00:03:39.620And the academic literature is actually pretty solid on this as well.
00:03:43.260The academic literature shows this and wouldn't dispute this.
00:03:46.780Now, some, of course, would dispute it, but certainly when it comes to immigration, a lot of the academic, there was a meta-analysis done, which is an analysis of all the literature, and they find essentially that how poor you are, whether you're unemployed or not, whether you've lost your job, those are not things that predict your immigration attitudes, and these are not things that are driving right-wing populism.
00:04:06.900So the mainstream narrative right now is essentially people have nothing to live on, people don't have a job, like you say, and they're lashing out against immigrants because that's where we normally channel our anger when we've lost out and whatever.
00:12:23.100We have to stick to the definition, and we can't sort of let that definition creep and expand to encompass anything that especially the left doesn't like, whether that's nationalism, whether that's majority group identity, etc.
00:12:36.740That's been part of the problem, because as that definition has crept out and shut down debate, because when you say something's racist, you're saying it's disgusting, it's beyond the pale, so we can't talk about it.
00:12:48.620And what that does is it then pushes it off the agenda of mainstream politics.
00:12:53.440And that then, it's like saying we can't sell alcohol, so who's going to rush in and fill that gap?
00:12:59.120It's not going to be a mainstream party.
00:13:00.900It's going to be the Sweden Democrats, for example.
00:13:03.240In Sweden, you couldn't talk about immigration.
00:15:23.020Or some of them are rapists. I agree with you. That's a racist statement.
00:15:25.900I think we need to distinguish that from, say, celebrating the arrival of Christopher Columbus, for example, or even the wall.
00:15:35.500I mean, the wall is actually not racist.
00:15:37.960If you think about a wall, okay, if you've got an illegal immigration problem, you decide to build a wall, there's nothing actually racist about that.
00:15:46.460However, when you point to a group like Muslims or Mexicans and you say something nasty or generalizing about them, that is racist.
00:15:53.620because, again, it's that distinction, or as I'm using the term,
00:15:57.140it's a distinction between antipathy to an out-group
00:21:24.120I mean, you raise that point, and we were talking about white indigenous cultures.
00:21:28.480I used to work a lot in the East End of London,
00:21:32.520and one thing that I noticed, like you said,
00:21:34.440a lot of them would be pro-Brexit or leave voters, white working class.
00:21:38.680But what I also noticed as well is that there tended to be a sort of resentment
00:21:44.080because they would notice that people, so immigrants would be coming in,
00:21:48.360they'd be in an area for a period of time and then they would move on,
00:21:53.580whereas the white, essentially the white population would remain in that area.
00:21:59.780Do you not think a lot of that as well is that resentment,
00:22:02.820that they feel that they're not getting a good end of the deal, as it were?
00:22:07.540And what they want is a politician to come and come in, like Trump, and redress the balance.
00:22:14.400Well, it depends what you mean by a deal.
00:22:16.640I mean, in the Brexit vote, it is true that people who are poorer were somewhat more likely to vote leave.
00:22:22.840So there is some truth to it in the Brexit vote, whereas in the Trump vote, there's almost zero evidence for that.
00:22:29.220What I would say is that it's true that there is some of that, but by far,
00:22:32.680You know, a much more important question than whether people are deprived or are not being able to move would be something like, do you support the death penalty, or what's your views on immigration?
00:22:42.800You know, these are much deeper questions in terms of getting at that cultural attitude.
00:22:47.760I mean, this is one of the reasons why education, having a degree or not, is so much more important for predicting the populist right voting than income.
00:22:56.020So you can be a wealthy plumber, for example, and you're very wealthy, you're very safe and secure, but because that educational qualification, getting a degree is linked to certain kinds of worldviews and cultural attitudes, it's a much more powerful predictor of support for the populist right.
00:23:15.040So, again, it's tapping a more cultural orientation rather than material orientations.
00:23:21.580And even when it comes to, for example, resenting politicians or the system, that, too, is not a predictor of populist right voting.
00:23:30.840So, you know, Brexiteers, voters for the Green Party, voters for the Labour Party, especially for Corbyn.
00:23:37.800But there isn't really a difference when you ask questions like, you know, decisions should be made by the people and not politicians, or Westminster politicians are remote.
00:23:46.260There are a number of these questions in the British election study, which all show that this is not something that predicts support for Brexit.
00:23:53.360And I think we have to go – by the way, this is the other thing I talk about a lot in the book, is we really have to go to these large-scale individual-level data sets to be able to control for these – you know, you put income in there, you stratify by age.
00:24:06.280So you can control for all these different effects, and once you do that, you actually see how unimportant something like income is compared to these attitudes.
00:24:15.960Death penalty is the clearest one, because that gives you a much stronger take on whether someone voted for leave than something like class.
00:24:24.520Oh, really? So if you agree with the death penalty, you're far more likely to be a leave voter?
00:24:31.500And is it a mark of, like, conservatism or authoritarianism, is that what it is?
00:24:37.560Yeah, so it's a mark of what they call authoritarianism, which I think is a somewhat unfortunate term, you know, reflects the orientation of academia, which is fine.
00:24:46.760I mean, of course, we can think what we want about the death penalty, but it's also linked to views on child rearing, strict versus permissive.
00:24:54.140So strict child rearing, views on death penalty would be another one.
00:24:58.240So these kinds of predictors, which all fall under the rubric of authoritarianism, that's a much more powerful predictor of, say, populist right voting than anything related to class or income.
00:25:11.820All right. Well, we are where we are with this, right, with immigration and with the whole conversation.
00:25:18.260If we accept everything that you say in the book, which is that's what's driving it,
00:25:23.740what do you project going forward if we keep doing what we've been doing?
00:29:28.020Your class, your income, your opportunities aren't affected so much.
00:29:32.580I think you can have that kind of a society.
00:29:35.140So there are groups like in Central Asia, like the Turkmen or the Pashtun and these other groups where, you know, you have people who look very white and you have people who look very South Asian.
00:29:43.500And that doesn't seem to be the basis for social stratification.
00:29:46.580So, yeah, I would hope we could avoid the Latin American model if possible.
00:32:24.680So I think you can actually get at those fears.
00:32:27.340And also the other thing is I think you need to have a vision
00:32:29.100for what's going to happen to the white majority.
00:32:32.760If you just say, you guys are going to shrink,
00:32:35.960we're going to get more diverse, celebrate that.
00:32:38.860It's just, that's actually, it'll work for the more cosmopolitan-minded members of, and this is again down to psychology, some people like that change and they're going to embrace that, but for a significant chunk of the population, that's not going to wash, they're going to want some vision of where they're going.
00:32:54.980And partly that's why this idea of white shift is, okay, you know, it is true that what I'm arguing here is that this mixed race group is essentially going to carry forth the memories, the myths, the history of this, what is currently the white group.
00:33:09.780If people can, if the white majorities can see something positive in that, then maybe they can say, okay, we've got a positive future too.
00:33:19.160You know, I think some way of giving them a future, whereas if you just say we're getting more diverse and that's great, I think that's going to further the kind of polarization that we're seeing.
00:33:31.740So it sounds like the prescription that you have is it would be reducing the levels of immigration while reassuring the white majority that immigrants who come here are going to integrate, they're going to become part of society, they will intermarry, and we all live happily ever after together.
00:33:48.600Yeah, yeah. So part of this is to say that, you know, the average person thinks the number of immigrants or the number of Muslims is two or three times higher than it actually is.
00:33:58.680So if we've got a problem, the problem is that the narrative of change and diversity is dominant.
00:34:04.860And what we need more of is the narrative of actually, there's a lot of people intermarrying, and actually, you know, all those European immigrants, their kids are identifying as white British, and they're being, you know, essentially they're part of you.
00:34:17.580And the Afro-Caribbeans, half of them marry out, and the mixed-race offspring marry mostly whites.
00:34:24.280So there's a narrative of kind of melting and reducing the threat that actually they're joining you, you know, and that, in fact, they're not so different.
00:34:34.000I mean, that's the kind of thing that you want to emphasize.
00:34:37.340So it's completely under the radar, all of that knowledge about how much voluntary assimilation is going on.
00:34:43.520Even Muslims, not so much in this country, but, like, in France, you know, over half, I think it's about half of Algerians, French Algerians, marry outside the group.
00:34:55.720So a lot of French Muslims are actually secular, and they're marrying out, and nobody knows that.
00:35:01.540You know, these are the kinds of things that need to be more widely known so that people actually can think, okay, you know, it's not a case of we're just going to be outnumbered and threatened.
00:35:11.260So part of what I advocate is moving to a different style of political communication, especially for conservative whites.
00:35:46.340Well, I don't, I'm not making a prescription.
00:35:48.700What I'm saying is that if the public is not comfortable with the rate of ethnic change and they're willing to pay the economic price, well, then the immigration numbers should come down.
00:35:59.500I'm saying that maybe when the majority gets comfortable with this idea that they're growing through assimilation,
00:36:07.500then maybe they'll relax a bit, and then maybe those numbers will come back up again.
00:36:12.500But one of the problems that I see, particularly with that left narrative that says,
00:36:18.500you know, it's racist to be in favor of reducing immigration,
00:36:21.500especially reducing immigration because you're uncomfortable with the ethnocultural consequences,
00:36:26.500I mean, that is still essentially a taboo.
00:36:28.500a taboo. I mean, even Steve Bannon, you know, was interviewed when he had that interview with
00:36:34.400The Economist, and he was saying, I'm an economic nationalist, which is nonsense. Actually, if you
00:36:39.400look at the support base and what drives the Trump vote, it is not economic nationalism. It is
00:36:44.220essentially a cultural sense of cultural loss. So because of that taboo over what I would call
00:36:52.920sort of this idea of casting ethno-traditional conservatism as racism,
00:36:58.540attachment to your own group if you're white as racism.
00:37:01.080Because of that narrative, it prevents open discussion of this.
00:37:05.500And I actually think it makes things worse in many ways.
00:37:07.600I mean, I think the Brexit vote, for example,
00:37:09.500to some extent the Brexit vote was an outcome of people who are upset at immigration,
00:37:14.920more upset at non-European than European immigration, by the way,
00:37:17.840and if you actually look at the polling, the survey data on this,
00:40:39.880..then that's racism, and I think that's deplorable.
00:40:41.700If what they're saying is, I was attached to London that had a certain character, and I feel a sense of loss, I think that's very different.
00:40:51.700I think that's just a conservatism, and people should be able to express that sense of loss, and they should actually even be able to say, I don't want that to change as fast.
00:41:02.480So we can look at, say, African Americans in Harlem or black Britons in Brixton here in London.
00:41:08.360But, you know, let's say Brixton, and of course we know it's become a lot less black, become more white as hipsters and others are moving in.
00:41:16.420So you might be in Afro-Caribbean and Brixton saying, I miss the way Brixton used to be.
00:41:22.260And my view is, actually, that's just conservatism.
00:41:25.560That's not that you hate white people, right?
00:41:28.720So that's the kind of subtle differences that I think we need to talk about.
00:41:32.320But if you're saying, I hate those white people, then that's different.
00:41:36.020So that's why I think we need to make these distinctions.
00:41:40.260And actually, if you do surveys and you ask liberals and conservatives their views of why people don't like immigration,
00:41:47.940you will tend to get liberals thinking that it's the conservatives hate minorities.
00:41:53.480And the conservatives will say, no, they just are attached to their own group.
00:41:56.620So we're getting people kind of talking past each other and kind of seeing the other in a negative light.
00:42:03.380and I actually don't think that's necessarily the case.
00:42:30.420Right. Well, that's a very interesting story, which I kind of go to in the book. I'm not so much of a fan of these theories which say that this social justice warrior stuff is a new thing and it's related to social media.
00:42:41.820I mean, of course, those things have an impact. But I actually think you have to put this in the context of a much longer intellectual history and ideological development of the left that goes back even 200 years to utopian socialism and anarchism.
00:57:12.760And I think moderate people in the middle who are interested in truth and facts and evidence need to come together and have these conversations and try and, you know, make society more harmonious as we move forward.
00:57:23.040And I think that's if people were to actually read your book instead of reading three sentences and getting annoyed about it, I think that's where it's headed.
00:57:30.020So thank you very much for coming to speak to us.