TRIGGERnometry - Dr Steve Davies on the Independent Group and a Realignment of British Politics

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00:00:23.540 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:27.560 I'm Constantin Kitchen.

00:00:28.440 And this is a show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects

00:00:33.100 they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask

00:00:38.460 the experts.

00:00:39.640 Our brilliant expert guest this week is the head of education at the Institute of Economic

00:00:43.940 Affairs, Dr. Stephen Davis. Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:47.000 Glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

00:00:48.400 Well, thank you for coming. And what a time to be here because exciting things are happening

00:00:52.540 in British politics. And you've been talking about this for a long time. And before we

00:00:56.280 get into that, just tell us a little bit about who you are, what's been your journey through life

00:01:00.240 so us and our viewers know everything. Well, to start at the beginning, I suppose, I was born in

00:01:05.860 Scotland in a place called Grangemouth, went to university in Scotland at St. Andrews. I'm a

00:01:11.300 historian by training, although I talk a lot about economics these days. My family roots are all in

00:01:17.140 Manchester and East Lancashire, Burnley to be precise, and Newton Heath in Manchester. Lived in

00:01:22.580 Manchester since 1979, staunch city fan. I used to work at the Manchester Metropolitan University,

00:01:30.820 Manchester Polytechnic as it was before then, but a few years ago I kicked the world of academia

00:01:35.500 into touch and I went full-time into the think tank world which I'd been involved with for quite

00:01:39.840 a long time actually and I worked first for a think tank in the United States called the Institute

00:01:44.640 for Humane Studies and then at the Institute of Economic Affairs for the last nine to ten years

00:01:50.200 or so and I do other kinds of freelance work as well so that's where I am at the moment really

00:01:55.660 looking forward to City winning the title and denying Liverpool the title again and also you

00:02:01.940 know taking a great interest in what's going on in the world right now well you've managed to

00:02:06.180 trigger a big portion of our following already with those comments fantastic we're called

00:02:11.460 trigonometry for a reason but it's it's so great to have you here because as I said we're recording

00:02:16.640 this video come out about a week or so from now. But so far, you've been talking about a

00:02:24.340 realignment of politics for a long time. And as we discussed before the show, not everyone

00:02:28.300 was immediately kind of receptive to that idea. But you've been talking about it for five or six

00:02:33.020 years. And it's actually happening. I think as we speak, 11 MPs have left their mainstream parties,

00:02:38.940 eight Labour, three Conservatives, to create this independent group. So take us back to the

00:02:45.440 beginning. What is this all about? Well, you need to distinguish between the factional moves in

00:02:52.240 Parliament, which are fascinating and interesting, and on the one hand, unbelying that, the underlying

00:02:58.580 structural changes in politics, which is what I mean by realignment. Now, the way to understand

00:03:03.940 that is this. At most times, lots of people have disagreements about all kinds of things,

00:03:09.620 But what we don't ever do in any country is elect lots of individual politicians who then form shifting ad hoc coalitions around each particular issue as it arises.

00:03:21.200 What you find instead is that there's always one issue, or maybe two, which are the aligning issue.

00:03:27.540 People group into large political blocs or tribes depending on the view that they have of that one big issue.

00:03:34.760 Now, that tribe that agrees on one side of that big issue will probably have lots of

00:03:39.240 internal disagreements about other issues, but that doesn't matter because politics is

00:03:44.860 aligned around the one big issue.

00:03:47.760 So for the last 40, 50 years or so, the two big issues have been on the one hand whether

00:03:53.760 or not you favor free markets or state control of the economy, and on the other hand whether

00:03:58.780 or not you think that the state has a role to play in enforcing moral rules. So with that second

00:04:06.860 issue, at one end of the poll, you could be John Stuart Mill. You think people should be allowed to

00:04:10.600 do whatever they like with almost no limits. At the other end, you could be like a former guest

00:04:16.000 of yours, Peter Hitchens, who thinks that the state should be doing all kinds of things to stop

00:04:19.820 people taking cannabis and various other kinds of things Peter doesn't approve of. So when you put

00:04:25.740 those two axes together, you end up with four broad blocks of voters. And the split, which for

00:04:34.440 the last 30 to 40 years has been between one group who are pro-market, but socially conservative,

00:04:41.640 like US Republicans, for example, and another group who are not exactly anti-market, but pro-government

00:04:48.160 intervention in the economy, but socially liberal, like US Democrats, for example. That's been the

00:04:53.420 split. Now, my argument is that while the economic division is still there, the other

00:04:57.880 division has changed. We're seeing a new division appearing in politics. And the division here

00:05:02.520 is between nationalists and globalists, basically. It's between people who think that the nation

00:05:08.860 state is a vital political institution and who favor traditional national identity as

00:05:15.200 opposed to people who think that national identity is only one part of what you are,

00:05:20.660 not necessarily the most important thing and that you need to move towards a world of more open

00:05:25.380 borders, freer trade, freer movement, more supranational forms of government like the EU

00:05:30.200 perhaps. And that's the emerging division, I think, in most countries. The problem we have in

00:05:36.300 Britain and indeed many other countries is that our two big parties don't match up to that new

00:05:42.240 division. The division between globalist and nationalist splits both of the two parties down

00:05:48.200 the middle. And so what is happening is that, in fact, that real division out there in the public

00:05:54.320 is now not yet reflected by the parties, but the parties are reorganizing themselves, if you will,

00:06:00.840 to get more in line with this newly emerging division. That's what I mean by realignment.

00:06:05.000 And one of the things you've talked about before you jump in, Francis, is that this is just the

00:06:10.780 beginning. What's happening in party political terms within Britain is just the beginning. So

00:06:15.740 So you've been predicting things for a while.

00:06:18.640 You maybe didn't get as much credit as you deserve.

00:06:20.580 How about you use this opportunity to make a bunch of other predictions

00:06:23.460 so you can then go, look, I was right all along.

00:06:26.440 I think what is going to happen is this.

00:06:28.680 First of all, the defections we've seen to this independent group

00:06:32.460 are only the start of a process.

00:06:34.680 Quite a lot more Labour MPs and a few more Conservative MPs are going to defect.

00:06:39.720 This has probably been arranged and set up in advance.

00:06:42.020 And I imagine that what you're going to see is a steady stream of defections.

00:06:45.740 This is being done for media management purposes.

00:06:48.400 It's to keep the story in the headlines over time.

00:06:51.500 That's how it's actually organised.

00:06:52.860 Are you saying politicians are behaving cynically?

00:06:54.680 Oh, absolutely.

00:06:56.160 My word, perish the thought.

00:06:58.400 But yes, unfortunately so.

00:07:00.720 So that's what is going to happen.

00:07:02.480 Now, the context for all these splits in Parliament at the moment

00:07:06.100 is that we can't have a general election

00:07:08.980 because of the Fixed-Term Parliament Act,

00:07:11.200 which means that you need two-thirds of MPs

00:07:13.500 to vote for a general election.

00:07:15.480 And there's always going to be at least a third of Parliament at the moment

00:07:18.880 who don't want a general election,

00:07:20.780 for the good reason that they fear they'll lose their seats.

00:07:23.700 So there isn't going to be a majority for dissolving Parliament at the moment.

00:07:27.900 Plus, you could do it with a no-confidence vote,

00:07:30.200 but as recent events have shown,

00:07:32.380 even if the government has lost its majority,

00:07:34.600 there's still a majority who think that they do not want Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister,

00:07:38.880 and so she's not going to lose a confidence vote.

00:07:40.820 So we aren't going to have a general election.

00:07:42.400 At the same time, we have a hard legal deadline for leaving the EU on the 29th of March.

00:07:48.940 And that basically means that Parliament has become a pressure cooker.

00:07:52.020 And all the divisions within the parties are becoming more and more intense.

00:07:56.600 And it's leading both of the parties to fracture and the emergence of quite distinct groups in Parliament,

00:08:03.340 which I think will become the parliamentary wings of two new parties effectively.

00:08:09.420 Certainly one new party, maybe two.

00:08:11.920 Because it's interesting you're talking about all of this.

00:08:14.940 But there is a party out there that is broadly centrist, pro-Remain,

00:08:20.320 as a Liberal Democrat.

00:08:21.660 Why is no one joining the Lib Dems?

00:08:23.780 That's a very good question.

00:08:25.520 And I think it's partly because they still haven't gotten over the,

00:08:28.680 for them, near-fatal experience of being in coalition with the Conservatives.

00:08:32.160 They should have learned from history.

00:08:33.440 Whenever the Liberal Party has historically gone into coalition

00:08:37.700 or supported one of the other two parties, it's been the kiss of death.

00:08:41.420 And I think they still haven't gotten over that.

00:08:43.640 Plus, they have the problem that they have a number of outstanding MPs,

00:08:47.260 but nobody who's in a really prominent leadership role

00:08:50.320 who ticks that box of really appealing to a wide part of the public.

00:08:54.080 They don't have any leaders left who are still comfortable with gay sex.

00:08:58.600 Possibly, yes.

00:08:59.240 That's the problem that they've got, really, isn't it?

00:09:01.260 Yes.

00:09:02.040 So how big is this independent group going to be two or three months from now, do you think?

00:09:07.240 I think it could be about 40 to 50 members of Parliament.

00:09:11.160 I would not be surprised.

00:09:12.480 It may be, I would say, we're probably going to see about another 20 Labour MPs leave

00:09:16.740 and another nine or so Conservative MPs.

00:09:19.980 So several Tory MPs like Nick Bowles have said that they're basically waiting to see

00:09:25.120 how votes go on various Brexit amendments in Parliament.

00:09:28.820 But I think that's pretty much certain.

00:09:31.140 They're not going to go the way he wants them to and therefore he's going to leave.

00:09:34.460 And I think this is true of quite a number of other MPs.

00:09:37.020 What role did Brexit play in this?

00:09:38.480 Was it the catalyst or was this always going to happen?

00:09:41.400 I think that this realignment was always going to happen,

00:09:43.760 but Brexit was the catalyst.

00:09:45.160 And that's a very good analogy, because in chemistry,

00:09:47.940 a catalyst is a substance that speeds up a reaction

00:09:50.260 but isn't actually involved in the reaction.

00:09:52.940 And that's exactly what Brexit has done.

00:09:54.780 It's made the realignment of British politics

00:09:56.960 around nationalism versus cosmopolitanism

00:10:00.160 happen much more quickly than it otherwise would have done.

00:10:03.200 And Brexit, and how you feel about leave or remain,

00:10:05.900 is a kind of proxy for a whole lot of other issues,

00:10:10.280 issues and feelings about identity.

00:10:13.000 A very revealing poll, you'll find this entertaining perhaps,

00:10:15.740 about Leibers and Remainers was to ask them what their favourite brands were.

00:10:20.880 And the favourite Leibers brands were things like Hovis, Bisto,

00:10:25.800 HP Sauce, Heinz Baked Beans,

00:10:28.600 a whole list of quintessentially 1950s traditional British brands.

00:10:33.160 The favorite brands of Remain voters were things like Uber, Apple, iMac, a whole range of very du jour, modish, trendy brands.

00:10:46.620 That tells you a huge amount, which is that the division between Remain and Leave is actually just the expression of a much deeper, if you like, cultural divide,

00:10:56.320 which is partly a division between old and young, partly between North and Midlands and the South,

00:11:01.560 partly between professional and university educated and traditional working class or middle class,

00:11:06.640 a whole series of social and cultural divisions like that.

00:11:11.100 You talk about the divisions. I always try and think, how are we going to heal these divisions?

00:11:16.680 Well, that's what politics is about. Realignments of this kind take place every 40 years or so.

00:11:22.640 So we had one in the 1880s, 1885 to 1893.

00:11:25.960 We had one in the 1920s, 1922 to 31.

00:11:29.900 We had one in the 1970s and early 80s.

00:11:32.640 Each time you have a realignment, initially politics is very, very bitter.

00:11:38.020 That's because the new issue is one that people have, it's fresh.

00:11:42.800 People are very divided by it.

00:11:44.680 There isn't much center ground.

00:11:45.880 But what the democratic political process does is that over time, over 10, 20 years or so,

00:11:51.980 And the sort of bitterness and starkness of that division is ameliorated.

00:11:57.260 And actually, you do get the emergence of a center.

00:12:00.700 I'm actually quite excited as someone who's horrified by the extremes on both sides,

00:12:05.460 which seem to have kind of got hold of the microphone recently.

00:12:08.880 And they're the ones that are getting all the attention, both on the left and on the right.

00:12:12.700 I'm quite excited about the idea that you have a new centrist force emerging on the one hand.

00:12:18.300 On the other hand, I look at the people who are forming this group, and it seems to me like the number one driving force behind their motivation in terms of creating this is really these are people who are vehemently opposed to Brexit.

00:12:33.060 That's what's forced them to leave their parties.

00:12:36.180 And as we were talking just before we started, that's not necessarily a very centrist point of view.

00:12:42.080 So it's a party that's allegedly in the centre, or it's a group for now that's allegedly in the centre.

00:12:46.760 a but. It's not actually. The thing is this, when you have a political realignment, what happens is

00:12:53.040 that the center is redefined. Because when you have a stable alignment, when everybody knows

00:12:57.820 that the big dividing issue is one particular question, you know where you stand on that issue

00:13:02.900 and there's going to be a lot of people who are in the middle of that issue. So in the classic one

00:13:07.680 of state control of the economy versus free markets, you had radical laissez-faire free

00:13:12.180 marketeers on the one hand, you had people like Jeremy Corbyn, old-fashioned socialists on the

00:13:16.280 other end, and then in between there was a middle. Now, when the alignment changes, when the issue

00:13:22.380 that politics is aligned around becomes a different one, what you find is that the center is

00:13:27.740 redefined, and people who were in the center on the old issue may not be in the center on the new

00:13:33.180 one. Now, if the new aligning issue, as I argue, is internationalism versus nationalism, then

00:13:40.820 people like Chukra Amuna, Anna Soubry, and all the others who've left to form this independent

00:13:45.360 group, they're actually pretty far out to one extreme of that new alignment. So actually it's

00:13:50.660 a mistake to think of them as centrist. The centre, what it is to be in the centre, is being redefined.

00:13:57.800 On the other hand, by the way, that means that you should not feel that the centre has collapsed,

00:14:02.280 which is a kind of common perspective I think you've just articulated. That's not what's going

00:14:06.480 on. What's happening is that what it is to be in the centre has a different content now to what it

00:14:13.120 did before. To be in the centre used to mean that you favoured a moderate degree of state

00:14:17.140 intervention, but a broadly, with maybe quite a big welfare state, but a broadly marked

00:14:21.960 economy. Tony Blair, basically. Without the wars. Without the wars, yes, on all that stuff.

00:14:27.760 Let's draw a veil over that. But what being in the centre was going to mean in a couple

00:14:33.160 of years' time is that you favour a certain amount of immigration control, but you're

00:14:37.560 not a hardline nativist nationalist. You are broadly in favor of international cooperation,

00:14:43.360 but you don't want the kind of complete merging of sovereignty that the EU means. That's what

00:14:47.700 the new center is going to be, essentially. So you still have a center position, but the

00:14:53.120 content of that position is determined by what the underlying alignment is. And as I

00:14:58.100 say, this new party is basically the globalist internationalist party. The thing is, they

00:15:03.940 yet they haven't quite got their heads around that.

00:15:05.720 The other problem is that I'm afraid to say

00:15:08.920 quite a lot of them typify another phenomenon

00:15:11.100 of the last 20 years, which is the professional

00:15:13.720 political class.

00:15:15.580 Not all of them, but quite a lot of them do.

00:15:17.420 And the British public, quite honestly,

00:15:18.780 is totally fed up with mass-produced manicured politicians

00:15:24.820 of the kind that Peter Mandelson has left us

00:15:27.300 as his legacy, God help him.

00:15:28.960 And that's one of the reasons why Jeremy Corbyn is popular.

00:15:32.480 He doesn't fit that kind of stereotype, nor does Jacob Rees-Mogg.

00:15:35.840 Nor does Jacob Farage.

00:15:37.140 Farage, exactly.

00:15:38.080 That's why the public is at the moment in the market for politicians who are seen to be their own man or woman

00:15:43.480 and not a kind of identikit, done PPV at Oxford and gone to the right schools

00:15:51.200 and got kind of identikit set of views, politicians.

00:15:54.700 So they need to find some way of giving themselves a distinctive identity.

00:15:58.460 But I think that will actually happen because, as I say,

00:16:01.120 what's going on in Parliament is only the kind of froth on the top of a much more

00:16:04.800 profound social shift. Thinking about a career in real estate? Start with Fleming College.

00:16:11.660 Our Real Estate Council of Ontario approved programs offer flexible online learning and

00:16:16.740 real world training. Gain the skills to thrive in Ontario's diverse market and build your future

00:16:22.180 your way. Learn more at flemingcollege.ca slash real estate. But it's also quite regressive when

00:16:28.360 you think about it like you said because the reality is we voted for brexit we have to we

00:16:33.420 have to leave so by actually choosing to go this particular route aren't you just denying a reality

00:16:39.100 well not necessarily the i think as long as these people insist that they want a second vote they

00:16:44.980 are denying reality and i think that's an extremely dangerous road to go down uh i think if we were to

00:16:50.060 have a second referendum the political consequences consequences would be disastrous that would give

00:16:56.180 the biggest boost ever to people like Tommy Robinson and other political pond life and

00:17:01.320 the far right, if you want to call it that, I think it would be a really big mistake.

00:17:06.180 And as you say, the public was asked to vote on this issue.

00:17:09.560 They were told the result of the issue would be enacted by Parliament.

00:17:12.900 So to say, well, sorry, you got it wrong, let's have another try, would be incredibly

00:17:17.520 offensive.

00:17:18.820 What I think this group is moving towards, though, and I think will be forced to move

00:17:23.020 is the position that, OK, we're going to leave, we deeply regret it,

00:17:27.200 and we're going to campaign that we should rejoin.

00:17:30.040 Rejoin?

00:17:30.600 I think that's what their position is going to be.

00:17:32.260 I do not see a white public support for rejoining.

00:17:35.820 Oh, you'd be surprised.

00:17:36.380 Really?

00:17:36.780 I think there is.

00:17:38.660 To go back to the point I made earlier,

00:17:40.420 there was a poll done recently which showed that people's attachment

00:17:44.040 to their party-loyal identity as conservative voters, Labour voters, whatever,

00:17:48.680 was very, very weak.

00:17:49.780 less than 30% felt a strong identification with their party.

00:17:55.900 Over 75% felt a very powerful identification

00:18:00.520 with their status as leave or remain voters.

00:18:04.260 And I think you underestimate the degree to which

00:18:06.660 there's a very powerful constituency of unreconciled remainers

00:18:11.480 out there in the country, about 25%, roughly, I would say, of the voters.

00:18:17.040 And that's basically the constituency that this new party that's emerging at the moment is going to appeal to.

00:18:22.200 But do you not think that's kind of like polling boxers in the middle of a boxing match?

00:18:25.820 Like, yeah, I hate them, but once the fight is over, they're all hugging and whatever.

00:18:28.840 Like, once Brexit happens, people will be reconciled to the fact that it's happened.

00:18:33.760 Well, some people will be, but I think that there are going to be, like I said, about 25% of the voters, 25% to 30% who are utterly unreconciled.

00:18:41.120 and these are the people who have a genuine, strong ideological commitment, if you like, to the European project.

00:18:49.180 There aren't enough of them to win the referendum,

00:18:51.180 which is why there wasn't a positive pro-EU case made during the referendum.

00:18:55.540 That's why instead we got this ridiculous kind of project fear nonsense from George Osborne and others

00:18:59.820 about how the sky was going to fall in if we voted to leave.

00:19:03.540 But that is a significant block of voters.

00:19:05.800 And the other thing about them is they're geographically concentrated.

00:19:08.360 that 25-30% of unreconciled

00:19:11.080 remainers have a distinct social

00:19:13.060 profile, they're typically younger

00:19:14.500 more educated, middle class

00:19:16.800 professionals and they live

00:19:18.600 overwhelmingly in London, the

00:19:20.760 south east and middle class

00:19:22.560 enclaves like Wilmslow or

00:19:24.460 Thornaby

00:19:25.900 outside London, so a place like

00:19:28.680 Oxford as well and Cambridge

00:19:29.860 so that means

00:19:32.760 that the political prospects for a new party

00:19:34.640 of this kind are actually better than people might imagine

00:19:37.200 The big problem the SDP had historically, for example,

00:19:40.680 was that its vote was very evenly spread around the country,

00:19:43.740 which in our electoral system gets you absolutely nowhere.

00:19:47.320 Whereas this party, I think, will have a much more concentrated vote.

00:19:50.580 So they could have like an S&P-like impact?

00:19:53.040 That's quite possible, yes, I think so.

00:19:54.860 But they're never realistically going to get into power?

00:19:57.480 Well, what is likely to happen is that we will see over the next couple of years

00:20:00.860 some pretty confused politics, like we did in the early part of the 1920s, for example.

00:20:05.100 I think it's quite likely we'll have hung parliaments.

00:20:07.160 Now, we may have a change in the electoral system.

00:20:09.640 That's a possibility.

00:20:11.400 The main reason why we stick with first-past-the-post

00:20:14.260 is because it yields decisive results.

00:20:16.100 If it stops doing that, the case for changing the system becomes quite strong.

00:20:21.280 On the other hand, it could well be that actually what will happen

00:20:23.260 is that after a few rather confusing elections,

00:20:25.460 we'll end up with two large parties,

00:20:27.160 and this breakaway faction will either become the core of one of them

00:20:30.100 or it will transform one of the two existing parties

00:20:32.740 in a way that makes it into a party rather like the one that they want to have.

00:20:38.500 I think the first is actually more likely than the second.

00:20:41.480 Do you think part of the problem as well is that it doesn't seem to be a political party out there

00:20:45.700 that represents the working class?

00:20:48.040 You talk to a lot of working class people and they say Labour doesn't represent me anymore,

00:20:52.800 which is a very dangerous place to be politically

00:20:55.920 because that's when somebody like the far rights or whatever type of people can swoop in

00:21:00.960 and appeal directly to that electorate, which is the majority.

00:21:04.500 I couldn't agree more.

00:21:05.660 If you look all across Europe,

00:21:07.380 social democratic parties are in really, really big trouble.

00:21:10.880 The Dutch Labour Party, for example,

00:21:12.600 which is one of the dominant parties in Dutch politics

00:21:15.040 from the 1900s onwards,

00:21:16.840 at the last election in the Netherlands,

00:21:18.160 they only got about 5% of the vote.

00:21:21.060 A catastrophic collapse.

00:21:22.600 The French Socialist Party is basically completely imploded.

00:21:26.000 It hardly exists anymore.

00:21:27.840 And the reason is that social democratic left-wing parties

00:21:30.720 all over Europe, now find that they are trying to appeal to two different kinds of voters,

00:21:36.600 traditional working class voters, their traditional core base. And on the other hand, the kind

00:21:41.200 of people I was talking about, young, green-minded, environmentally conscious university graduates

00:21:46.160 who are interested in a totally different agenda, an agenda about what you might call

00:21:51.180 left-wing identity politics, supranationalism, cosmopolitanism. Now those two blocks of voters

00:21:56.320 agree about economics, but they don't agree about anything else. And the whole cultural

00:22:00.860 politics of the kind of middle class post-1968 New Left alienates those working class voters

00:22:07.960 massively. And the danger, as we can see, say in Germany, is that the SPD's working

00:22:14.560 class voters, a lot of them have switched to the far-right AFD party. And that's the

00:22:20.520 risk that could happen here. It could have happened with UKIP, except that UKIP basically

00:22:25.400 imploded and went up its own fundament, partly because it was full of complete cranks and

00:22:32.100 nut jobs, not to be blunt about it. But you're right, if there's a block of about 30 to 35%

00:22:40.100 of the population, traditional working class communities in small towns, parts of the Midlands

00:22:45.860 and north of England, who feel not only that they're not being represented, but that they're

00:22:52.520 being condescended to, talked down to, and despised by educated middle class

00:22:57.800 elites in their own party, things could get really unpleasant. Well that's what's

00:23:02.420 been happening, that's what you're talking about, which is you know a laborer

00:23:05.600 from Hull being talked down to with some vegan Corbynista, it's not gonna go down well.

00:23:09.380 That's not gonna go down well at all. People will put up with a lot, but being

00:23:13.140 patronized is something that really annoys most people. They're just not

00:23:17.720 going to take it. So if you were a Labour leader, how would you try and unite these

00:23:32.180 two tribes? Or is it simply impossible? I think it's very difficult, almost impossible

00:23:36.720 actually. What you would have to do is to really bang on all the time about economics,

00:23:42.080 because that's the one subject that those two blocs of voters agree upon. And what you

00:23:45.740 you would have to do is seriously downplay the cultural leftism, the identity politics,

00:23:51.500 the anti-imperialism which leads into anti-Semitism in the current case in the Labour Party, the

00:23:56.620 sort of obsession with quite radical identity politics around things like gay rights and

00:24:03.400 so on. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the point is you shouldn't make

00:24:06.420 that your major theme. You shouldn't instead emphasize working class self-interest and

00:24:12.740 traditional, very traditional, left-of-centre economics, more Marx and less post-modernism,

00:24:17.580 if you will. That's what you would need to do to try and keep those two blocks of voters on board.

00:24:23.440 I do think that it's very, very difficult. I have quite a lot of sympathy for Jeremy Corbyn,

00:24:27.160 actually. I think he's got a very difficult job. And obviously the schism or the crack in between

00:24:31.660 those two blocks is Brexit, because as we all know, a lot of white working class voters voted

00:24:36.780 Brexit, and the other side of them demonise them as racist and thick for doing it. Precisely. And

00:24:41.540 And if you look at the, that's an example of the cultural split I mentioned earlier.

00:24:44.620 And if you look at the, read papers like The Guardian, the in-house paper for Remainers,

00:24:49.800 what they all constantly go on about is how 60 to 70% of Labour voters voted Remain.

00:24:55.980 Well, that is true.

00:24:56.920 But the problem is those, the 30% who voted Leave are overwhelmingly Labour's traditional

00:25:03.020 working class vote.

00:25:04.260 And they're geographically very concentrated in small towns, the North and the Midlands,

00:25:08.800 which is why a majority of Labour seats voted Leave, often by massive margins.

00:25:15.140 You know, you're talking about 70% to 80% Leave votes in places like Sunderland,

00:25:19.320 parts of South Yorkshire, parts of the West Midlands.

00:25:22.400 So the fact that you've got a ton of Labour voters,

00:25:25.080 mostly living in safe Tory seats, who voted Remain,

00:25:30.160 is not going to help you win the general election

00:25:32.480 if you're identified as being the pro-Remain party

00:25:35.680 when all the great majority of your voters in actual Labour seats are strongly leave.

00:25:41.520 And that's where there's this huge cultural split, as you say,

00:25:43.780 right down the middle of that existing Labour coalition.

00:25:46.780 And I think trying to hold it together is almost certainly going to be impossible.

00:25:51.120 Just as an aside as well, actually, I think even that is underestimating the case

00:25:55.540 because a lot of those traditional Labour voters, they stopped voting for several elections.

00:26:01.480 So when they've come back into the system to vote in the referendum,

00:26:04.980 them. By that point, they weren't really Labour voters anymore. But actually, they are that base

00:26:09.780 that you talk about. So let's talk about identity politics and the direction that that's going.

00:26:15.400 What do you make of that? Well, I think at the moment, what you're seeing is a big division

00:26:19.840 between two. This is part of the new alignment. There's a big division between two different

00:26:24.100 ways of conceiving of identity. One way has it that your identity is largely something that's

00:26:30.620 given to you. You don't really choose to be what you are. It's determined by things like who your

00:26:35.840 parents are, where you're born, where you live, where you grow up, a whole number of factors that

00:26:40.560 ultimately you don't control. The contrary view is that your identity should, as far as possible,

00:26:46.800 be self-made, that it should be what you have chosen to be. Now, you can see this most clearly

00:26:53.820 in sexual identity. That's a kind of key point issue here, where on the one hand, you have people

00:26:59.080 who say well basically there's a kind of biological fact that you have no control over that you're

00:27:03.540 a man or a woman and that's it. You have a sexual orientation and that's it. On the other

00:27:08.560 hand there are people who say well no actually because of modern technology and for other

00:27:13.120 reasons this is actually a matter of choice. You choose to define what your sexual identity

00:27:18.500 is, what kind of a person you are, what you are and that's the division. It's a division

00:27:22.640 between two different ways of conceiving or structuring your identity.

00:27:29.840 That also plays into arguments about national identity because one view would have it that,

00:27:33.960 well, you are born in a particular part of the world, you are brought up within a particular

00:27:38.220 national culture and tradition, and therefore you have a kind of identity which you haven't

00:27:42.420 chosen and which is part of you and which is important for you that it's maintained

00:27:49.480 and it's upheld, otherwise the world is going to become a rather strange, threatening place

00:27:52.920 for you.

00:27:53.920 The contrary view is that, no, you're living in a world of easy travel, of globally interconnected

00:28:01.140 cities, a world economy which has long supply chains that go halfway around the world to

00:28:07.160 produce everyday products, and in that world, you basically can choose to live where you

00:28:13.040 want, be the kind of person you want, and you can also, to a great degree, construct

00:28:16.880 a kind of whole set of overlapping identities for yourself by almost picking and choosing

00:28:21.300 between different cultural traditions. Those are two radically different ways of understanding

00:28:25.200 what social identity is, and I think that's what the big division is.

00:28:29.700 And that also ties into Brexit, because Brexit is whether you see yourself as UK and whether

00:28:34.520 you see yourself as European. The question I really wanted to ask is, is this the end

00:28:38.320 of the Labour Party as we know it? I think in some senses, when Jeremy Corbyn won that

00:28:44.660 election, as I said at a sort of immediate aftermath of that, the Labour Party had been

00:28:50.000 transformed. It was a new party at that point. So what often happens actually in British politics

00:28:55.140 is that you have a party with the same name, but it's completely different from what that party was

00:29:01.740 10 years before. It's like the famous problem of Trigger's broom, you know, 10 new handles,

00:29:08.000 four new heads, but still the same broom. So in the same way, if you think about historically,

00:29:13.140 to give a historical example, the Conservative Party by the end of the 1920s was a completely

00:29:17.060 different kind of party in terms of the people who were in it, the people who voted for it,

00:29:20.980 to what it had been before the First World War. It had changed basically from being an

00:29:24.760 aristocratic party to being a business party, if you want to put it that way. So I think

00:29:28.920 what happened with the Labour Party is that it was a shell party. Under the Blair and

00:29:35.780 Brown, the party's membership had shrunk dramatically. There was almost nothing left.

00:29:40.520 And then all these thousands of Corbynistas joined the party with great enthusiasm and essentially it became a new party.

00:29:49.560 Now the question is what kind of party is that?

00:29:51.840 And I think the issue, which is what we were alluding to a moment ago, is is it going to continue being a traditional working class party

00:30:00.120 Or will it become a party of the radical populist left, like, say, Podemos in Spain or maybe the Greens in Germany or Syriza in Greece, that kind of thing?

00:30:13.440 I would have to say that that's an open question because the other factor in this is the trades unions, who are still, of course, enormously powerful institutions in the Labour Party.

00:30:22.120 And obviously they represent the traditional working class aspect of it.

00:30:25.960 However, the leadership of the trades unions has moved a long way away from those organizations' traditional working class roots.

00:30:33.060 So at the moment, we will probably have a party called the Labour Party around, but I suspect it is going to be less and less of a working class party.

00:30:41.620 Now, in that case, to go back to the point you raised earlier, what kind of political force is then going to be able to articulate working class interests and identity and concerns?

00:30:52.120 And that could have a rather bad answer if we're not careful.

00:30:55.320 So for Tommy Robinson, that's a very rich scene for him to plan.

00:30:59.920 If things don't work out, yes.

00:31:04.400 Fortunately, people like him are still largely not taken seriously or discredited

00:31:09.640 because of their association with thuggery and violence,

00:31:12.160 which, not surprisingly, puts a lot of people off.

00:31:15.060 The danger is that somebody will arise who is charismatic, persuasive, articulates the views and interests of a lot of people very effectively, but who doesn't have the kind of baggage that people like Tommy Robinson or the football lads or whatever they call themselves have.

00:31:31.540 Football lads alliance.

00:31:32.720 But you say the danger.

00:31:34.480 But if someone came along who, you know, we get a lot of shit, actually, for criticizing Tommy Robinson ourselves.

00:31:39.560 Yeah.

00:31:40.100 Oh, I do, yeah.

00:31:40.880 Yeah, you deserve it, though.

00:31:42.440 No, but the issue with him is I've listened to his Oxford Union talk.

00:31:49.640 He explains a lot of things quite articulately very well.

00:31:52.940 But it's the association with violence and thuggery, as you say, that for us is a problem.

00:31:57.320 A lot of people want us to interview him.

00:31:59.120 And we're like, well, he does say some things that are interesting and that are valid.

00:32:04.240 But that association is a problem for us.

00:32:06.700 Right. But if someone was to come along and articulate the views and the needs and the interests of working class people up and down this country who was not violent, who wasn't coming from that background, what's wrong with that?

00:32:19.960 Actually, I don't think there is anything wrong with that.

00:32:22.020 I mean, I think what you said it was a danger.

00:32:23.720 Well, OK. And let me rephrase or expand it slightly.

00:32:28.040 I think it is very dangerous to have a significant block of voters whose views, concerns, interests are not being articulated.

00:32:35.240 That's very dangerous.

00:32:36.700 And one of the problems I think we've had in democratic politics in most developed countries over the last 30 years is the

00:32:43.540 narrowing of the range of concerns and interests that are represented. Basically, if you're a university graduate and

00:32:50.000 have a certain set of views and you're working in certain areas of the economy, things are pretty good.

00:32:55.260 Your views are being discussed, but a lot of other people it's not the case. That's very dangerous.

00:32:59.760 Now, the question is, given that, what form does the politics that represents those currently

00:33:06.280 unrepresented interests take?

00:33:08.240 So, if you like, in the past, working class interests were not represented at the end

00:33:11.700 of the 19th century.

00:33:13.200 So there were two different routes that their representation took.

00:33:16.520 One was for them to be represented by radical but democratic parties like the Labour Party,

00:33:23.560 parties that were not prepared to subvert civil liberties, were committed to preserving

00:33:28.820 the main institutions of the democratic political process and the like.

00:33:32.520 The other route in, say, France, for example, was to go and vote for the Communist Party,

00:33:37.640 a revolutionary party that, to put it mildly, was not interested in maintaining democratic norms or liberal rights.

00:33:45.560 So when we are talking about an unrepresented working class or a working class that feels itself to be unrepresented,

00:33:52.440 which amounts to the same thing, the question is then what kind of politics comes along to express it.

00:33:58.160 If it's a kind of politics which does articulate their concerns and interests but combines that with a kind of radical revolutionary rhetoric or a commitment to violence and the destruction of their political opponents, that's extremely dangerous.

00:34:13.460 On the other hand, if it is a kind of politics which says,

00:34:16.320 look, here we have a set of views and concerns that are not being taken seriously,

00:34:19.640 we think they should be taken seriously,

00:34:21.400 but does so within what you might call the rules of the democratic system,

00:34:25.800 that can't help but be a good thing,

00:34:27.580 because it means that the people who disagree with those views

00:34:30.740 or who have queries about them will at least have to take them seriously

00:34:33.840 and engage with them, and that's what happens.

00:34:35.940 This is the thing.

00:34:36.800 Well, can I just...

00:34:37.820 Now, we've been talking about this political figure.

00:34:39.740 Maybe it's me because I'm not as okay with politics as everyone.

00:34:45.360 But we're talking about this figure who has led a movement

00:34:48.040 that is a little bit revolutionary,

00:34:50.500 addresses working-class people's views.

00:34:53.300 It's Nigel Farage, isn't it?

00:34:54.800 That's what I was about to say.

00:34:55.520 To some degree, yes, absolutely.

00:34:57.640 The problem that I think Nigel Farage and the element of view

00:35:04.100 that he represented had was that he was articulating those concerns

00:35:09.540 But he also combined it with a kind of economic position, which personally I favor, but which was not going to, I think, appeal to the audience he was also speaking for.

00:35:20.000 Because I think the crucial thing is that you've got, if you think of there being a four-way block, four quadrants, really,

00:35:27.940 if the vertical axis up here is this whole question of identity that we're talking about, the other axis is how you feel about economics still.

00:35:37.800 And so you've got on the one hand down here a block of voters, largely working class, not entirely, who are both left-wing on economics and nationalist or culturally traditionalist.

00:35:49.580 Over here you have a block of voters who share the cultural traditionalism, but who are much more free market or less left of center in economics.

00:35:58.600 Now up here on the other hand you've got on the one hand the kind of people that the independent group are appealing to, liberal cosmopolitan, broadly free market, very globalist.

00:36:07.080 And up here, you've got the far left, you've got momentum and the Greens.

00:36:09.740 Now, the problem is that I think Nigel Farage is down in this quadrant and his economic view,

00:36:14.820 his views on things like national identity, opposition to the EU,

00:36:18.480 they appeal to those working class voters over here, but his economic views did not.

00:36:22.540 The big gap in the market, if you will, is for a party that is left of centre in economics,

00:36:29.700 but traditionally nationalist, what I would call a national collectivist party.

00:36:34.700 This is what the Front National in France is.

00:36:36.820 That's what Marine Le Pen has turned it into.

00:36:39.040 And I think that that's the kind of big gap in the market, if you will.

00:36:42.720 It's like a left-wing Nigel Farage.

00:36:44.700 Exactly. Something like that.

00:36:46.160 And isn't that what the Labour Party used to be?

00:36:48.980 Indeed.

00:36:50.040 But it hasn't been that for a long time.

00:36:52.220 Because I think what happened was that from as early as the 1960s,

00:36:56.000 perhaps certainly from the 1980s onwards,

00:36:57.840 the Labour Party became much less of a working-class party

00:37:01.080 in terms of its leadership anyway,

00:37:02.580 and much more dominated by middle-class professionals

00:37:04.820 who tended to emphasise the social aspect of the Labour Party's gender

00:37:10.500 rather than the economic aspect.

00:37:13.120 And do you think a lot of this comes from politicians who are career politicians

00:37:16.760 and their detachment from everyday people and their issues

00:37:20.900 and the travails that they have and the difficulties that they face?

00:37:24.560 To some degree, but I think that's a phenomenon really of the last 15,

00:37:27.880 no more than 20 years, career politicians of that kind.

00:37:31.080 the political class as I referred to earlier. I think what you've got with our MPs are in

00:37:37.740 a better position actually than MP or politicians in many other countries because they represent

00:37:42.200 particular geographical constituencies and because every week they have to go and do

00:37:46.120 surgeries and they actually come into contact with voters on a much more direct basis I

00:37:51.760 think, than politicians in, say, France or Germany or Italy do.

00:37:57.440 So there's a constant of feedback mechanism there.

00:38:02.440 The problem is, though, that to get a nomination to advance

00:38:06.340 within the party machinery to get to the point

00:38:08.980 where you get a winnable seat, you

00:38:10.960 have to become one of these professional politicians.

00:38:16.080 Didn't used to be the case.

00:38:17.320 There used to be lots of ways in which you could get into politics.

00:38:20.440 You could do it through being in the law or business,

00:38:22.780 particularly in the Conservative Party.

00:38:24.320 You could do it through being a trade union official

00:38:26.180 or activist in the Labour Party.

00:38:28.000 Both parties took people from the military

00:38:30.200 and other professions.

00:38:31.780 That's no longer the case.

00:38:32.900 You can only become an MP by going through a very strictly

00:38:38.060 structured career route, which involves having no proper job,

00:38:42.840 or what most people regard as a proper job,

00:38:46.220 going to a very limited number of academic institutions

00:38:49.020 junior academic career, and basically studying a pretty limited range of topics.

00:38:53.260 The number of people who've done PPE at Oxford or in Parliament is remarkable.

00:38:58.040 And the result is there for an extremely narrow basis.

00:39:00.620 Now, having then got into Parliament, that process I described means they're then made to realise that maybe the world they've been working in for 9, 10 years or so is not the whole of the world.

00:39:12.460 But the problem is that's what they are.

00:39:15.040 And so I think, yes, that is a problem.

00:39:16.220 And do you think, given that you've talked about the fact that we're going to get possibly a few hung parliaments and that lack of decisiveness that we crave from the first-parts-the-post system, do you think we need PR? Do you think we need proportional representation?

00:39:29.420 I think I would support some kinds of PR, but not others, basically. I would be totally against any kind of proportional representation that relied on a list system, because that would give even more power to party bureaucracies.

00:39:44.000 If anyone is not familiar with that, Steve, just break it down.

00:39:46.080 OK. In many countries like the Netherlands, for example, or Israel, which is the most extreme case,

00:39:51.500 you just vote for a party and the party has a list of candidates.

00:39:56.000 And depending on, let's say, that the party wins 10% of the vote,

00:40:00.700 you go down its list until you reach the number of people who make 10% of the legislature

00:40:06.860 and they're the ones to become MPs.

00:40:08.640 That means that what determines whether or not you get into the legislature

00:40:11.240 is how high you are on the list.

00:40:13.080 So that gives enormous power to the party managers, and I don't approve that at all.

00:40:18.440 I would strongly support the Irish system, which is where you have a multi-member seat,

00:40:24.260 a seat with three to five MPs, which often corresponds to the local government unit,

00:40:29.620 and you basically then rank the candidates in order of preference.

00:40:34.500 And the good thing there is that if you're the voter, you can give a first preference vote to somebody from one party,

00:40:40.060 but a second preference vote to somebody you like from a different party.

00:40:43.080 And also you vote within the party that you support, as well as between parties.

00:40:47.880 So if you are a Remainer Conservative in that system, you can vote only for people like Anna Soubry.

00:40:53.760 Conversely, if you're a Lever Conservative, you can make sure that Jacob Rees-Mogg gets your number one vote,

00:40:58.020 and you never give a vote to Heidi Allen.

00:41:01.100 So I quite like that system.

00:41:04.280 Failing that, the only other kind of PR system I would support is the German system,

00:41:09.840 where you have single-member seats, but then there's a top-up.

00:41:12.320 This is what they use in the Scottish Parliament as well.

00:41:15.040 And, Steve, we're going to go back to Brexit briefly

00:41:18.320 because we are, to use the term, hurtling out or crashing out.

00:41:23.000 I mean, is that a bad thing?

00:41:26.040 Is it a good thing?

00:41:27.420 And where do you stand on Brexit?

00:41:30.040 Because I've got no idea anymore.

00:41:31.700 Well, I was actually on the fence in terms of Brexit

00:41:34.380 until really quite late on in the referendum campaign.

00:41:37.220 It was only about a week before the vote

00:41:38.560 that I decided I was going to vote leave.

00:41:40.760 And I did so with the firm opinion that both of the campaigns were doing their best to get me to vote for the other side.

00:41:47.740 They were so utterly useless in terms of the quality of their argumentation.

00:41:52.240 And I decided to vote Leave for two reasons.

00:41:54.520 One is because I think that not being in the EU will open up the range of options for British policymakers and the British electorate.

00:42:02.740 Right now, there's a whole range of particular policy positions, some good, some bad,

00:42:07.400 that you just can't follow because they violate EU rules and regulations.

00:42:11.980 So a kind of radical free market policy is not possible,

00:42:15.340 but also a radical socialist policy isn't possible,

00:42:17.980 which is why I'm quite convinced Jeremy Corbyn voted leave, by the way.

00:42:21.880 As is pretty much everyone, I suspect.

00:42:25.680 So that's one reason.

00:42:26.920 The other reason is I think that I strongly suspect that the EU

00:42:31.680 will not be around in its current form in five years.

00:42:34.700 It may well have collapsed altogether because it has fundamental design flaws, which are acts of hubris that the European politicians engaged in at the Maastricht conference.

00:42:45.600 Obviously, the euro, which pretty much every economist on the planet told them was a total disaster.

00:42:51.040 But also, I think the whole idea of an EU, common EU citizenship, I think that was an act of hubris because there is no European demos.

00:42:58.800 people still think of themselves as French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Spanish, not European.

00:43:06.660 So I think that if the hotels are burning, better to get out before the ceiling comes in, is my view.

00:43:11.860 But you don't think crashing out without a deal.

00:43:14.500 We both voted Remain, by the way.

00:43:16.440 Because we're good people.

00:43:17.180 Yeah, there we go.

00:43:18.660 He always does that joke.

00:43:19.760 We always get a ton of hate for it online.

00:43:21.840 So now it's become a catchphrase.

00:43:23.560 Yeah.

00:43:25.060 But we both voted Remain.

00:43:26.760 But do you not think this idea of crashing out without a deal is going to be horrific?

00:43:31.860 Everyone's going to die. We're all going to be eating rats.

00:43:33.960 No. The term crashing out is actually a loaded propagandist term.

00:43:40.340 What that actually means is that we will legally leave

00:43:43.000 and we will then revert to trading with the EU on World Trade Organization rules.

00:43:48.180 That's what the actual legal situation will be.

00:43:52.100 Now, I'm not saying it will be painless, actually.

00:43:55.280 there will be significant disruption if we leave without a worked out trade deal if we go to

00:44:00.840 trading on WTO rules. The reason is that what we have is a lot of transnational supply chains

00:44:07.260 particularly for manufacturing but for other sectors as well and those supply chains will

00:44:12.080 be significantly disrupted in the short term through things like customs checks and controls

00:44:16.300 and because so much production is done on a just-in-time basis what that means is that

00:44:21.720 things could be delayed by say two or three hours and believe it or not that actually can disrupt

00:44:28.340 the entire productive process because everything's done on a just-in-time basis. However I think that

00:44:33.240 would be sorted out in less than a year. There will be a whole series of specific agreements made

00:44:38.540 which would sort out particular problems like for example aircraft not being allowed to take off

00:44:43.460 from British airports and fly over European airspace. I think that will be sorted out very

00:44:47.520 very quickly, for example. So I think that, yes, there is disruption for leaving without a worked

00:44:53.920 out trade deal in place and reverting to WTO rules. But the disruption is not going to be the

00:45:00.660 kind of catastrophic end of the world that we're being told it will be by a lot of the press. That

00:45:05.960 is quite simply scare tactics, quite often deliberately designed to panic the public.

00:45:11.760 But having, I fear actually for them, the exact opposite effect. Everyone's thinking, my God,

00:45:16.140 not another scare story. And they're actually ignoring what might be genuine problems in

00:45:21.060 some cases. But also, it's a case of taking a hypothetical worst case scenario and assuming

00:45:31.220 that because this might happen, therefore it has to happen. And so you will get these

00:45:36.240 reports saying, oh, companies have done contingency planning for running out of food or things

00:45:41.660 like that. So the implication is, therefore, this is what's going to happen. That's wrong.

00:45:47.020 Contingencies are things that might happen, not necessarily things that are going to happen or

00:45:52.540 even have a probability of happening. And any company in its right mind with responsible

00:45:58.240 directors and managers is going to plan for contingencies. That's what you always do. You

00:46:03.540 always plan for worst case scenarios and things going completely, you know,

00:46:08.800 pear-shaped, you would be responsible not to do it. But that doesn't mean that the probability

00:46:14.720 of things going totally pear-shaped is actually as high as people often think it is, much less

00:46:20.800 the certainty that some of the press reports would have you believe. And every time I go on

00:46:27.500 my Facebook, I just see a list of companies that are leaving. It's going to be the end of trade as

00:46:32.540 we know it. Britain is going to become, you know, is it realistic that we're going to lose a lot of

00:46:37.540 trade to the EU? No. There are two things that are going on there. Well, three things, actually.

00:46:42.900 One is that quite a lot of this is changes that would have happened anyway. So Honda shutting

00:46:47.400 down the factory in Swindon, for example, that's something that would have happened in any event.

00:46:51.280 Honda is basically relocating all its production back to Japan. They've shut down a factory in

00:46:55.640 Turkey as well, and Turkey has a trade deal with the EU. So some of this is stuff that would have

00:46:59.960 happened anyway, and it's now just a convenient excuse to say it was because of Brexit.

00:47:03.600 it. Sometimes there will be changes because it may be, for example, that if you have one

00:47:09.020 of those supply chains, you'll relocate part of what goes on in the UK over to Europe because

00:47:14.160 it will then become less costly because you won't incur perhaps customs charges. So there

00:47:18.420 is some of that going on as well. On the other hand, what you've also got is trade just going

00:47:24.380 on as it did before. And I think that is actually going to be the bulk of what you see simply

00:47:28.800 because making big changes like that is very costly. And people are not going to do that

00:47:32.940 if they can possibly avoid it.

00:47:34.760 Plus, the EU exports a very large amount to us.

00:47:38.980 We have been running a very large trade deficit with the EU,

00:47:42.940 basically with Germany, for most of the last 20 years.

00:47:46.860 And it's been getting worse and worse,

00:47:49.740 in the sense we are selling less and less to the EU.

00:47:52.240 The Germans in particular are selling more and more to us.

00:47:54.900 Conversely, our exports to the world outside the EU

00:47:57.780 are steadily growing, both in absolute terms

00:48:00.200 and as a proportion of total British trade and GDP over the last 10 years.

00:48:05.260 So we are already less integrated with the rest of Europe than most other EU countries are.

00:48:11.160 And for that reason, I think the impact on the British economy is not going to be as big as most people imagine.

00:48:16.540 Are we going to have a second referendum?

00:48:18.140 No, absolutely not. I would put strong money on that.

00:48:20.960 I'd give you really long odds against the second referendum

00:48:24.120 because there's a clear and overwhelming majority against it in Parliament.

00:48:28.080 And do you think Theresa May is going to...

00:48:31.120 What's going to happen, do you think, with the Conservative Party?

00:48:34.680 Because it's interesting because Labour are in crisis,

00:48:37.380 and we talk about Labour a lot,

00:48:38.660 but we really haven't mentioned the Tories.

00:48:41.080 They are also in crisis.

00:48:42.760 The problem at the moment is that Theresa May wants to put through Brexit

00:48:47.900 and she wants to do that purely relying upon Conservative and DUP votes.

00:48:55.620 She knows that if she puts through a deal which involves making a deal with the Labour Party,

00:49:00.740 because of the terms that Labour MPs would insist on, which involves being in the customs union,

00:49:06.220 it would provoke an enormous split in her own party.

00:49:09.200 Basically, if she reached out to Jeremy Corbyn or, beyond him, Labour backbenchers,

00:49:15.000 and she made a deal, probably Norway Plus, as it's often called,

00:49:18.580 going in the European economic area, remaining in the free trade area,

00:49:24.840 then about all of the ERG, about a third of the party would walk out.

00:49:30.480 They would effectively stand on their own platform as a separate party in all but name.

00:49:35.140 I suspect they would keep the Conservative label, but they would effectively be a new party.

00:49:39.400 She obviously wants to avoid that at almost any cost.

00:49:41.860 The problem is it's not easy to see how she can come up with any kind of deal

00:49:47.200 that will command the support of enough Tory MPs

00:49:50.760 and other MPs to get through Parliament.

00:49:52.660 So she's in a very tricky position.

00:49:54.380 So the Tory party is facing a really serious division,

00:49:58.520 just like the Labour Party is.

00:50:00.020 Now, Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand,

00:50:01.500 he also wants Theresa May to put through a Brexit deal

00:50:03.960 with only Tory votes,

00:50:05.700 because he wants Brexit to happen,

00:50:07.900 but he wants the Conservative Party to take the blame for it.

00:50:12.560 And so he thinks that then he can say,

00:50:14.440 well, OK, we've left now.

00:50:16.260 Now is the time for a radical socialist policy

00:50:18.440 to deal with the problems the Tories have left us with

00:50:21.300 and let's forget about Brexit

00:50:24.180 and get on with electing a Labour government

00:50:25.560 and meanwhile blame the Conservatives

00:50:27.400 for any kind of bad news that does happen in the aftermath.

00:50:31.380 But his problem is the mirror image of Theresa May's,

00:50:34.900 which is A, he's got a block of MPs, as we can see,

00:50:37.600 because they're leaving now,

00:50:38.820 who are just totally against that

00:50:40.640 because they're totally anti-leaving.

00:50:42.740 But he's also got a lot of MPs

00:50:44.600 who, if the choice is between making a deal with Theresa May and leaving without a deal,

00:50:50.340 they'd rather make a deal with Theresa May.

00:50:51.980 Now, it's an interesting question what will happen in Parliament in the next month.

00:50:56.160 It may be that we actually see the coming together of a coalition of MPs beyond the

00:51:01.700 party leadership who will support something like Norway+.

00:51:04.280 Now, whether the EU would then agree to that is another matter.

00:51:08.020 I suspect not, because quite reasonably they've said that you can't be in the single market

00:51:13.260 and the tariff union unless you also accept free movement of labour quite reasonably.

00:51:20.860 They're saying you can't cherry-pick one part of the deal and leave the rest out.

00:51:25.580 And I think there's no way most Conservative MPs would support that.

00:51:30.620 On the other hand, you never know, the EU also doesn't want Britain to leave on WTO terms.

00:51:35.240 That would be very disruptive for them.

00:51:37.380 So they might well actually go along with some kind of tweaked Norway deal.

00:51:40.920 But the question is whether or not enough MPs are prepared at the last minute to break their party whip to form a cross-party coalition.

00:51:48.540 I can't remember, I was talking to someone involved in politics who said that the EU are notorious for making last-minute deals.

00:51:54.140 Do you think we're going to get a deal at the 24th hour?

00:51:56.280 Yes, probably.

00:51:57.420 I mean, I think the typical thing that happens is that you get lots and lots of photographs of tired and maybe slightly intoxicated EU figures

00:52:07.780 staggering out of luxury hotels at 3 or 4 in the morning.

00:52:10.920 After some, they've pulled an all-nighter of, like, crash negotiations.

00:52:14.300 I suspect something like that may happen.

00:52:16.280 The only reason why it might well not happen

00:52:18.820 is that the issue of the Irish border is particularly intractable and difficult.

00:52:23.780 And it's not easy to see how it's even possible for a deal to be made

00:52:28.360 that will actually command a majority in Parliament.

00:52:31.300 Well, you know, it's interesting times when the only party not in crisis are the Lib Dems.

00:52:36.020 Yeah.

00:52:36.700 It's funny times.

00:52:37.960 Well, I was listening to the radio, maybe it was news night,

00:52:40.920 last night, and there was a Remainer Conservative talking about how if we leave under WTO rules,

00:52:47.920 he will leave the party.

00:52:49.000 This is very true.

00:52:49.820 I think Theresa May is in an extremely difficult position, just like Jeremy Corbyn is.

00:52:54.660 On the one hand, if she makes a deal, the only way she can get a deal through Parliament

00:52:58.300 is to make a deal with a lot of Labour MPs.

00:53:00.440 If she does that, the ERG and the Tory Brexiteers will effectively leave the party.

00:53:05.620 If, on the other hand, she doesn't do that,

00:53:08.140 given that there's no majority for any deal she's got in Parliament,

00:53:13.700 that means we would leave in WTO deals, we would have a no-deal exit,

00:53:16.780 and at that point, a whole lot of people like Dominic Grieve, Amber Rudd, David Gork,

00:53:22.220 about half the Cabinet and a big chunk of the party would leave the party then

00:53:25.320 and go over to join the trade.

00:53:27.120 So she's...

00:53:28.780 Fucked!

00:53:30.820 Yes, yes.

00:53:32.260 You can say that.

00:53:33.480 Yes. Basically, it's like in Persian mythology, when you die, you have to go across a bridge

00:53:39.220 and the bridge gets narrower and narrower as you walk across it.

00:53:43.400 And if you're virtuous, you make it to the other side.

00:53:45.400 But if you're not, you just fall off and there's a bunch of crocodiles down there to tear you apart.

00:53:49.400 And that's pretty much what she's in.

00:53:51.360 The options are getting narrower all the time.

00:53:53.460 And Jeremy Corbyn is in a similarly very difficult position.

00:53:56.560 Do you know the one thing that I'm going to take away for this interview is,

00:54:00.080 and I hope you do as well,

00:54:01.300 is if you've got ambitions

00:54:02.740 to go into politics,

00:54:04.140 don't become the leader

00:54:04.960 of a major political party.

00:54:06.780 No.

00:54:07.700 It's just unbelievable.

00:54:09.220 No, absolutely.

00:54:10.040 But what I find interesting

00:54:10.940 with Corbyn is

00:54:11.740 he's got this aura

00:54:13.020 of this principled man

00:54:14.640 who stands up for everything.

00:54:19.840 Is that door closed, Anton?

00:54:21.380 Yeah.

00:54:21.940 Just check,

00:54:22.940 because I see some flapping about.

00:54:27.500 Yeah.

00:54:28.280 We'll do that bit again.

00:54:29.720 Yeah.

00:54:30.580 That's the first time that's happened.

00:54:33.100 So what I find interesting with Corbyn, though, is that this guy came to lead the Labour Party under this aura of being principled and honest and speaking truth to power and saying it like it is.

00:54:46.100 And as you say, he probably voted leave and isn't admitting it.

00:54:49.960 He's hedging his bets.

00:54:51.480 He's trying to get the Conservatives to put through Brexit, which is what he wants to happen, under the guise that he doesn't want it to happen.

00:54:59.080 And it kind of puts into question his whole status as this honest, true-speaking guy, doesn't it?

00:55:04.580 Well, the point is he's doing his job.

00:55:07.380 I mean, his job is to hold the Labour Party's electoral coalition together

00:55:11.280 and, if possible, to use that electoral coalition to gain power and have a Labour government.

00:55:16.020 Now, everything he does makes sense in that light.

00:55:20.520 If he comes out and says, well, actually, I think we should leave the EU

00:55:24.780 because that would make a more radical economic policy possible,

00:55:27.860 which is almost certainly his view.

00:55:29.360 He's come pretty close to saying that.

00:55:31.760 Of course, a huge chunk of the Labour Party's MPs

00:55:34.360 and his membership would have a total fit

00:55:38.000 and the party would disintegrate.

00:55:39.280 I would love that so much.

00:55:40.180 So he wouldn't win power.

00:55:41.360 On the other hand, if he comes out ardently for pro-Remain,

00:55:45.200 as people like Polly Toymy and The Guardian want him to do,

00:55:48.260 and campaigns to stay in or have a referendum,

00:55:50.560 then he would lose a whole ton of seats in the north of England

00:55:53.960 and a whole bunch of working-class voters to the Conservatives

00:55:56.900 or even a renaissance UKIP.

00:55:59.080 So he can't do that.

00:56:00.220 So he's basically doing what he has to do to do his job.

00:56:03.420 And that's what politicians' job is about.

00:56:05.620 The idea that you can just say whatever you like in politics

00:56:08.860 is extremely naive.

00:56:11.160 Anyone who's actually gone into politics should realise

00:56:13.920 there's no point in being in politics

00:56:16.420 if you don't actually get into power.

00:56:19.660 So obviously you have principles

00:56:21.700 and you don't compromise them totally.

00:56:23.760 But at the same time, you can't simply say openly

00:56:26.820 what you think all the time.

00:56:28.220 You have to do things that will keep together

00:56:29.980 the electoral coalition.

00:56:31.500 You need to win power.

00:56:33.460 Well, I think that's a great place to end it, really.

00:56:37.200 And the way we end every interview is always the same.

00:56:40.880 It's the same question.

00:56:42.340 Stephen, what's the one thing that we're not talking about

00:56:45.860 as a society or maybe in politics

00:56:48.200 that we really need to be talking about?

00:56:50.400 What a terrible idea meritocracy is.

00:56:53.700 Everybody at the moment seems to think

00:56:55.680 that meritocracy is a great idea. It's the way to go. It's one of those unexamined beliefs that

00:57:01.980 nobody really questions or challenges. I think it's one of the worst ideas ever. And it has

00:57:07.520 destroyed education in this country. And I think a lot of the argument we have about education at

00:57:13.260 both higher education level and school level is really beside the point. Because the real problem,

00:57:18.640 the thing that is destroying education as an activity, is that we use formal education as

00:57:23.420 the way to decide who gets high-paid, high-status jobs.

00:57:27.660 And this has had so many bad consequences, I hardly know where to start, from the kind

00:57:32.540 of arms race between pushy parents to get their kids into the right school and then

00:57:37.760 beyond that, the right college, to the way that higher education has become almost entirely

00:57:42.260 about getting certifications which are supposed to give you a chance of a high-paid, high-status

00:57:47.620 job, but increasingly not so because of overproduction of graduates, basically.

00:57:52.560 for the number of graduate positions available.

00:57:56.160 And so I think that's a really bad idea,

00:57:58.600 but it has not been subject to any kind of serious criticism.

00:58:02.540 Hold on.

00:58:03.120 So just for clarification,

00:58:05.640 when I think of meritocracy,

00:58:08.180 I think of the best person for the job gets the job.

00:58:11.080 The most intelligent, capable, skilled whatever

00:58:15.860 gets the position, gets the promotion,

00:58:18.760 gets the advancement, right?

00:58:20.180 Now, who would be against that?

00:58:23.400 Well, you, apparently.

00:58:24.220 No, no, but that's not what meritocracy actually is.

00:58:26.480 That's why I wanted to clarify.

00:58:26.940 That's not exactly what it actually is.

00:58:28.380 There are two sort of other aspects to meritocracy.

00:58:32.080 One is the idea that the way you determine who the best person for the job is

00:58:36.640 is by formal academic qualifications.

00:58:39.300 That's highly questionable, to put it mildly.

00:58:41.980 But the really deep problem is that the unexamined and implicit assumption

00:58:49.080 is that certain kinds of work, certain kinds of job are better, more meritorious, more valuable,

00:58:56.400 more worthwhile than others. And what you do not want to do at any cost is to be doing a job that

00:59:04.760 is not meritorious, worthwhile, valuable and high status. And I think that is an outrageous idea

00:59:11.420 and wrong on so many levels that I don't know where to start. My view, very strong view, is that

00:59:17.300 all kinds of work have equal dignity and are equally valuable.

00:59:21.000 That doesn't mean they're going to be paid the same.

00:59:22.620 For economic reasons, they won't be.

00:59:24.120 But it does mean that all kinds of work should attract equal social status.

00:59:28.000 And the idea that some kinds of work should have a higher social status

00:59:31.940 and you then allocate them through this supposedly meritocratic system

00:59:36.480 of examinations and certification, I think that's a disgraceful idea.

00:59:40.640 Well, we will leave it there.

00:59:42.060 Dr. Stephen Davies, thank you very much for coming on.

00:59:44.220 You're on Twitter at?

00:59:45.200 Steve365

00:59:47.540 Steve365, we'll put that in the video

00:59:49.380 as always follow us at TriggerPod

00:59:51.500 on all the social media, subscribe to the YouTube channel

00:59:53.580 click that bell next to the subscribe button

00:59:55.360 and give us a review on iTunes, thank you

00:59:57.500 very much and we will see you very soon

00:59:59.400 take care guys, thank you very much and thanks

01:00:01.520 for watching, bye bye

01:00:15.200 You

TRIGGERnometry - March 03, 2019

Dr Steve Davies on the Independent Group and a Realignment of British Politics

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