and there's an element of truth in that. 1.00
00:23:58.000 But I think the bigger factor is this.
00:24:02.000 The European ideal is based on the premise that national loyalties are arbitrary, transient, and ultimately discreditable.
00:24:10.000 That the nation-state is a bad thing.
00:24:12.000 That nationalism causes war and ethnic conflict and all the rest of it. 0.66
00:24:15.000 And that we should all be transcending the nation-state and forming these big supranational unions.
00:24:20.000 That's the EU story in a nutshell.
00:24:22.000 Now, there is no stronger rebuke of that ideology than the story of Israel. 0.57
00:24:30.000 Here is a people who are, for 2,000 years, stateless and scattered, but who never lose the aspiration of nationhood.
00:24:40.000 Next year in Jerusalem, right? 0.98
00:24:42.000 And then one day, against all the odds, providentially you might say, they achieve it.
00:24:46.000 Now, I look at that story, most American, you know, politicians look at that story and say, that's a great uplifting story, you know, how fantastic, a triumph against all the odds.
00:24:55.000 But if your starting point is that the national principle is the root of all evil, then you're bound to be triggered by it.
00:25:02.000 And ultimately, I think that's why Israel is always going to fight to get a fair hearing in Brussels.
00:25:07.000 It's because simply by existing, it undermines the whole basis of the European project.
00:25:12.000 So let's talk for a second about the conservative parties.
00:25:14.000 We've talked about sort of the shortcomings of the Labour Party.
00:25:16.000 First of all, most Americans hear a conservative party and they think, OK, American conservative.
00:25:20.000 What are the differences between European conservative parties, European right-wing parties, and the American Republican Party, or American conservative ideology, do you think?
00:25:31.000 Depends what you mean by Europe.
00:25:32.000 So I'm British rather than European.
00:25:34.000 Our Conservative Party, I think, is fairly analogous to your Republican Party in its good and its bad ways.
00:25:41.000 But in Europe, especially in continental Europe, it's a different story.
00:25:46.000 You have Christian Democrat parties that tend to be culturally of the right but economically much more of the centre or centre-left.
00:25:53.000 And then you have Liberal parties which are economically to the right but are culturally to the centre or centre-left.
00:25:59.000 So we as British Conservatives struggled for a long time to find a neat fit in continental Europe.
00:26:06.000 There were no obvious allies for us.
00:26:09.000 We've now found some, from Scandinavia and from Eastern Europe in particular, but not really so much from the old core EU countries.
00:26:16.000 And the Christian Democrat parties that are called the main, you know, Angela Merkel's party or, you know, the Dutch Christian Democrats or whatever, They are, I mean they're pretty, you know, as that great Californian Arnold Schwarzenegger would say, these are girly men conservatives.
00:26:33.000 These are panty waist conservatives.
00:26:36.000 They're not conservatives as you and I would understand.
00:26:39.000 So when it comes to the UK Conservative Party, what does the party believe the role of government is?
00:26:44.000 So it seems like the NHS, for example, is completely untouchable by both sides of the political aisle.
00:26:49.000 Obviously, that is an issue of tremendous import in the United States when it comes to the role of government in health care, where the Republican Party used to, and I hope still for the future will stand against nationalized health care.
00:26:49.000 in Great Britain.
00:27:00.000 But increasingly, both parties are moving in that direction.
00:27:03.000 But you know, the weirdest thing about that is that in both countries, defenders of...
00:27:03.000 Yeah.
00:27:07.000 I mean, I don't think either of our countries has an especially good health care system, right?
00:27:11.000 Absolutely.
00:27:11.000 I mean, there are many, many better models out there than either the American or the British system.
00:27:17.000 And yet, in both countries, defenders of the status quo have done an incredibly good job of pretending that the other country is the only alternative, right? 0.63
00:27:24.000 So any proposal to reform the NHS is, oh, you want an American system.
00:27:27.000 And similarly here, any move away from the old system is either Canada or Britain.
00:27:33.000 Well, you know, there are countries with way better health outcomes than either yours or ours and way better value for money.
00:27:39.000 Switzerland, Singapore.
00:27:41.000 Yeah, right, right.
00:27:42.000 Loads.
00:27:42.000 And in all these places, you know, You are not denied healthcare because you're poor.
00:27:49.000 But if you can afford it, you don't get treated as a supplicant.
00:27:55.000 You're a consumer and you tend to get much better value and much better treatment.
00:27:58.000 And it works out particularly in Singapore.
00:28:02.000 I mean, they've got incredibly good outcomes compared to anybody else.
00:28:05.000 Healthier population and it's a much better place to be poor, right, in terms of health outcomes.
00:28:09.000 I mean, at every level you're better off in Singapore.
00:28:13.000 You know, we've got the same, we've got the same spread, you know, we have the same electoral system as you.
00:28:18.000 Our right of centre party, like yours, is a coalition.
00:28:21.000 It's got some great people and some bad people.
00:28:23.000 And I'll tell you one thing that I think is going to be where we move in your direction.
00:28:28.000 As we record this interview, we're two weeks away from knowing who the Tory leader is, but I'm going to go out on a limb, and I may look an idiot when this is broadcast, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Boris Johnson is likely to be elected and will be prime minister.
00:28:41.000 I think we're going to see something very similar to the culture war prompted by Donald Trump.
00:28:48.000 I don't mean to imply that Boris is like Donald Trump.
00:28:52.000 In character or personality.
00:28:54.000 They are very, very different people.
00:28:55.000 Boris is one of the cleverest people I've ever met.
00:28:57.000 And I don't just mean in politics, I mean in life.
00:28:59.000 He's a brilliant, brilliant man.
00:29:02.000 Who is clever enough to understand that that can intimidate people, so he clowns around a little bit and puts people at their ease.
00:29:09.000 It's kind of polite, right?
00:29:12.000 Whereas I don't think that is true of Donald Trump.
00:29:14.000 He is keen to tell everyone what a genius he is, but I've yet to see much independent evidence of it.
00:29:21.000 Having said that, they do have this in common.
00:29:23.000 They're both kind of outside their parties.
00:29:26.000 And they both polarize opinion.
00:29:28.000 And very quickly the culture war ceases to be about them and becomes about whether you like or dislike the other side, right?
00:29:34.000 And I don't think that's a good thing.
00:29:36.000 I don't think it's been good for you and I don't think it's going to be good for us.
00:29:39.000 But it's the way politics is moving.
00:29:42.000 So speaking of President Trump, you're obviously not from the United States.
00:29:46.000 What is sort of the conservative British view of President Trump, his performance, his personality, and sort of speaking to the future of conservatism along those lines?
00:29:55.000 I think you are about the only popular commentator in the U.S.
00:29:59.000 who gets this right.
00:30:00.000 One of the things that really alarms me is that you can't express any kind of modulated view on this now, you know, without being howled down.
00:30:09.000 So if you take a statement that would have been completely uncontroversial during the primaries like, it's wonderful that Trump is cutting taxes but he shouldn't have lied about releasing his own tax return, or how fantastic to have him getting on top of the administrative state but you shouldn't insult the family of a dead serviceman, right?
00:30:25.000 My point is not that these are true or false.
00:30:26.000 The point is you never hear them.
00:30:28.000 You never hear them because nobody, apart from you, is even trying to be balanced about this.
00:30:34.000 And it shouldn't be impossible to say, yes, you know, he's doing some good things and some bad things, like every other human being.
00:30:41.000 Part of the problem is that, of course, the left won't countenance that.
00:30:45.000 They've turned this into a moral battle and he's evil.
00:30:50.000 Frankly, part of the problem is that he doesn't like it either.
00:30:52.000 He doesn't want conditional support.
00:30:54.000 He doesn't want people to say, I support you when I agree with you.
00:30:57.000 He insists in a quite needy way on getting people to support him when he does his 180 degree flips.
00:31:03.000 And so that means it's very difficult to have a kind of moderate view on this.
00:31:09.000 And I don't know, I was just reading Jonah Goldberg's book about the state of current politics, and he makes the point that autocracy or wanting to follow a strong man on his own account rather than because of what he stands for is actually a very natural condition of human government. and he makes the point that autocracy or wanting to You know, We were monarchies for almost the whole of the last 10,000 years.
00:31:33.000 And when we stopped formally being monarchies, we very quickly went back to having the strong guy.
00:31:37.000 In fact, I think it's not just that we have this in our past.
00:31:42.000 When we imagine the future, when we write Star Wars, Look, we fill it with emperors and princesses, right?
00:31:48.000 It's almost like that is the natural human condition.
00:31:52.000 And I think this is what Franklin meant by if you can keep it, right?
00:31:57.000 The US is extraordinary in that it has created a system of checks and balances where autocracy is difficult.
00:32:05.000 But just because you've managed for a couple of hundred years doesn't mean that what you're doing is natural.
00:32:10.000 It's not.
00:32:11.000 It runs up against human instincts and intuitions.
00:32:14.000 And one of the things that really worries me is how easily people can go back to authoritarian politics, autocracy, my guy, not your guy, tribalism.
00:32:25.000 It's happened here.
00:32:27.000 With a rapidity that I found astonishing, and it's happening all over the Western world.
00:32:31.000 So, how do we keep this anachronism going?
00:32:33.000 I mean, given the fact that people seem to want to follow the strongman, given the fact that the only type of politics people actually want to talk about is not the legislative sausage-making, or even the party interplay, what they really want to talk about is the leadership, right?
00:32:45.000 Here, we've only talked about Donald Trump, we've talked about Boris Johnson, we've talked about Jeremy Corbyn, namely the quote-unquote big men of politics.
00:32:51.000 How do we avoid- - Fairly unlikely big men, right? - Yeah. - You don't imagine any of them as like a dictator, right?
00:32:56.000 The classic sort of fictional dictator.
00:32:58.000 They are, I don't know which of them is the least plausible.
00:33:01.000 Here's the thing.
00:33:04.000 You and I are products of an education system that, and most people watching, that taught us a bunch of counterintuitive and countercyclical ideas.
00:33:13.000 For example, the notion that someone that you don't like may still have something useful to say.
00:33:18.000 That is a really difficult idea.
00:33:19.000 It does not come naturally.
00:33:21.000 We're much more prone to go with our tribal heuristic of my side good, your side bad.
00:33:27.000 And you have to be taught that.
00:33:28.000 You have to be taught the scientific method, you have to be taught empiricism, you have to be taught this difficult idea of assessing something by whether it's true, rather than by whether you like the guy saying it.
00:33:38.000 I don't think we're doing that now.
00:33:39.000 I think, not only in, and most obviously in universities, but actually in secondary education as well, we are, instead of teaching these counter-cyclical ideas that make an open society and republican government possible, We're doing the opposite.
00:33:54.000 We're teaching identity politics.
00:33:55.000 We're going back to the pre-modern idea that you're defined by the circumstances of your birth.
00:34:01.000 And I think that is turning our backs on the Enlightenment.
00:34:04.000 I think it's a really alarming trait.
00:34:06.000 I'm generally hugely optimistic about the world and about the US, but this is the thing that worries me more than almost anything else, because having built this extraordinary miracle where we are able to change governments peacefully without anyone being exiled or shot, where you have free speech and free assembly and private property and all the rest of it, If you lose that, the idea that it's just going to happen again, when it really only happened the one time in 10,000 years, it's kind of a big gamble.
00:34:30.000 So you've got to constantly work to keep our system going.
00:34:35.000 Constant repair work.
00:34:36.000 Constant husbandry.
00:34:37.000 And in particular, that means teaching people all the time.
00:34:42.000 You can disagree with someone without his being an enemy.
00:34:45.000 Our opponents are not our enemies.
00:34:46.000 This is one of the things that I find so odd about sort of our modern politics.
00:34:51.000 We focus a lot on what government is doing, what government actors are doing.
00:34:55.000 But it seems like the important work is being neglected.
00:34:57.000 This is sort of the upkeep of the ditches to make sure the irrigation is flowing.
00:35:01.000 The social fabric that requires stitching, that is being allowed to fray.
00:35:05.000 Meanwhile, we're focusing on sort of clubbing each other at the governmental level.
00:35:08.000 It's become what Barack Obama suggested in 2012.
00:35:12.000 The only thing that we have in common is government, which means that if the only tool of power is government and the only thing we have in common is government, then control of government becomes the only end.
00:35:21.000 Whereas if you really don't care about government that much, then you can say we disagree about government and that's that and we leave each other alone and we can live in a society.
00:35:28.000 The more powerful government becomes, the less we are allowed to disagree with each other, lest we undermine the basis of the state itself.
00:35:36.000 I mean, I still think there is an immense job of education to be done, and that's partly a question of formal schooling, but it's also, I think, partly a question of, you know, we are civilized by families in the first instance.
00:35:50.000 Hannah Arendt had this lovely phrase where she said, every generation the West is invaded by barbarians.
00:35:55.000 They're called children, right?
00:35:57.000 So we arrive with the same basic mental kit that a baby would have had 50,000 years ago, right?
00:36:03.000 The thing that makes us What we are, rather than hunter-gatherers and vengeful and violent and all the rest of it, in the first place is what we learn in our families, and then what we learn in schools and by imitating norms of other people.
00:36:18.000 And to be honest, I think the West is kind of falling down on all those things at the moment, and we're storing up a heap of trouble.
00:36:23.000 So let's talk about one of the things that I think a lot of conservatives in the United States look at Europe and are deeply worried by.
00:36:29.000 Because for me as a conservative, I look at Europe and I say, OK, we're always 50 years behind whatever Europe has going.
00:36:36.000 So Europe can be 50 years more toward the cliff, and we will be there soon enough.
00:36:40.000 And you see this in terms of spending habits, or you see this in terms of health care systems, and you see this in terms of social institutions as well.
00:36:47.000 European religion began its long, slow, it seems, irreversible decline in the 1910s and 1920s, and then that pursuit apace.
00:36:56.000 By the time you hit post-World War II, religion in Europe has basically hit low up and then continued to drop even beyond that.
00:37:03.000 In the United States, you're seeing late-breaking irreligion.
00:37:06.000 You're seeing secularism rise.
00:37:08.000 It's now the single sect that is most identified with as unaffiliated in the United States, about 25, 26 percent of the population.
00:37:15.000 But, And it seems to me that that is reflected in our politics, that if people don't believe in the notion of God-given rights, if people don't believe in the notion of a social fabric that exists outside of government, which used to exist in churches, that that's very bad news.
00:37:27.000 Number one, do you see a substitute for religion in Europe that is rising? 0.51
00:37:30.000 Number two, do you see anything like a religious revival on the road in Europe?
00:37:36.000 These things can happen, right?
00:37:37.000 I mean, there was a religious revival in the late 18th, early 19th century in Britain.
00:37:44.000 It was kind of like the Great Awakening here.
00:37:46.000 These things can go in waves.
00:37:48.000 But I would say it's not intrinsically impossible to carry on being a successful, confident society with a lower number of people who are churchgoers, as long as you have other values that bind the country together.
00:38:04.000 And throughout the 20th century, although rates of church attendance fell in Britain, life generally got better, people got richer, the country became successful in lots of ways, we were inventive, because we still had a brand, we still believed in ourselves.
00:38:19.000 What worries me much more is if people lose their belief in anything.
00:38:25.000 There's no substitute.
00:38:27.000 And I don't think it's going too far to say that this has contributed to the rise of some forms of religious extremism among the children of immigrants.
00:38:39.000 If you grow up in a country where Patriotism is scorned and where if you've got any history at all in school it will have been presented to you as a hateful chronology of racism and exploitation where every interaction you had with the state will have taught you to despise it.
00:39:01.000 You're going to start casting around for something more assertive.
00:39:07.000 And one thing that the Salafists do not lack is self-confidence.
00:39:14.000 I don't know if you saw how many of the Paris bombers had come from one district of Brussels called Molenbeek, which is very close to where the European Parliament is.
00:39:23.000 It's kind of obvious when you go there what the problem is for at least some people.
00:39:28.000 You know, Belgium has the problems of the EU writ large.
00:39:30.000 There's no Belgian language.
00:39:31.000 There's no Belgian culture.
00:39:32.000 There's no Belgian history.
00:39:33.000 You've got two completely separate communities who live side by side, Dutch-speaking and French-speaking.
00:39:38.000 They read two sets of newspapers.
00:39:40.000 They vote for two sets of political parties.
00:39:43.000 They use different banks, shops, TV channels, the whole works, right?
00:39:47.000 So no one really feels Belgian.
00:39:50.000 You're either Flemish or you're Walloon. 1.00
00:39:51.000 But then what if you're the child of Moroccan immigrants in Molenbeek?
00:39:54.000 What is there for you to be part of?
00:39:55.000 You're not Flemish. 0.98
00:39:56.000 You're not Wallonian. 1.00
00:39:58.000 Of course you're not Belgian. 1.00
00:39:59.000 Everyone has taught you that the nation-state is finished and is evil and all the rest of it.
00:40:04.000 Some people – it's important to stress that most kids in that category do not become terrorists – but some people are bound to start thinking, well, there's got to be something more meaningful out there.
00:40:15.000 And they, I think, are the ones who are then prey to the people who make the most forceful argument that, you know, the bigger the sacrifice you make, the more meaningful your life is.
00:40:27.000 The more it seems at odds with all the values of the people around you, the better, right?
00:40:30.000 And I think that's what's going on.
00:40:31.000 I think a lot of these people are attracted precisely by the sense of glamour attached to something being shocking and extremist, rather than by anything that you and I would understand as conventional religion or piety.
00:40:43.000 Well, and this is, I think, my big focus on religion lately when it comes to upholding liberalism itself.
00:40:51.000 One of the things that I fear is that it's very easy to view liberalism as moral relativism.
00:40:55.000 It's very easy to look at liberalism and its freedoms and say, OK, well, you're just saying that everybody's opinion is equally I think the U.S.
00:41:02.000 has been very good at doing this.
00:41:03.000 everybody ought to do whatever they want, that it slides into libertinism, and that if there's no rooted sense of common good, that government is either going to have to fill it on the left, or that I'm going to fill that with my own sense of moral certainty.
00:41:16.000 I think the U.S. has been very good at doing this.
00:41:18.000 It's a secular republic, but it has been very, very good at making people want to belong.
00:41:24.000 And it sometimes does so in ways that are very simple and very straightforward, and are exactly the kind of thing that Euro-sophists sneer at.
00:41:32.000 And indeed, that sophisticated liberals here sneer at.
00:41:35.000 The flags and the bunting and the 4th of July celebrations and so on.
00:41:39.000 But actually that makes it very easy for a newcomer to feel that there is something to belong to, right?
00:41:45.000 And that's been a miraculously powerful agent for binding people together for a very long time.
00:41:52.000 And people are always Every generation of Americans thinks it's coming to an end, but actually it hasn't.
00:42:00.000 You can't read the history of this country without realising that people are unduly pessimistic.
00:42:06.000 The attitude of every generation of Americans is, immigration has been great until now, But this time it's different.
00:42:13.000 And there's always some apparent reason why it's going to be different.
00:42:16.000 Yeah, but up until now they all spoke English.
00:42:17.000 Yeah, but up until now they were all Protestant.
00:42:19.000 Yeah, but up until now they were all white. 0.60
00:42:21.000 It always works.
00:42:22.000 And it will work now.
00:42:24.000 As long as you retain a sense of confidence.
00:42:28.000 As long as you project a sense of, this is a country worth coming to.
00:42:31.000 This is my biggest beef, right?
00:42:33.000 Cheer up, guys.
00:42:34.000 I mean, I was watching the Democrat debate last week, and one after another they were telling us that the economy's in collapse and people are getting poorer and children are being left in unchanged diapers and all this kind of stuff.
00:42:44.000 Come on.
00:42:45.000 I mean, this country is a quarter of the world's economy.
00:42:48.000 It could take on the armies of the next two or three biggest combined.
00:42:53.000 Growth from the first quarter was like 3-point-something percent.
00:42:56.000 You know, jobs have never been better since the 50s.
00:42:59.000 But what is that civic religion going to be?
00:43:00.000 There's a reason why people are risking life and limb to try and come and live here, right?
00:43:04.000 And generally when they arrive, they're pretty grateful for the opportunity. 0.99
00:43:07.000 You don't take that risk to go to a country that you think is a bit crap, right? 0.98
00:43:11.000 But what is that civic religion going to be? 0.99
00:43:14.000 What is the binding tie?
00:43:16.000 So we've been told now that apparently, according to Colin Kaepernick, the flag is a symbol of American racism and slavery. 0.82
00:43:22.000 The Constitution is a hallmark of rich white property owners who disdained black folks and gay folks and women. 0.82
00:43:30.000 American history is replete with suffering and cruelty. 0.95
00:43:34.000 Fourth of July parades themselves are indicative of... So, I mean, I'd say two things about that.
00:43:38.000 First of all, it is the cheapest kind of bad history to judge any past generation by our common standards, but especially in this case, when our modern standards came precisely from the promise of the Constitution.
00:43:50.000 Right?
00:43:52.000 In other words, the Constitution is being damned precisely by the set of values that it created and that Martin Luther King appealed to and that Frederick Douglass had appealed to.
00:44:04.000 Their argument was precisely, it is because this republic is not living up to its ideals that we should have equality.
00:44:09.000 That seems to me a pretty good story, right?
00:44:13.000 They would have had, I think, no truck with this idea that the whole system was rigged.
00:44:17.000 And was wrong.
00:44:19.000 The other thing that really struck me as an outside observer is just how suddenly, how quickly everyone rushed to pretend to believe something that was patently absurd, right?
00:44:29.000 The idea that the Betsy Ross flag was... I mean, you know, I can buy an argument that you shouldn't wear a flag on your sneakers, right?
00:44:35.000 I think that you could... But that was not the problem, right?
00:44:39.000 And the suddenness, you know, you beat over a rock saying, well, yeah, you know, that we've got to feel the pain and...
00:44:44.000 What pain?
00:44:45.000 Who was complaining?
00:44:47.000 People who knew better within hours said, OK, that's the new line.
00:44:51.000 And then this was really kind of Salem witch trial stuff.
00:44:54.000 I need to rush out my condemnation first before somebody accuses me.
00:45:00.000 And that really, I mean, I'll tell you, if the Betsy Ross flag stands for anything and Actually, it wasn't, of course, the first flag of the Republic.
00:45:06.000 That is the now largely forgotten Continental Colours, which expressed in its Union Flag iconography the belief that the Patriots had that they were standing for their freedoms as free-born Englishmen.
00:45:18.000 But, you know, okay.
00:45:21.000 The country has invested with some mythology, the Betsy Ross flag, that she probably didn't invent, etc, etc.
00:45:28.000 If it stands for anything, with all that mythology attached, it's for the idea of an inclusive republic that everyone is part of.
00:45:35.000 And the idea that people now kind of rush to anticipate criticism by being the first in line to condemn it, I think is profoundly un-American.
00:45:43.000 And this is one of the things that is that is truly scaring me is I'm seeing all of these common institutions disappear.
00:45:48.000 And that includes the teaching of of Western civilized history.
00:45:51.000 If you say the phrase Western civilization, you are now condemned as a sort of xenophobe or some sort of racist.
00:45:57.000 And I've seen the same thing take place in terms of how people characterize British history.
00:46:00.000 Apparently, British history is just a litany of rape, slaughter, looting, imperialism, colonialism and brutality.
00:46:06.000 And you know what's missing is any sense of perspective.
00:46:09.000 So, of course, Britain has done things that are sordid and things that are shameful, like America has, like every single country in the world, right?
00:46:17.000 A country is a collection of human beings, some of whom are saintly, some of whom are monstrous, and most of whom are somewhere in the middle, right?
00:46:26.000 Think of the extent, in terms of time and space of the British Empire, of course it will contain examples of heroism and examples of nastiness and everything in between.
00:46:37.000 But I would just say, judge by the relevant standards of that age.
00:46:43.000 There was a Cambridge historian in the early beginning of the 20th century called Herbert Butterfield who said, the study of the past with one eye on the present is the origin of all the sins and sophistries in history.
00:46:57.000 It is the essence of what we mean by the word ahistoric.
00:47:02.000 I would just say to people, when they say, oh, you know, Britain or indeed the U.S., it was kind of, you know, bad for gay people or for women or whatever, OK, in what other country at that time Would you rather have been gay?
00:47:17.000 Or from an ethnic minority?
00:47:17.000 Or female?
00:47:18.000 Or poor?
00:47:19.000 Seriously, where?
00:47:20.000 Ethiopia?
00:47:21.000 You know, really?
00:47:21.000 Japan?
00:47:24.000 And unless there is an answer to that, all of this is meaningless.
00:47:28.000 It's the cheapest kind of virtue signaling.
00:47:30.000 It is a self-righteous contemporary mediocrity saying, I am a better human being than Thomas Jefferson or Winston Churchill or whatever, right?
00:47:38.000 And being able to get away with it because they've identified some past attitude that we no longer hold.
00:47:43.000 So where is this revival going to come from?
00:47:46.000 We've been talking about it for a while.
00:47:47.000 Who are going to be the leaders in this revival?
00:47:49.000 Because it seems a bit much to ask our politicians to do it.
00:47:52.000 Yeah, I really worry about this because the way I see it, the drive of identity politics here is Instead of creating, let's call it a civic-liberal backlash that would say, no, no, no, we're all together, we're all equal before the law, I think it is much more likely to create an identitarian white response, which would be wrong for all the same reasons that the current... In fact, I think it's already happening, right? 0.75
00:48:18.000 When I first came to this country, I didn't really come across any white Americans who thought of themselves as white rather than as Americans.
00:48:26.000 I'm afraid that is no longer true because they've been repeatedly told by the woke left that the most important fact about them is that they're white and that this is some kind of original sin and there's nothing they can do about it and it's irrecoverable.
00:48:40.000 I'm afraid some people are bound to respond then by having an identity politics of their own.
00:48:47.000 An immigrant-descended, multi-ethnic republic like this, more than almost any other country, cannot afford to let people do that. 1.00
00:48:55.000 I'm not talking about people having pride in the hyphenated bit of their name.
00:49:00.000 That's fine.
00:49:01.000 And freedom to congregate, and sure, you're going to have Italians or Irish or whatever.
00:49:05.000 It's fine.
00:49:06.000 But when you start defining people as a legal category, effectively, Whether it's in terms of universities or jobs or whatever, when the state starts defining people by accident of physiognomy or birth, then we are in kind of apartheid South Africa territory, and that is not something that the United States should ever contemplate.
00:49:28.000 OK, so let's talk for a second about what you do with most of your time, which is represent the free trade perspective.
00:49:33.000 So this sort of populist revolution that is supposedly sweeping the globe, which I find bizarre because a lot of these populists don't think alike at all.
00:49:40.000 It seems like Donald Trump's platform is closer to Nigel Farage's than it is to Boris Johnson's.
00:49:46.000 It seems like many of the populist groups in Australia are not very similar to President Trump.
00:49:51.000 So I'm confused by the word populist, first of all, because it doesn't seem to have a common definition.
00:49:54.000 But beyond that, there seems to be this push now against free trade.
00:49:57.000 Where is that coming from?
00:49:59.000 I think free trade is counterintuitive.
00:50:01.000 Free trade runs up against instincts and intuitions that we've evolved, you know, for a much more dangerous planet.
00:50:13.000 Put it the other way around.
00:50:15.000 The Trumpian protectionist position rests on a series of assertions that sound completely plausible, even though none of them is true.
00:50:22.000 But it sounds totally reasonable to say something like, we can't carry on with the trade deficit like this, or we need to protect strategic industries, or we can't compete with low-wage economies, or we should be self-sufficient in food.
00:50:37.000 And none of those things is true, and the countries that have done those things have always made themselves poorer.
00:50:41.000 Always.
00:50:42.000 Always, by a kind of mathematical iron law.
00:50:44.000 But they all sound reasonable.
00:50:46.000 Like, you know, you and I are descended from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, right?
00:50:50.000 We carry deep in our DNA the desire to hoard food to provide against famine.
00:50:55.000 So translated to a political level, that means that you're always going to have a majority of people who say, yes, of course we should grow our own food here, right?
00:51:04.000 Actually, the countries that are trying to be self-sufficient in food are the ones that open themselves to localized catastrophe.
00:51:10.000 The ones that have diverse supply globally are the ones that genuinely have security of food.
00:51:15.000 The country that is most determinedly trying to be self-sufficient in food anywhere on the planet is North Korea.
00:51:21.000 The country which grows zero food and imports its own drinking water and everything is Singapore.
00:51:25.000 Where would you rather live?
00:51:27.000 So you have to keep winning these arguments because they seem implausible.
00:51:32.000 And I think that's a big part of it.
00:51:34.000 Also there's the perennial problem of free trade which is It brings dispersed gains and concentrated losses.
00:51:42.000 So the steel tariffs here may have propped up 20,000 jobs possibly in the steel sector, but would have affected well over a million jobs in everything else, in construction, automotives, aeronautics.
00:51:57.000 But of course it's the steel lobby that is aware and that will vote accordingly, whereas the other people don't really notice.
00:52:02.000 So what do you make of the Tucker Carlson argument, which is that free trade has sucked away manufacturing jobs to places like China, a lot of those manufacturing bases, those people are not qualified to certainly go learn computer programming, and that that's a derisive way of referring to folks shifting industries in any case, and that lack of economic opportunity is leading to A certain amount of societal breakdown, fundamental institutions like marriage being broken down because of economic need, so isn't some government involvement necessary to prop those folks up?
00:52:31.000 So I'm really interested by this, and you see the contradiction actually in the president's tweets.
00:52:35.000 Half of the tweets are along those lines, you know, the world is laughing at us, we're offshoring jobs to Mexico and China and so on.
00:52:42.000 And then the other half is, best employment figures we've ever had!
00:52:46.000 Listen, they can't both be true.
00:52:47.000 And it's the second one that's accurate.
00:52:50.000 Yes, when you have free trade with a lower-wage country, some low-paid jobs will go to that country, and many more high-wage jobs will be created in your country.
00:53:01.000 And that's basically what happens.
00:53:04.000 But this is a difficult point.
00:53:05.000 I totally get it.
00:53:06.000 Your country, mine, they've all largely made a transition already away from heavy industry towards services.
00:53:15.000 We've gone a bit further than you have, but we're now both largely service-based economies.
00:53:22.000 And that isn't really about free trade, that's just about technological advance and automation and so on.
00:53:26.000 When a steelworks closes, that bothers us much more than when video rental chain closes or a travel agent or whatever, you know, other, which are all equally victims of the same technological advance.
00:53:36.000 And I get that.
00:53:38.000 I mean, I have, in my constituency, I had an old shipyard, Chatham Docks, which employed 12,000 people at peak.
00:53:48.000 It closed in 1984, just the same moment that all the steel mills and coal mines were closing all over Britain.
00:53:52.000 And to this day, there are guys there who still get angry about it.
00:53:55.000 That evil witch Margaret Thatcher, she hated the working class. 0.98
00:53:58.000 She did this to us out of sadism. 0.99
00:54:00.000 Do you know what?
00:54:00.000 I get it.
00:54:02.000 I mean, who wouldn't be mad in their position?
00:54:04.000 Forty years old, you've got a perfectly good job as a welder.
00:54:07.000 No fault of yours.
00:54:08.000 Suddenly that disappears and you're going to be a security.
00:54:10.000 Of course you'd be furious.
00:54:11.000 I'd be furious.
00:54:13.000 But it's only fair to tell this story to the end.
00:54:17.000 Unemployment in that constituency is now 1.2%.
00:54:19.000 There are more people per square inch on the old dockyards than there were when there were ships there.
00:54:25.000 And what are they doing?
00:54:26.000 Part of it is university, a little bit of it is kind of industrial heritage tourism, but the biggest employer there is the audiovisual sector.
00:54:34.000 It's where they make Call the Midwife, it's where they make Sherlock, you know.
00:54:40.000 My maternal grandfather was a shipyard worker in the West of Scotland on the Clyde.
00:54:45.000 And he had the typical unhealthy West of Scotland lifestyle and he died very young, I mean 59, 60.
00:54:51.000 So I never met him.
00:54:53.000 So I never got the chance to say to him, would you have rather kept this whole industry artificially alive?
00:55:01.000 I suspect that if he could see what my cousins and I are doing for a living instead, if he could see us tapping at a screen instead of hitting metal, he would not hesitate.
00:55:07.000 Now that is a tough argument to make to the people who are involved.
00:55:11.000 I totally, totally get that.
00:55:13.000 But this, of all countries, is based on the premise that people are prepared to make sacrifices so that their kids get a better deal?
00:55:20.000 And let's do people the courtesy of assuming that they are also able to think long-term like that.
00:55:25.000 We cannot stay with old industries simply because we already have them.
00:55:29.000 There is going to be a gradual shift towards new things.
00:55:33.000 The next thing is going to be driverless cars, right?
00:55:35.000 How many people in this country drive for a living?
00:55:36.000 Put them all together.
00:55:37.000 Uber drivers, bus drivers, you know, cab drivers.
00:55:41.000 When that happens, are they all going to be unemployed?
00:55:43.000 Of course not.
00:55:44.000 Of course not.
00:55:44.000 Just like phones put telegraphists out of business, they move on to the next thing.
00:55:49.000 And living standards continue to rise.
00:55:51.000 And I know this is a really difficult thing for people.
00:55:53.000 But if you could go back in a time machine to any other time, you would find it tougher than now.
00:55:57.000 The progress is always over time in one direction.
00:56:00.000 Tucker Carlson sat in that chair and informed me that he would outlaw self-driving cars specifically to ensure that truckers were able to keep their business because there are so many of them in the United States.
00:56:10.000 So what do you make of the rise of China?
00:56:12.000 So you suggested before that you're in favor of free trade with China.
00:56:16.000 I'm a free trader as well.
00:56:18.000 My only hesitation with regard to China is the question as to whether we are actively strengthening a regime that will be opposed to us in the future.
00:56:30.000 Yeah, of course.
00:56:31.000 And that is exactly the right question to ask.
00:56:35.000 You know, there are issues of industrial espionage as well, which are not really about a free trade agreement.
00:56:39.000 I mean, they're happening now without a free trade agreement, so you've got to tackle that.
00:56:43.000 But as a general rule, I would say economic engagement is almost always a way of driving reform in a good direction.
00:56:49.000 It doesn't work every time, but the tendency is always a good one.
00:56:52.000 Or let me put it the other way around.
00:56:53.000 Sanctions never work.
00:56:55.000 General economic sanctions hurt the wrong people and prop up the government by creating a sort of siege mentality and allowing The relatively greater opportunities for corruption that happen in a more closed economy.
00:57:09.000 And if you think about it, not signing a trade deal is the weakest form of trade sanction, right?
00:57:13.000 So, I mean, I'd have said the same about Cuba or whatever.
00:57:17.000 It's always better to engage economically.
00:57:20.000 You can by all means sanction politicians, by all means have personalized, micro-targeted sanctions like against the Madurista regime in Venezuela.
00:57:31.000 But in the long run, the aim surely has to be to try to draw China into a rules-based international trading order.
00:57:37.000 I mean, I suppose that the counter-argument would be sort of the Soviet Union, that Reagan took a much harsher stance against open trade with the Soviet Union, and in doing so helped collapse their economy, make it impossible for them to continue their expansionism.
00:57:48.000 China obviously has been directing an enormous number of resources toward expansionism in the South China Sea, spending resources in South America, really expanding its tentacles into Africa.
00:57:57.000 So are we enriching Sure, sure.
00:58:00.000 I mean, it doesn't guarantee peace.
00:58:02.000 are intransigently in power.
00:58:03.000 I mean, current President Xi has been radically increasing his power radically rather than decreasing his power.
00:58:09.000 I wonder if that theory actually works or not.
00:58:12.000 In other words, which countries have been actually liberalized by free trade?
00:58:16.000 I mean, there's heavy free trade in the run up to World War I as well.
00:58:19.000 And then World War I happened and that was sort of the end of free trade in the region.
00:58:22.000 Sure.
00:58:22.000 Sure.
00:58:23.000 I mean, it doesn't guarantee peace.
00:58:25.000 It makes peace more likely.
00:58:27.000 But of course, there's no guarantee.
00:58:29.000 I mean, you know, I agree.
00:58:32.000 I think China is a nasty autocracy which under the current leadership has become more revanchist, more nationalist and more saber-rattling generally.
00:58:46.000 But I think the thing that defeated the Soviet Union wasn't really economic sanctions, it was superior military standoff.
00:58:56.000 It was the deployment of the cruise and Pershing missiles and then the Star Wars system.
00:59:00.000 And I do think you may need to be prepared to challenge China in quite strong terms over Taiwan.
00:59:10.000 I mean, in fact, over, I would say, almost every... I'm trying to think of a contiguous country to China that has not at one time or another felt Chinese aggression.
00:59:16.000 You know, Russia, India, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Tibet.
00:59:24.000 But I just don't think there's ever been a... Saddam or Castro or whatever, they all end up being more propped up By being able to say, look, I'm the guy leading the country against all these people who are trying to besiege us.
00:59:41.000 So, in one second, I want to ask you the final question, which is, what does the United States need to learn from Britain, and what does Britain need to learn from the United States?
00:59:48.000 I'm going to ask you that question in just one second.
00:59:49.000 If you want to hear Daniel Hannan's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
00:59:53.000 To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com.
00:59:55.000 Click subscribe.
00:59:55.000 You can hear the end of our conversation over there.
00:59:58.000 Well, Daniel Hannan, thank you so much for stopping by.
01:00:00.000 I've wanted to have you on for a really long time.
01:00:01.000 It's been a real pleasure, Ben.
01:00:03.000 Keep it up.
01:00:03.000 I'm going to keep enjoying the show.
01:00:05.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
01:00:15.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
01:00:16.000 Associate producer, Mathis Glover.
01:00:18.000 Edited by Donovan Fowler.
01:00:20.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromino.
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01:00:25.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.