＂I Knew Something Was Badly Wrong When They Censored The Scientists＂ - David Davis MP
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 9 minutes
Words per minute
169.83075
Harmful content
Misogyny
14
sentences flagged
Toxicity
4
sentences flagged
Hate speech
12
sentences flagged
Summary
David Davis is one of the few Tory MPs left who actually cares about civil liberties. And unlike many of them, he actually had a life before politics, and an interesting one. In this episode, he tells us about his early life in a slum in South London, growing up in a prefab house, and how he ended up in politics.
Transcript
00:00:11.000
Back when I was 18, we've at long last got to the point where Brexit is now looking like it's working, as it broadly should.
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Do you think that this Conservative Party values freedom?
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Well, I've already characterised, but the single most important things relate to freedom, right?
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If I'm going to have an identifier, I want it under my control.
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You may remember early on, some of us said, this looks like a virus that's come from a laboratory.
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And God, did you get pilloried for saying that online.
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That was the first point, by the way, in this whole process where I saw a French Nobel Prize winner effectively banned from talking about his expert subjects, you know?
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our brilliant guest today is one of the few MPs in this country left who actually cares about civil liberties.
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We don't normally talk to politicians because it's hard to get a straight answer out of you guys.
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But I get the sense that, A, you've kind of, you've been there.
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You've spoken up quite a lot about the things that you care about.
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And also, unlike many MPs, you actually had a life before politics and an interesting one.
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So I thought it would be a great place to start, actually.
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Tell us about your life and how you are where you are.
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Born son of a single mum, 1948, when it was unfashionable.
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I mean, because in those days, you know, you just didn't raise your own child.
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In the Second World War, when a stick of bombs went down the street, they would bulldoze the
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street and put little asbestos boxes, ready-made houses made in a factory, prefab.
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Everybody thinks it's terrible, you know, awful.
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Sounds like a Monty Python sketch, straight off.
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Actually, it was fantastic because they were well-designed, had nice central heating and
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My stepfather, working-class shop steward, actually, and we lived in a slum in South London,
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Literally, two up, two down, no electricity, gas, no indoor loo, no bathroom, tin, tin,
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I mean, that, frankly, it sounds terrible, but actually it was not that unusual, post-war.
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Then, past my 11 plus, most important, probably most important event of my life.
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When I passed my 11 plus, I went to grammar school.
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Ended up, I'll foreshorten this, I left home, you know, rather violent, disagree with my stepfather.
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I studied science, molecular sciences, and computer science.
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Pretty much the first computer science degree in the country.
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While I was there, Margaret Thatcher was the education secretary.
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And I became the national leader of the Conservative students,
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sort of thing called the Federation of Conservative students,
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I get to see Ted Heath, the prime minister, about four times a year.
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I then went to business school, London Business School.
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Spent my time working for Tate & Lyle as their troubleshooter, principally.
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Putting right companies losing money gone wrong.
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Because they all think it's terribly glamorous.
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And my parents weren't going to support my grant.
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So one way of doing it was to join the reserve SAS, which was arduous.
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This is like the Navy SEALs for an American audience, right?
00:06:08.000
Well, if you just take it in objective pass rate terms, the pass rate for the SAS is a
00:06:16.000
And, of course, the SAS in the first instance was probably the first of the modern special
00:06:37.000
The reserve SAS, not the regulars, had a rather dramatic...
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Our primary role in warfare, in the event of a conflict in Europe, was to jump in behind
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enemy lines, up to 300 kilometers behind enemy lines, find the targets, maybe create the
00:07:05.000
Well, as you've seen in North of Kyiv in the last year, in truth, our job was to sort
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of create that, find it, target it, by Morse code, send in the locations, and call in missile
00:07:20.000
strikes, probably nuclear missile strikes in a conventional war in Europe.
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In fact, when I was doing parachute school at Abingdon, just north of Oxford, RAF Abingdon
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We'd had this incredibly dramatic screw-up on the jump, whereby my parachute tangled with
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So somebody else flew his chute over mine, dropped, because of the low pressure zone
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I looked up, saw his feet, about 150 foot above the ground, thought, this chute can't
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So I pulled down one side of my chute to get him off.
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Instead of sliding off, he slid through the chute.
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So the two chutes just collapsed into one another.
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And he was hanging about as far away as you are, screaming, mother, mother, not again.
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He shortened his leg, broke all his leg bones, and broke his back.
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As we came back into the barracks on the little black and white tube television that
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they used to have in those days, about this big, you know, deep, there was a picture of
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I thought, I thought, expletive deleted, I'm only going to live three months.
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And we did lots of other things, but those I can't talk about, but that bit's public domain.
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So before you jump in, David, you mentioned a whole bunch of things that I want to dig
00:09:09.000
But here you are, you're growing up, son of a single mother.
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I mean, you say, you know, it was pretty common, but you're not living in the lap of luxury.
00:09:23.000
Well, I wasn't initially, because my grandfather was a communist.
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In fact, my grandfather had been in prison on a couple of occasions for supposedly leading
00:09:35.000
That's how Liberty, the organization, came to be formed.
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It was the National Council of Civil Liberties because of the treatment of demonstrators
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And I thought of myself as very left wing until I went to university.
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And a series of different things came together.
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You know, for example, when we had a mock election at my school, I stood as a communist
00:10:18.000
I was left to center liberal, not left to center Marxist, really.
00:10:24.000
So for example, I was in favor of homosexual law reform.
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I've always said, when people say to me, who was the greatest home secretary of your
00:10:34.000
I say, Roy Jenkins, which surprises conservatives because, you know, he introduced censorship
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reform, abolish the death penalty, homosexual law reform.
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All those things came in under that government.
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I have slightly nuanced views on death penalty, but not important ones.
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And so I had to look quite hard at what the Soviet threat really was in a way that other
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I mean, we had all the classified briefings and looking at what their war plans were and
00:11:18.000
And I went to university during 1968, which was an extraordinarily pivotal year in all sorts
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of ways, social ways, modern ways in terms of modern society.
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And all of that led me quite quickly, within a course of about 12 months, to come to a view
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a view which is really that the most important thing in a good society, in a civilized society,
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are individual freedoms, rights under the law, robust democratic systems, by which I mean
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And I'm going to annoy your American audience again in the way that the American one has sort
00:12:01.000
of got bent out of shape by Obama, Trump, Biden, and so on.
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And it seemed to me the best institutional representation of that was the Conservative Party.
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Didn't mean I agreed with everything they did or believed in.
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In fact, I actually signed up my entire Federation of Conservative Students to Amnesty International,
00:12:30.000
Because, you know, at the same time as believing in a capitalist economy, which is the best way
00:12:35.000
to deliver on the things I've talked about, and an economy where the rule of law is predominant,
00:12:41.000
again, the best way, I also believed in things like not torturing people, not imprisoning
00:12:46.000
people with things that have actually lasted through my life, really.
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It was the first time, frankly, I thought properly about it, rather than just inherited views.
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You see, because my grandfather was a communist, and my stepfather was an ex-communist, Labour
00:13:04.000
voter, and we had row after row after row.
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00:13:07.000
He was a shop steward, and so we'd argue all the time about trade union.
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Although I'm very pro-union, we argue all the time.
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So up until, as it were, I acquired my independence, I didn't really exercise my brain.
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Once I did, it was a very quick decision, within a year.
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And what does it mean to you to be a Conservative?
00:13:29.000
Well, it means the single, well, I've already characterised it, but the single most important
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An assumption the state doesn't know best, all right?
00:13:41.000
And this has resurfaced in the last decade or two, post all the counter-terrorism stuff,
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and now the woke stuff, where somehow there's a view that the collective approach to things
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And the trouble is, it's also written into the mindsets of even some of our more talented Conservative politicians.
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When we're talking about what Britain's going to be like post-Brexit, he talks about Florence
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and how he attributes to the Medicis all the successes of Florence.
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It was all to do with the chaos of Florence.
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Florence is a city full of alchemists and weird religious sects and so on.
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And because it allowed the freedom of all that chaos and bad ideas, out of a thousand bad
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ideas, a half a dozen really good ones and half a dozen geniuses, you know, the Michelangelo's
00:14:56.000
And I think human nature is such and well-designed institutions are such that if you allow a lot
00:15:03.000
more freedom than you're quite comfortable with, you get a really good outcome.
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It's a sort of intrinsic meritocracy of chaotic societies.
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I completely agree with you, David, and I think that freedom is one of the things that
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Do you think that this Conservative Party values freedom?
00:15:28.000
One of the difficulties of freedom, when states, particularly in a democratic state like ours,
00:15:41.000
address a new threat, I'll use the word mildly, invariably that impinges on freedom.
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And all the sort of the disciples of freedom, the intellectual disciples of freedom, privacy
00:16:03.000
During the Blair years, Blair was absolutely obsessed with the idea of identity cards.
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He's just come up with it again last week, you notice.
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And at the time, because this was being presented as a way of protecting people, you know,
00:16:24.000
You think they write terrorists down as their occupation.
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And I was the Shadow Home Secretary at the time, and I'd love to be able to tell you,
00:16:43.000
What actually changed the public's mind was that the state lost two CDs, tax records,
00:16:53.000
All the home addresses, the bank accounts, they just disappeared.
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And within a month, it was 70% against, rather than 80% in favor.
00:17:02.000
Because people saw the dangers of centralized data on people.
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I mean, Whitehall, just down the road from here, believes in something called identity
00:17:22.000
If I'm going to have an identifier, I want it under my control.
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I want it my solicitor, or my lawyer, or my bank, or whatever.
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I don't want the state controlling my identity.
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Of course, when you give them the data, they mess it up anyway.
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But I think, you know, identity cards are quite a good demonstrator of what looks like
00:17:50.000
Actually, when you do it, it makes a real unholy mess of it.
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And when I came here in the mid-90s, I was like, oh, this is a country that believes
00:18:04.000
And I cannot tell you how shocked I was in the last few years, particularly with COVID.
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I didn't remember 80% of people supported it, which is kind of relevant to my question,
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because, look, in a crisis when there's danger and fear, of course, the government is going
00:18:21.000
to use that as an opportunity to seize more power, to accumulate more data, to do all that.
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But the polling from people that we saw, you know, 20% of people want nightclubs closed
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down, irrespective of COVID, you know, all of this stuff.
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I was going, what the hell is going on here, right?
00:18:42.000
Now, what I'm hearing out of you is people perhaps are less well-informed.
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People are terrified, and they were terrified by the government, by the media and so on.
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Well, look, I mean, two things, to get straight first.
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I mean, number one is, most of the time, most people don't think about politics, right?
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And it's my job to have these fights on their behalf.
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Second thing is, when they do first think about it, not the eventual conclusion,
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but when they do first think about it, the first template, the first test, quite properly,
00:19:37.000
is how will it affect me or my family or whatever?
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And if I'm frightened that my granny or my mum, or me, will catch COVID, you know, and they're in a risk category,
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I'll say, yeah, right, okay, do what's necessary, lock your mum, whatever.
00:20:00.000
You know, that is, you know, as human beings, we're built to defend our families.
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You know, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution of programmed us that way.
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There's a sort of hierarchy of needs type argument.
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Because we'd lost a vote in the Commons over 42 days detention without charge,
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and because I didn't believe that when it came down to it,
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when the government brought it back, as they would just before an election,
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I didn't want to be the Home Secretary who was going to impose that.
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Now, again, at the time, 70% of people thought 42 days detention without charge
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Indeed, some people said, what's wrong with 42 years, you know?
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And it was in the aftermath of the seven bombings and all that.
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People, you know, they imagine this terrible event.
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Of course, later on, they start thinking through the details.
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Who are the people that actually get held for six weeks, what it is, without charge?
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Well, it's people against whom you have no evidence.
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It's people who live in the same house as the person who did it,
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People who themselves get charged in five, six days.
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So what happened over the course of, I don't know, about five weeks of a local,
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localized by-election was that people started to think about it.
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And again, that one went from 70-30 one way to 70-30 the other way over the course
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because I made people think terrorist suspect, right?
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So, again, it's just that people, they ration their time, they ration their thought process,
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they ration the effort, the interest they waste on things.
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You know, they want to raise their children, they want to do their job,
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They don't want to spend their time thinking about things that the state should do properly first time.
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It seemed to me that the level of authoritarianism both in the government
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And I think that process is a slower process going on at the moment.
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And part of the problem is the sort of public censorship that's going on.
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You know, it was very difficult to get a proper hearing.
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I mean, in the Conservative Party, for example, I wasn't a member of it,
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but the thing called the Coronavirus Research Group, I think it was.
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But I think what's going to happen is slowly, over time,
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the weaknesses in the state argument will become apparent.
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You're seeing it with, as we sit here, the front page of Daily Telegraph
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is a story taken from Matt Hancock's WhatsApp exchanges,
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suggesting that he wasn't actually going from science at all.
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He was going from other, whatever, other convenient,
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politically convenient reasons he had for making those decisions.
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We saw, you may remember early on, some of us said,
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this looks like a virus that's come from a laboratory.
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And God, did you get pilloried for saying that online.
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That was the first point, by the way, in this whole process,
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where I saw a French Nobel Prize winner effectively banned
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from talking about his expert subjects, you know.
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We need to deal with misinformation at the source, David.
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Well, your old country knew how to deal with misinformation at the source,
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But the, so, so the, that's beginning to break up.
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And, and one of the, one of the things I am going to be focusing on
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in the next year or two is trying to make sure that the inquiry
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actually looks at all the facts and takes them all on board.
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Well, it matters because there is a unique characteristic to this.
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And the unique characteristic, which I've never seen before in my lifetime anyway,
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is that every single ruling establishment in the world,
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possibly accepting Sweden, made the same mistake.
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And ruling establishments are very bad at admitting mistakes.
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And when they're defending each other, you know,
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you've got the World Health Organization, you've got, you've got America,
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the American government, the British government, all of these,
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all the European governments, they all essentially made the same mistake.
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And so it's going to be quite hard to tease it apart.
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But I think it's going to be one of the big jobs in the next couple of years,
00:25:30.000
Because, but partly protect freedoms from unnecessary incursions,
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but also partly to make sure the next time we have a pandemic,
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we respond in a way which actually deals with it,
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rather than sort of behaves in a sort of politically defensive way,
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the political defensiveness by every establishment in the world.
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So, you know, it's, the last time something like this happened probably
00:25:56.000
was when the Catholic Church was the dominant force in the sort of,
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You know, when you only have one, one allowed mindset.
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And so, you know, it's, it's, it's going to be a, the next five years,
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I think it's going to be a long, long battle to get the facts straight.
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And are you going to be covering misappropriation of funds as well
00:26:24.000
Oh yeah. I mean, look, I, I used to be, we skim past all sorts of things,
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but I used to be the Public Accounts Committee chairman.
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Um, and, uh, I take the view that proper operation of the state,
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not to, not to take your money and waste it or throw it away,
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or worst, worst of all, hand it over in a corrupt process
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to, to your favourite supporters, whatever it might be.
00:26:55.000
Um, and if that's what's happened, I'm not, I'm not going to prejudge these things,
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but if that's what's happened, then the judicial system should come down on it
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Absolutely. David, uh, a real criticism that people have of the Conservative Party,
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and I think is a very valid one, is that the Conservative Party isn't conservative.
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It got elected to implement Brexit, which they've done.
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But you look at what the, some of the policies that they brought in,
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and I'm not a conservative, but I'm looking at that going,
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that is almost more centre left or left than it is conservative.
00:27:32.000
Well, first thing to say about the Conservative Party is,
00:27:35.000
it's, it's pretty bloody difficult to define what conservative means, right?
00:27:39.000
If you, if you, if you looked at my philosophy,
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and this hasn't changed since I entered Parliament,
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uh, you could probably more accurately describe me as a Gladstonian liberal.
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You know, uh, low taxes, free trade, uh, free movement, rule of law,
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Um, and the Conservative Party is a, um, an alliance.
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It's always had a range of, a range, a spectrum.
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People, if I'm a red wall voter, I don't think I voted to have,
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for example, this is just one example picked at random,
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I don't think I voted to have 40,000 people come into this country
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Look, I, I'm allowed to say this as an immigrant myself.
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I don't think I, when, when I, when you told me tens of thousands,
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I don't think I voted for hundreds of thousands.
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So irrespective of whether that's a Conservative policy or not,
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it's not a government that's delivering on his commitments.
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I mean, the, I mean, part of the problem, I mean,
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we're talking at a difficult time in terms of answering this question,
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You've had more importantly, in many ways, COVID.
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You've got the fracturing of the world trading system.
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Which is, in many ways, may be the most important.
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All of these really, really important structures have been buggered up.
00:29:14.000
And, and, and of course we've had, what, three changes as a leader, really.
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I mean, since, since Cameron, I mean, through, through all this.
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And so, in terms of political distraction, it's been quite the normal focus,
00:29:30.000
you know, the, as I say, the low taxes, control of our borders,
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all those standard Tory, actually standard good management things, really.
00:29:44.000
Well, that's a very gentle word to use to describe what's happened.
00:29:49.000
We've got, we, the corporation taxes, every tax that I can see is going up.
00:29:56.000
Like, I, I think it's, I think, look, this isn't an attempt to attack you or the Conservative
00:30:02.000
I mean, as Francis says, neither of us is Conservative.
00:30:07.000
Like, it's not, yeah, and it's not delivering for the people who voted for the Conservative
00:30:12.000
Well, one of, one of the, one of the difficulties is that, and this is, this is, this applies
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to all parties and not just the Conservative Party.
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It's a general, there's a tendency in this day and age, and it, and it really mostly started,
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not uniquely, but mostly started under Blair and has got worse ever since, is there's a tendency
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to replace actual answers with populist answers.
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Um, partly because I think it's sort of uncivilized, but also partly because I don't think it'll work.
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But if you go out in the, if you went out in the street and you stopped a hundred people,
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Which is why, in my view, it's, it's the policy.
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Blair used to talk in, in, in big terms, you know, about cracking down and migration on,
00:31:07.000
you know, and all the various anti-crime things.
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Crime got worse under Blair, but, but yeah, you know, we had all sorts of, um, uh, things
00:31:15.000
he was talking about and, and, and on, and on terrorism, of course, as well.
00:31:19.000
And the trouble is that people hear the policy.
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Truth is what we need to do on something like, um, the, the, the boats across the channel
00:31:31.000
is some of it's down to, uh, some really simple, sensible things.
00:31:36.000
I wrote to the prime minister before Christmas, you wouldn't necessarily remember, um, with
00:31:42.000
initially 50 other MPs on the letter, but it turned out to be a hundred after I got a
00:31:46.000
bit of coverage, um, saying, look, just define Albania as a safe country, because it is.
00:31:54.000
Albania has had fewer references to the European court in the last 10 years than we have.
00:32:01.000
I have a better, I have a better case to go to Tirana than they do to come here, right?
00:32:07.000
That doesn't solve the problem, but, but golly, it knocks about 15,000 or 12,000 people out
00:32:13.000
of it straight away, you know, it's a third of the, uh, of the overall total.
00:32:20.000
Um, uh, I've also said, not in the letter, but I've said to the, the various people involved
00:32:25.000
in this, you know, you've got to improve the, the cross channel surveillance.
00:32:29.000
You know, a British company provides Frontex, which is the European, um, uh, border agency
00:32:38.000
with the surveillance for the, uh, for the Mediterranean light aircraft, twin engine light
00:32:44.000
aircraft, a DA62 for your, for your techie, uh, viewers, uh, complete with, uh, with synthetic
00:32:50.000
aperture radar, with infrared, with long range cameras, with, um, uh, devices that detect,
00:32:57.000
um, uh, mobile phones, uh, and, you know, the combination of all of them, they can spot
00:33:04.000
They can spot people arriving at the beach in Libya, uh, from international airspace.
00:33:09.000
They can spot people arriving at the beach in France from British airspace.
00:33:13.000
The French tell us they can't do it because of privacy concerns.
00:33:15.000
Well, I'm a privacy enthusiast and I don't see that, but never mind.
00:33:19.000
Uh, but we could do that and we could, we should have been telling them every time somebody,
00:33:27.000
I think it's a, I think it's a, I think it's a competent, I think it's a government competent
00:33:32.000
I think the home office throughout really since, remember I made my reference to, um,
00:33:37.000
Roy Jenkins, really since those days, I don't think the home office has been functional
00:33:40.000
and there've been desperate attempts to make it work.
00:33:43.000
Prisons have been taken out and justice has been taken out and they still quite haven't
00:33:50.000
I think there is a, there is a serious problem of competence in Whitehall generally, decline
00:33:58.000
Um, but I can see why you're not administering.
00:34:01.000
Well, I mean, it's, it's, I mean, I had, I had this conversation once, I probably shouldn't
00:34:08.000
tell you with whom, but let's say somebody who was at the top of the Whitehall regime.
00:34:15.000
Uh, and I said, you served in the, um, the Lawson treasury, you know, tell me, is today's
00:34:22.000
Whitehall as competent as it was in Thatcher's time?
00:34:27.000
And he, and he thought for a second, he said, no.
00:34:31.000
He said, well, in the treasury case, you know, you've got the, the, the very clever youngsters
00:34:35.000
who used to go to, to become treasury policy principals, you know, uh, and now making a million
00:34:41.000
million a year in a city, you know, post big bang.
00:34:44.000
Um, post, uh, Blair, Blair, Blair gave a lot of extra power to special advisors, the, the
00:34:52.000
Alistair Campbells of the world and so on, which of course he took that power away from
00:34:55.000
the policy advisors in the foreign office and in, and in the cabinet office and so on.
00:35:00.000
So what happened was that, uh, we, uh, we basically aren't doing as good a job.
00:35:06.000
We also rotate people too often and lots and lots of tiny techie things like, like Blair
00:35:12.000
Used to be in order to become perm secretary, you had to serve in the minister's private
00:35:17.000
Now serving the minister's private office is a nightmare.
00:35:20.000
You know, you work in seven days a week, you know, long hours, minister can call you
00:35:26.000
And I used to and say, let's just come on the news.
00:35:31.000
Um, and, but, but, you know, if you want to get to top, that's what you did.
00:35:35.000
Well, you know, think changes rules, lots and lots of changes rules like that and other
00:35:39.000
ones as well has, has reduced the effectiveness of Whitehall, I think.
00:35:43.000
And we, over COVID, you know, you, you also saw another decline in the effectiveness.
00:35:48.000
You saw it with, um, the, uh, the case officers, the rate of the case officers cleared or dealt
00:36:00.000
You know, it should be about five times that a day, you know, it should be four or five a
00:36:05.000
Um, and, uh, and those sorts of things, you know, you've got a real, you've got real serious
00:36:10.000
competence issues, I think, given the size of the problems.
00:36:13.000
And that, I'm sorry, it's a long one you'd answered your question.
00:36:19.000
Um, we also got, we also got young, you've got young politicians too.
00:36:23.000
You know, before I came into the house, I've been working in business.
00:36:26.000
I was a main board director of a FTSE 100 company before I became an MP.
00:36:35.000
So it's, there's some, it's true for some, but most people, most is probably putting it
00:36:39.000
too strongly, but a very large proportion of MPs coming in now are ex-spads.
00:36:45.000
They've done nothing but work in Whitehall and so on.
00:36:48.000
And actually, you know, if you're representing people, you want to have done something in
00:36:53.000
the outside world, not just something in government.
00:36:55.000
You know, I think it, I think it's really, really important that, uh, and that's, that's
00:37:03.000
David, you spoke in an interview about how there's only been two transformational prime
00:37:09.000
And I look at the current political cohort that we have, and it seems that they lack
00:37:15.000
one fundamental quality necessary to be a good leader.
00:37:19.000
And that is the willingness to be unpopular and to be hated.
00:37:24.000
And I look at all our leaders and they don't seem to want to be disliked.
00:37:29.000
They don't seem to want to annoy people, which if you want to transform things, if you want
00:37:37.000
to make things better, you've got to make unpleasant and difficult and unpopular decisions.
00:37:44.000
Margaret didn't want, want, she had to get used to it.
00:37:54.000
But when I first knew her, you know, she had, she was Margaret Thatcher milk snatcher.
0.56
00:37:59.000
You're too, both of you too young to remember the scandal, but she, uh, scandal.
00:38:03.000
She, she had canceled free school milk for, uh, for certain categories of youngsters.
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00:38:10.000
But the thing you have to understand is that Margaret was very calculating.
00:38:22.000
Um, she, when she took on a big problem, let us say she took on the issue of over mighty
00:38:29.000
unions or took on the issue of the, uh, of the miners strike or whatever.
00:38:37.000
She'd set out the big strategic aim, but then she'd salami slice it into small pieces
1.00
00:38:44.000
Ideally only one enemy at a time, you know, not a thousand enemies.
00:38:48.000
Well, you see, in 1974, Ted Heath lost the election because he basically made an enemy
00:38:52.000
of about 300 different groups over industrial relations and then got thrown out by, by the
00:39:01.000
Um, so give you an example, uh, with the miners strike.
00:39:05.000
Um, number one, when Derek Ezra tried to precipitate it before she was ready, she sacked him.
0.65
00:39:14.000
Um, during it, she, she won that conflict, um, albeit at great social cost.
00:39:20.000
But, um, uh, during it, she was scared by the Dockers coming out on a wildcat strike,
00:39:31.000
And so ever, ever thereafter, until I changed her mind, she avoided having a conflict with
00:39:39.000
And then I said, we've got to reform the scheme, the Dock labor scheme.
00:39:41.000
And so we did all that, but it took a long time because she was very, very careful.
00:39:47.000
She was, she was much more a woman than a man on this.
00:39:50.000
I think women are much better sometimes at dealing objectively with risk than we are.
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00:39:56.000
We're sort of sometimes brought up to sort of rush head first into risks, not clever in politics.
00:40:02.000
She understood what needed to be done, and she did it.
00:40:06.000
And notably, she always did the unpopular things in the first year or two.
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00:40:11.000
So, sort of unfair to apply this to Sunak, because he hasn't got spare time to do this.
00:40:17.000
But generally speaking, I think you're right that the people, modern politicians haven't
00:40:25.000
got in the habit of thinking through, right, okay, what am I going to do in year one, year
00:40:29.000
Because by year four, she always had the results to show, you see?
00:40:36.000
And in a very calculated way, you know, so this wasn't sort of, you know, the political
00:40:45.000
You know, Margaret was about winning the battle.
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00:40:47.000
And all right, there was some pain to take early on, but she knew, she calculated it out.
00:40:51.000
And I think people, very few people in the House of Commons have a real memory of Margaret.
00:41:01.000
So, for example, when Liz Truss was presenting herself as a modern marketer, nothing like it.
00:41:07.000
Margaret would never have done what Liz and Quasi did with that budget, you know, frankly,
00:41:14.000
in my view, a mad budget, because, you know, it lost the markets, it lost everything.
00:41:19.000
She would have, she would have done that calculation properly.
00:41:21.000
She would have got Lawson or Howe or whoever, whoever's the chance of the sit down and work
00:41:26.000
out what you could do and what would maximize the effects and so on and minimize the risks.
00:41:38.000
Really, really, that post-war generation was much more tough-minded, I think, in many ways,
00:41:47.000
no matter what the politics, you know, Tory or Labour, or Liberal for that matter, less liberal,
00:41:53.000
less liberal, because they weren't really in play, but Tory or Labour were willing sometimes just to add up.
00:41:57.000
I mean, Barbara Castle, if you read your history books, Barbara Castle and the Place of Strife,
00:42:03.000
Harold Wilson ran away from it, but they at least started down the road.
00:42:07.000
So, that's to some extent a generational thing, you know.
00:42:10.000
When I came into the House of Commons, my two predecessors, the members for Howden and Halton Price,
00:42:16.000
were the last two double-decorated members of the House.
00:42:19.000
They both had a military cross and a distinguished service order, and that's always preyed on my mind.
00:42:24.000
You know, these are people who, you know, were patriotic in the sense of,
00:42:29.000
putting themselves in harm's way for their country,
00:42:31.000
but also looked after their regiment in North Africa for two or three years.
00:42:35.000
So, what I've got to do with a constituency issue of somebody's planning problem or somebody's
00:42:40.000
can't make ends meet or whatever, you know, they've got Jimmy whose wife has left him,
00:42:44.000
they've got Johnny who can't pay his debts, they've got Frankie who's an alcoholic, and so on,
00:42:51.000
So, they, from the beginning, had a far closer grasp, I think, of ordinary people's concerns
00:43:01.000
I was going to say, but this is a very real problem, David,
00:43:04.000
because if you don't understand the concerns or the lives of ordinary people,
00:43:09.000
with the best will in the world, how are you then going to enact policies that are going to help these people?
00:43:13.000
Well, I agree, I agree, but I think it's a systemic problem.
00:43:16.000
Now, against that, you've got a circumstance where the caseload of MPs is much bigger than it used to be,
00:43:24.000
so the counter-argument to me would be, well, that brings them closer to the people.
00:43:31.000
But I think, I just think that British society has become more stratified,
00:43:36.000
got more layers in it now than actually it had when I was growing up.
00:43:42.000
I think, I mean, nobody wants to wish a war on a country, but the, the, one of the effects of the second,
00:43:50.000
well, actually one of the effects of the 1930s and the 1940s together was to make us feel more of a nation.
00:43:59.000
I mean, after we got wiped out in 1945, you know, but I think there was,
00:44:04.000
and indeed the Tories had more working class votes in those days as well, even than now.
00:44:09.000
But, you know, it, that sense of nationhood was very important.
00:44:24.000
And I think, I think, although we all know what everybody's thinking because of social media these days,
00:44:31.000
it's an incredibly fragmented society it reflects.
00:44:36.000
You know, you, you, you look at strands of social media and it's so intolerant of other viewpoints,
00:44:45.000
that instead of having a debate where if you sort of did a distribution diagram of people's opinions along a spectrum,
00:44:56.000
it would tend to be that shape, you know, be a normal distribution.
00:44:58.000
Sometimes it was like a dromedary, you know, two humps, you know, slightly different.
00:45:05.000
I sometimes easily, I'm talking about, I don't know, Brexit or COVID or, or woke issues or whatever.
00:45:12.000
I sometimes feel it's just two competing echo chambers.
00:45:17.000
In fact, if you stand in the middle, you get shot at by everybody.
00:45:22.000
But David, I want to move on from the party politics.
00:45:25.000
But first, I want to ask you a final question on that.
00:45:31.000
I think, I think if you'd asked me that six months ago, I would have said we had a one in 10 chance at best, if not zero.
00:45:58.000
Because we've got, we've got a budget coming up.
00:46:02.000
And I think what the budget does is very important.
00:46:05.000
The issue you've been talking about of borders, you know, I think there are some solutions available.
00:46:13.000
I've talked about the Albanian issue and the more practical issue of how we deal with it.
00:46:22.000
I've been, I've been, I've been talking a lot to number 10 about those things.
00:46:25.000
You know, I used to be shadow home secretary for five years.
00:46:27.000
I mean, I used to be a specialist in removing home secretaries when they were Labour ones.
00:46:32.000
So, you know, you can imagine I have views on that.
00:46:35.000
And I think those three issues could move it the other way.
00:46:40.000
So, you know, I've been around in politics long enough to see much, much worse circumstances
00:46:50.000
I mean, bear in mind, I was an MP in 1997, you know, when we had 100 and whatever it was.
00:46:59.000
I don't think the country was in a worse state than it is now.
00:47:05.000
The amazing irony there was that we delivered a fantastic economy and we got zero credit for
00:47:12.000
Oh, no, there's no doubt that the countries, but all countries in a difficult state.
00:47:16.000
And what I said to you before, I'm a sort of Gladstonian liberal in my intrinsic politics.
00:47:27.000
In my view, the greatest positive thing that's happened in the history of the world in the
00:47:36.000
And what happened then was the World Trade Organization and the Gap Round had a dramatic
00:47:42.000
reduction of extra tariff barriers around the world.
00:47:47.000
And what that did was it led to about one and a half billion people, billion, 1,500 million
00:47:58.000
In my view, probably the greatest event in modern times.
00:48:02.000
And if we're not careful, that trade liberalization could go into reverse.
00:48:08.000
Ukraine, China, Taiwan, the Chinese state capitalist behavior, Huawei and all those other issues.
00:48:21.000
Obviously, Ukraine, what is in effect the attempt to recreate the old Soviet Union is going
0.75
00:48:33.000
to be agonizing one way or another, the outcome, either for the West or for Russia at some point.
00:48:42.000
I think that's all of a sudden, that's a rather different color.
00:48:48.000
You've got a United States that's sort of indecisive in where it is in the world at the moment.
00:49:00.000
But I'm not sure that Biden's a great leader either for all sorts of reasons.
00:49:06.000
So, you know, of course, we've got a huge number of problems, but they're not just British
1.00
00:49:13.000
Well, let's talk about one of them, which is the war in Ukraine.
00:49:16.000
And one of the things that we saw during COVID particularly is the breakdown of trust in
00:49:22.000
what we were being told that had been going on for some time.
00:49:25.000
I think it probably really kicked off in 2015, 2016 and the way that it is going now.
00:49:29.000
Now, we've got to a point now where there's a lot of people, particularly people who are
00:49:33.000
sort of anti-woke or maybe lean right, who quite understandably, I think, really distrust
00:49:38.000
what anyone is telling them from the mainstream media, politicians, et cetera.
00:49:42.000
And we've got to a point with Ukraine where I'm sort of tearing what's left of my hair
1.00
00:49:46.000
out in the sense that there are quite a lot of people who've sort of delved into all sorts
00:49:51.000
In fact, we had a debate with Peter Hitchens only a few days ago in here talking, and there
00:49:56.000
are people who think this is all NATO's fault and all of this.
00:49:59.000
I actually disagree with you about the attempt to recreate the Soviet Union.
00:50:04.000
That's why he hates Lenin so much because he gave away parts of the Soviet Union, of what
00:50:20.000
But in any case, we talked about Thatcher as well.
00:50:26.000
How do you think she would have handled this for a start?
00:50:37.000
Probably in a quite similar way to what's been done, i.e. supply of arms rather than direct
00:50:48.000
She might have been a bit more aggressive in the first part.
1.00
00:50:53.000
She wouldn't have allowed direct engagement, but she might have done something like, I don't
00:50:59.000
know, provide a no-fly zone for the west of Ukraine, something like that.
00:51:05.000
I mean, designed to stay out of entanglement, but to provide some sort of safe spaces.
00:51:11.000
But broadly speaking, she should have done something similar to what we're doing now.
00:51:15.000
She would probably have taken a more active international role, pushing around than any
0.86
00:51:24.000
British, current British Prime Minister really able to do, because, bear in mind, the structures
00:51:35.000
And I remember vividly sitting in the tea room, not in the tea room, in the dining room in the House
00:51:40.000
of Commons, and she came in and sat next to me.
0.79
00:51:42.000
And I said, and it was at the time of the Reykjavik talks.
00:51:46.000
And I said, what have you been doing, Margaret?
00:51:55.000
And we forget, of course, that juanvirate was very important.
00:51:59.000
It had some friction from time to time over Grenada and other things, but that juanvirate
00:52:05.000
And there's no real equivalent juanvirate around today.
00:52:09.000
But there would have been an incredibly clinical exercise in how far can we go.
00:52:16.000
Remember what I said before about controlling risk.
00:52:20.000
Her strategic aim would have been, I'm quite sure, complete expulsion of Russia from Ukraine.
00:52:27.000
She might have had a different view about Crimea, because Crimea's got different histories.
00:52:33.000
But broadly speaking, I think she would have gone through, she would have had from the beginning
00:52:39.000
the idea of a complete expulsion, but she would have sliced it into very, very small pieces,
00:52:47.000
And she would have paid close attention to herself.
00:52:51.000
She would have appointed somebody like Ben Wallace, who she trusted as MOD, but it would
00:53:02.000
And what would she, and what do you say to the people who say, this is, West intervention
00:53:09.000
And in fact, by expanding east towards NATO has caused this.
00:53:13.000
We are leading to World War III and the potential for nuclear engagement between the world's
0.93
00:53:19.000
Why don't we just let Russia have influence over what it has?
00:53:24.000
Putin's talked about how it's just Russian land that's temporarily called Ukraine.
00:53:31.000
Well, I think the first of them, you know, go back to my original principles, the right
00:53:36.000
of self-determination is individual self-determination and state self-determination, you know.
00:53:42.000
And at the end of the day, what does Ukraine want to do, you know, the nation of Ukraine?
00:53:50.000
Second thing is, I don't pay a lot of attention to the conspiracy theories and so on.
00:53:59.000
Some of them might have some substance of truth.
00:54:02.000
I'm not in a position to know, to have a detailed intelligence brief on what EU's activities
00:54:08.000
in, you know, pre-Maiden and so on were in Ukraine.
00:54:17.000
You know, the things we did in the Second World War, you know, there were some nasty things
00:54:22.000
Don't get talked about because we won, you know.
00:54:27.000
And so I'm afraid, you know, once you're at war, you've got to recognize that this is,
00:54:33.000
But, you know, there's going to be lots of stories flying around and you won't know the
00:54:38.000
So we have to decide, you know, we are supporting one side.
00:54:44.000
I don't suppose pre-invasion that the Ukrainian state was a perfect state any more than, well,
0.78
00:54:54.000
You know, there is a big symbolic thing here and it doesn't just affect Ukraine.
00:54:58.000
Because if we had stood back and let Ukraine fall, what would happen to Taiwan?
00:55:06.000
What would happen elsewhere with the next time?
00:55:08.000
I mean, bear in mind, this is what, number seven in Putin's excursions.
00:55:13.000
You know, you've got South Ossetia and Abkhazia and all these other, all these other,
00:55:22.000
I mean, well, you know, we should be, and Syria.
00:55:25.000
You know, I'm one of the few MPs here who's been to Damascus since the Syrian war.
00:55:30.000
I went and I saw Assad and spoke to him, you know, about what was going on there.
00:55:36.000
And just as an aside for you, I don't think I've ever said this publicly.
00:55:43.000
I crossed the border or coming across the Bekar Valley.
00:55:45.000
There were clearly Russian, what looked like Spetsnaz, at the border.
00:55:50.000
In the hotel I was staying in, in Damascus, there were plainly at least two sets of Russian aircrew.
00:55:56.000
I don't speak enough words of Russian to know what they were saying, but I knew it was Russian.
00:56:03.000
And he said, oh, Putin has pulled back because he'd been accused of undermining the peace process.
00:56:09.000
But I spoke to him about it and Putin said to me, we will not let you lose.
00:56:14.000
And astonishingly chilling thing, this is way back when, this is 2016 I think it was.
00:56:19.000
An astonishingly chilling thing, but you know, you can see the calculation going on.
00:56:24.000
And mostly his calculations have worked in his favour.
00:56:27.000
You know, South Ossetia, why did they pick South Ossetia?
00:56:30.000
South Ossetia, part of Georgia, has got the highest number of gallantry medal wins per capita in the old Soviet Union.
00:56:43.000
You know, an incredible high level of pro-Russian, pro-Soviet patriotism sort of thing.
00:56:49.000
They picked it for a reason, you know, picking away.
00:56:52.000
And if he keeps winning, then he'll keep going.
00:56:55.000
And there has to come a point, this is the lesson of the 1930s.
00:56:59.000
We didn't have nuclear weapons in the 1930s, people would say.
00:57:02.000
We didn't have nuclear weapons, but you can't allow nuclear weapons to then suddenly just give the advice the other side.
00:57:06.000
A lot of people said, oh, early on there was lots of fear of this.
00:57:10.000
And bear in mind, I grew up with nuclear weapons.
00:57:13.000
As I said, part of my role in the reserve forces was related to that.
00:57:19.000
In the event of a nuclear exchange, one of the people who would be greatly at risk would be Putin himself.
00:57:29.000
Now, is this a man who is a sort of, you know, such a heroic self-image is willing to give up his life.
00:57:36.000
This is a man who spent two years in a bunker avoiding Covid.
00:57:43.000
He wouldn't have a meeting as close as we're having.
00:57:45.000
You know, whose security meetings are, you know, in a room as big as this, but with four people in it.
00:57:50.000
You know, the man is a man, an aging man with intimations of mortality.
00:57:56.000
You know, so he's not going to rush into a nuclear exchange.
1.00
00:58:02.000
But don't don't let yourself be frightened by your own weapons.
00:58:09.000
We've been in it for a longer time than we think, I think.
00:58:13.000
All that's happened is we haven't recognized it, you know, and we haven't calculated around it.
00:58:18.000
What's happened is the war on terrorism has elided through Syria in particular into a sort of involuntary slippage into Cold War.
00:58:28.000
And this Cold War actually includes China, too, actually.
00:58:31.000
We have, I mean, we've allowed the great benefit I talked about before, the 1995 transformation.
00:58:41.000
We have allowed the real benefits of that to blind us and handicap us in our responses to things like China's treatment of the Uyghurs.
00:58:53.000
China's basically kleptocratic approach to state capitalism.
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And we should have been a bit more rigorous about that.
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You know, I'm afraid that is the nature of Western politics.
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It is quite, I mean, democracies are quite weak a lot of the time.
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I mean, this struck me most starkly when, after the Litvinenko killings, a few years later, David Cameron was taking Putin to the Judo Olympics.
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You know, for a trivial diplomatic advantage, we were telegraphing that we'd sort of forgiven them for murdering people in our territory.
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You know, we have to, you know, there are lessons we have to relearn in this world.
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And Cold War 2 or 3, whatever it is, is not a bad description, I'm afraid.
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We've got to learn to manage relations with not necessarily actively hostile states, but potentially hostile states in such a way that they know there's a price for breaking our rules.
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David, we're going to move on to a subject very quickly.
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That's even more toxic than the Ukraine war, which is obviously Brexit.
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Just sum it up for people who aren't au fait with Northern Ireland discussions, the protocol, etc.
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Well, we got to a problematic position after Theresa May, many years ago, when I was Brexit Secretary, without talking to me, agreed with the European Union, full alignment between the North and South of Ireland.
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Either a barrier within Britain, or we'd all have to follow, you know, Brexit becoming useless because it wouldn't allow us to deviate from European standards and so on.
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And from that, there's been a cascade of problems, which has been handled not terribly well necessarily by successive governments.
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We got to a point really where we were heading towards a number of things.
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One, a barrier in the North Sea, which meant selling goods from Great Britain into Northern Ireland and vice versa was just as bad as selling them across an international border.
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And also, not making it difficult for the North to deal with the South as well.
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What's happened in the last week or so, effectively the last few months, but it's come to the surface the last week, is that Rishi has found a way, Rishi Sunak, and I think it's him personally, has found a way of eradicating most of the problems.
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But, you know, if you are selling goods, most goods to and from, not all goods, most goods to and from Northern Ireland, you could do so without a barrier.
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If you're selling them to Northern Ireland to go south, then it does go through a barrier.
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We have got to the point where we've got a block on new laws being imposed on Northern Ireland, which, two blocks.
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One, they will only relate to its ability to trade.
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And secondly, if new ones come along, we've got, or at least the Northern Ireland Assembly, 30 out of 90 of them, for more than one party, are able to trigger a veto with the help, with the support of the British government.
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Now, when people say, oh, well, how will this work and so on?
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We'll act as a disincentive for the Europeans to pick a fight over it because, you know, we have the veto.
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I've got nothing, I've got no problem with that.
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So we've got, at long last, and it's several years later than it should have happened, and it took so long because we were too soft in the first instance in our negotiating strategies.
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But we've, at long last, got to the point where Brexit is now looking like it's working, as it broadly should.
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I mean, I would have preferred not to have to do the deals in Northern Ireland, but that pass was sold by a long time ago, which led to my resignation.
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And most important of all, not most important of all, but an added benefit, is also we're on a good relationship with the Europeans.
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You know, you couldn't have it at the beginning because there was bound to be tension at the beginning, the resentment and all that.
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But we're now in a position where we're talking to them.
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And the reasons for that, partly it's, I think, Rishi's skill.
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But part of it is, they suddenly realised that if they kept pressing the way they did, they would destroy the Good Friday Agreement.
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And the world would not, history would not forgive them.
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And secondly, post-Ukraine, they realised that actually, we're really still very important to them.
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You know, and even the people who are most resentful of Brexit, who I think the French, probably realise it most.
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Because, you know, there's a major military power on the continent.
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So I think that the outcome is a good outcome in the final announcement.
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I guarantee you, the next week, there will be loads of little wrinkles.
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Which is why I gave it a stronger welcome than I normally give most government actions this week.
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And you don't think the DUP are going to try and scupper it?
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Well, I think at the end of the day, the DUP is divided amongst itself, I think.
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You know, there's a spectrum of views inside the DUP.
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And I think there's a corollary which has got almost nothing to do with Brexit,
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which is do they want to go back into government wishing and fame?
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They don't like being in government wishing and fame, I don't think.
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Like they said, I think history would tell us that.
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And for whatever reason, they may not end up supporting this.
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But, you know, they don't get their powers unless they go back into government.
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They don't get their veto power unless they go back into government.
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So I think there's a good incentive to restart the Good Friday Agreement,
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The truth of the matter is this is going to get carried in the House of Commons by over 400 votes
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And it will be seen, broadly speaking, as a success.
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And you've got people ranging from Steve Baker, Reece Mogg, me.
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You know, people who are not later rivals to Brexit.
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You know, we've been fighting these battles for a long time,
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We always finish our interviews with the same question, which is,
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what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?
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The future of the country, not the future of the world,
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but the future of this country in particular, because we are such a big science superpower,
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is going to be dictated by everything from DNA manipulation, modern methods of healthcare, artificial intelligence, you name it.
01:06:43.000
And the level of public discussion of technology today is...
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We don't have enough people in government, or in public life generally, who are scientists, who happily sit down.
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During COVID, we treated models, the product of models, as though they were facts.
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Remember all those imperial models and all that stuff?
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You know, I wrote along with Matt Ridley, an article in Telegraph way back at the beginning,
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saying, look, for heaven's sake, stop treating this as a fact.
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He's got every lasting prediction wrong in all the pandemic so far.
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So things like that, the use of mathematics, the use of scientific techniques and so on, are very, very poorly understood in public life.
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It's not so true in places like Singapore and Japan.
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But in this country, we've got to wake up that science, technology, engineering, mathematics are the future.
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And it's about time government started understanding it and talking about it properly, and the public at large.
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I want to, my throwaway last policy for you, I want to do away with university loans for STEM subjects.
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I would like to put science, technology, engineering and maths on a grant basis, a full grant basis for anybody who wants to do it.
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Two, because I think it would be a way of pulling really clever working class kids into higher education,
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because they'll look at it as risky at the moment, and give them proper careers, which is not happening at the moment.
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So, you know, it's a very grand, broad subject, and I could sit and talk for hours on it.
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But that, for me, is the big hole in modern politics.
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Of course, you're cancelling all the amazing media studies graduates we've produced over the last many decades in that process.
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We're going to ask you a couple of questions that our supporters have submitted that only they will get to see on Locals.
01:08:58.000
But for now, thank you so much for coming on the show, and thank you guys for watching and listening.
01:09:03.000
We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or our show.
01:09:08.000
And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.
01:09:15.000
This is a very good question from Clean Purple Bunny.
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Would you regret most about the British government's response to COVID and your fight against it?
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We are a little bit concerned here, but I'll consult in a���ings at the end of the war.
01:09:51.000
I think there's nobody but the את objet beingkurr to assist me.
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