00:03:33.280And it was that that I didn't, that kind of, in a way, sort of turned my head.
00:03:38.060I didn't really, having covered a world historic event,
00:03:40.560I didn't fancy going back to the FT and spending the next 10 or 15 years
00:03:44.440becoming features editor or whatever i might have been um so i decided to set up a magazine i set
00:03:50.700up a magazine called prospect monthly current affairs magazine really based on the sort of
00:03:56.260modeled on the american magazines like like the atlantic monthly and new york view of books and
00:04:02.260new yorker and harpers i'm not obviously we weren't going to be exactly like them um we were
00:04:08.060going to be a much smaller fry thing but um it was like that the kind of the lack of a proper
00:04:13.900essay uh essay writing culture here in our journalism that i hope to do something about
00:04:19.200um and i did that for 15 years from 95 to 2015 um and intellectually in that in that time i mean
00:04:29.240prospect had started off very much as sort of it started off in the mid 90s was seen very much as
00:04:34.200sort of part of the kind of new Labour-ish world of, you know,
00:04:40.020we were just coming to that end of that long period of Conservative rule.
00:04:43.860And we were not political with a capital P,
00:04:47.120but we were kind of happy enough to sort of go along with that sort of reformist zeitgeist.
00:04:53.820But we then, or I anyway, developed a kind of critique of aspects of contemporary liberalism,
00:05:02.100particularly on issues of race and multiculturalism and immigration.
00:05:08.120And I wrote a long essay in 2004, it was February 2004, I think,
00:05:15.480called Too Diverse? Really aimed very much at the centre-left,
00:05:20.360which I still considered then my political home,
00:05:23.300essentially saying, look, there is a kind of...
00:05:26.300It was quite an abstract philosophical argument
00:05:28.280and saying about the tension between the left's two favourite principles, in a way,
00:05:35.840the principle of solidarity and the principle of diversity,
00:05:39.060and based on the common sense idea that people are ready to share with
00:05:44.220and to trust people who they're familiar with and that they know
00:05:47.540and they have some reciprocal experiences with,
00:05:51.420based on that common sense assumption,
00:05:53.440I argued that it was an increasingly diverse society, not just through immigration, but through the much greater moral diversity, value diversity of modern societies.
00:06:09.980It was harder to hold on to that sense of common identity across a much more varied range of people.
00:06:17.940and therefore it was much harder to persuade people
00:06:22.060to share their resources and have a degree of trust in each other,
00:06:27.560which any decent society, I think, requires.
00:06:30.440Anyway, this essay was about 6,000 words,
00:06:33.440but it was printed word for word almost in The Guardian.
00:06:38.640I mean, with our permission, obviously,
00:06:39.740I was thrilled that The Guardian wanted to reprint it,
00:06:42.460but it caused quite a little kind of hullabaloo I was accused of.
00:07:17.060And 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.
00:07:29.380But 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.
00:07:57.700Let 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.
00:08:07.640Anyway, so that, I mean, I sort of stumbled into this territory without really having thought very much.
00:08:14.880You know, I kind of bought the package. You know, I was a kind of liberal.
00:08:17.180So, of course, I was in favour of high levels of immigration. I never really sort of thought about it.
00:08:20.940but that started to sort of change my worldview to some extent
00:15:21.280sort of yes to a market economy, but no to a market society,
00:15:24.860which I always thought was rather an attractive way of putting it in some ways.
00:15:29.280And I think a lot of populism, you might say,
00:15:34.300is part of that sort of pushback against a market society.
00:15:40.260including in its sort of demographic and immigration-related aspects.
00:15:43.920Like the idea that everything is about the economy,
00:15:46.400so that's why we tend to have this conversation about immigration,
00:15:49.380strictly through the lens of the economy.
00:15:52.220And I'm an immigrant myself, by the way,
00:15:54.400but it just blows my mind that no one seems to ever really want to talk about the cultural side of it,
00:16:01.100you know, the fact that this constant churn and change also has an impact on people's lives,
00:16:06.020which, frankly, you know, this is what Eric and Matt told us about,
00:16:09.42070% of Leave voters say they'd be prepared to lose out financially if I meant reducing immigration.
00:16:14.420And 35% of them say they'd be prepared to lose out significantly if I meant reducing immigration to zero.
00:16:22.420So people clearly don't just measure the success or failure of immigration based on their economy.
00:16:27.420And yet we always talk about it strictly in those terms, at least in the public domain.
00:16:31.420Yeah, 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.
00:16:50.840I mean, I think most of us, I'm certainly not against all of what liberalism has done, either economically or socially and culturally.
00:16:58.500I mean, I think there have been great advances in many ways.
00:17:02.680We've had the great liberalisation on race, on gender, on sexuality, much of which I think has been a great human advance.
00:17:14.520I 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.
00:17:35.360I 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.
00:17:51.800And of course, again, we had hangovers from earlier eras, you know, older generations found it kind of difficult to adjust.
00:17:58.740I 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.
00:18:28.740And they had something sort of to beat the older generation with.
00:18:31.960They had a kind of, you know, they had a righteousness.
00:18:35.980Dave, let's dig into how that happened, because you talk about this in your book,
00:18:39.100and you've come up with a way of categorizing the different groups in society who are engaged in this contest,
00:18:44.320which I think quite a lot of people are now relying on as the underpinning of their work.
00:18:49.040So tell us a little bit about the somewheres and anywheres.
00:18:52.160yeah I mean it's it's looking at value groups rather than social class as the sort of as the
00:18:59.520new kind of motors of of politics um obviously there's some overlap but um yeah but very broadly
00:19:06.720um what I'm talking about is the is the switch from a from society from a society in which
00:19:13.160politics is primarily socio-economic in which social class are the basic units the issues are
00:19:18.300to do with kind of market versus state and size of the state and levels of public spending
00:19:23.660and redistribution and so on, to much more sociocultural issues to do with identity,
00:19:31.580to do with borders, immigration, nation states, and security versus liberty issues in relation
00:19:42.360to terrorism, to gender equality issues
00:21:44.980I think it's one of the reasons why some of these value divides
00:21:47.520are particularly acute in this country.
00:21:50.180Half of American students live with their parents.
00:21:52.580Most 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.
00:22:07.200So 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.
00:22:16.960In 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.
00:22:26.460How 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.
00:22:36.900uh we we we kind of preserve more of the external trappings of class in sort of accent and we
00:22:44.260preserved our private schools and so on but we're actually not that different to most other
00:22:49.460developed countries um uh and i think we we kind of we focus on on on the trappings as do foreigners
00:22:57.420when they kind of observe us um but but but all countries have their elite institutions um and most
00:23:06.340of those elite institutions are full of kids from mainly elite backgrounds, you know, whether
00:23:11.740the, you know, the kind of N-Arcs in France, you know, the, what are they called, all those
00:28:07.100your identity is much more susceptible to being discomforted by social change.
00:28:12.120So 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.
00:28:28.520most somewheres are more likely to see change as loss
00:28:32.520partly because they're through being less well educated
00:28:35.240they're less well equipped to achieve well in the modern world
00:29:09.600so I think those are the two big differences
00:29:11.400and I've invented those labels and they rather caught on
00:29:19.900And 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.
00:29:32.960But it does, you know, a lot of the critics of the book sort of said, you know, how sort of simplistic and binary.
00:29:41.480And actually, if you read the book, you'll find it's not that binary.
00:29:44.580I mean, these are big, baggy groupings, as I said earlier, a bit like kind of working class and middle class.
00:29:49.140No one goes around sort of saying, oh, well, that's far too binary.
00:29:52.180We kind of understand that they don't necessarily say a huge amount about you,
00:29:56.300but they kind of give a kind of general fix on somebody.
00:30:01.440And they kind of, you know, they sort of work in a rough and ready way.
00:30:07.320Obviously, there are all sorts of different kinds of Anywhere's.
00:30:12.360There are all sorts of different kinds of somewhere.
00:30:14.020So, 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.
00:30:25.460I mean, the kind of, you know, citizens of nowhere that Theresa May talked about.
00:30:30.060And 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.
00:30:44.020And 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.
00:30:55.760Now, 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.
00:31:03.620Well, of course, otherwise the labels would be useless.
00:31:05.120Yeah, well, but I mean, well, a lot of people have questioned them.
00:31:07.760But I mean, if you look at the British Social Attitude Service, I mean, it's not written down there, you know, anywheres, you know.
00:31:13.340But 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.
00:31:24.820And so, you know, you can see the evolution of these values and ideas.
00:31:29.120And the anywhere group is growing very rapidly.
00:31:31.060I 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.
00:31:43.760And higher education, particularly humanities and social sciences, are kind of engines for creating anywheres in some ways.
00:31:49.520and they have, you know, you have to go back only about 30 or 40 years
00:31:57.020and perhaps the anywhere, the people who would have self-consciously ascribed
00:32:00.580to a kind of anywhere worldview would have been 5, 10% of the population.
00:32:46.300Yeah, 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.
00:33:02.400They haven't realised that they are, you know, only a quarter or at most a third of the society.
00:33:08.820And they have assumed, I mean, you know, often with the best of motives,
00:33:12.560they've assumed that they have been acting in the general interest
00:33:17.720when they've actually been helping to shape a society that is overwhelmingly in the interest of people like them
00:33:23.140who've had their kind of backgrounds, who are highly educated.
00:33:26.180You know, one can go through the list of, you know, the knowledge economy.
00:33:30.540you know i mean the very phrase suggests that this is an economy that works best for
00:33:35.120people who are highly educated uh you've had rapid de-industrialization in other areas
00:33:40.240um you've you've had um meaning um it's it's it's become harder for large sections but what you've
00:33:50.620had too something i didn't emphasize in the road to somewhere but but it's actually something i'm
00:33:54.800working on now for another book, the way in which cognitive ability has become the kind of gold
00:34:00.900standard of human esteem is also a very recent thing. There was a place for people who were not
00:34:09.000highly able cognitively. Cognitivability is just one quite narrow form of human aptitude and
00:34:17.500the way both in economics and indeed in education policy, the massive expansion of
00:34:24.140higher education in this country at least the continuing neglect of of technical and vocational
00:34:29.860education um you know it is another area of kind of unconscious anywhere domination um but but i
00:34:39.200think i think underpinning all of it is the way in which we've sort of we've kind of tilted the
00:34:44.780balance away from other forms of human aptitude um and people who um who felt that they had a
00:34:53.440that they had meaningful lives um uh what what i'm increasingly realizing is that actually
00:35:00.320you know look looking and we'll come on to the present in a minute but i mean looking macro
00:35:04.420historically if you think of uh we think of industrial the transition from an agrarian to
00:35:09.000industrial society as a ghastly, violent, physically violent process as
00:35:18.000people poured into the teeming industrial cities and for a short
00:35:22.320period of time it was pretty dreadful, although pretty well from the beginning
00:35:26.160actually longevity and an income and pretty well everything rose pretty
00:35:33.720rapidly. But what we sort of forget about the transition is actually how much continuity
00:35:39.880there was. It did not, the process of industrialisation in the 19th century did not undermine traditional
00:35:47.360religious beliefs. Indeed, it created new forms of Christianity, Methodism, Wesleyan
00:35:51.880in the big industrial cities. It did not undermine the family. Rates of illegitimacy
00:35:59.800fell pretty radically through the 19th century.
00:36:03.180No, I mean, life is compared to today.
00:36:05.000Obviously, life is pretty hard for most people.
00:36:08.140But, you know, bring it forward to the 20th century
00:36:10.740and combine it with democracy and welfare states.
00:36:15.480And bear in mind also that industrial society
00:36:18.160produced new forms of meaning and identity,
00:40:51.120and being able to stay at home when your children are very young for two or three years
00:40:55.520many women and indeed some men would like to do that
00:41:01.020but it's become almost impossible for most families to be able to afford to do that
00:41:06.960And we have no support for, in the tax system, or very, very minimal support in the tax system for families.
00:41:15.720David, 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.
00:41:23.940That's the thing. So I'll be the foreigner here and go and create that opportunity.
00:41:28.340I 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.
00:41:35.640and I think you've really touched on something there
00:42:05.260essentially taking information regurgitating it you are thrown on the scrap heap metaphorically
00:42:11.760and one question i want to ask you is at the moment it feels we're polarized how do we bridge
00:42:18.900that gap can we do it or is this sense because of technology and because of the way the education
00:42:24.000system is that essentially the gap is going to grow wider and wider um i think we can bridge the
00:42:32.200gap um i mean i mean with some difficulty i mean it's the the the purpose of politics is to bridge
00:42:40.840the gap in a way i mean that is what most you know that that is what good politicians should
00:42:45.600be focusing upon i mean it's what um you know politics is is in a sense always a base about
00:42:51.740trying to trying to bring conflicting um views and and indeed conflicting interests together
00:43:00.320to some degree, or finding compromises that allows different groups
00:43:07.780to function relatively happily together in the same society.
00:43:14.800I mean, I think, obviously, Brexit didn't create these divisions.
00:43:18.740These divisions sort of emerged particularly strongly
00:43:22.500over the last 20 or 30 years in response to both the cultural arrogance
00:43:29.660but also the over-domination that we talked about earlier.
00:43:32.420And one manifestation of that over-domination, whether it's in the field of the economy,
00:43:38.300whether it's in the field of education, the massive over-expansion of higher education,
00:43:44.100whether it's in, you know, whether it's in the kind of almost the delegitimization of many small C conservative views
00:43:53.260and tradition, you know, kind of, you know, male breadwinner.
00:43:56.160I 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.
00:44:07.760Now, 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.
00:44:18.200I 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.
00:44:41.700um um but um you know so in all these different areas i mean quite large minorities if not
00:44:50.640majorities um of our society have have not have not felt you know this whole kind of um you know
00:44:59.560left v right has been replaced by open v closed is incredibly self-serving way of looking at the
00:45:04.820world i mean i've never met anyone who wants to live in a closed gulag like society nobody does
00:45:10.560obviously uh but a lot of people feel that the forms of modern openness that we've created in
00:45:14.960the last 30 years and i mean i mean symbolized most graphically by you know the supply chain
00:45:22.520going to china um you know the rapid industrial de-industrialization of of of britain america
00:45:29.240even more so perhaps um um or parts of britain and um and symbolized also by large-scale
00:45:37.400immigration, the kind of double whammy, the feeling that, you know, your factory closes
00:45:42.100and goes to, probably not China, to Vietnam or Cambodia or somewhere, but then a whole
00:45:49.000new workforce is introduced into the country to compete with you in the service jobs that
00:45:55.360you're probably then doing, came as a real shock to people, I think. And most of those
00:46:00.700people, it's so important to emphasize this, against the contempt of much modern liberalism,
00:46:06.480Most of those people are not hostile to the individual immigrant.
00:46:10.900They're anti-immigration. They're not anti-immigrant.
00:46:13.420I mean, it's an elision that liberals often make, you know, such and such, you know, the anti-immigrant party, the anti-immigrant politician.
00:46:20.340There are some, but most of the time people are hostile to the immigration and not the immigrant.
00:46:27.120You 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.
00:46:35.560They're not hostile to the individual.
00:46:37.040That doesn't mean to say they think it's in their economic or cultural interests
00:46:39.800to have had that movement of people on such a large scale.
00:46:43.640Clearly it is very much part of the liberal market system
00:46:48.300and it's one part of it that has not, on the whole, benefited people
00:46:52.120and so people have rightly pushed back against it.
00:46:55.280So how can we resolve this, which is what France is getting at,
00:57:30.540The gender pay gap is overwhelmingly the result of the preferences expressed, the different preferences expressed by men and women.
00:57:39.180The fact that women, when they have young children, overwhelmingly choose to work part time, etc., etc.
00:57:46.280I 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,
00:58:05.860although in a clumsy way the Tory manifesto I just referred to
00:58:09.520sort of had a kind of failed bash at it,
00:58:13.320the extraordinary, I think this is actually an economic thing in a way
00:58:17.520rather than we've been talking mainly about cultural things,
00:58:19.780but the enormous unearned increase in wealth,
00:58:28.740arbitrary unearned increase in wealth for people who happen to live