TRIGGERnometry - David Goodhart on the Left, Multiculturalism, Cognitive Elites & Brexit

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00:00:30.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this is the

00:00:40.260 show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing

00:00:45.540 about at trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts we ask the experts our fantastic

00:00:51.680 expert guest this week is a journalist think tanker and the author of the road to somewhere

00:00:57.380 David Goodhart, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:59.180 Thank you.

00:01:03.040 It's good to have you here.

00:01:04.240 It's good to be here.

00:01:05.020 Thank you for coming.

00:01:05.880 The question we always like to ask at the beginning is,

00:01:08.780 how are you where you are?

00:01:09.740 What's been your journey through life?

00:01:11.380 Have there been any kind of things in your life that have informed the work that you do

00:01:15.260 and the views that you now hold?

00:01:18.500 Yes.

00:01:18.980 I mean, my entire life, I guess, has helped to inform the views I have.

00:01:23.820 I came from a very privileged background.

00:01:26.400 My father was a Conservative MP. I went to a very grand public school.

00:01:32.120 A combination of those two things meant, you know, growing up in the kind of 70s,

00:01:37.500 that inevitably I became a leftist.

00:01:41.440 And at university I was really pretty radical.

00:01:45.620 So I think I kind of understand some of the kind of mentality of the attractions, indeed,

00:01:51.020 of the kind of holistic world view of kind of Islamism or Marxism or whatever.

00:01:57.280 Indeed, I found being a Marxist for a few years in my late teens, early 20s

00:02:02.140 was enormously intellectually productive in some ways

00:02:05.240 because of the kind of intellectual vanity of Marxism.

00:02:10.240 You have to be an expert or pretend to be an expert on everything.

00:02:12.880 You know, you have to kind of have a theory on everything.

00:02:15.760 So it's quite good training for kind of journalism and think tank world.

00:02:21.020 But I kind of gradually read my way out of the more kind of silly and extreme views that I had at that time.

00:02:31.680 But I mean, I consider myself to be very much on the centre left for, I guess, most of my adult life.

00:02:41.380 After university, I became a local newspaper journalist where I'd been at university in York.

00:02:47.580 and then rather accidentally ended up on the Financial Times in the early 1980s,

00:02:54.880 which was wonderful training.

00:02:56.800 The FT then was one of the last big institutions to believe in the generalist principle.

00:03:01.480 You did a subject for two or three years,

00:03:04.240 and then you moved on to a completely different subject,

00:03:06.580 a bit like the higher reaches of the civil service.

00:03:10.840 And I was a Labour reporter covering the last great disputes

00:03:15.700 against the Thatcher government in the early 80s, early mid-80s,

00:03:18.980 then moved on to talking about, writing about big company takeovers.

00:03:24.200 And I then had the very good fortune of going to Germany just before unification.

00:03:29.620 And that was a fantastic experience.

00:03:33.280 And it was that that I didn't, that kind of, in a way, sort of turned my head.

00:03:38.060 I didn't really, having covered a world historic event,

00:03:40.560 I didn't fancy going back to the FT and spending the next 10 or 15 years

00:03:44.440 becoming features editor or whatever i might have been um so i decided to set up a magazine i set

00:03:50.700 up a magazine called prospect monthly current affairs magazine really based on the sort of

00:03:56.260 modeled on the american magazines like like the atlantic monthly and new york view of books and

00:04:02.260 new yorker and harpers i'm not obviously we weren't going to be exactly like them um we were

00:04:08.060 going to be a much smaller fry thing but um it was like that the kind of the lack of a proper

00:04:13.900 essay uh essay writing culture here in our journalism that i hope to do something about

00:04:19.200 um and i did that for 15 years from 95 to 2015 um and intellectually in that in that time i mean

00:04:29.240 prospect had started off very much as sort of it started off in the mid 90s was seen very much as

00:04:34.200 sort of part of the kind of new Labour-ish world of, you know,

00:04:40.020 we were just coming to that end of that long period of Conservative rule.

00:04:43.860 And we were not political with a capital P,

00:04:47.120 but we were kind of happy enough to sort of go along with that sort of reformist zeitgeist.

00:04:53.820 But we then, or I anyway, developed a kind of critique of aspects of contemporary liberalism,

00:05:02.100 particularly on issues of race and multiculturalism and immigration.

00:05:08.120 And I wrote a long essay in 2004, it was February 2004, I think,

00:05:15.480 called Too Diverse? Really aimed very much at the centre-left,

00:05:20.360 which I still considered then my political home,

00:05:23.300 essentially saying, look, there is a kind of...

00:05:26.300 It was quite an abstract philosophical argument

00:05:28.280 and saying about the tension between the left's two favourite principles, in a way,

00:05:35.840 the principle of solidarity and the principle of diversity,

00:05:39.060 and based on the common sense idea that people are ready to share with

00:05:44.220 and to trust people who they're familiar with and that they know

00:05:47.540 and they have some reciprocal experiences with,

00:05:51.420 based on that common sense assumption,

00:05:53.440 I argued that it was an increasingly diverse society, not just through immigration, but through the much greater moral diversity, value diversity of modern societies.

00:06:09.980 It was harder to hold on to that sense of common identity across a much more varied range of people.

00:06:17.940 and therefore it was much harder to persuade people

00:06:22.060 to share their resources and have a degree of trust in each other,

00:06:27.560 which any decent society, I think, requires.

00:06:30.440 Anyway, this essay was about 6,000 words,

00:06:33.440 but it was printed word for word almost in The Guardian.

00:06:38.640 I mean, with our permission, obviously,

00:06:39.740 I was thrilled that The Guardian wanted to reprint it,

00:06:42.460 but it caused quite a little kind of hullabaloo I was accused of.

00:06:47.900 Really, what a surprise.

00:06:49.820 Well, this was 2004 as well.

00:06:51.520 It was 2004, yeah, yeah.

00:06:51.800 This wasn't a conversation anyone was willing to have at that time.

00:06:54.340 No, no, it was a little bit ahead of its time.

00:06:57.640 And so I was duly described as a kind of nice racist.

00:07:01.600 You know, even nice people do racism.

00:07:06.180 How can you be a nice racist?

00:07:08.620 Well, I think, you know, the prospect was seen

00:07:12.080 as this rather sort of genteel intellectual magazine.

00:07:15.700 And, you know, Gary Young.

00:07:17.060 And actually, even Trevor Phillips had a go at this, although there obviously was a bit of a cusp moment then, because I don't think there was any cause and effect, I wouldn't claim that.

00:07:29.380 But a couple of weeks later, Trevor gave an interview, a famous interview to the Times, in which he himself was very critical of multiculturalism, thought that it was essentially kind of overstretched and that it was now more important to worry about what we have in common rather than always stressing the importance of separate identities, which is what multiculturalism had been primarily doing.

00:07:57.700 Let me interject for our international viewers. Trevor Phillips used to be the head of the Human Rights and Equalities Commission, and he's black as well, as it happens.

00:08:07.640 Anyway, so that, I mean, I sort of stumbled into this territory without really having thought very much.

00:08:14.880 You know, I kind of bought the package. You know, I was a kind of liberal.

00:08:17.180 So, of course, I was in favour of high levels of immigration. I never really sort of thought about it.

00:08:20.940 but that started to sort of change my worldview to some extent

00:08:27.780 or partly the reaction to it

00:08:29.440 and I also then started to think about these issues a lot more

00:08:33.480 and read about them

00:08:34.300 and I kept getting invited to sort of seminars and conferences

00:08:37.440 and the BBC were quite keen on me for a while

00:08:40.860 because this really was still a time when it was quite hard

00:08:43.220 to talk about sort of greater restrictions on immigration

00:08:48.520 without being considered, you know, suspect on race in some way.

00:08:56.920 I mean, the two things I think are now much more separated.

00:09:00.040 I mean, the issues of racial justice, which are real,

00:09:03.160 and the kind of economic and cultural issues associated with large-scale immigration.

00:09:10.040 I think we now, partly because of the immigration from Central and Eastern Europe

00:09:16.640 since 2004, 2005, has made it easier to separate out the two issues,

00:09:23.620 which is a good thing.

00:09:24.440 I do think that the debate has become more open and honest

00:09:30.580 in some ways since that time.

00:09:34.160 But I think it's, I mean, becoming interested in the subject

00:09:37.780 did cause me, as it were, to sort of question

00:09:41.860 some of the kind of liberal assumptions that I had made earlier

00:09:45.440 earlier, and I did sort of feel myself kind of drifting away from the liberal tribe, as it were.

00:09:54.680 And I think it was partly realizing both that my own instincts and the instincts of many of my fellow citizens

00:10:03.820 were much more sort of communitarian, to put it no stronger,

00:10:12.520 and much less sort of individualist universalist,

00:10:18.640 which is the sort of the default position of so many kind of liberal-minded graduates.

00:10:25.020 Even those on the left, they tend to be very suspicious of sort of group attachments and group identities.

00:10:34.600 They tend to see them as inherently kind of hostile to the other,

00:10:38.160 which I don't think is either logically or historically necessary,

00:10:42.960 although it clearly has sometimes been true.

00:10:47.100 I mean, of course, the left tends to be hypocritical about group feelings

00:10:52.340 in that it privileges some and denigrates others, as it were.

00:10:55.780 I mean, so the left is still groupist when it comes to social class,

00:11:00.580 or at least the kind of, you know, more sort of serious left, old left, if you like.

00:11:05.240 um but um very very suspicious of groups when it comes to ethnicity or you know or nation even

00:11:15.320 um and you know see certain kinds of groups as um uh you know in inherently sort of unreasonable

00:11:24.340 in a way um so toxic in fact yeah um but but i think it was that it was it was kind of coming

00:11:32.880 at the so my so i you know as sort of populism began to emerge as a subject um i think i had

00:11:40.200 um a kind of understanding uh you know even to some extent a kind of sympathy with some of the

00:11:47.060 feelings that um that people had about about rapid social change and it seemed to be completely

00:11:54.060 reasonable that people were pushing back against um rapid changes to neighborhoods and ways of

00:12:02.840 life, and it was this idea that is really something that has been, it's really an idea

00:12:13.360 that Eric Kaufman has made his own, who I think you've interviewed him already, this

00:12:19.600 idea of asymmetrical multiculturalism, the fact that multiculturalism is based around

00:12:26.520 the importance of ethnicity to human beings,

00:12:29.700 but only regards it somehow as being important

00:12:34.800 to ethnic minorities in white European societies.

00:12:40.680 And that it's almost a kind of Orientalism

00:12:46.480 in relation to white people,

00:12:48.000 as if white people are kind of not really...

00:12:50.380 They've kind of transcended ordinary human feelings

00:12:53.240 in some magical way

00:12:54.560 and don't have ethnic feelings too, like minority people do. 0.98

00:12:59.240 Now, of course, it's the case that majority ethnicities 0.97

00:13:02.980 are different in some ways to minority ethnicities.

00:13:05.240 Yes, if it's your society, people like you, generally speaking,

00:13:10.660 have more power than at least relatively new arrivals

00:13:13.680 or are obviously bound to generally have less status and power in the society,

00:13:21.500 at least for a generation or two.

00:13:24.560 So I'm not saying that they're exactly identical,

00:13:27.640 but we have clearly seen the limits of asymmetrical multiculturalism in recent years

00:13:35.020 and people have pushed back against what they see as kind of infringements

00:13:41.820 on what they thought was their sort of entitlement to a relatively settled life.

00:13:48.980 Now, you know, the modern world is pretty unsettling in many ways,

00:13:52.900 But politics holds out the promise.

00:13:56.820 I mean, modern politics, modern democratic politics.

00:13:59.760 And I think we forget just how recent, really properly democratic societies we've been.

00:14:06.920 I mean, how relatively recently, I mean, we had sort of formal democracy.

00:14:12.580 We didn't have universal franchise until the end of the 1920s.

00:14:16.740 But you have the hangovers of the attitudes of previous eras.

00:14:22.900 in kind of deference and, you know, respect for elites.

00:14:31.160 And I think it's really only in the last 20 or 30 or 40 years,

00:14:35.380 you might say, that people have come into their full democratic inheritance

00:14:41.900 and, you know, are ready to kind of use the extraordinary, you know, equality,

00:14:52.960 the political equality that democracy offers in order to try and resist some of the, you know,

00:15:02.660 perhaps the necessary creative destruction and upheavals of modern dynamic market economies,

00:15:10.260 to try and sort of almost hold the society

00:15:15.760 within the bounds of that old left slogan,

00:15:19.300 or sort of centre-left slogan anyway,

00:15:21.280 sort of yes to a market economy, but no to a market society,

00:15:24.860 which I always thought was rather an attractive way of putting it in some ways.

00:15:29.280 And I think a lot of populism, you might say,

00:15:34.300 is part of that sort of pushback against a market society.

00:15:40.260 including in its sort of demographic and immigration-related aspects.

00:15:43.920 Like the idea that everything is about the economy,

00:15:46.400 so that's why we tend to have this conversation about immigration,

00:15:49.380 strictly through the lens of the economy.

00:15:52.220 And I'm an immigrant myself, by the way,

00:15:54.400 but it just blows my mind that no one seems to ever really want to talk about the cultural side of it,

00:16:01.100 you know, the fact that this constant churn and change also has an impact on people's lives,

00:16:06.020 which, frankly, you know, this is what Eric and Matt told us about,

00:16:09.420 70% of Leave voters say they'd be prepared to lose out financially if I meant reducing immigration.

00:16:14.420 And 35% of them say they'd be prepared to lose out significantly if I meant reducing immigration to zero.

00:16:22.420 So people clearly don't just measure the success or failure of immigration based on their economy.

00:16:27.420 And yet we always talk about it strictly in those terms, at least in the public domain.

00:16:31.420 Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think the whole point of the politics that we've been seeing in the last five or ten years, the new kind of instability, or I like to think of it as a kind of rebalancing, where there's been a pushback against the dominant liberalism, both economic and social and cultural liberalism of the last 30 years.

00:16:50.840 I mean, I think most of us, I'm certainly not against all of what liberalism has done, either economically or socially and culturally.

00:16:58.500 I mean, I think there have been great advances in many ways.

00:17:02.680 We've had the great liberalisation on race, on gender, on sexuality, much of which I think has been a great human advance.

00:17:14.520 I mean, we've taken seriously the idea of human moral equality, which only really became, I mean, like democracy, it's a remarkably recent idea, at least an idea that is properly grounded in our laws and constitutions.

00:17:35.360 I mean, it wasn't really until the UN Declaration of Rights in, when was it, 1948, that this idea did become commonplace, at least in Western liberal democracies, the idea of human equality, human moral equality.

00:17:51.800 And of course, again, we had hangovers from earlier eras, you know, older generations found it kind of difficult to adjust.

00:17:58.740 I mean, I think it's one of the things that lies behind 1968, I mean, particularly in Germany for obvious reasons, but in France too, you know, the kind of the young egalitarian minded, mainly lefty students were saying, look, you know, we've now got these laws that say that we're all equal, but, you know, but the older generation are not behaving as if those laws were on the statute books.

00:18:28.740 And they had something sort of to beat the older generation with.

00:18:31.960 They had a kind of, you know, they had a righteousness.

00:18:35.980 Dave, let's dig into how that happened, because you talk about this in your book,

00:18:39.100 and you've come up with a way of categorizing the different groups in society who are engaged in this contest,

00:18:44.320 which I think quite a lot of people are now relying on as the underpinning of their work.

00:18:49.040 So tell us a little bit about the somewheres and anywheres.

00:18:52.160 yeah I mean it's it's looking at value groups rather than social class as the sort of as the

00:18:59.520 new kind of motors of of politics um obviously there's some overlap but um yeah but very broadly

00:19:06.720 um what I'm talking about is the is the switch from a from society from a society in which

00:19:13.160 politics is primarily socio-economic in which social class are the basic units the issues are

00:19:18.300 to do with kind of market versus state and size of the state and levels of public spending

00:19:23.660 and redistribution and so on, to much more sociocultural issues to do with identity,

00:19:31.580 to do with borders, immigration, nation states, and security versus liberty issues in relation

00:19:42.360 to terrorism, to gender equality issues

00:19:47.240 and how those are playing out.

00:19:51.060 So these kind of socioculturalist use

00:19:53.280 have become the kind of central currency

00:19:56.580 of contemporary politics.

00:20:00.460 And that's produced new sort of groupings

00:20:06.300 and I think value groups have become

00:20:09.700 um as important if not more important than social class groups um and yes in my book the road to

00:20:17.840 somewhere i talked about two in particular um that the two kind of two big ones that almost

00:20:23.700 sort of you might say are kind of analogous with with kind of middle class and working class in

00:20:28.700 the older formulations um the people that see the world from anywhere and the people see the world

00:20:34.280 from somewhere and the Anywheres are about 20-25% of the population, perhaps a little

00:20:40.700 bit more in different countries. I think this applies across most of the developed world

00:20:44.900 by the way, although it plays out differently in different places. So Anywheres tend to

00:20:49.380 be highly educated, at least an undergraduate degree, sometimes postgraduate qualifications

00:20:58.140 of one kind or another. So educated and mobile, generally mobile, and particularly in this

00:21:04.860 country because of residential universities where people from whatever social class background

00:21:09.740 tend to leave home and their hometown usually at the age of 18 and go off to 150 miles away

00:21:17.980 to college and often never return to live at least in where they came from. And you socialise

00:21:26.740 with an entirely new group often

00:21:30.340 and you're cut off from the group of people

00:21:36.940 that you went to school with often

00:21:38.540 and your local hometown friends.

00:21:41.500 This is much less true, by the way, in most other countries.

00:21:43.760 It is peculiarly.

00:21:44.980 I think it's one of the reasons why some of these value divides

00:21:47.520 are particularly acute in this country.

00:21:50.180 Half of American students live with their parents.

00:21:52.580 Most middle class students, many of the elites in continental Europe come here to university or go to America, but most ordinary middle class kids in Germany will go to their local town university.

00:22:07.200 So you get more of a kind of blending. You're more likely to, even if you become a kind of upper professional, you're more likely to know somebody who's a plumber or an electrician.

00:22:16.960 In this country, you have a much greater apartheid as a result of, well, residential universities combined with London, too, I think the London effect tends to say.

00:22:26.460 How much do you think the class system plays into that as well? Because we are very structured by class. I mean, Augsburg is a perfect, and the Augsburg are a perfect example of this.

00:22:36.900 uh we we we kind of preserve more of the external trappings of class in sort of accent and we

00:22:44.260 preserved our private schools and so on but we're actually not that different to most other

00:22:49.460 developed countries um uh and i think we we kind of we focus on on on the trappings as do foreigners 0.93

00:22:57.420 when they kind of observe us um but but but all countries have their elite institutions um and most

00:23:06.340 of those elite institutions are full of kids from mainly elite backgrounds, you know, whether

00:23:11.740 the, you know, the kind of N-Arcs in France, you know, the, what are they called, all those 1.00

00:23:17.360 École Supérieure Normale, all those, or the, you know, the Ivy League universities

00:23:23.220 in America.

00:23:23.780 I mean, everybody has them.

00:23:27.900 And it may be that because of private schools, we, I mean, ours are somewhat less meritocratic,

00:23:35.980 come in, and you can kind of argue about that. But yes, I mean, there is an overlap. There's

00:23:42.780 an overlap between my value groups and social class, but they are different. So you get,

00:23:49.820 you know, you get odd, you get sort of social class mixes and indeed, and indeed sort of

00:23:56.680 ideological mixes. So you might have an any, you know, typical anywhere might be a very

00:24:00.860 internationally minded, you know, management consultant, speaks three or four languages,

00:24:11.820 perhaps could be from a middle class background, or could be from any background really. I mean,

00:24:17.260 you know, someone who's done well, you know, past exams, went young, went to more or less

00:24:22.280 good university, and now has a successful professional career, but might have very

00:24:29.240 kind of free market views on economics

00:24:32.280 where, you know, somebody who is

00:24:35.900 equally anywhere in their kind of

00:24:39.020 sociocultural world view

00:24:42.060 but is, you know, an extremely left-wing

00:24:44.940 sociology professor or whatever, you know

00:24:47.900 but they're both anywheres

00:24:49.060 because they share those basic, you know

00:24:53.760 they've embraced much, I mean

00:24:56.020 the left-wing sociology professor will obviously be critical of some

00:24:58.880 aspect of uh of the economic liberalism of the last 30 or 40 years but they will both be very

00:25:04.760 comfortable in the modern world i mean they're both um i mean i mean the you know what anywheres

00:25:11.460 share despite potential disagreements over economic um economic um policy is is you know

00:25:22.200 they believe in openness they believe in in autonomy they tend to be highly individualistic

00:25:26.620 they tend to be comfortable with social change they can surf that they're comfortable with

00:25:32.000 social fluidity and they have what the american sociologist talk of parsons called achieved

00:25:38.640 identities he talked um he's an incredibly boring sociologist but he did come up with this very

00:25:44.820 useful um um idea of this thinking about human identity on a spectrum between achieved and

00:25:51.300 ascribed. So we all have a mix of the two, but any people from highly educated backgrounds

00:25:56.660 who are kind of mobile and sort of individualistic in their life path, tend to have achieved

00:26:03.880 identities. Like I say, the kind of people who've passed exams and gone to good universities

00:26:08.780 and have solid professional careers, they tend to think of themselves as the sort of

00:26:14.240 consequence of their own achievements in some ways. And obviously that's only very partly

00:26:19.820 true, but

00:26:21.180 it means your identity

00:26:23.900 is more sort of

00:26:25.540 portable. You know, you can

00:26:27.920 take it anywhere. It's customisable

00:26:29.960 as well. Yeah, you can fit in.

00:26:31.840 You're happy living in the kind of edgy

00:26:33.720 inner city in Tower Hamlets

00:26:35.760 surrounded by Bangladeshi people,

00:26:37.780 British Bangladeshis or whatever.

00:26:40.640 Because you have a sort

00:26:41.860 of sense of yourself that's

00:26:44.060 derived from your previous

00:26:46.100 life achievements.

00:26:48.040 So these people make up about 20-25% of the population?

00:26:50.600 Yeah, 20-25% of the population, yeah.

00:26:52.040 And some ways, I mean, just staying on the identity thing,

00:26:54.340 some ways tend to have identities that are more ascribed,

00:26:57.920 i.e. things about you that you can't really change.

00:27:00.400 I mean, you know, I'm white, male, British,

00:27:04.680 but, you know, I don't know, you could be a Scottish farmer

00:27:06.800 or a working-class Geordie, or obviously you can change your class,

00:27:10.080 but, you know, if your identity is mainly ascribed to you,

00:27:15.920 then your identity is derived from the place that you come from

00:27:22.680 and the groups that you belong to,

00:27:24.960 some of which obviously you can't change, some of which you can.

00:27:29.540 And therefore I think it's much...

00:27:33.000 So somewheres, just doing my more general spiel on somewheres,

00:27:38.080 somewheres, unlike anywheres, tend to be much more rooted,

00:27:41.300 tend to be much less well-educated,

00:27:42.620 tend to value the things that you would expect people from more rooted backgrounds

00:27:48.080 to value security, familiarity, and so on.

00:27:51.680 But also, just looping back to the identity idea,

00:27:56.040 having a mainly ascribed identity means that your identity is very much tied in

00:28:02.280 with the places and groups that you come from.

00:28:04.340 So if those places and groups change,

00:28:07.100 your identity is much more susceptible to being discomforted by social change.

00:28:12.120 So I think the two really important differences between the anywhere and the somewhere worldview and the anywhere and somewhere people is that, you know, like anywheres are comfortable with social change and somewheres, I mean, obviously somewheres can be, but I mean, obviously I'm generalizing, I'm talking in averages.

00:28:28.520 most somewheres are more likely to see change as loss

00:28:32.520 partly because they're through being less well educated

00:28:35.240 they're less well equipped to achieve well in the modern world

00:28:42.040 so they're more likely to see

00:28:43.340 but the other big thing

00:28:44.580 so it's attitudes to social change

00:28:46.460 and attitude to group attachment

00:28:48.360 anywheres like we were talking about earlier

00:28:51.940 Anywheres tend to be rather suspicious of group attachment

00:28:59.240 even rather look down upon it

00:29:01.100 whereas to some ways it's an important sort of emotional sustenance to their lives

00:29:07.860 often, not always

00:29:09.600 so I think those are the two big differences

00:29:11.400 and I've invented those labels and they rather caught on

00:29:19.900 And why the book did quite well, I think, is that they seem to be quite useful ways of looking at the modern world, thinking through that, thinking of the world being divided between anywheres in some ways.

00:29:32.960 But it does, you know, a lot of the critics of the book sort of said, you know, how sort of simplistic and binary.

00:29:41.480 And actually, if you read the book, you'll find it's not that binary.

00:29:44.580 I mean, these are big, baggy groupings, as I said earlier, a bit like kind of working class and middle class. 1.00

00:29:49.140 No one goes around sort of saying, oh, well, that's far too binary.

00:29:52.180 We kind of understand that they don't necessarily say a huge amount about you,

00:29:56.300 but they kind of give a kind of general fix on somebody.

00:30:01.440 And they kind of, you know, they sort of work in a rough and ready way.

00:30:07.320 Obviously, there are all sorts of different kinds of Anywhere's.

00:30:10.540 I mean, I have all sorts of subsets.

00:30:12.360 There are all sorts of different kinds of somewhere.

00:30:14.020 So, you know, the kind of high end of the anywhere is there is a group, about three, five percent of the population who are real kind of global villages.

00:30:25.460 I mean, the kind of, you know, citizens of nowhere that Theresa May talked about.

00:30:30.060 And then at the bottom end of the somewheres, you might, again, on the sort of value spectrum, see people who are genuine authoritarians and xenophobes, perhaps three, five percent of the population, perhaps a bit more on some issues.

00:30:44.020 And there's also a big in-betweener group, a group who share almost equally the value worldview of the anywheres and the value worldview of the somewheres.

00:30:55.760 Now, like I said, I invented the labels, but I didn't, I mean, these value groups really are there in the data, as the academics like to say.

00:31:03.620 Well, of course, otherwise the labels would be useless.

00:31:05.120 Yeah, well, but I mean, well, a lot of people have questioned them.

00:31:07.760 But I mean, if you look at the British Social Attitude Service, I mean, it's not written down there, you know, anywheres, you know.

00:31:13.340 But if you can interrogate the, you know, the British social attitudes have been asking people about a whole range of things, including in this whole social social cultural area for 35, 40 years.

00:31:24.820 And so, you know, you can see the evolution of these values and ideas.

00:31:29.120 And the anywhere group is growing very rapidly.

00:31:31.060 I mean, this is one of the reasons for the political instability and uncertainty of more recent times is that it's kind of the growth partly through the expansion of higher education.

00:31:43.760 And higher education, particularly humanities and social sciences, are kind of engines for creating anywheres in some ways.

00:31:49.520 and they have, you know, you have to go back only about 30 or 40 years

00:31:57.020 and perhaps the anywhere, the people who would have self-consciously ascribed

00:32:00.580 to a kind of anywhere worldview would have been 5, 10% of the population.

00:32:04.500 It's now three, four times that.

00:32:07.460 And another reason for the, and that's kind of an unbalanced thing.

00:32:13.380 It's an unbalanced society in some ways.

00:32:16.940 Well, this is what I was going to ask.

00:32:18.280 Let's get right into it.

00:32:19.520 because this is all absolutely fascinating and our views will be enjoying this.

00:32:24.060 But if we make this theoretical conversation a little bit more practical

00:32:28.020 and we look at what's been happening in Western developed societies

00:32:32.380 over the last two or three years, particularly,

00:32:34.340 I mean, it's obviously part of a much longer process,

00:32:36.360 but if we look at what's happening now,

00:32:38.240 is it essentially a question of the fact that

00:32:40.800 the anywheres have been the ruling caste for a good period of time 0.99

00:32:44.620 and some ways are rebelling?

00:32:46.300 Yeah, that's essentially, it's a rebalancing. It's a pushback against Anywhere over domination. And I think Anywhere's, you know, and well, we can come on to solutions later, but I think Anywhere's have often been oblivious of their power.

00:33:02.400 They haven't realised that they are, you know, only a quarter or at most a third of the society.

00:33:08.820 And they have assumed, I mean, you know, often with the best of motives,

00:33:12.560 they've assumed that they have been acting in the general interest

00:33:17.720 when they've actually been helping to shape a society that is overwhelmingly in the interest of people like them

00:33:23.140 who've had their kind of backgrounds, who are highly educated.

00:33:26.180 You know, one can go through the list of, you know, the knowledge economy.

00:33:30.540 you know i mean the very phrase suggests that this is an economy that works best for

00:33:35.120 people who are highly educated uh you've had rapid de-industrialization in other areas

00:33:40.240 um you've you've had um meaning um it's it's it's become harder for large sections but what you've

00:33:50.620 had too something i didn't emphasize in the road to somewhere but but it's actually something i'm

00:33:54.800 working on now for another book, the way in which cognitive ability has become the kind of gold

00:34:00.900 standard of human esteem is also a very recent thing. There was a place for people who were not

00:34:09.000 highly able cognitively. Cognitivability is just one quite narrow form of human aptitude and

00:34:17.500 the way both in economics and indeed in education policy, the massive expansion of

00:34:24.140 higher education in this country at least the continuing neglect of of technical and vocational

00:34:29.860 education um you know it is another area of kind of unconscious anywhere domination um but but i

00:34:39.200 think i think underpinning all of it is the way in which we've sort of we've kind of tilted the

00:34:44.780 balance away from other forms of human aptitude um and people who um who felt that they had a

00:34:53.440 that they had meaningful lives um uh what what i'm increasingly realizing is that actually

00:35:00.320 you know look looking and we'll come on to the present in a minute but i mean looking macro

00:35:04.420 historically if you think of uh we think of industrial the transition from an agrarian to

00:35:09.000 industrial society as a ghastly, violent, physically violent process as

00:35:18.000 people poured into the teeming industrial cities and for a short

00:35:22.320 period of time it was pretty dreadful, although pretty well from the beginning

00:35:26.160 actually longevity and an income and pretty well everything rose pretty

00:35:33.720 rapidly. But what we sort of forget about the transition is actually how much continuity

00:35:39.880 there was. It did not, the process of industrialisation in the 19th century did not undermine traditional

00:35:47.360 religious beliefs. Indeed, it created new forms of Christianity, Methodism, Wesleyan

00:35:51.880 in the big industrial cities. It did not undermine the family. Rates of illegitimacy

00:35:59.800 fell pretty radically through the 19th century.

00:36:03.180 No, I mean, life is compared to today.

00:36:05.000 Obviously, life is pretty hard for most people.

00:36:08.140 But, you know, bring it forward to the 20th century

00:36:10.740 and combine it with democracy and welfare states.

00:36:15.480 And bear in mind also that industrial society

00:36:18.160 produced new forms of meaning and identity,

00:36:23.720 particularly for men,

00:36:25.040 through skilled and semi-skilled industrial employment.

00:36:27.320 you compare that to the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial society

00:36:33.440 which is kind of what we're what we're living through now

00:36:36.460 and I think you see how lots of traditional sources of meaning have been destroyed

00:36:46.920 I mean our you know anywhere cultural the kind of cultural hegemony of the anywhere classes

00:36:54.500 is uh has tended to be very secular um has tended to be very liberal um has tended to and has tended

00:37:02.980 as i said to to focus very much on one form of human aptitude that of cognitive ability and if

00:37:10.060 you don't you know if you don't get through the bottleneck um you know if you're not an exam

00:37:14.200 passer when you're young and you don't get into the the kind of higher into the a-level stream

00:37:18.460 and then into a good university these days not even any university but really it has to be a

00:37:24.080 good university um we've narrowed the kind of source of of human esteem and and meaning to

00:37:31.980 that outcome and if you think of all the all the kind of institutions that give you meaning

00:37:37.420 and recognition unconditionally you know like religion itself is fading away the family has

00:37:45.220 obviously been under great pressure um in in recent generations um and they're not you know

00:37:51.480 other you know like institutions that you know like the the big industrial factory the the the

00:37:59.020 military you know the institutions that provided roles and and meaning and usefulness to millions

00:38:06.720 and millions of people who didn't necessarily thrive um academically or cognitively and so i

00:38:12.820 think um i think this is a kind of this is a sort of underlying explanation i think for a lot of the

00:38:18.600 it's the kind of arrogance of the cognitive elites

00:38:21.900 who have decided that their form of aptitude

00:38:29.820 is the one that should hold sway

00:38:35.660 and they haven't intentionally downgraded other forms of aptitude

00:38:42.020 but I think whether it's technical manual functions

00:38:47.660 or the caring economy.

00:38:53.200 We pay lip service to the wonderful nurses 0.98

00:38:57.300 or social care workers,

00:38:58.840 but we pay them absolutely dreadfully

00:39:00.400 and we continue to...

00:39:05.660 The other thing about the Anywhere worldview,

00:39:10.020 it's very, very public realm focused.

00:39:12.700 It's about work and politics and public life.

00:39:15.960 but actually for most people the most important things in life are in the private realm

00:39:20.600 it's you know it's your kind of private life and your family life and things like that

00:39:24.040 and we met and i think we hugely under sort of underestimate the important that's one of the

00:39:30.880 reasons why so many of the caring jobs are jobs that used to be done in the emotional economy of

00:39:36.240 the family by women overwhelmingly uh for free um you know in our grandmother's generation

00:39:42.420 many of those jobs are now done outside the home

00:39:46.740 but partly for that reason

00:39:48.020 partly because they used to be done for free inside the family

00:39:51.140 they're held in relatively low esteem

00:39:54.880 but I think that's a more general function

00:39:57.880 that anywheres tend to hold the private realm

00:40:01.280 and you see this in modern feminism

00:40:02.640 which tends to be very dominated by upper professional anywhere women 1.00

00:40:08.800 the kind of Nicky Morgans and Harriet Armans

00:40:12.100 tend to not have a very keen interest in the private realm.

00:40:20.540 I mean, they see that as kind of belonging to women's past in some ways,

00:40:23.680 and the important thing now is being able to compete equally

00:40:27.280 with men in the public realm.

00:40:29.660 But I mean, I think if you kind of look at opinion data

00:40:32.820 and things like that, that doesn't seem to be a view

00:40:36.080 that is shared by most women in Britain.

00:40:39.480 obviously most women in Britain want to be able to compete equally with men in the public realm

00:40:43.720 but they want to place much greater influence than much of modern feminism does 1.00

00:40:48.680 on the private realm of the family

00:40:51.120 and being able to stay at home when your children are very young for two or three years

00:40:55.520 many women and indeed some men would like to do that 0.80

00:41:01.020 but it's become almost impossible for most families to be able to afford to do that

00:41:06.960 And we have no support for, in the tax system, or very, very minimal support in the tax system for families.

00:41:15.720 David, let me pause you there, because I can see that Francis, he's been wanting to jump in for about 20 minutes, but he's far too British to interrupt. 0.97

00:41:23.940 That's the thing. So I'll be the foreigner here and go and create that opportunity.

00:41:28.340 I think you've touched on something, because I was a teacher for 10 years, and I taught in primary, I taught in secondary, and I taught in deprived communities.

00:41:35.640 and I think you've really touched on something there

00:41:38.240 about the Anywhere's

00:41:39.200 and I pretty much am an Anywhere

00:41:41.800 but I think it's the arrogance of the Anywhere

00:41:44.460 and I think it's their idea that they know best

00:41:48.420 and we saw that with Brexit

00:41:50.040 where all the Anywhere's went

00:41:51.360 what a surprise, everyone voted for Brexit

00:41:53.640 and it's like no, you weren't listening

00:41:55.520 and I've seen it more and more and more

00:41:58.020 how in education

00:41:59.500 unless you ascribe to these sets of values

00:42:02.380 unless you are good at

00:42:05.260 essentially taking information regurgitating it you are thrown on the scrap heap metaphorically

00:42:11.760 and one question i want to ask you is at the moment it feels we're polarized how do we bridge

00:42:18.900 that gap can we do it or is this sense because of technology and because of the way the education

00:42:24.000 system is that essentially the gap is going to grow wider and wider um i think we can bridge the

00:42:32.200 gap um i mean i mean with some difficulty i mean it's the the the purpose of politics is to bridge

00:42:40.840 the gap in a way i mean that is what most you know that that is what good politicians should

00:42:45.600 be focusing upon i mean it's what um you know politics is is in a sense always a base about

00:42:51.740 trying to trying to bring conflicting um views and and indeed conflicting interests together

00:43:00.320 to some degree, or finding compromises that allows different groups

00:43:07.780 to function relatively happily together in the same society.

00:43:14.800 I mean, I think, obviously, Brexit didn't create these divisions.

00:43:18.740 These divisions sort of emerged particularly strongly

00:43:22.500 over the last 20 or 30 years in response to both the cultural arrogance

00:43:29.660 but also the over-domination that we talked about earlier.

00:43:32.420 And one manifestation of that over-domination, whether it's in the field of the economy,

00:43:38.300 whether it's in the field of education, the massive over-expansion of higher education,

00:43:44.100 whether it's in, you know, whether it's in the kind of almost the delegitimization of many small C conservative views

00:43:53.260 and tradition, you know, kind of, you know, male breadwinner.

00:43:56.160 I mean, lots of men, you know, for the last couple of centuries have got out of bed in the morning essentially because they feel the responsibility of being a breadwinner.

00:44:07.760 Now, for perfectly good reasons, in some cases, that has gone or has become less important because women have become much more autonomous, which is a good thing on the whole.

00:44:18.200 I mean, my mother just kind of missed out on kind of mainstream modern feminism and suffered for that in many ways and, you know, wasn't able to live the same sort of, wasn't able to be as fulfilled as her daughters and granddaughters. 0.65

00:44:41.700 um um but um you know so in all these different areas i mean quite large minorities if not

00:44:50.640 majorities um of our society have have not have not felt you know this whole kind of um you know

00:44:59.560 left v right has been replaced by open v closed is incredibly self-serving way of looking at the

00:45:04.820 world i mean i've never met anyone who wants to live in a closed gulag like society nobody does 0.87

00:45:10.560 obviously uh but a lot of people feel that the forms of modern openness that we've created in

00:45:14.960 the last 30 years and i mean i mean symbolized most graphically by you know the supply chain

00:45:22.520 going to china um you know the rapid industrial de-industrialization of of of britain america

00:45:29.240 even more so perhaps um um or parts of britain and um and symbolized also by large-scale

00:45:37.400 immigration, the kind of double whammy, the feeling that, you know, your factory closes

00:45:42.100 and goes to, probably not China, to Vietnam or Cambodia or somewhere, but then a whole

00:45:49.000 new workforce is introduced into the country to compete with you in the service jobs that

00:45:55.360 you're probably then doing, came as a real shock to people, I think. And most of those

00:46:00.700 people, it's so important to emphasize this, against the contempt of much modern liberalism,

00:46:06.480 Most of those people are not hostile to the individual immigrant.

00:46:10.900 They're anti-immigration. They're not anti-immigrant.

00:46:13.420 I mean, it's an elision that liberals often make, you know, such and such, you know, the anti-immigrant party, the anti-immigrant politician.

00:46:20.340 There are some, but most of the time people are hostile to the immigration and not the immigrant.

00:46:27.120 You know, people who work in fish finger factories in Hull probably go out to drink after work with the Polo Slovenian they're working beside. 1.00

00:46:35.560 They're not hostile to the individual.

00:46:37.040 That doesn't mean to say they think it's in their economic or cultural interests

00:46:39.800 to have had that movement of people on such a large scale.

00:46:43.640 Clearly it is very much part of the liberal market system

00:46:48.300 and it's one part of it that has not, on the whole, benefited people

00:46:52.120 and so people have rightly pushed back against it.

00:46:55.280 So how can we resolve this, which is what France is getting at,

00:46:57.740 because our time is almost out.

00:47:00.260 What are some of the potential ways of...

00:47:02.860 Well, I mean, I think a lot of the emphasis is on a lot of the responsibility for this.

00:47:10.940 We've had anywhere liberal overreach in many aspects of our societies.

00:47:18.360 And we need, and anywheres need to be more emotionally intelligent about the extent of their domination.

00:47:27.300 They need to, and you're seeing this already, you're sort of seeing the kind of anywhere classes,

00:47:32.680 I think dividing between the kind of admonished

00:47:34.660 anywheres, you know, the kind of

00:47:36.480 Theresa Mays, who are

00:47:38.760 sort of saying, you know, it's true, we didn't really

00:47:40.560 listen to people, and we bloody well should have done,

00:47:42.640 you know, otherwise we wouldn't have ended up with Brexit.

00:47:44.980 You know, this is our

00:47:46.140 fault, in many ways.

00:47:48.640 And then you've got the kind of militant anywheres,

00:47:51.020 you know, the A.C. Graylings and all of the

00:47:52.500 cams, who are sort of saying, you know,

00:47:54.080 they are the barbarians, you know,

00:47:56.460 we're the decent, civilised

00:47:58.520 people.

00:48:00.760 I think you are seeing that division.

00:48:02.180 I mean, I think and hope, obviously, the kind of admonished liberals anyways will win that argument.

00:48:11.780 And, you know, there is still quite a lot of common ground.

00:48:15.760 I mean, one shouldn't, I mean, there's a lot of polarizations, obviously, magnified by social media and so on.

00:48:22.260 You know, obviously, social media gives a megaphone to relatively small groups.

00:48:27.380 And we sometimes have the impression, I think, that we're more polarized than we are.

00:48:30.920 I'm not denying that we are polarised

00:48:33.380 we do have these value divides

00:48:34.860 and we need to find ways of

00:48:37.180 finding common ground again, of finding

00:48:39.380 some sort of settlement

00:48:40.220 post Brexit

00:48:42.820 and I think the kind of contours of it

00:48:45.060 are reasonably clear

00:48:46.220 and it has to do with

00:48:48.960 having greater respect

00:48:51.180 for the more settled part

00:48:53.260 of our population. After all this has been

00:48:55.100 I mean

00:48:56.540 these people are not militants

00:48:59.440 this is a very

00:49:00.120 you know populism is a defensive um it's a defensive impulse it is not you know this is

00:49:06.080 not the 1930s they're not sort of we're not thinking about kind of invading denmark um

00:49:11.060 you know it's about holding on to something that people wanted you know which was a relatively

00:49:17.380 stable life and and i think politics will have to take that into account more and it already is

00:49:23.440 it's already doing so and with difficulty it's true but i mean brexit was essentially a somewhere

00:49:28.360 policy that is now being implemented rather reluctantly by anywheres, both in the civil

00:49:34.760 service and indeed in the, you know, 70% of the political class was Remainer.

00:49:40.920 But that sort of taps into the fear from the somewheres that, all right, they made their 0.66

00:49:48.180 point, they said this is what they want.

00:49:50.100 They want.

00:49:50.720 They want.

00:49:51.520 And now the fear is that the anywheres are not going to implement it, or if they do,

00:49:56.040 they're not going to

00:49:56.780 implement it properly

00:49:57.840 and they're going to

00:49:58.960 fudge it

00:49:59.500 and my fear

00:50:01.160 and Constance's fear

00:50:02.380 is that

00:50:02.800 if that happens

00:50:03.840 that then allows

00:50:05.280 the

00:50:05.760 depends how big the fudge is

00:50:06.920 I think

00:50:07.220 I mean I think

00:50:08.120 some degree of

00:50:09.000 what Francis is talking about

00:50:11.040 I was on LBC

00:50:11.780 a few days ago

00:50:13.040 and I said

00:50:14.380 that I thought

00:50:15.000 and we both voted

00:50:16.340 Remain by the way

00:50:17.160 we are quintessential

00:50:18.580 we are quintessential

00:50:20.060 anyways

00:50:20.620 good people

00:50:21.880 every time I make that joke

00:50:24.080 the internet explodes

00:50:25.440 and someone's acting like, 1.00

00:50:26.700 you fucking baby, 1.00

00:50:28.380 you monger prick. 1.00

00:50:29.460 Anyway, sorry. 0.98

00:50:30.540 But we are very much both of us now

00:50:32.600 coming around to the position

00:50:33.720 of those anywheres who've woken up.

00:50:36.920 Yeah, yeah, same here.

00:50:37.880 And we're going,

00:50:38.880 hold on a second.

00:50:40.020 If Brexit isn't delivered,

00:50:41.980 if Brexit is seriously fudged,

00:50:43.460 this is what I said in LBC.

00:50:44.920 Or if we have a second vote,

00:50:46.180 it could poison our politics for a generation.

00:50:47.880 I agree, absolutely.

00:50:48.780 Well, I actually said on the programme,

00:50:50.740 I thought that if Brexit,

00:50:52.220 it doesn't get delivered,

00:50:53.980 you could have a political movement in this country

00:50:56.240 led by someone like Tommy Robinson

00:50:57.580 with funding from someone like Steve Bannon.

00:51:00.400 And you already see it happening.

00:51:01.740 Steve Bannon's already talking about Tommy Robinson

00:51:03.360 being a British patriot and all this stuff is happening. 0.95

00:51:06.300 And I got a lot of crap from both sides 0.97

00:51:08.080 for saying that on the radio. 0.89

00:51:09.720 No, I mean, you will have 50 MPs

00:51:11.980 even with first-past-the-post, I think.

00:51:13.640 I mean, if we really have a Brexit in name only.

00:51:17.980 However, having said that, I mean,

00:51:19.480 I think there is also a strong case

00:51:21.060 for having a degree of fudge

00:51:22.700 because it was only 52-48.

00:51:25.420 It was 52-48.

00:51:27.820 And so I think, you know, you can't, you know,

00:51:30.740 we don't want a winner-takes-all Brexit either.

00:51:33.360 We don't want a kind of a really hard Brexit.

00:51:35.700 But, I mean, there is a kind of reasonable,

00:51:37.880 there is respecting Brexit sufficiently without, you know,

00:51:42.260 while taking into account the views of the 48 too.

00:51:46.320 And, I mean, that's a very kind of difficult combination.

00:51:49.440 I mean, that is partly why our own internal argument has been so difficult, let alone the negotiation with Brussels.

00:51:56.780 And people sort of say, oh, how awful it is.

00:51:58.620 But actually, this is democracy.

00:52:01.260 It's a mess, but it's a democratic mess.

00:52:03.220 It's an unavoidable democratic mess, given the 52-48 outcome.

00:52:09.180 And I think and hope that we will get some kind of deal.

00:52:12.920 It'll be sufficient.

00:52:13.760 It won't be perfect.

00:52:16.040 There'll be grumbles on both sides.

00:52:18.600 But we really do then have to get down to sorting out these internal differences of which Brexit was a kind of manifestation.

00:52:26.440 And I think, you know, and Brexit, in a sense, will be the first step towards that sorting out.

00:52:31.300 It does give us, it does allow us to repatriate some of our democratic accountability.

00:52:36.080 And it allows us to, you know, to have a radical industrial policy if we want to.

00:52:40.720 Now, there may be many arguments against having that.

00:52:43.460 But we can do stuff now or after Brexit, we'll be able to do stuff that we couldn't before.

00:52:48.720 And I hope a lot of that energy goes into, I mean, you know, the anywhere dominated political class has had a huge shock from Brexit.

00:52:56.360 And I think, you know, and we aren't doing, you know, we have an apprenticeship levy.

00:53:00.920 OK, people criticise the way it's been implemented.

00:53:03.800 You know, we have T levels.

00:53:05.000 I mean, there is a recognition that we've got over expanded higher education.

00:53:08.520 You know, the ridiculous idea that 50% of kids go to, it's not so much.

00:53:13.860 Obviously we need forms of post-school education, all developed countries have, but we've gone

00:53:22.160 for a very, very narrow classical university structure, three or four years, often sort

00:53:30.740 of boarding, as I was saying, residential, you know, and even if you're doing a degree

00:53:36.280 in construction management, you still spend half the time writing essays, I mean, so they

00:53:40.780 very very academic and like other countries have a much greater range of post-school institutions

00:53:47.820 you know catering for a much greater range and or a different range of functions and

00:53:52.940 aptitudes and abilities so you know the community colleges in america or the fach or schule in

00:53:57.980 in germany and things like that you know we we can you know i think we'll kind of probably move

00:54:02.380 in that direction more thinking you know worrying less about the pushing more and more kids to

00:54:07.580 university um i think levels of immigration will come down they're already coming down

00:54:13.240 partly because of the uh um the fall in sterling's made it less attractive economically for the for

00:54:20.080 the kind of commuter immigrant to come here um and um and you know and just what what we really

00:54:27.220 need above all i think is and what i hope will come from this is actually liberals becoming

00:54:33.020 less illiberal uh you know liberals actually becoming more pluralistic accepting that there

00:54:38.420 are other forms of life apart from their own sort of you know russell group university liberalism

00:54:43.860 um and they're sort of you know androgynous feminism whatever um that uh you know that 1.00

00:54:50.880 other people live by different lights and they're not monsters uh that they they they have small

00:54:57.560 c conservative views about a lot of things uh but they're they're decent people still they're

00:55:02.700 decent populists. I use the phrase decent populists in my book. What I mean by that is basically

00:55:08.520 people who've accepted the great liberalisation, they accept the idea of human equality. They

00:55:13.940 obviously don't think they have the same obligation to all humans in the world. They

00:55:17.520 believe in their group, their country, and the interests of national citizen rights before

00:55:25.500 universal rights. So they're not liberals, but they're part of the modern,

00:55:32.700 in a very broad sense, kind of liberal acceptance of human equality.

00:55:36.840 But they think that society has not reflected their interests

00:55:41.100 and they're often quite traditional, small-c conservative interests.

00:55:46.140 And I think the interesting thing is that politics,

00:55:50.200 you know the American political scientist Daniel Bell,

00:55:53.760 who talked about it sometime back in the 1980s,

00:55:57.300 talked about his political credo, and he said he was a,

00:56:00.420 I'm editing slightly, but he said he was a kind of market-friendly social democrat in economics,

00:56:04.800 he was broadly liberal in politics, and he was somewhat conservative in social and cultural matters.

00:56:10.400 And that combination seems to me the kind of hidden majority in our societies in some ways,

00:56:16.420 and it's for all sorts of historical reasons the party political system has not reflected that combination.

00:56:23.220 Although perhaps you might say the Tory manifesto of the last election probably came closer to it

00:56:28.160 than anything in recent politics.

00:56:31.220 But it's sort of how we can kind of represent

00:56:35.200 that hidden majority in our political system,

00:56:39.500 I think, is one of the things that will kind of emerge

00:56:43.260 over the next few years in the post-Brexit world.

00:56:47.640 Francis, you've barely got a word in edgeways this interview,

00:56:50.260 so why don't you do the last question?

00:56:51.440 OK, right, OK. So we are running out of time.

00:56:54.320 So, David, what we'd like to finish up with is,

00:56:56.740 Is there one issue that people aren't talking about that should be talking about, that we should all be talking about?

00:57:04.620 Something maybe that we gloss over and why?

00:57:12.660 Yeah, I mean, I do think the, you know, Theresa May talked about her burning injustices. 0.98

00:57:19.140 And I think in many cases she focused on very much the kind of white wall, sort of liberal establishment burning injustices.

00:57:28.000 I mean, the gender pay gap.

00:57:30.540 The gender pay gap is overwhelmingly the result of the preferences expressed, the different preferences expressed by men and women.

00:57:39.180 The fact that women, when they have young children, overwhelmingly choose to work part time, etc., etc. 0.85

00:57:46.280 I think there, I mean, there are serious injustices in some of the ways that are, I mean, one of the biggest injustices, and it's very hard to know quite what to do about it,

00:58:05.860 although in a clumsy way the Tory manifesto I just referred to

00:58:09.520 sort of had a kind of failed bash at it,

00:58:13.320 the extraordinary, I think this is actually an economic thing in a way

00:58:17.520 rather than we've been talking mainly about cultural things,

00:58:19.780 but the enormous unearned increase in wealth,

00:58:28.740 arbitrary unearned increase in wealth for people who happen to live

00:58:32.480 in London, parts of the South East

00:58:35.200 and little pockets of the rest of the country

00:58:37.440 as a result of the increasing value of their houses

00:58:41.360 is going to create down the road a real problem

00:58:46.960 unless we find some fair way of kind of tapping into it.

00:58:51.160 I mean, we've got 10 million people in this country

00:58:54.060 are now wealthy,

00:58:59.920 I mean obviously a small slice of them are the kind of traditionally wealthy

00:59:02.920 but 10 million people who happen to own properties in the right part of the country

00:59:06.420 are you know unaccountably and unexpectedly rich

00:59:11.180 and you know so I mean the whole issue of inheritance is going to become really thorny one I think

00:59:18.160 because it's a natural human impulse you want to kind of hand on what you have to your children

00:59:22.920 um and you know what how we how we tap into that that wealth um you know without i mean if i'm

00:59:34.420 allowed a second one i mean i would say that it which almost sort of conflicts with that first

00:59:39.500 one is the way in which um modern family policy i think um influenced very much by a kind of

00:59:50.660 anywhere professional feminism has really not placed enough effort on 1.00

01:00:00.160 supporting young couples bringing up young children. In much of continental

01:00:06.900 Europe you essentially, if you're a young couple bringing up children, you

01:00:10.580 essentially pay no tax or very little tax, whereas here we do not allow couples 0.99

01:00:16.420 and I don't think you should have to be married, I think the genie is out of the

01:00:19.900 bottle on that i think you know anyone who's can prove they've been cohabiting for a couple of

01:00:24.560 years and they have a kid together um should be able to share their tax allowances i mean that

01:00:29.960 would make a huge difference you know we have what are you know it's 12 12 and a half thousand pounds

01:00:35.560 um you know you can combine two people's tax allowances and you're already pretty much at

01:00:41.120 the average wage um and we spend nine billion pounds on child care subsidizing child care you

01:00:47.340 can't get a penny of that to look after your own child you know we do it's this anywhere public

01:00:53.100 realm focus and and much of contemporary feminism has adopted that similarly sort of public realm 0.99

01:01:01.220 focus as a as a measure of of equality but there are millions of families who would you know who

01:01:09.480 and and most most of us most human beings in britain you know most of the things that really

01:01:14.900 matters are in the private realm and and we're not doing nearly and we have a we have a huge

01:01:20.860 amount of family breakdown we're not quite as bad as america but we're worse than much of

01:01:24.040 continental europe um you know only less than half of 15 year olds i think still live with their

01:01:30.420 their two biological parents um this is not a good state of affairs and we've been and we've

01:01:37.100 been too blasé about it and uh and i think you know it's a combination of of a certain sort of

01:01:43.520 liberal individualist sort of squeamishness combined with a certain strand of modern

01:01:50.240 feminism has prevented us providing more support for young families when they really need it. 1.00

01:01:56.920 I mean, it's not only people break up for all sorts of reasons, it's not just money,

01:02:01.480 but money will often be behind conflict in a family.

01:02:05.460 and we need to do much more to help people stay together

01:02:11.100 and bring up kids in a secure environment.

01:02:16.600 I think this interview probably wins the award for the fewest questions

01:02:20.520 that we've ever asked.

01:02:22.540 Sorry, I talk too much.

01:02:23.700 Down to how articulate and eloquent you are on these issues.

01:02:26.940 It's been an absolute pleasure.

01:02:28.040 Thank you so much for coming to talk to us.

01:02:29.920 You're very active on Twitter, I notice,

01:02:31.860 in battles pretty much every day with different people.

01:02:36.220 So if anyone wants to follow you on Twitter

01:02:37.880 and be a kind of a peaceful observer to these battles,

01:02:40.900 you are on Twitter at...

01:02:41.980 I am. Oh, gosh, what am I?

01:02:43.400 I'm David underscore Goodheart.

01:02:46.420 Is that...?

01:02:47.060 What we'll do is we'll double-check it,

01:02:48.760 and if it's not that, we'll stick it in the video.

01:02:50.780 Yeah, I'm definitely David. Is there something else?

01:02:53.220 No.

01:02:53.400 That sounds like I'm at David underscore Goodheart, aren't I?

01:02:57.040 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:02:57.800 Brilliant.

01:02:58.500 Also, the book that you so fascinatingly talked about.

01:03:02.240 It's called The Road to Somewhere.

01:03:03.580 Yeah, The Road to Somewhere, yeah.

01:03:04.980 And we'll put a link to that as well.

01:03:07.020 And you work at the Policy Exchange.

01:03:08.840 I work at Policy Exchange Think Tank,

01:03:11.140 and I'm doing another book in the next year or so,

01:03:15.680 basically on this theme of how smart people are too politically powerful.

01:03:20.700 Well, come back and talk to us about that when it's ready to go.

01:03:24.660 Yeah, absolutely.

01:03:25.360 And just to say thank you very much, guys.

01:03:27.720 if you've watched it

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01:04:10.020 yep

01:04:11.420 see you next week

01:04:12.120 bye bye

01:04:12.480 see you next week

01:04:12.800 bye

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TRIGGERnometry - November 26, 2018

David Goodhart on the Left, Multiculturalism, Cognitive Elites & Brexit

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