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
00:00:48.000Look, 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.
00:00:58.000It's now clear that one of those two parties didn't mean it.
00:01:00.000The Labour Party have done everything they can to frustrate it.
00:01:03.000So we've had years of Postponement and delay, and it is making people crazy.
00:01:08.000And 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.
00:01:36.000Why did the British population vote for it?
00:01:38.000If 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?
00:01:48.000You'd have to be crazy to have a problem with that.
00:01:51.000The problem was that the EU didn't stop there.
00:01:54.000It wanted ultimately to become a country called Europe.
00:01:58.000And one by one it acquired all of the attributes and trappings of a nation-state.
00:02:03.000It 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.
00:02:15.000What it doesn't have is a sense of nationhood.
00:02:19.000It doesn't have a sense of shared identity or affinity among the people that can sustain these organizations.
00:02:25.000So Britain, in the end, was not prepared to become a province of a country called Europe.
00:02:30.000We want to have the best and closest relations with our neighbors.
00:02:34.000They will remain our friends and our allies and our suppliers and our customers.
00:02:38.000But we want to live under our own laws, just like any other country.
00:02:42.000Because originally it was just supposed to be sort of an economic bonding together, wasn't it, the European Commonwealth?
00:02:47.000Well, there were always people who wanted a federal state of Europe, right from the start.
00:02:52.000But the real shift came at the beginning of the 90s, when the Treaty of Maastricht was passed.
00:02:57.000And that was when it stopped being the European Economic Community and became the European Union.
00:03:02.000And that was when it acquired the flag and the trappings and attributes of statehood.
00:03:06.000And that really was the birth of modern British Euroscepticism.
00:03:10.000Up until then, there'd been a tiny remnant, mainly of the trade unions and the far left, who'd always been against it.
00:03:18.000But Euroscepticism was not a thing until the early 90s.
00:03:22.000And as the EU has gone further and further towards political amalgamation, Britain has gone in the other direction.
00:03:29.000How is it allowed to progress so fast?
00:03:32.000I mean, it really did progress pretty quickly.
00:03:35.000one 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.
00:03:45.000Why did things escalate this quickly inside the EU?
00:03:48.000It's become, I think, almost a religion for them.
00:03:51.000So it began, of course, from good motives, right?
00:03:54.000I mean, like almost everything in politics, we're not dealing with evil people.
00:03:58.000We're dealing with people who have good intentions but have made miscalculations.
00:04:02.000And 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.
00:04:16.000Some of them look to the example of the US.
00:04:19.000The big difference, of course, is that in the U.S.
00:04:21.000people 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.
00:04:30.000And so you can't, the way I'd put it is this, if you want a democracy, You have to have a demos.
00:04:36.000You have to have a unit with which we identify when we say the word we.
00:04:40.000It's what my friend Roger Scruton calls the politics of the first person plural.
00:04:45.000You've got to have that sense of community.
00:04:47.000And 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.
00:04:58.000Because there is no common patriotism.
00:04:59.000Because no one really feels European In the same sense that somebody might feel Hungarian or Swedish or Portuguese.
00:05:05.000So in a second, I want to ask you about sort of the particular driving force behind Brexit.
00:05:12.000First, let's talk about being an adult.
00:05:14.000Part 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.
00:05:21.000But another part of adulthood is learning to delegate what you hate.
00:05:24.000And while you can't delegate a visit to the in-laws, you can certainly delegate life insurance shopping.
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00:06:11.000So, let's talk for a second about what exactly was the driving force behind all this.
00:06:15.000So 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.
00:06:24.000The idea that there is this open immigration movement, particularly springing from Angela Merkel in Germany.
00:06:29.000And this freedom of movement inside the EU where people could basically settle where they want and move across borders freely.
00:06:34.000How much of Brexit was driven by immigration concerns and how much of it was driven by economic pressures or over-regulation from Brussels?
00:06:43.000Well, we had quite a lot of polling data on this, including a massive exit poll on the day of more than 12,000 people.
00:07:05.000It was one of many areas where people wanted control back.
00:07:08.000But 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.
00:07:17.000In fact, I will give you a general rule of thumb, Ben.
00:07:20.000A heuristic, as we might pretentiously call it.
00:07:23.000If any Brit says to you, Brexit was all about immigration, I guarantee that you're talking to someone who voted Remain.
00:07:30.000Because leavers know that that wasn't really the issue.
00:07:31.000That the issue was democracy, of which immigration was one subset.
00:07:35.000So with that said, when looking at the media coverage of this, the media basically covered this as a xenophobic backlash to immigration.
00:07:51.000So much, much easier to dismiss your opponents than to engage in any self-analysis, right?
00:07:56.000So, 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.
00:08:04.000I wonder whether we might have played that a bit better.
00:08:06.000I wonder whether other people might not like us.
00:08:08.000Maybe we should be a little bit more flexible.
00:08:09.000But of course, nobody likes to do that.
00:08:12.000Nobody likes to question whether they got something wrong.
00:08:14.000It's always more tempting to say, bunch of xenophobes.
00:08:17.000It was all about not liking different races or not liking immigration.
00:08:23.000You don't have to question yourself at all.
00:08:25.000And that's now sort of built up this head of steam.
00:08:27.000I mean, it's become almost an article of faith among the Romaine media that There was a spike in racially aggravated crime.
00:08:37.000This turns out to be absolute rubbish.
00:08:40.000There's a police kind of hotline where people are encouraged to say, I'm a victim of hate crimes.
00:08:45.000There was a spike in the 96 hours after the vote.
00:08:48.000Which turned out to be a lot of people complaining about the Leave campaign.
00:08:52.000And yet this is now solemnly reported everywhere as the spike in hate crimes that followed the referendum.
00:08:57.000And even to question that, it's now taken on kind of canonical force.
00:09:00.000Even 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.
00:11:06.000It's created a climate where if you say something else, it sounds jarring.
00:11:10.000And that makes life much easier if you're on the left.
00:11:12.000So 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.
00:11:23.000First, I want to ask you one more question about Brexit.
00:11:25.000And that is, now that we've had this Brexit vote, what's the holdup?
00:11:30.000So the EU obviously is attempting to leverage Britain into staying.
00:11:35.000And basically revoking its own referendum, which seems to me pretty good justification for the Brexit campaign in the first place.
00:11:41.000I mean, if the complaint is that the EU is taking away your power.
00:11:48.000Basically 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.
00:12:04.000We are not prepared to walk away from the table.
00:12:09.000Imagine 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.
00:12:15.000What's the other guy going to do, right?
00:12:37.000Because 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.
00:12:54.000These 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.
00:13:02.000You're obviously the head of a group that is free trade.
00:13:08.000In 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.
00:13:17.000Always, one of them was, free a trade with the world.
00:13:19.000This wasn't something we sneaked out in the small print.
00:13:22.000I mean, we were absolutely clear about this.
00:13:24.000And that is a big difference between the Trump campaign here and the Brexit campaign in the UK.
00:13:29.000I 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.
00:13:37.000But as I understand it, a big part of Donald Trump's shtick here was, we don't want free trade with China.
00:13:43.000Whereas 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.
00:13:52.000And 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.
00:14:01.000We're already each other's biggest trading partners.
00:14:03.000We're already each other's biggest investors.
00:14:05.000Of course, because of the affinities of language and law and all the rest of it.
00:14:09.000But up until now, we haven't been able to sign a free trade agreement.
00:14:13.000And 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.
00:14:29.000All 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?
00:14:41.000So you get away from all the common standards, all the common regulation, all the bureaucracy, all the cartels, all the corporatism.
00:14:46.000And you just say, if a drug is approved by the FDA, that's good enough for us.
00:14:50.000If a guy is qualified to work as a trader in the city of London, he can automatically work on Wall Street.
00:14:55.000Think of how that would bring down costs, remove regulations, work for the little guy instead of for the big corporate.
00:15:00.000And that would be a different way of doing trade.
00:15:02.000So 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.
00:15:09.000One 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.
00:15:17.000What happened to the Labour Party in Britain, which used to be of Tony Blair and is now of Jeremy Corbyn?
00:15:50.000Because this is a guy who's pro-IRA, pro-Hamas, pro-Hizballah, pro-Castro, pro-Chávez.
00:15:55.000Even 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?
00:16:06.000But of course, as soon as they were all with us, no, no, no, we couldn't criticize it.
00:16:10.000And you could see the process going on.
00:16:13.000And then like a little boy who gets the right answer in class, he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, the Second World War!
00:16:18.000And 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.
00:16:27.000Actually, do you know what a really funny thing that I discovered?
00:16:29.000His father, who was a communist at that time, did exactly that.
00:16:34.000So he was against us when the Nazis and the Soviets were on the same side.
00:16:39.000And then he switched when Hitler attacked Stalin, like almost all British communists did.
00:16:45.000It is, by the way, an incredible cultural victory for the left.
00:16:50.000This 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.
00:17:00.000How did Jeremy Corbyn end up at the head of this Labour party?
00:17:03.000I guess the short answer is, from the 80s, Labour began to expel the hardline Trotskyist militants.
00:17:13.000And 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.
00:17:22.000And 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.
00:17:35.000And 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.
00:17:46.000And although 200,000 is tiny in a nation of 65 million, it is huge for a political party.
00:17:51.000And 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.
00:18:04.000I mean, I can't tell you how strange this is, how outside our experience it is.
00:18:09.000I mean, we've had a fairly moderate party of the centre-left compared to almost any European country.
00:18:14.000You 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.
00:18:28.000It was not A violent revolutionary party.
00:18:31.000Unlike most places, you don't have to look too far to see a different model.
00:18:37.000And suddenly we have got a doctrinaire Marxist who I won't say that he is himself an anti-Semite.
00:18:49.000I always think he looks like a rather scruffy Reform rabbi actually when you see him.
00:18:53.000But he has opened the door to some unbelievable people.
00:19:00.000I just think this is really interesting.
00:19:10.000I 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.
00:19:18.000This is completely unprecedented in Britain.
00:19:21.000And 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.
00:19:36.000And therefore, since anti-Semites are intolerant, they can't be on the left.
00:19:41.000As I don't need to tell you, Ben, of all people, that is such a falsification of history.
00:19:45.000The guy who invented the word anti-Semitism was a socialist.
00:19:47.000The guy who invented the word socialism was an anti-Semite.
00:19:50.000In the late 19th century, this wasn't common to the whole left, but it was a very, very natural thing.
00:19:57.000To have revolutionary socialist parties who said, capitalists and Jews are the problem.
00:20:02.000They're grinding down the working man.
00:20:03.000In 1920, Hitler says to his party members, how, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?
00:20:09.000And nobody thought it an odd thing to say in those days.
00:20:11.000It's the strange cultural victory of the left that these phrases now sound so jarring.
00:20:17.000Because how can you be a nice lefty and think these things?
00:20:23.000Of course, there was an honorable pluralist tradition on the left.
00:20:27.000There were lots of Jewish socialists and all that, right?
00:20:29.000But going right back to Karl Marx, there was this other tradition as well of seeing anti-Semitism as an extension of anti-capitalism.
00:20:39.000And that is what's come flooding back in to the Labour Party.
00:20:43.000This idea that we're against kind of Rothschild taking over the world.
00:20:47.000And it is not something you find on the right.
00:20:49.000It's something that is almost exclusively now on the left.
00:20:51.000So 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.
00:20:59.000I 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.
00:21:24.000Does that have any linkage with the Labor Party's move on anti-Semitism?
00:21:32.000I think that the left in Britain and in the U.S.
00:21:35.000And 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.
00:21:50.000And 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.
00:21:59.000And you guys, in some ways, are ahead of anywhere else on this.
00:22:06.000And so it has good categories and bad categories.
00:22:10.000And generally, if you're an immigrant, you're in a good category.
00:22:15.000What'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.
00:22:35.000Success 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.
00:22:46.000And 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.
00:22:54.000And 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.
00:23:02.000So 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?
00:23:08.000Because one of the things that is obviously notable about Europe is the entire European attitude toward Israel, which is extraordinarily hateful and terrible overall.
00:23:18.000There are some exceptions, but it seems like there's pretty broad agreement that Israel is the bad guy across Europe.
00:23:29.000So I'm not saying that you should never criticise Israel or any other country.
00:23:34.000But 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.
00:23:50.000I 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.
00:23:58.000But I think the bigger factor is this.
00:24:02.000The European ideal is based on the premise that national loyalties are arbitrary, transient, and ultimately discreditable.
00:24:42.000And then one day, against all the odds, providentially you might say, they achieve it.
00:24:46.000Now, 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.
00:24:55.000But if your starting point is that the national principle is the root of all evil, then you're bound to be triggered by it.
00:25:02.000And ultimately, I think that's why Israel is always going to fight to get a fair hearing in Brussels.
00:25:07.000It's because simply by existing, it undermines the whole basis of the European project.
00:25:12.000So let's talk for a second about the conservative parties.
00:25:14.000We've talked about sort of the shortcomings of the Labour Party.
00:25:16.000First of all, most Americans hear a conservative party and they think, OK, American conservative.
00:25:20.000What are the differences between European conservative parties, European right-wing parties, and the American Republican Party, or American conservative ideology, do you think?
00:26:09.000We've now found some, from Scandinavia and from Eastern Europe in particular, but not really so much from the old core EU countries.
00:26:16.000And 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.
00:26:36.000They're not conservatives as you and I would understand.
00:26:39.000So when it comes to the UK Conservative Party, what does the party believe the role of government is?
00:26:44.000So it seems like the NHS, for example, is completely untouchable by both sides of the political aisle.
00:26:49.000Obviously, 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.
00:27:11.000I mean, there are many, many better models out there than either the American or the British system.
00:27:17.000And 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?
00:27:24.000So any proposal to reform the NHS is, oh, you want an American system.
00:27:27.000And similarly here, any move away from the old system is either Canada or Britain.
00:27:33.000Well, you know, there are countries with way better health outcomes than either yours or ours and way better value for money.
00:27:42.000And in all these places, you know, You are not denied healthcare because you're poor.
00:27:49.000But if you can afford it, you don't get treated as a supplicant.
00:27:55.000You're a consumer and you tend to get much better value and much better treatment.
00:27:58.000And it works out particularly in Singapore.
00:28:02.000I mean, they've got incredibly good outcomes compared to anybody else.
00:28:05.000Healthier population and it's a much better place to be poor, right, in terms of health outcomes.
00:28:09.000I mean, at every level you're better off in Singapore.
00:28:13.000You know, we've got the same, we've got the same spread, you know, we have the same electoral system as you.
00:28:18.000Our right of centre party, like yours, is a coalition.
00:28:21.000It's got some great people and some bad people.
00:28:23.000And I'll tell you one thing that I think is going to be where we move in your direction.
00:28:28.000As 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.
00:28:41.000I think we're going to see something very similar to the culture war prompted by Donald Trump.
00:28:48.000I don't mean to imply that Boris is like Donald Trump.
00:29:42.000So speaking of President Trump, you're obviously not from the United States.
00:29:46.000What 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?
00:29:55.000I think you are about the only popular commentator in the U.S.
00:30:00.000One 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.
00:30:09.000So 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?
00:30:25.000My point is not that these are true or false.
00:30:54.000He doesn't want people to say, I support you when I agree with you.
00:30:57.000He insists in a quite needy way on getting people to support him when he does his 180 degree flips.
00:31:03.000And so that means it's very difficult to have a kind of moderate view on this.
00:31:09.000And 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.
00:31:33.000And when we stopped formally being monarchies, we very quickly went back to having the strong guy.
00:31:37.000In fact, I think it's not just that we have this in our past.
00:31:42.000When we imagine the future, when we write Star Wars, Look, we fill it with emperors and princesses, right?
00:31:48.000It's almost like that is the natural human condition.
00:31:52.000And I think this is what Franklin meant by if you can keep it, right?
00:31:57.000The US is extraordinary in that it has created a system of checks and balances where autocracy is difficult.
00:32:05.000But just because you've managed for a couple of hundred years doesn't mean that what you're doing is natural.
00:32:11.000It runs up against human instincts and intuitions.
00:32:14.000And 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.
00:32:27.000With a rapidity that I found astonishing, and it's happening all over the Western world.
00:32:31.000So, how do we keep this anachronism going?
00:32:33.000I 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?
00:32:45.000Here, 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.
00:32:51.000How do we avoid- - Fairly unlikely big men, right? - Yeah. - You don't imagine any of them as like a dictator, right?
00:32:56.000The classic sort of fictional dictator.
00:32:58.000They are, I don't know which of them is the least plausible.
00:33:04.000You and I are products of an education system that, and most people watching, that taught us a bunch of counterintuitive and countercyclical ideas.
00:33:13.000For example, the notion that someone that you don't like may still have something useful to say.
00:33:28.000You 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.
00:33:39.000I 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.
00:34:06.000I'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.
00:34:30.000So you've got to constantly work to keep our system going.
00:34:46.000This is one of the things that I find so odd about sort of our modern politics.
00:34:51.000We focus a lot on what government is doing, what government actors are doing.
00:34:55.000But it seems like the important work is being neglected.
00:34:57.000This is sort of the upkeep of the ditches to make sure the irrigation is flowing.
00:35:01.000The social fabric that requires stitching, that is being allowed to fray.
00:35:05.000Meanwhile, we're focusing on sort of clubbing each other at the governmental level.
00:35:08.000It's become what Barack Obama suggested in 2012.
00:35:12.000The 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.
00:35:21.000Whereas 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.
00:35:28.000The more powerful government becomes, the less we are allowed to disagree with each other, lest we undermine the basis of the state itself.
00:35:36.000I 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.
00:35:50.000Hannah Arendt had this lovely phrase where she said, every generation the West is invaded by barbarians.
00:35:57.000So we arrive with the same basic mental kit that a baby would have had 50,000 years ago, right?
00:36:03.000The 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.
00:36:18.000And 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.
00:36:23.000So 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.
00:36:29.000Because for me as a conservative, I look at Europe and I say, OK, we're always 50 years behind whatever Europe has going.
00:36:36.000So Europe can be 50 years more toward the cliff, and we will be there soon enough.
00:36:40.000And 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.
00:36:47.000European religion began its long, slow, it seems, irreversible decline in the 1910s and 1920s, and then that pursuit apace.
00:36:56.000By the time you hit post-World War II, religion in Europe has basically hit low up and then continued to drop even beyond that.
00:37:03.000In the United States, you're seeing late-breaking irreligion.
00:37:08.000It's now the single sect that is most identified with as unaffiliated in the United States, about 25, 26 percent of the population.
00:37:15.000But, 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.
00:37:27.000Number one, do you see a substitute for religion in Europe that is rising?
00:37:30.000Number two, do you see anything like a religious revival on the road in Europe?
00:37:48.000But 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.
00:38:04.000And 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.
00:38:19.000What worries me much more is if people lose their belief in anything.
00:38:27.000And 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.
00:38:39.000If 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.
00:39:01.000You're going to start casting around for something more assertive.
00:39:07.000And one thing that the Salafists do not lack is self-confidence.
00:39:14.000I 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.
00:39:23.000It's kind of obvious when you go there what the problem is for at least some people.
00:39:28.000You know, Belgium has the problems of the EU writ large.
00:39:59.000Everyone has taught you that the nation-state is finished and is evil and all the rest of it.
00:40:04.000Some 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.
00:40:15.000And 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.
00:40:27.000The more it seems at odds with all the values of the people around you, the better, right?
00:40:31.000I 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.
00:40:43.000Well, and this is, I think, my big focus on religion lately when it comes to upholding liberalism itself.
00:40:51.000One of the things that I fear is that it's very easy to view liberalism as moral relativism.
00:40:55.000It'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.
00:41:03.000everybody 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.
00:41:16.000I think the U.S. has been very good at doing this.
00:41:18.000It's a secular republic, but it has been very, very good at making people want to belong.
00:41:24.000And 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.
00:41:32.000And indeed, that sophisticated liberals here sneer at.
00:41:35.000The flags and the bunting and the 4th of July celebrations and so on.
00:41:39.000But actually that makes it very easy for a newcomer to feel that there is something to belong to, right?
00:41:45.000And that's been a miraculously powerful agent for binding people together for a very long time.
00:41:52.000And people are always Every generation of Americans thinks it's coming to an end, but actually it hasn't.
00:42:00.000You can't read the history of this country without realising that people are unduly pessimistic.
00:42:06.000The attitude of every generation of Americans is, immigration has been great until now, But this time it's different.
00:42:13.000And there's always some apparent reason why it's going to be different.
00:42:16.000Yeah, but up until now they all spoke English.
00:42:17.000Yeah, but up until now they were all Protestant.
00:42:19.000Yeah, but up until now they were all white.
00:42:34.000I 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.
00:43:16.000So we've been told now that apparently, according to Colin Kaepernick, the flag is a symbol of American racism and slavery.
00:43:22.000The Constitution is a hallmark of rich white property owners who disdained black folks and gay folks and women.
00:43:30.000American history is replete with suffering and cruelty.
00:43:34.000Fourth of July parades themselves are indicative of... So, I mean, I'd say two things about that.
00:43:38.000First 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.
00:43:52.000In 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.
00:44:04.000Their argument was precisely, it is because this republic is not living up to its ideals that we should have equality.
00:44:09.000That seems to me a pretty good story, right?
00:44:13.000They would have had, I think, no truck with this idea that the whole system was rigged.
00:44:19.000The 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?
00:44:29.000The 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?
00:44:35.000I think that you could... But that was not the problem, right?
00:44:39.000And the suddenness, you know, you beat over a rock saying, well, yeah, you know, that we've got to feel the pain and...
00:44:47.000People who knew better within hours said, OK, that's the new line.
00:44:51.000And then this was really kind of Salem witch trial stuff.
00:44:54.000I need to rush out my condemnation first before somebody accuses me.
00:45:00.000And 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.
00:45:06.000That 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.
00:45:21.000The country has invested with some mythology, the Betsy Ross flag, that she probably didn't invent, etc, etc.
00:45:28.000If it stands for anything, with all that mythology attached, it's for the idea of an inclusive republic that everyone is part of.
00:45:35.000And 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.
00:45:43.000And this is one of the things that is that is truly scaring me is I'm seeing all of these common institutions disappear.
00:45:48.000And that includes the teaching of of Western civilized history.
00:45:51.000If you say the phrase Western civilization, you are now condemned as a sort of xenophobe or some sort of racist.
00:45:57.000And I've seen the same thing take place in terms of how people characterize British history.
00:46:00.000Apparently, British history is just a litany of rape, slaughter, looting, imperialism, colonialism and brutality.
00:46:06.000And you know what's missing is any sense of perspective.
00:46:09.000So, 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?
00:46:17.000A 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?
00:46:26.000Think 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.
00:46:37.000But I would just say, judge by the relevant standards of that age.
00:46:43.000There 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.
00:46:57.000It is the essence of what we mean by the word ahistoric.
00:47:02.000I 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?
00:47:24.000And unless there is an answer to that, all of this is meaningless.
00:47:28.000It's the cheapest kind of virtue signaling.
00:47:30.000It is a self-righteous contemporary mediocrity saying, I am a better human being than Thomas Jefferson or Winston Churchill or whatever, right?
00:47:38.000And being able to get away with it because they've identified some past attitude that we no longer hold.
00:47:43.000So where is this revival going to come from?
00:47:46.000We've been talking about it for a while.
00:47:47.000Who are going to be the leaders in this revival?
00:47:49.000Because it seems a bit much to ask our politicians to do it.
00:47:52.000Yeah, 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?
00:48:18.000When 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.
00:48:26.000I'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.
00:48:40.000I'm afraid some people are bound to respond then by having an identity politics of their own.
00:48:47.000An immigrant-descended, multi-ethnic republic like this, more than almost any other country, cannot afford to let people do that.
00:48:55.000I'm not talking about people having pride in the hyphenated bit of their name.
00:49:06.000But 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.
00:49:28.000OK, so let's talk for a second about what you do with most of your time, which is represent the free trade perspective.
00:49:33.000So 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.
00:49:40.000It seems like Donald Trump's platform is closer to Nigel Farage's than it is to Boris Johnson's.
00:49:46.000It seems like many of the populist groups in Australia are not very similar to President Trump.
00:49:51.000So I'm confused by the word populist, first of all, because it doesn't seem to have a common definition.
00:49:54.000But beyond that, there seems to be this push now against free trade.
00:50:15.000The Trumpian protectionist position rests on a series of assertions that sound completely plausible, even though none of them is true.
00:50:22.000But 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.
00:50:37.000And none of those things is true, and the countries that have done those things have always made themselves poorer.
00:50:46.000Like, you know, you and I are descended from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, right?
00:50:50.000We carry deep in our DNA the desire to hoard food to provide against famine.
00:50:55.000So 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?
00:51:04.000Actually, the countries that are trying to be self-sufficient in food are the ones that open themselves to localized catastrophe.
00:51:10.000The ones that have diverse supply globally are the ones that genuinely have security of food.
00:51:15.000The country that is most determinedly trying to be self-sufficient in food anywhere on the planet is North Korea.
00:51:21.000The country which grows zero food and imports its own drinking water and everything is Singapore.
00:51:34.000Also there's the perennial problem of free trade which is It brings dispersed gains and concentrated losses.
00:51:42.000So 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.
00:51:57.000But of course it's the steel lobby that is aware and that will vote accordingly, whereas the other people don't really notice.
00:52:02.000So 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?
00:52:31.000So I'm really interested by this, and you see the contradiction actually in the president's tweets.
00:52:35.000Half 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.
00:52:42.000And then the other half is, best employment figures we've ever had!
00:52:47.000And it's the second one that's accurate.
00:52:50.000Yes, 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.
00:53:06.000Your country, mine, they've all largely made a transition already away from heavy industry towards services.
00:53:15.000We've gone a bit further than you have, but we're now both largely service-based economies.
00:53:22.000And that isn't really about free trade, that's just about technological advance and automation and so on.
00:53:26.000When 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.
00:54:26.000Part of it is university, a little bit of it is kind of industrial heritage tourism, but the biggest employer there is the audiovisual sector.
00:54:34.000It's where they make Call the Midwife, it's where they make Sherlock, you know.
00:54:40.000My maternal grandfather was a shipyard worker in the West of Scotland on the Clyde.
00:54:45.000And he had the typical unhealthy West of Scotland lifestyle and he died very young, I mean 59, 60.
00:54:53.000So I never got the chance to say to him, would you have rather kept this whole industry artificially alive?
00:55:01.000I 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.
00:55:07.000Now that is a tough argument to make to the people who are involved.
00:55:44.000Just like phones put telegraphists out of business, they move on to the next thing.
00:55:49.000And living standards continue to rise.
00:55:51.000And I know this is a really difficult thing for people.
00:55:53.000But if you could go back in a time machine to any other time, you would find it tougher than now.
00:55:57.000The progress is always over time in one direction.
00:56:00.000Tucker 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.
00:56:10.000So what do you make of the rise of China?
00:56:12.000So you suggested before that you're in favor of free trade with China.
00:56:18.000My 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.
00:56:55.000General 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.
00:57:09.000And if you think about it, not signing a trade deal is the weakest form of trade sanction, right?
00:57:13.000So, I mean, I'd have said the same about Cuba or whatever.
00:57:17.000It's always better to engage economically.
00:57:20.000You can by all means sanction politicians, by all means have personalized, micro-targeted sanctions like against the Madurista regime in Venezuela.
00:57:31.000But in the long run, the aim surely has to be to try to draw China into a rules-based international trading order.
00:57:37.000I 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.
00:57:48.000China 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.
00:58:32.000I think China is a nasty autocracy which under the current leadership has become more revanchist, more nationalist and more saber-rattling generally.
00:58:46.000But I think the thing that defeated the Soviet Union wasn't really economic sanctions, it was superior military standoff.
00:58:56.000It was the deployment of the cruise and Pershing missiles and then the Star Wars system.
00:59:00.000And I do think you may need to be prepared to challenge China in quite strong terms over Taiwan.
00:59:10.000I 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.
00:59:16.000You know, Russia, India, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Tibet.
00:59:24.000But 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.
00:59:41.000So, 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?
00:59:48.000I'm going to ask you that question in just one second.
00:59:49.000If you want to hear Daniel Hannan's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
00:59:53.000To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com.