TRIGGERnometry - Brexit and Why People Voted For It

00:00:00.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this is a show

00:00:12.160 for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about

00:00:17.220 at trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts we ask the experts our fantastic guest

00:00:22.940 this week is a wonderful comedian jeff norko professor of politics at birkbeck university

00:00:28.440 in London, Eric Kaffman, the Spike columnist and the author of What Women Want, Fun, Freedom

00:00:34.880 and an End to Feminism, Ella Whelan, Matt Goodwin, who's a Professor of Political Science

00:00:39.820 at the University of Kent and a Senior Fellow at Chatham House. Matt, welcome to Trigonology.

00:00:50.020 National populism has obviously, we've seen a rise. How much of that has got to do with

00:00:53.820 the economic crash in 2008?

00:00:56.500 Well, this is a million-dollar question, right?

00:00:58.180 So if you're on the left, you basically argue, and I'm making judgments.

00:01:01.820 I don't know where your politics are.

00:01:03.420 I've got an idea.

00:01:04.680 But if you lean leftwards, you tend to say all of this is about economic scarcity, right?

00:01:10.100 It's the old Marxist line that effectively anybody who votes for nationalist movements

00:01:14.680 or movements that express unease about mass immigration,

00:01:17.440 that they are driven by their worries over basically income, wages, and scarce economic goods.

00:01:26.960 And usually an extension of that argument is that the people are being manipulated by ruthless elites in society,

00:01:35.000 whether it's the media, whether it's these conspiratorial right-wingers trying to divide and rule.

00:01:42.180 The evidence, I would argue, and certainly we argue in the book, is pretty overwhelming in pointing in a different direction,

00:01:48.680 which is that if you think, for example, about some of the most successful national populists that we've had in the Western world

00:01:54.800 coming in places like Switzerland, in Austria, the Netherlands, they broke through amid very low unemployment rates,

00:02:03.120 some of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe, very strong growing economies.

00:02:06.760 look at law and justice in Poland, really came into power on the back of a rapid economic

00:02:13.080 expansion. Take Britain, Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party first really broke through in

00:02:18.820 2004 after 48 consecutive periods of growth. And then when we drill down to the individual level

00:02:25.000 and we look at who's actually supporting these movements, and I'm sure we'll come back to it,

00:02:28.300 they tend to be working full time, they tend to often be on not amazing wages, but standard,

00:02:33.980 average wages. And so the unemployed, the kind of real losers of globalization in a sort of

00:02:42.060 visceral sense, they are not generally providing the bulk of support to national populism. I mean,

00:02:48.140 it's worth remembering even in the 1930s, many people on the left like that comparison at the

00:02:53.020 moment. A lot of the unemployed and those who are out of work are actually voting for the communists,

00:02:57.560 not for the national socialists. And national socialism, national populism are two very

00:03:03.500 different movements. But the idea that the left pushes that this is all about economic scarcity,

00:03:09.680 I'm afraid is not actually very convincing when you look at the evidence.

00:03:13.840 One of the interesting points in the book is that one of the interesting facts you cite in the book

00:03:17.540 is that Donald Trump voters had the average highest income of the three available candidates.

00:03:22.260 So if you take Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump, his voters actually had a higher

00:03:27.140 average income than any of the other two. And I wanted to come back to the fact that you've been

00:03:32.420 talking about this for a long time actually you've been predicting this unlike most people who

00:03:36.700 predicted Brexit and Trump very confidently after it happened right you actually predicted it many

00:03:42.080 years before you've been talking about this since like 2010 at least from what I've seen

00:03:45.920 in interviewed with economists for example where you were talking actually about Anders Breivik I

00:03:50.200 think in the context of this and that is not a time in which we were having these conversations

00:03:55.140 at all so can you take us back through that period if it's not the economic crash that Francis asked

00:04:00.600 you about what has happened over the last 10 to 15 years that has caused this movement to emerge

00:04:05.800 in this way? Yeah, well, one of my pet frustrations about the public debate is that we focus on the

00:04:12.940 short-term factors, right? And we're obsessed about what happens during campaigns. I mean,

00:04:18.100 I just finished reading Hillary Clinton's book, What Happened? And I realized she still doesn't

00:04:22.340 know what happened, largely because she's obsessed with what happened during that campaign period.

00:04:28.500 Now, I would say actually if you look not at the last 10 to 15 years, but actually at the last 30 to 40 years, you can really see a number of deep currents begin to come forward and start to reshape democracies in the West quietly, but in a powerful way from below, creating the conditions that have allowed national populism today to get to the levels of support that we're seeing.

00:04:55.720 And this is partly about a backlash to the rise of what you might call the new left in the 60s and the 70s, which pushed a very liberal agenda, the expansion of rights for minorities, the support, if not celebration, of mass immigration, the shift towards supranational institutions like the European Union.

00:05:17.500 And in the 80s and the 90s, and particularly in countries like France and Austria, you began to see the beginnings of a backlash to that new liberal consensus.

00:05:28.360 Jean-Marie Le Pen, for example, who used to run on the slogan, Le Pen, the people, or the Austrian Freedom Party and Jörg Haider, an earlier generation of populists that we now tend to forget because we like to think everything is unique to our era.

00:05:43.400 Jörg Haider used to say, I say what the people think, right?

00:05:47.880 And it was that notion that he's tapping into a concern,

00:05:51.900 particularly among an alliance of social conservatives that were often quite affluent

00:05:56.520 and blue-collar workers who together felt very uncomfortable

00:06:02.140 with both the scale and the pace of change that was happening within the broader nation.

00:06:07.400 And that was partly about immigration.

00:06:08.900 It was also about, in some countries, increasingly a political establishment that seemed to be holding the people in contempt, certainly neglecting them.

00:06:20.200 And also increasingly, in more recent years, the specific issue of Islam in Europe and the refugee crisis that followed.

00:06:28.020 So by the time you get to really the 90s or 2000s and you guys start going through things like 9-11, long before the financial crisis, you're beginning to see these movements actually reaching very high levels of support in some countries, joining national governments, often doing well in very prosperous, affluent areas, and really winning over low-skilled service workers, the self-employed blue-collar workers.

00:06:52.180 So we talk a lot about the collapse of social democracy today. Actually, you can really trace that to the early to mid 2000s. And now the crisis kicked in and no one's saying the crisis isn't important because it is. It wasn't the underlying driver, but it did exacerbate a number of these emerging value conflicts in the West between kind of culturally liberal middle class professionals and those social conservatives and workers.

00:07:17.880 And you begin to see this kind of gradual polarization within a lot of Western democracies.

00:07:24.300 And I think what mattered in a big way was the national populists themselves also changed.

00:07:29.500 They became more articulate.

00:07:30.860 They became more sophisticated.

00:07:32.380 They started to tone down white supremacism.

00:07:34.700 They started to basically get a bit more in line with where public opinion really was on these issues.

00:07:40.820 People like Gert Wilders started to say, well, let's be pro-LGBT, but also let's be anti-Islam at the same time.

00:07:47.880 So you started to see these kind of curious innovations that we didn't really have before.

00:07:52.440 And, of course, that then really brought together, you know, the public demand for a sort of a challenge to that liberal consensus with the sort of party supply, with these parties just being a bit more competent, a bit more articulate at how they're bringing these groups into the political system.

00:08:11.860 And today where we are, you know, I think the interesting macro question at least is when you look at what's happening in the West.

00:08:17.680 Does this signal that we are at the end of a period of great change and volatility,

00:08:22.020 or does it instead signal that we are at the beginning of a new period of great change, fragmentation and polarisation?

00:08:29.240 My view is that if you look at all the evidence,

00:08:31.760 we are very much at the beginning of a new period of great change and volatility.

00:08:42.540 When we talk about Brexit, the majority position is the one that's demonised.

00:08:47.040 which is quite incredible in and of itself.

00:08:49.200 So when you talk about most people think this,

00:08:51.280 I think there's so many issues in which most people think something,

00:08:54.180 and that is the position that is demonised,

00:08:56.380 which is an incredible place to be in, isn't it?

00:08:58.120 Yeah, but it shows how completely out of step

00:09:00.660 the political establishment and, to a certain degree,

00:09:03.640 the media are with public opinion.

00:09:06.220 So the fact that, I mean, I was a Brexiteer,

00:09:09.200 and I see that as a pretty standard left-wing position,

00:09:13.000 but the fact is the vote was announced,

00:09:16.480 and then I think it was probably about 45 minutes afterwards,

00:09:19.320 we got to celebrate in the spiked office for about half an hour

00:09:21.740 and then we were like, right, we're on the defensive.

00:09:24.460 And, yeah, the biggest political mandate in British history

00:09:27.040 has been systematically demonised and, like, viciously demonised

00:09:31.200 for two years straight or whatever point we're at now.

00:09:35.140 And I think that isn't coming from people.

00:09:38.720 People aren't stopping leavers in the street and hurling eggs at them

00:09:41.900 and saying, like, you've put the country to hell.

00:09:44.800 its MPs and its political commentators

00:09:48.700 who are really viciously against Brexit.

00:09:51.700 I think that tells you about the separation

00:09:53.320 that's going on, the kind of big lines in the sand

00:09:55.620 between those who are the rulers and who make the laws

00:09:59.180 and those of us who are ruled, to a certain extent.

00:10:01.820 What I find interesting about Brexit is this.

00:10:03.860 We get quite a lot of comments,

00:10:05.500 and in particular comedians who are sort of...

00:10:08.500 that sort of very... the left, sort of Corbynite left.

00:10:12.060 And the criticism that they always put to me is,

00:10:14.800 You never get any left-wing people on.

00:10:16.600 And I say, actually, we do, but a lot of them support Brexit.

00:10:21.180 And a lot of people seem to think that

00:10:23.580 in order for you to support Brexit, you need to be on the right.

00:10:26.980 But that's obviously a fallacy,

00:10:28.940 because there's a lot of people on the left,

00:10:30.400 especially what you consider to be the old-school Tony-Ben-esque left.

00:10:34.160 They all support Brexit, or a large majority of them do.

00:10:36.920 Corbyn does as well, by the way.

00:10:37.940 Yeah, he does. He's just not honest about it.

00:10:42.020 No, he isn't honest about it. He's kind of sold out.

00:10:44.800 his side of the left in relation to Brexit.

00:10:47.100 I guess it's because the main Leave campaign,

00:10:49.780 the main faces of it, were Tory MPs,

00:10:53.620 or I don't think you can necessarily call them rabid right-wingers,

00:10:56.600 but there wasn't a vocal left for Brexit other than Spiked.

00:11:00.620 We had our sort of, as big as we could be, our campaign,

00:11:03.740 and you had some Labour left people who campaigned for Brexit.

00:11:08.940 But on the whole, there wasn't a coherent left-wing movement

00:11:13.520 for what I thought was this great opportunity

00:11:16.180 to break through years of mush and status quo

00:11:21.760 and not moving anywhere in politics,

00:11:23.820 then you have this moment where lots of working-class people are saying,

00:11:28.700 we want to change in politics and we want to have a greater say

00:11:32.080 and we want to shake things up and the left's nowhere to be seen.

00:11:36.160 And so not that I revel in the fact that that is the case,

00:11:39.500 but I think it tells you a lot about where the left is today.

00:11:41.980 if they were so blind as to not see this as an opportunity

00:11:45.220 to change politics quite dramatically.

00:11:48.880 I mean, I remember in the two weeks after the vote,

00:11:52.840 you had news about how the Tory party was going to disintegrate,

00:11:56.340 about how Labour was going to disintegrate,

00:11:58.000 Westminster was crumbling, everyone was falling apart.

00:12:00.640 And I was like, yes, like, this is what I vote for.

00:12:04.820 This is great.

00:12:05.800 I mean, you know, I never have voted in general elections

00:12:09.300 when I was younger, I used to spoil my ballot

00:12:11.100 and then my mum was said they never read the like essay that you write you know they just see that

00:12:16.780 you haven't ticked the book so anyway um I and that was a conscious decision because I thought

00:12:22.500 none of these people represent what I want in any way shape or form I'm very very against picking

00:12:27.800 the best of a bad bunch but Brexit was the first thing ever in my political career I was like right

00:12:33.080 this is something I definitely know that I care about I'm 100% behind this let's go and that was

00:12:38.980 I think that was a lot of people's experience.

00:12:42.220 I mean, the voter turnout for Brexit was ginormous in comparison to general elections.

00:12:47.000 And you just see then the general election after it, numbers completely tanked again,

00:12:50.760 which tells you what you need to know about how important this thing was

00:12:55.980 and how tragic I think it is that it's being slammed to such a great extent.

00:13:00.000 a lot of the uh the media narrative around populism immediately after say the trump or

00:13:10.460 brexit vote you know turned to you know who voted for trump or who voted for brexit and where do

00:13:15.920 they live and you can see that the cities tended to be say remain voting and and outlying areas

00:13:21.160 tended to be for leave and those areas tend to be a bit more deprived so people kind of jump to

00:13:25.900 these conclusions well it's the people the left behind they're the ones who voted to leave or

00:13:30.760 they voted for Trump the problem with that of course is that you know just take London as a

00:13:35.920 city it's got a large number of people who are not white British it's got a large number of people

00:13:41.220 with university degrees a large number of young people so that makes it fairly unusual demographically

00:13:46.420 the only real way to do that study properly is to take a white working class person in London 0.98

00:13:51.840 and a white working-class person in the north, in a mining town, for example, and compare them.

00:13:57.820 And when you do that, you actually see, if anything, that person in London is slightly more likely to have voted leave.

00:14:04.220 So that's the kind of method where you're actually looking at individuals, individual-level, large-scale survey data,

00:14:10.420 not looking at these election maps or talking about opioid crises or so on.

00:14:15.880 So, yeah, the first takeaway really is that it's almost all about immigration.

00:14:20.140 when we talk about right-wing populism.

00:14:22.360 Not left-wing populism, Podemos and Corbyn, that is about the economy,

00:14:26.100 but right-wing populism in the West, not, again, in India or even in Eastern Europe.

00:14:32.560 In the West, it's about immigration.

00:14:35.140 And the academic literature is actually pretty solid on this as well.

00:14:38.820 The academic literature shows this and wouldn't dispute this.

00:14:42.340 Now, some, of course, would dispute it, but certainly when it comes to immigration,

00:14:45.720 a lot of the academic, there was a meta-analysis done,

00:14:48.260 which is an analysis of all the literature,

00:14:50.300 and they find essentially that how poor you are,

00:14:53.680 whether you're unemployed or not, whether you've lost your job,

00:14:56.260 those are not things that predict your immigration attitudes,

00:14:59.580 and these are not things that are driving right-wing populism.

00:15:02.800 So the mainstream narrative right now is essentially

00:15:06.100 people have nothing to live on, people don't have a job, like you say,

00:15:10.780 and they're lashing out against immigrants

00:15:13.260 because that's where we normally channel our anger

00:15:16.800 when we've lost out and whatever.

00:15:19.760 And you say...

00:15:21.300 Well, I say no.

00:15:22.560 I say essentially what this is about is anxiety

00:15:25.160 over ethnocultural change, threats to identity.

00:15:28.960 And I'll give you a kind of question that we might ask people.

00:15:31.780 Say in this country, we ask Brexiteers,

00:15:34.040 white British Brexiteers, how concerned are you?

00:15:37.280 How much of a problem is pressure on public services?

00:15:41.000 Zero to 100.

00:15:42.000 100 being it's a big problem.

00:15:44.780 And people give it about a 40.

00:15:45.920 You know, Brexit leave voters give it about a 47, 48 out of 100.

00:15:50.720 And all you have to do is stick the word immigrants putting

00:15:53.720 pressure on public services.

00:15:55.020 So it's the same question, how much of a problem is pressure

00:15:57.680 on public services, but it's immigrants putting. 0.99

00:16:00.840 Just two words, pressure on public services.

00:16:03.080 It goes from sort of 48 out of 100 to 70 out of 100.

00:16:07.200 For Remainers, it's the reverse.

00:16:08.880 And actually, it makes sense.

00:16:09.980 What the Remainers are doing actually does make sense,

00:16:11.840 because if the problem is pressure on public services,

00:16:14.980 the part of that problem that is accounted for by immigrants

00:16:17.480 has to be smaller than the problem itself.

00:16:19.980 So it makes no sense to get a number moving from, say, 48 up to 70,

00:16:24.880 because the problem, the immigrant-fueled part of the problem 0.99

00:16:27.600 cannot be larger than the whole problem.

00:16:29.300 But that's just a way of, by way of explaining

00:16:32.100 that this is not driven by people's worry

00:16:34.420 about pressure on public service as economic things,

00:16:37.180 which is sort of the narrative of probably both parties in a way,

00:16:40.640 because that's what they know.

00:16:41.780 They've got economic policy tools.

00:16:43.240 It's also safer because we can talk about, well, people are feeling pressure on material things, schools and hospitals,

00:16:49.620 and that's why they're upset about immigration.

00:16:51.800 It's not that nasty cultural stuff, but actually it is that cultural stuff.

00:16:56.480 Well, let's break that down.

00:16:57.720 When you say the nasty cultural stuff, I've read your book very carefully, 1.00

00:17:02.240 so you're not saying that the majority of the people who are on the populist right hate immigrants and they're racist, right?

00:17:09.400 You're not saying that.

00:17:10.020 I'm not saying that, no.

00:17:11.000 I actually think we need to open up a conversation about white identity, first of all, and secondly, something I call the white tradition of national identity, and to do so in a fair-minded way. 0.84

00:17:23.120 So there is a certain kind of toxicity around the subject of white group identity.

00:17:28.600 Oh, really?

00:17:29.480 Is that right?

00:17:32.400 I hadn't noticed.

00:17:35.160 It never ends well, though, let's be fair.

00:17:37.960 When you get through a group of people together and go, right, we're white and we identify for being white, it tends to end in camps.

00:17:46.320 Well, no, I disagree with you.

00:17:48.560 So, for example, I don't think identifying as white or identifying as black or identifying as Hawaiian, you know, we have to look at these things differently.

00:17:57.180 I mean, all of those identities can be abused.

00:18:00.040 You can go, you can fixate and be extremist about it.

00:18:02.720 But just if you think about the world,

00:18:05.920 80% of the world's countries have an ethnic majority.

00:18:09.260 Persians in Iran, it could be Tswana in Botswana,

00:18:12.600 Japanese in Japan, et cetera.

00:18:15.980 These people identify with their group, with their culture,

00:18:18.360 and they're not out killing each other.

00:18:19.700 Now, some will.

00:18:20.540 But when we think about what are the predictors of genocide,

00:18:23.540 for example, it's an ideology that

00:18:26.660 says this country should only be inhabited

00:18:29.960 by either a particular group or people

00:18:33.260 who adhere to an ideology like socialism or like Islamism.

00:18:38.120 And if you don't adhere to that, you're in the way 1.00

00:18:40.400 and we're going to exterminate you. 0.98

00:18:41.640 So it doesn't necessarily matter whether it's 0.99

00:18:43.540 a particularist identity like ethnicity

00:18:45.860 or it's a universalist identity like Islam or socialism.

00:18:49.420 There are extreme versions and moderate versions.

00:18:51.160 And you can have a moderate version of white identity 0.72

00:18:53.340 as you can a moderate version of Islamic identity.

00:18:56.460 And there's nothing wrong with that.

00:18:57.800 And that's sort of the normal state of affairs in most countries most of the time.

00:19:02.280 So I think this focus on white identity as toxic actually doesn't have a basis, in fact.

00:19:09.700 Even though we know, yes, we're all thinking about the Nazis.

00:19:12.340 You're wrong.

00:19:13.800 Yeah, we're all thinking about the Nazis.

00:19:15.400 You know, I lost relatives in the Holocaust. 0.74

00:19:17.420 You know, yes, of course.

00:19:19.020 But that's one case.

00:19:20.260 And we actually have to say, okay, all of the countries in the world that have ethnic

00:19:23.520 majorities that identify with their group and then all of the places in the

00:19:28.020 world that have a genocidal event and we have data sets actually where we can

00:19:31.980 look at this question systematically and we find well actually you have to have

00:19:36.300 a number of conditions in place one of which is this exclusivist focus on

00:19:40.980 identity so it's not just saying you know we are Hindus in India but it's you 1.00

00:19:46.560 know everybody who isn't a Hindu is garbage and must be exterminated that's 1.00

00:19:50.400 That's a very different thing from just saying, we identify as Hindu. 1.00

00:19:53.980 So you can have moderate versions and extreme versions of any identity,

00:19:57.920 whether it's a minority identity or a majority.

00:20:00.760 So I really think, actually, we have to start to think about

00:20:03.940 it being, you know, okay to express a moderate white identity,

00:20:09.020 or what I mean by that is ethnic majority identity.

00:20:12.180 Because, again, 80% of the world's countries have these ethnic majority identities. 0.74

00:20:16.820 If we try and say you can't have that, I actually think we are making things worse.

00:20:22.320 If anything, I think that's the greater risk than if we say,

00:20:24.740 OK, it can be expressed, but it's got to be done in a moderate way.

00:20:33.440 You've never felt like you do pro-Brexit material,

00:20:36.880 especially in Zone 1 in London, and just feel you're losing.

00:20:39.860 But wherever you go, there were a lot of people that voted leave.

00:20:42.820 I mean, this is one of the weird things about it, you know, with the sheer numbers game.

00:20:46.380 You know, you talk about in London, what was it, 37% voted leave?

00:20:49.740 I mean, if you was in a room of 100 people, right,

00:20:52.480 and 37 of them voted leave, 63 of them voted,

00:20:55.520 that would feel like a lot of people.

00:20:56.700 And in some ways, at times, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference

00:20:58.960 of, you know, just looking around on a pure optics level,

00:21:02.120 who's in the majority here.

00:21:03.180 So there's always a lot of people that... 0.99

00:21:05.080 Most of them don't give as much of a shit as we do, you know, in the comedy game. 0.99

00:21:08.260 A lot of them are... Most people are reasonable people, you know. 0.99

00:21:11.520 The Remainers that you hear online moan, the Ultra Remainers, are exactly that. 0.89

00:21:15.240 Most people are happy to have the piss taken out of them.

00:21:18.260 And the other thing is it's not pro-Brexit material as such.

00:21:21.500 I think that it's very hard to do any comedy about something

00:21:24.140 where you're saying, I really believe in this, man,

00:21:26.220 and here's some jokes about what I believe in. 1.00

00:21:27.840 I mean, comedy almost exclusively comes from what you think is shit. 0.99

00:21:31.840 So it's aiming the satirical fire back at the Remain way of thinking. 0.99

00:21:38.320 And I think that...

00:21:39.560 I mean, a simple rule I have is satire is always possible

00:21:42.720 is if it's the three H's, right?

00:21:45.580 Hysteria, hypocrisy, and hyperbole, right?

00:21:48.420 Now, if you think about all those things

00:21:49.620 and you look at, you know,

00:21:50.760 some wings of the Remain camp,

00:21:52.220 hysteria, hyperbole,

00:21:54.200 I think we'll still have sandwiches, 0.95

00:21:56.140 you know, hypocrisy. 0.97

00:21:57.540 That's the big one, hypocrisy.

00:21:59.140 There's so much of that flying on both sides.

00:22:01.240 So much of that flying.

00:22:02.080 Oh, yeah, yeah, totally.

00:22:03.000 And they've become like each other.

00:22:04.980 That's what's so odd.

00:22:05.780 You know, I think ultra Remainers

00:22:07.120 have become exactly,

00:22:08.720 and maybe that's what you,

00:22:09.720 sometimes they say to defeat something,

00:22:11.240 you have to become the beast

00:22:12.380 in order to beat it, but you sometimes think,

00:22:14.760 do you realise what you're saying here? 0.99

00:22:17.460 Do you realise how fucking mental it sounds to me? 0.95

00:22:20.640 And I think the one bit of Project Fear that has worked, actually, 0.95

00:22:24.560 I think a lot of it failed miserably,

00:22:26.220 but I think the thing of making it seem like a no-deal Brexit

00:22:29.720 is actually the cliff edge.

00:22:31.180 I think that that's actually worked for most people, you know,

00:22:33.480 for the Remain camp.

00:22:34.420 The language is stuck, isn't it?

00:22:35.740 You know, a cliff-edge Brexit crashing out of the EU.

00:22:39.180 There was an interesting stat about, you know,

00:22:41.160 they talk about the reduction in GDP

00:22:43.040 against

00:22:44.000 because it's not actually a reduction in GDP

00:22:47.180 it's against what Britain would have otherwise had

00:22:49.340 so the worst case scenario was over

00:22:51.100 15 years, this is Mark Carney's

00:22:53.500 prediction so you know this was pessimistic

00:22:55.240 I mean if that case has told you

00:22:57.240 it was raining you go hang on just check out the window

00:22:59.260 but he said

00:23:01.260 it would be 7.7% lower over

00:23:03.160 15 years, now that roughly works out

00:23:05.220 about half a percent of GDP

00:23:07.080 a year, now you think that's not obviously

00:23:08.940 that's a big sum of money it could build hospitals and schools would the average punter recognize

00:23:13.360 that year in year out i don't know you know but they've been quite successful in creating that

00:23:17.920 sort of environment and that sense of fear well actually the stats show that about 70 percent of

00:23:22.640 voters would happily sacrifice a chunk of their income yeah and for example reducing immigration 0.56

00:23:27.320 yes yeah and then taking back well i mean the top thing in the lord ashcroft poll was was

00:23:31.780 sovereignty wasn't it right self-determination in a pure sense but that is one thing right and i had

00:23:36.800 this chat with the producer of the mash report chris stott who's a really good bloke and he you

00:23:41.260 know we just we just accept it's the one thing like he doesn't understand you know and at least

00:23:46.520 he's honest about it they just don't get it they just don't get it as a principle and you think

00:23:50.920 you in a way you have to respect that there's two years on it if people don't understand sort of

00:23:55.820 total the self-determination now they never will and i think that you know they'll say things oh

00:24:01.460 but we do say i mean we don't because there's things that we can't do um as a country and i

00:24:06.200 I think that immigration was interesting because, like, it's always perceived that if you was against freedom of movement, that's because you wanted really low immigration.

00:24:14.560 It's not, for a lot of people, certainly myself, it wasn't that.

00:24:17.420 It just seemed quite an absolutism, you know, freedom of movement in perpetuity for all time.

00:24:22.460 You think that, you know, any nation state shouldn't be allowed to, you know, sort of appropriate their needs based on what was happening in their country at that point.

00:24:29.320 I just thought it was strange that that was decided centrally, you know.

00:24:33.980 And also, you know, when it comes to immigration,

00:24:35.880 sometimes for a long time now in Britain,

00:24:38.000 people have been able to, successive governments have been able to go,

00:24:41.200 well, you know, it makes it a negative thing, doesn't it?

00:24:43.920 We go, well, you know, the EU is better for us, freedom of movement,

00:24:46.820 it's just one of those things that goes with the territory.

00:24:49.700 Whereas if you actually take responsibility for the amount of migrants coming here, 0.99

00:24:53.460 you actually have to sell it to the public in a positive way, you know?

00:24:56.300 One of the reasons that the Windrush scandal had broad sort of sympathy from the public

00:25:00.160 is that was how that was sold to the British people at the time.

00:25:03.020 people are coming to Britain 1.00

00:25:04.160 because we need these people

00:25:05.260 to come and do our jobs

00:25:06.080 whereas for too long now

00:25:07.520 it's just been seen

00:25:08.500 as one of these

00:25:09.140 unfortunate by-products

00:25:10.480 of being part of the EU

00:25:11.520 well that's what I was going to say

00:25:12.700 I'm an immigrant here

00:25:13.600 right you know

00:25:14.140 France's mother 0.81

00:25:14.760 came here as well

00:25:15.660 to this country

00:25:16.260 I don't understand

00:25:17.820 how they've created

00:25:18.980 this cultural meme

00:25:20.200 in society

00:25:21.400 that if you want to control

00:25:23.000 or reduce immigration

00:25:24.160 that's racist

00:25:25.340 I don't understand

00:25:26.500 how that

00:25:27.320 how that

00:25:27.920 came to be

00:25:28.880 I mean there's no doubt

00:25:29.700 there's some people

00:25:30.380 that want to end it

00:25:31.720 that are

00:25:32.080 but they're racist

00:25:32.820 you know like but the i think there was that watershed moment wasn't there do you remember

00:25:36.760 gordon brown and there was that there was that woman who who gillian duffy yeah gillian duffy

00:25:41.360 right she spoke to him about a lot of different things you know a lot of stuff that was very pro

00:25:44.600 nhs and then she ended it by saying something about immigration they called her an awful woman

00:25:48.780 and i think it was like you know things were changing very fast you know the labor government

00:25:53.900 had sort of underestimated you know the impact of it and and i don't think it necessarily comes

00:25:58.680 from a place of total cynicism, but they just hadn't legislated.

00:26:02.700 It's a way of filing it away, isn't it?

00:26:04.480 Well, if you've got any concerns about migration whatsoever, 0.96

00:26:07.540 then you're a racist.

00:26:10.040 And, you know, the problem is it just breeds a backlash, right?

00:26:14.560 And I think that for this economy of this country to be successful,

00:26:20.460 there will need to be, you know, of course there will need.

00:26:22.640 But no one ever said migration was ending.

00:26:25.860 But again, I suppose that's one of the remaining bits of hyperbole that has stuck.

00:26:30.440 The idea that people will say, well, I won't be able to go and work in Europe now.

00:26:34.460 You go, you know that relative of yours that works in the United States, right?

00:26:37.660 That's not part of the EU.

00:26:39.900 So these things will be possible.

00:26:41.180 Admittedly, there might be slightly more.

00:26:42.760 There will be more forms to fill out and stuff, and it won't be as guaranteed.

00:26:47.300 But yeah, the absolutism has been quite jarring.

00:26:51.840 Well, listen, guys, if you've enjoyed it this week,

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TRIGGERnometry - December 31, 2018

Brexit and Why People Voted For It

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