TRIGGERnometry - Matt Goodwin on National Populism, Immigration, Brexit & the Future of Politics

00:00:00.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this is the

00:00:12.620 show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing

00:00:17.320 about at trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts we ask the experts our fantastic expert

00:00:24.000 guest this week is matt goodwin who's a professor of political science at the university of kent

00:00:28.520 and a senior fellow at Chatham House.

00:00:30.720 Matt, welcome to Trigon Rotary.

00:00:40.900 Thanks for having me.

00:00:42.040 It's great to have you.

00:00:43.100 And listen, the question we always ask is,

00:00:45.220 who are you, what's your background, how are you, where you are,

00:00:48.040 what's your interest and some of the things that we're going to be talking about?

00:00:50.980 Yeah, well, I'm an academic.

00:00:52.700 I've been in political science,

00:00:54.580 the study of politics for 15 years, something like that.

00:01:01.140 I got interested in populism, I think, really during the early 2000s,

00:01:07.200 late 1990s, early 2000s.

00:01:09.200 I was doing my undergraduate dissertation on what was going on in Austria at the time.

00:01:14.700 And Austria was one of the first democracies in Europe to have a national populist party

00:01:20.900 really join a national government in a way that got global attention.

00:01:24.580 There'd been some stuff in Italy prior, but, and I found myself in Austria running around

00:01:28.560 sort of talking to all of these national populists, asking them what they were trying to do and

00:01:32.500 so on.

00:01:32.760 And from there on, it kind of became this real interest in trying to understand, you

00:01:37.600 know, really why people were voting for those movements, where they were coming from, and

00:01:42.340 how they were trying to change their countries.

00:01:45.160 And then over the years, I started doing some pretty interesting research projects.

00:01:51.920 my PhD, I was interviewing the harder end of that scene, talking to a lot of folks on

00:01:58.640 the extreme right wing about why they became active, why they joined these parties and

00:02:04.160 movements that were even further to the right than national populace. And then, yeah, went

00:02:10.860 the academic route, got a job at Manchester and then Nottingham and then ended up where

00:02:16.340 I am now at Kent and doing some work with think tanks along the way.

00:02:19.240 And you're about to release a book literally in a couple of days about national populism. We'll get into that. And it's fascinating. Thank you for sending us a copy. We've had a chance to look through some of it. First of all, define national populism for us, because I think some people don't really understand what we're talking about. People see Brexit and Trump and these movements in Europe happening, but they don't have quite a solid idea of what it is that we're talking about. So who are these people? What's their agenda?

00:02:44.220 Yeah, so there's a bit of a debate about how to define all of these movements, but basically I refer to national populists as being really movements that want to prioritise the nation and the common plain people against political media, social elites that have often held the people in contempt or certainly have neglected them on a number of key issues.

00:03:12.860 And national populism is quite different from left-wing populism.

00:03:16.640 Left-wing populists prioritize class allegiance.

00:03:20.240 National populists prioritize the nation and a particular conception of the nation.

00:03:26.160 And not all of the things that tend to get lumped into that category are necessarily national populists.

00:03:32.960 Brexit had elements of national populism, but it wasn't exclusively a national populist revolt.

00:03:38.120 In the same way that Donald Trump had elements of national populism, but he was also, too, a Republican candidate at a presidential election.

00:03:46.060 But in Europe, it's a bit more different.

00:03:47.900 We have movements that are firmly outside of the mainstream that are, I would argue, unequivocally national populist.

00:03:57.400 And they all build on a very long tradition in democracy that goes back as long as we've had democracy,

00:04:04.640 that as long as we've been participating in elections, voting for parties, we've had national populists.

00:04:10.700 So it's been with us for a very long time.

00:04:13.320 And national populism has obviously, we've seen a rise.

00:04:15.960 How much of that has got to do with the economic crash in 2008?

00:04:20.060 Well, this is a million dollar question, right?

00:04:21.700 So if you're on the left, you basically argue, and I'm making judgments.

00:04:25.360 I don't know where your politics are. I've got an idea.

00:04:28.220 But if you lean leftwards, you tend to say all of this is about economic scarcity, right?

00:04:33.620 It's the old Marxist line that effectively anybody who votes for nationalist movements or movements that express unease about mass immigration, that they are driven by their worries over basically income, wages, and scarce economic goods.

00:04:50.260 and that usually an extension of that argument is that the people are being manipulated by ruthless elites in society,

00:04:58.520 whether it's the media, whether it's these conspiratorial right-wingers trying to divide and rule.

00:05:05.940 The evidence, I would argue, and certainly we argue in the book, is pretty overwhelming in pointing in a different direction,

00:05:12.200 which is that if you think, for example, about some of the most successful national populists that we've had in the Western world

00:05:18.320 coming in places like Switzerland, in Austria, the Netherlands.

00:05:22.880 They broke through amid very low unemployment rates,

00:05:26.640 some of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe,

00:05:28.480 very strong growing economies.

00:05:30.800 Look at law and justice in Poland, 0.72

00:05:32.660 really came into power on the back of a rapid economic expansion.

00:05:38.260 Take Britain, Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party

00:05:41.160 first really broke through in 2004 after 48 consecutive periods of growth.

00:05:46.520 And then when we drill down to the individual level and we look at who's actually supporting these movements, and I'm sure we'll come back to it, they tend to be working full time.

00:05:53.980 They tend to often be on not amazing wages, but standard, average wages.

00:05:59.520 And so the unemployed, the kind of real losers of globalization in a sort of visceral sense, they are not generally providing the bulk of support to national populism.

00:06:10.520 populism. I mean, it's worth remembering even in the 1930s, many people on the left like that

00:06:15.440 comparison at the moment. A lot of the unemployed and those who are out of work are actually voting

00:06:19.880 for the communists, not for the National Socialists. And National Socialism, National

00:06:25.600 Populism are two very different movements. But the idea that the left pushes that this is all

00:06:31.200 about economic scarcity, I'm afraid is not actually very convincing when you look at the evidence.

00:06:37.100 One of the interesting points in the book is that one of the interesting facts you cite in the book is that Donald Trump voters had the average highest income of the three available candidates.

00:06:45.980 So if you take Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, his voters actually had a higher average income than any of the other two.

00:06:53.640 And I wanted to come back to the fact that you've been talking about this for a long time.

00:06:57.300 Actually, you've been predicting this, unlike most people who predicted Brexit and Trump very confidently after it happened.

00:07:03.880 Right. You actually predicted it many years before.

00:07:06.060 You've been talking about this since like 2010, at least, from what I've seen an interview did with economists, for example, where you were talking actually about Anders Breivik, I think, in the context of this.

00:07:15.880 And that is not a time in which we were having these conversations at all.

00:07:19.600 So can you take us back through that period, if it's not the economic crash that Francis asked you about, what has happened over the last 10 to 15 years that has caused this movement to emerge in this way?

00:07:30.460 Yeah, well, one of my pet frustrations about the public debate is that we focus on the short-term factors, right?

00:07:38.080 And we're obsessed about what happens during campaigns.

00:07:41.440 I mean, I just finished reading Hillary Clinton's book, What Happened?

00:07:44.360 And I realise she still doesn't know what happened, largely because she's obsessed with what happened during that campaign period.

00:07:52.260 Now, I would say, actually, if you look not at the last 10 to 15 years, but actually at the last 30 to 40 years,

00:07:58.740 you can really see a number of deep currents begin to come forward and start to reshape

00:08:05.560 democracies in the West quietly, but in a powerful way from below, creating the conditions that have

00:08:12.460 allowed national populism today to get to the levels of support that we're seeing. And this

00:08:20.040 is partly about a backlash to the rise of what you might call the new left in the 60s and the 70s,

00:08:26.600 which pushed a very liberal agenda, the expansion of rights for minorities,

00:08:33.020 the support, if not celebration, of mass immigration,

00:08:37.100 the shift towards supranational institutions like the European Union.

00:08:41.580 And in the 80s and the 90s, and particularly in countries like France and Austria,

00:08:44.900 you began to see the beginnings of a backlash to that new liberal consensus.

00:08:51.900 Jean-Marie Le Pen, for example, who used to run on the slogan, Le Pen, the people.

00:08:56.600 or the Austrian Freedom Party and Jörg Haider,

00:09:00.120 an earlier generation of populists that we now tend to forget

00:09:03.480 because we like to think everything is unique to our era.

00:09:06.920 Jörg Haider used to say, I say what the people think, right?

00:09:11.400 And it was that notion that he's tapping into a concern,

00:09:15.200 particularly among an alliance of social conservatives

00:09:18.520 that were often quite affluent and blue-collar workers

00:09:22.060 who together felt very uncomfortable with both the scale and the pace of change

00:09:28.420 that was happening within the broader nation.

00:09:31.060 And that was partly about immigration.

00:09:32.420 It was also about, in some countries, increasingly a political establishment

00:09:37.960 that seemed to be holding the people in contempt, certainly neglecting them.

00:09:43.700 And also increasingly, in more recent years, the specific issue of Islam in Europe

00:09:48.560 and the refugee crisis that followed.

00:09:51.480 So by the time you get to really the 90s or 2000s and you start going through things like 9-11, long before the financial crisis, you're beginning to see these movements actually reaching very high levels of support in some countries, joining national governments, often doing well in very prosperous, affluent areas, and really winning over low-skilled service workers, the self-employed blue-collar workers.

00:10:15.700 So we talk a lot about the collapse of social democracy today. Actually, you can really trace that to the early to mid 2000s. And now the crisis kicked in and no one's saying the crisis isn't important because it is. It wasn't the underlying driver, but it did exacerbate a number of these emerging value conflicts in the West between kind of culturally liberal middle class professionals and those social conservatives and workers.

00:10:41.400 And you begin to see this kind of gradual polarization within a lot of Western democracies.

00:10:47.820 And I think what mattered in a big way was the national populace themselves also changed.

00:10:52.940 They became more articulate. They became more sophisticated.

00:10:55.920 They started to tone down white supremacism.

00:10:58.220 They started to basically get a bit more in line with where public opinion really was on these issues.

00:11:04.360 People like Gert Wilders started to say, well, let's be pro-LGBT, but also let's be anti-Islam at the same time.

00:11:11.400 So you started to see these kind of curious innovations that we didn't really have before.

00:11:15.960 And, of course, that then really brought together, you know, the public demand for a sort of a challenge to that liberal consensus with the sort of party supply, with these parties just being a bit more competent, a bit more articulate at how they're bringing these groups into the political system.

00:11:35.280 And today, where we are, you know, I think the interesting macro question at least is when you look at what's happening in the West, does this signal that we are at the end of a period of great change and volatility, or does it instead signal that we are at the beginning of a new period of great change, fragmentation and polarisation?

00:11:52.760 My view is that if you look at all the evidence, we are very much at the beginning of a new period of great change and volatility, and these movements will ride that wave.

00:12:03.020 So, you know, with populism, right?

00:12:05.460 Now, I've got a lot of friends.

00:12:06.680 You may have a PhD.

00:12:08.400 You may be a professor.

00:12:09.320 I've got mates who've read a couple of Guardian articles,

00:12:12.600 and they've told me that populism is racism.

00:12:15.520 Is this right?

00:12:18.220 So, no, that's not right.

00:12:23.680 Surprise!

00:12:25.040 So there are racist voters who are drawn to national populism, right?

00:12:29.140 Nobody is denying that.

00:12:31.680 But I think the debate, particularly on the left, dare I say the Guardian, I have many of the same friends, by the way, within academia especially, there is a default, there's a view that populism equals fascism, populism equals racism and some of my colleagues I think have given up on the search for truth and have become social justice activists who are more interested in pushing a political agenda than they are in actually interrogating the evidence.

00:12:59.020 If you look at the evidence, there is a minority of national populist voters who certainly subscribe to overtly racist, xenophobic views that argue you can only really be British if you were born in the country and if your father and mother and grandparents were born in the country.

00:13:19.540 and they hold that very narrow ethnic conception.

00:13:22.880 But there are a lot more voters than those within the national populist electorate

00:13:27.660 that distance themselves from those very narrow kind of race-based conceptions

00:13:34.240 that say actually, you know, when I think about who's in the nation,

00:13:39.040 I would like people to speak the language.

00:13:40.960 I'd like them to share some of the customs and traditions.

00:13:44.820 I'd like them to integrate into the national community.

00:13:47.620 And I feel, for example, completely comfortable with minority rights, with LGBT communities, but I have some specific concerns over the extent to which the pace of this change is actually being able to be managed and these new communities are being integrated into the national community.

00:14:11.480 And that isn't about race at all.

00:14:15.020 And these movements as well, I think, have not just out of strategy.

00:14:21.400 I do think part of it is a sincere generational change within the national populist movements themselves.

00:14:27.080 You know, they are very different from what we saw in the 60s, 70s and the 80s.

00:14:31.320 The likes of Golden Dawn in Greece, which is basically a neo-Nazi party, is very much an outlier.

00:14:38.120 Now, I did a lot of work, for example, on the UK Independence Party, looking at that movement and how it was organising, and lots of UK Independence Party leaders and activists were completely comfortable with non-white Britons, black minority ethnic Britons.

00:14:57.000 Many of them were in the party, they were active, but they did have specific concerns over that issue of the pace and the scale of demographic change and wanting to slow that down.

00:15:09.440 And I think the problem for the left is it's drawn a straight line between populism and fascism or populism and racism.

00:15:16.680 And it's fuelled, as a consequence of that, the sense among voters that actually the left really isn't interested in having a conversation about these legitimate grievances over communities being changed, sense of community decline, community loss, concerns over who's in the social contract, who's not actually interested in joining that social contract.

00:15:42.420 And as a consequence, I don't think it's a coincidence that national populism has risen at the same time as social democracy has collapsed, because I think the way in which the left has responded to this has really exacerbated its decline.

00:15:58.240 Are you telling me that calling someone a racist doesn't help the situation?

00:16:01.700 Well, we have a lot of evidence suggesting that it makes things worse, right? And we've got a lot of evidence now coming out on the kind of political correctness agenda, social norms, that if you're brandishing somebody in that way, then actually what you're doing is you're encouraging that backlash and you're basically creating conditions under which people are more likely to abandon the mainstream and go over to national populism.

00:16:28.720 And these parties are, you know, doing a reasonable job of exploiting that unfortunate strategy on the left.

00:16:38.880 And, you know, we have to try and get past this moment in the West where we associate any airing of grievances over migration as racism.

00:16:49.240 Because if we don't get over it, we're going to end up with incredibly polarized societies.

00:16:54.400 And the kind of polarization that we can begin to see now in the U.S., for example, in the U.S., when 90 percent of people say support interracial marriage, but now we're seeing over 50 percent in some groups saying, I'd be uncomfortable if my son or daughter married somebody from the other political tribe.

00:17:11.560 You're beginning to see the building blocks of a polarization that actually I find incredibly worrying.

00:17:16.380 and in Europe you can begin to see the same

00:17:19.000 and this is partly why I'm increasingly perhaps provocative

00:17:23.980 and controversial within academia

00:17:25.880 is that there are still many who refuse to accept

00:17:30.560 that what we're seeing through the prism of national populism

00:17:34.380 is an expression of grievances that are partly legitimate

00:17:38.160 and we need to respond to those

00:17:40.840 it's perfectly legitimate to talk about prioritising citizens

00:17:45.380 over non-citizens. It's perfectly legitimate to talk about integration, what isn't working, 0.70

00:17:51.500 and it's perfectly legitimate to say we'd quite like to reform the migration system

00:17:55.560 in order to be more responsive to what ordinary people want. Those are perfectly legitimate

00:18:01.400 grievances. Unfortunately, the left in general is terrible at actually having that conversation.

00:18:09.880 And why do you think that is?

00:18:10.920 I think it's a combination of factors. I think partly it's about, it's a genuine, I think the left was essentially hijacked in the 60s and 70s by a philosophical movement that really had no real interest in engaging with anything that wasn't part of its broader agenda.

00:18:33.960 that it was a movement that I think was very much around the prioritization of minority rights

00:18:44.440 and identity politics that we are all familiar with, and I don't need to rehash what that is

00:18:51.180 and how it came here, but very much prioritized that at the expense of sustaining and replenishing

00:18:59.980 its relationship with traditional voters on the left and I think that that was a big strategic

00:19:05.140 mistake and we're still living through the consequences of that. But it's also exacerbated

00:19:10.560 by social networks. So many people on the left kind of constantly within their own bubbles,

00:19:16.200 within their own orbits, that they don't have many networks, they don't have many links

00:19:20.720 outside of those and that fuels this disconnection. I mean I'm from a, you know, I grew up in

00:19:25.560 a working-class community, single-parent household. Most of my mates are in construction or non-academic,

00:19:35.840 non-elite, if you like, industries. And I think increasingly we're seeing this sort

00:19:43.560 of coming apart, the tearing apart of that centre ground. And it's going to have, I think,

00:19:51.120 incredibly negative effects um and so my line on this in terms of where we're going over the future

00:19:58.160 is that as we polarize and as we've seen through the brexit debate there are lots of people on the

00:20:04.300 left that simply you know who've been used to feeling like winners and now feel like losers

00:20:09.180 but consequently have no interest in actually even having a conversation with the other side

00:20:14.480 and that's going to make this a lot worse well that's what we tried to do on the show is have

00:20:18.540 these conversations with people piss people off yeah well that's definitely part of it but that's

00:20:22.740 what that's why we've got you here yeah uh but generally we try to have these honest conversations

00:20:27.020 because that's the only way this is ever going to change i mean that that was that's my biggest

00:20:30.800 frustration with what's happening around these issues is that we're no longer communicating and

00:20:35.380 and then we are going to be more polarized

00:20:37.120 but i want to take you back to a chapter in the book which i think is a kind of a key piece of

00:20:51.560 it which is the bit where you talk about myths and one of the myths that you you talk about is

00:20:56.960 the idea that the support for national populism comes from angry white men basically francis

00:21:01.960 ten years from now a lovely slice of gammon yeah uh so you talk about that and there's a whole

00:21:08.280 bunch of other myths that you talk about as and and i think you're just reading it i was like yep

00:21:13.620 yep yep yep yep because it's just what we're seeing out there in the world right now so tell

00:21:18.320 us about that what are the myths about the typical populism supporter yeah so the these are what i

00:21:24.600 call comfort blankets right a lot of folks who have been outflanked by this political change

00:21:29.880 have thrown comfort blankets over themselves to try and explain it away.

00:21:34.820 And one of those is that this is all about angry old white guys 0.96

00:21:38.860 who are basically going to die in five years 0.95

00:21:41.160 and they're going to be replaced by, you know, my students,

00:21:43.720 you know, young, liberal, tolerant Corbynistas

00:21:46.300 who are going to take us into this, you know,

00:21:48.900 the sunny uplands of cosmopolitanism, internationalism

00:21:52.180 and never-ending diversity.

00:21:53.780 My God, that sounds horrible.

00:21:55.180 This is what I call the economist argument.

00:21:57.300 I mean, the economist loves it.

00:21:58.360 they wheel it out on a weekly basis and my friends on the liberal left really love it

00:22:05.200 because the implication of that argument is you don't actually need to engage with the grievances

00:22:10.180 you don't need to actually take this stuff too seriously because it it's a waiting game just

00:22:14.780 hold on put the seatbelts on let's just hang on okay right now they're all dead okay now we can

00:22:19.920 and you saw that in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum an economist friend of mine even

00:22:25.560 calculated that if remainers could hold on to 2022, then that is the moment at which remainers

00:22:34.160 will have a clear majority because enough leavers will have died. And therefore, you don't basically

00:22:39.860 need to engage with the grievances and other, you know, the columnists and national newspapers have

00:22:44.260 also pushed this argument. It's the laziest argument that's going around. And it's also

00:22:49.500 bloody insulting, to be honest. But the it's also a factual because as people get older,

00:22:54.880 they changed their political opinions.

00:22:55.920 Well, so here's where you can basically easily destroy that argument.

00:22:59.900 One is, if you just look at who's voting for national populists across Europe, it's often

00:23:03.480 the under-40s.

00:23:04.580 Marine Le Pen closed the gender gap last year for the first time in her party's movement.

00:23:10.320 She was as successful among young women as young men. 0.97

00:23:12.920 There you go, women are racist too. 1.00

00:23:14.760 Austria, the under-40s, were very supportive of the Freedom Party. 0.97

00:23:19.520 41% of white millennials back Donald Trump, half of 35 to 45-year-olds in the UK endorse leaving,

00:23:28.520 the Sweden Democrats, strongest among the 30 to 54-year-olds, the alternative for Germany, 0.54

00:23:33.500 strongest among the 30 to 50-year-olds. I mean, the argument basically is being stretched to its

00:23:39.280 absolute extreme by lots of what I would call hyper-liberals because, you know, it's a sexy

00:23:45.560 argument, right? They like it. It kind of conforms to their value set. But generational change takes

00:23:51.280 a long, long, long time. And secondly, the jury on life cycle effects is out, right? So I've got

00:23:57.860 a colleague at Oxford, James Tilly, who's shown that as all of us age, we'll become 0.38% more

00:24:05.520 conservative as one year replaces the next, right? 0.38%, which doesn't sound like a lot.

00:24:11.240 But if you consider that over the course of a lifetime,

00:24:14.420 that basically explains the generational differences in labor

00:24:18.040 and conservative support among the different age groups.

00:24:21.060 And, you know, we do it.

00:24:23.300 And the second thing to keep in mind, by the way, related to that,

00:24:25.980 is I don't really see much evidence in the survey data

00:24:29.080 on the new sort of iGen generation, the millennial generation,

00:24:32.200 that these actually are passionate, tolerant liberals

00:24:35.880 who are going to defend freedom of speech

00:24:38.180 and have these really big debates and proactively really hold up the marketplace of ideas

00:24:44.880 and ensure that the beating heart of liberalism continues.

00:24:49.100 If anything, I actually, I'm a bit anxious in that I see evidence to the contrary,

00:24:53.400 that if you look at the debates over campus environments in the U.S.,

00:24:58.680 if you look at some of the evidence in Europe, yes, they tend to be socially liberal,

00:25:03.880 but not always as open to the exchange of views,

00:25:09.260 the exchange of opinions and debate

00:25:11.320 as perhaps we would like them to be.

00:25:13.980 You put that very mildly, Matt.

00:25:15.540 I mean, if you look at the concept...

00:25:17.140 Try to be diplomatic.

00:25:18.940 Well, screw that, Matt. Not on this show.

00:25:21.020 Right.

00:25:21.620 But, I mean, you look at the concept of free speech

00:25:24.980 in things like academia and things like the comedy industry,

00:25:28.640 which we know very well,

00:25:29.940 it's essentially become a right-wing issue.

00:25:32.240 Well, there are lots of people who, when you point this out, will say,

00:25:34.640 oh, the problem on universities is being stoked up by people who are causing problems, right?

00:25:39.380 And then you see actual real-world events going on around where you think,

00:25:43.400 well, actually, I'm not sure this is being blown up.

00:25:45.060 I mean, if you look, for example, at the recent story of my university,

00:25:47.760 which has just decided that, or at least the union has decided that people dressing up as cowboys

00:25:54.940 is a sort of cultural appropriation and could be seen to be offensive.

00:25:58.940 And unfortunately for me, actually, the guy who pushed that argument was also called Matt Goodwin.

00:26:03.000 So I suddenly found I woke up one morning, my email was stacked full of emails saying,

00:26:07.040 what on earth are you doing?

00:26:07.960 I said, well, actually, quite the contrary.

00:26:09.180 I think people should dress up in whatever they want to dress up in and be offensive.

00:26:14.140 Not in my name.

00:26:15.160 Yeah, yeah, indeed.

00:26:16.220 But the argument is very real.

00:26:17.700 And the evidence is certainly there.

00:26:20.540 And it's good to see the U.S. now having a much more vigorous debate about that and where we're headed.

00:26:24.500 But the angry old white man narrative also ignores the fact that we have generations, particularly in Europe, new generations, that are going to feel left behind in their own way.

00:26:36.660 that if you're grappling with youth unemployment rates of 10% to 15% in southern Europe,

00:26:41.420 if you are struggling to get a £100,000 deposit for a house in London, 0.90

00:26:47.240 if you are keenly aware, as my students are, that they've got a pretty crap deal

00:26:52.420 compared to their baby boomer parents or grandparents,

00:26:56.060 then I would argue the conditions, the underlying conditions,

00:26:59.980 that partly fuel national populism, that sense of relative loss, relative deprivation,

00:27:04.520 And also some concerns over the speed at which societies are being transformed.

00:27:10.420 I think these movements are going to continue to have a lot of gas in the tank.

00:27:15.020 In Austria, for example, they campaign for votes in nightclubs.

00:27:19.460 I mean, something that would be like the equivalent of Nigel Farage going to the Ministry of Sound or something.

00:27:24.020 It would just be very bizarre.

00:27:25.360 But the youth in Hungary and Central and Eastern Europe too, by the way, the youth vote's very important to these parties.

00:27:32.760 Now, you were pointing out about the different types of people who voted for populism.

00:27:37.560 We didn't really touch it.

00:27:38.840 Apparently, there are quite a lot of ethnic minorities.

00:27:40.640 For instance, my mother is a Latin American woman, and she loves Trump, and she voted Brexit.

00:27:46.660 Well, when Vince Cable came out and said, you know, the vote for Brexit was a kind of a backlash among old white people that want to return to the days of empire,

00:27:55.360 it was a very ill-judged intervention.

00:27:58.520 It was also completely disconnected from the evidence, right?

00:28:00.880 One in three black or minority ethnic voters in Britain endorsed leaving the European Union.

00:28:07.540 And my frustration, I suppose, with the media is we've had a lot of vox pops with the white working class from Stoke and Burnley and Clacton. 0.90

00:28:18.220 All great towns.

00:28:19.180 All great towns.

00:28:20.280 But we haven't seen many similar vox pops in Birmingham, Slough, Luton with minority communities that also voted leave.

00:28:29.900 In the same way we haven't heard much about the one in three Hispanic-Latino voters in the U.S. that endorsed Trump, Cuban-Americans in Florida, Jewish activists in Europe that have got involved with national populism because they, I think, have made a strategic trade-off in a way in viewing these movements as being more serious about countering sort of the perceived threat from Islam than the mainstream parties.

00:28:56.520 And so I think that we're going to hopefully get into a debate that acknowledges that these electorates that are supporting these movements are more diverse than many commentators and thinkers would have us believe.

00:29:11.360 And when you look at why minorities voted to leave the European Union, a strong sense that goes back to the point about young people, that they were being left behind or excluded at the expense of others, that EU nationals were being given preference to the UK at the expense of their relatives, friends and networks from South Asia, for example.

00:29:33.400 also a strong sense of social conservatism, that they, like other social conservatives,

00:29:38.240 value stability, group conformity within a quite diverse conception of the nation,

00:29:45.060 and aren't really down with this never-ending social change argument that liberals really love.

00:29:52.720 The analogy I use, the Tony Blair argument was you're on a train and it's going 300 miles an hour,

00:29:59.980 the train is called globalisation, you can't get off.

00:30:03.400 And it's inevitable. You just have to stay on.

00:30:05.480 And that was effectively Blair's argument in his 2005 conference speech.

00:30:09.500 A lot of these voters, I think, now are saying, actually, well, we can get off the train.

00:30:14.060 We can try and slow down the pace of change.

00:30:17.240 And there's this concept that I think national populism offers,

00:30:20.360 which is this idea that there is an alternative state, right?

00:30:24.180 You don't have to just be down with this never-ending, constant churn.

00:30:29.780 You can try and shift things in a different direction.

00:30:32.860 and the world might not collapse.

00:30:34.900 Now, that comes with a lot of negatives, too.

00:30:36.540 Those movements can be xenophobic.

00:30:38.780 They can foment grievances and polarization.

00:30:42.180 But even minority voters, I think, are partly receptive to that argument of saying,

00:30:46.060 well, if you're in the U.S., for example, you might feel that, well, now you are established within that national community.

00:30:53.120 You might not necessarily, therefore, be down with endless change, endless flux,

00:30:57.660 just because you happen to be from the same background.

00:31:02.860 as new migrants and new arrivals.

00:31:05.960 So that may increase.

00:31:08.240 The jury's out. We'll have to see.

00:31:10.060 One of the things I find interesting about the political situation at the moment

00:31:13.440 is that it sounds like we come from Sierra Mere backgrounds

00:31:16.900 in terms of, I come from an upper working class area.

00:31:21.100 And when I grew up, there was the NF.

00:31:23.560 And everybody knew they were right-wing, they were racist,

00:31:26.060 they were pretty unabashedly.

00:31:27.060 Where did you grow up?

00:31:27.880 In a place called Morden in South London.

00:31:30.320 And it was very obvious what they were

00:31:33.460 There was the NF pub and all the rest of it

00:31:35.240 Now you look at a lot of these groups

00:31:37.120 And you go, I don't know whether you're right wing or not

00:31:40.260 Like the Football Lads Alliance

00:31:41.600 Who went on a march

00:31:43.160 And then there was a case where

00:31:44.800 The team that I support, West Ham

00:31:46.720 Had a coach go along and openly support them

00:31:49.720 And there's a discussion now

00:31:51.040 Whether he should lose his job or not

00:31:52.660 Are the Football Lads Alliance a right wing group

00:31:55.200 Is Tommy Robinson right wing

00:31:57.120 Well he's definitely right wing

00:31:58.560 is he far right yeah yeah absolutely is he far right and all these different things i mean where

00:32:03.560 do you stand on this with these types of groups are they far right are they racist or is there's

00:32:08.560 something more going on there yeah well with those particular groups and also groups like

00:32:13.780 pegida in germany it's quite it's they're quite amorphous they don't really have fixed borders

00:32:19.260 and they operate outside of electoral politics which makes it quite difficult to understand

00:32:24.040 really what they're about. But they are certainly right-wing in that they are prioritizing the

00:32:31.440 nation. They're certainly not interested in class allegiance, but they are prioritizing

00:32:36.120 issues of migration and identity and culture, which puts them firmly on the right. Are they

00:32:42.860 extreme right-wing or are they radical right? And traditionally, the distinction between the two is

00:32:48.680 If you're advocating the overthrow of democracy, if you're anti-democratic, if you are like historic fascism and you are revolutionary, you just believe democracy should be overthrown, then you are on the extreme right wing.

00:33:02.720 If, alternatively, you're saying, I accept democracy, I think democracy as a system of government is probably what we should have, but I'd quite like to give more power and influence to ordinary people who have been shut out of key decisions.

00:33:17.420 For example, they haven't been talked to about these issues of Islamic terrorism or grooming or female genital mutilation, these issues on which Tommy Robinson and others campaign.

00:33:31.480 then I would say they are radical right not extreme right-wing when they trip

00:33:37.480 into violence and when they trip into openly undermining the democratic state

00:33:43.300 then they trip into that extreme right-wing category the term far-right

00:33:47.980 I just think is meaningless because it doesn't really tell us anything it's if

00:33:51.580 you're on the far right well is that Greece Greece's Golden Dawn is it the

00:33:55.900 UK Independence Party and if you lump them all under far right doesn't really

00:33:58.960 give us that nice dividing line that we need.

00:34:02.180 I've done a lot of work with police and security services over the years, and I think that's

00:34:08.160 where we need to be very careful in how we categorise these movements.

00:34:10.720 National Action, for example, which was an extra-parliamentary extreme right-wing

00:34:15.660 group that was advocating terrorism and was banned by the UK state, was banned on that

00:34:21.820 basis, that it sought to overthrow the democratic system and commit violence, if not murder.

00:34:28.260 But there are groups within the radical right orbit, Football Lads Alliance, I would say,

00:34:32.780 that are not overtly advocating terrorist activities,

00:34:38.500 are not saying let's get rid of democracy,

00:34:41.160 but they do feel, they tap into that national populist point,

00:34:44.120 which is that they've been neglected in terms of their views about key issues,

00:34:48.620 whether that's relating to the role of Islam, its capacity to integrate,

00:34:52.000 whether it's about the grooming scandal, because this is an awkward point, right?

00:34:55.920 but many of the people on the radical right who were talking about child sexual exploitation in the early 2000s

00:35:03.960 have partly been legitimised by the subsequent events that have occurred.

00:35:09.080 The Times have brought attention to this, great journalists like Andrew Norfolk and others

00:35:14.060 who have really kind of been forerunners on that,

00:35:17.920 but groups on the radical right, the BNP, the English Defence League,

00:35:21.760 were talking about those issues in the early 2000s.

00:35:24.280 And I wonder kind of out loud how British politics might have been different had we collectively as a society been more responsive to those issues early on.

00:35:36.180 I mean, working class anger, disillusionment, you know, was evident in the late 90s, early 2000s.

00:35:42.200 If you've been looking at turnout in some communities like in South London or the Midlands, North East, North West,

00:35:50.380 you would have seen, particularly after Blair's second landslide in 2001,

00:35:55.280 turnout levels among working class voters just start to decline steadily.

00:35:59.940 And by the time you get to 2010, many of those voters are basically not voting.

00:36:04.500 Some of them came back into the system for the UK Independence Party.

00:36:08.380 Some of them then went back into apathy in 2015.

00:36:11.240 But at the 2016 election, a lot of them came out to vote leave because they felt that outside of first-past-the-post, that was an opportunity to get those values, to get those views, to get that seat at the table, and they came out and voted.

00:36:25.400 Turnout, let's not forget, was higher in working-class districts, but it was lower than average in some of the hipster London districts of Camden and Shoreditch and Hackney.

00:36:35.080 And I think partly, and what data can't tell us, but what my suspicion is,

00:36:39.000 is that that's partly about this sense that, listen, I want to be listened to.

00:36:44.000 I've got concerns. I want to put them on the agenda.

00:36:47.160 And Football Labs Alliance and those groups, which are on that borderline,

00:36:52.100 I think the risk is if you don't open up this conversation and you have it nationally,

00:36:56.740 those are the groups that are closer to that border that will end up having that conversation.

00:37:01.300 And they would just control that space.

00:37:03.140 And they are significant, right? Those movements are significant.

00:37:06.840 And as the Germans are discovering, when you don't get control of that conversation,

00:37:12.200 you quickly lay the conditions for a very significant backlash,

00:37:17.660 which partly found its expression through Pegida, but also through the alternative for Germany.

00:37:22.480 and it sounds like what you're saying really if i'm reading between the lines is

00:37:34.920 these movements have been necessary because the elites haven't been listening the media

00:37:39.760 the the mps the parliament the government hasn't been listening to the concerns of ordinary people

00:37:45.060 things like you talk about grooming games you know there's significant amount of evidence now

00:37:49.320 that the reason they were able to thrive in these areas is because of political correctness,

00:37:55.140 is because the police, the councils, the social services didn't want to raise the issue

00:37:59.040 that there was an ethnic component to this problem.

00:38:03.060 And so do you think that the rise of national populism

00:38:06.340 has been a necessary wake-up call for the rest of society?

00:38:11.460 So I think this is really where the debate is,

00:38:14.620 and the key part of the debate is very much around,

00:38:18.040 do you view populism as an inherently evil force, which many on the left do,

00:38:23.240 and therefore they're not interested in engaging and thinking about it seriously?

00:38:27.300 Or do you instead view it partly as a corrective, as a movement that ebbs and flows throughout the history of democracy,

00:38:36.260 but it really comes to the forefront when certain groups feel that they're not being listened to

00:38:42.880 and certain issues are not being addressed that concern a large number of people.

00:38:48.660 So populism, for some writers and thinkers, is a snapback in the system.

00:38:54.360 The system has gone too far away from groups or issues

00:38:57.860 and it's forced to come back into those areas in order to deal with it.

00:39:03.360 So that's why it's a controversial point, but in a way that's why some people argue

00:39:07.720 that national populism has a silver lining in that it brings these issues back. It also brings

00:39:14.240 groups back into the political system. I mean, if you look at the alternative for Germany,

00:39:19.500 you know, the German party system is rapidly imploding, right, in front of our eyes. We're

00:39:24.280 seeing mad shifts in Germany, essentially. I mean, the SPD is, the once dominant centre-left SPD is

00:39:31.380 collapsing. The AFD is now in 15 of 16 state parliaments, will probably be in all of them by

00:39:37.960 the end of October 2018, and is also having quite a clear impact on the policy agenda.

00:39:45.080 The number one source of votes for the AFD, non-voters, people who didn't vote at the

00:39:51.720 previous election. The Brexit referendum, I was involved with an exit poll on the day of the

00:39:57.500 referendum, about 2 million voters turned out who hadn't voted at the previous election. About 30%

00:40:04.300 of them then didn't vote at the 2017 election. So they are bringing these non-voters back in.

00:40:11.720 That, to me, is something that should be welcomed, right? That we want the marketplace of ideas to be

00:40:17.440 as strong as possible. Now, you might not like what national populism is saying about these

00:40:24.360 issues you might not like how it frames these issues and sometimes it does frame them in a

00:40:28.600 in a xenophobic way but the underlying grievances are legitimate ones and that's certainly the 0.99

00:40:35.480 argument in the book that if you just think about where the West is heading over the next few

00:40:40.000 decades a lot of the trends that are already in place we can't do anything to stop it now

00:40:44.600 right a lot of the trends that are in place that are fueling these movements they are going to

00:40:49.100 accelerate at speeds that are going to cause a significant sense of alarm among a large

00:40:56.360 number of voters.

00:40:57.740 I would rather have those voters in the democratic marketplace of ideas than outside of that

00:41:04.560 and pursuing things like the Football Labs Alliance or the Defence Leagues or PEGIDA.

00:41:10.780 And that means, I think, for my friends on the liberal left, when they're at the table

00:41:17.020 and they've asked you a question, you have to give a reply.

00:41:21.420 You can't ignore it anymore.

00:41:22.640 You can't duck it, for the simple reason being

00:41:25.040 that your own vote shares are rapidly dwindling.

00:41:28.800 Do you think that there's any way that this can be addressed

00:41:31.920 credibly without reducing immigration?

00:41:35.960 So I think immigration is front and centre to the phenomenon,

00:41:40.020 and I think that inevitably, particularly Western Europe

00:41:45.840 in the US will have to reform immigration in a much more substantive way, that we will

00:41:53.220 have to slow down migration and we will have to work at the same time a lot harder at how

00:42:02.660 we integrate minorities into the broader national community.

00:42:07.960 And you can see the beginnings of this already.

00:42:09.480 So if you look at Scandinavia, it's actually many parties on the left that are now endorsing

00:42:15.120 more assertive policies to try and bring people together in a meaningful way.

00:42:20.100 Denmark, for example, has just pledged to end all parallel societies by 2030.

00:42:24.840 And it's doing some pretty radical stuff that will make a lot of people feel uncomfortable, right?

00:42:29.360 Reducing welfare for people that choose to live in segregated neighborhoods,

00:42:34.060 knocking down apartment blocks that have become too segregated,

00:42:38.240 giving people who commit crimes in those neighborhoods harsher crimes than they would

00:42:42.400 if they lived in other areas, effectively forcing kids under five to go into mixed schooling

00:42:47.860 so they develop those bridges, those links with other groups, with kids from other backgrounds.

00:42:53.840 And that stuff will make a lot of people feel uncomfortable,

00:42:56.400 but I think that's the beginning of the broader direction of travel.

00:42:59.700 Europe in general will have to strengthen external security and borders considerably

00:43:07.120 just simply because of the political pressures that are going to bear down on liberal Europe,

00:43:11.020 especially from Central and Eastern Europe

00:43:12.960 and it may be over time that actually internal borders

00:43:16.340 will have to be a lot stronger than they are at the moment

00:43:19.520 I mean over the last few years we've really seen Schengen

00:43:22.040 not die but certainly be weakened significantly

00:43:26.240 we've had temporary border checks and so on

00:43:28.020 and I think simply because of the mood in the continent

00:43:31.420 the sort of mood music that we know that these issues

00:43:33.720 are now at the front and centre of people's minds

00:43:35.780 we know that they're going to, I would argue

00:43:38.520 they're going to stay at the front and centre of people's minds

00:43:40.840 because what they're going to see over the coming years

00:43:42.960 is going to be quite troubling,

00:43:44.680 particularly not for the winners, if you like,

00:43:47.300 not for the highly educated middle-class professionals

00:43:50.440 that are basically at ease with a lot of these changes,

00:43:54.540 but other sections of society are going to want to push back very strongly.

00:43:59.440 And when you look at people like Macron,

00:44:01.720 they're the outlier, they're not the norm.

00:44:04.100 The norm now are conservative parties, right-wing parties,

00:44:07.120 and the evidence backs me up on this.

00:44:08.760 Europe is moving very quickly to the right in policy terms.

00:44:12.340 So a lot of my liberal left academic colleagues are very excited about the Greens in Bavaria at the moment.

00:44:17.620 I would say show me one study that shows the Greens having anything like the policy influence that conservatives and national populists are having.

00:44:27.800 When you've got left-wing parties advocating more restrictive migration measures,

00:44:31.140 even Corbyn has come out and said, well, let's respect the referendum result and let's reform freedom of movement.

00:44:36.460 And I think that that's the beginning of a much broader shift.

00:44:41.480 It could also be that he loves Brexit.

00:44:45.100 Yeah, but exactly.

00:44:45.720 But the point is Labour on that policy issue are much more, I think, to the right, if you like, than Blair would ever have been.

00:44:55.640 Or Chukra Amuna would ever have been. 0.89

00:44:57.340 And that's the broader travel.

00:44:58.480 Now, the Democrats in the US are an exception.

00:45:00.780 But I think the Democrats are going to have a very difficult few years.

00:45:05.400 I called Trump quite early. It was quite obvious that I think Trump was going to do surprisingly well.

00:45:11.020 And everything since the political shocks of 2016 has told us that many on the liberal left are completely and utterly lost.

00:45:19.300 They don't have a meaningful reply to these moments.

00:45:22.560 Well, this is exactly my concern, because what I see since 2016 is the very people who should have taken that as an opportunity to listen and to go, well, first of all, how did you do this?

00:45:32.840 Right. You know, listen to Steve Bannon about how he thinks he achieved what he achieved getting Trump elected, but also listen to the concerns of the people who did that.

00:45:41.420 Like, you know, I was against Brexit and it was a massive wake up call for me when Brexit and Trump happened.

00:45:46.200 And it's led to this process of us doing the show because I wanted to understand people from different sides and their opinions.

00:45:52.840 But it seems to me like the Democrats in America, the far left here in the U.K., they're doing the opposite.

00:45:59.120 They're doubling down on exactly the things that helped to lead to Brexit and helped to get Trump elected.

00:46:05.820 Well, I mean, I completely agree, except I wasn't surprised by Brexit.

00:46:09.900 You're a lot smarter than I am.

00:46:11.040 No, but I thought Brexit was odds on.

00:46:13.000 I always thought the fundamentals favored Brexit.

00:46:14.960 You know, it's just that everyone got lost and they wanted – groupthink triumph.

00:46:18.580 People saw what they wanted to see, basically, and they completely lost sight of what was going on around them.

00:46:22.840 And when you have a referendum like that against the backdrop of the refugee crisis, terrorist attacks in Paris, the Bataclan, the suicide bombings in Brussels, 20 years at which the surveys had shown us consistently, more or less, that more than half of Britain's population either wanted to leave the EU or wanted to dramatically reduce the EU's powers.

00:46:43.800 The fundamentals were there. What the Vote Leave campaign did as an aside, which was ruthlessly effective, was the slogan, take back control, which was emotionally resonant, but also gave people a personal sense of agency that they could take back control.

00:46:57.980 Now, irrespective of whether you believe it, whether you don't and so on, just from a campaign point of view, it was ruthless.

00:47:03.440 Now, what I see in the U.S. today is the emergence of a new strategy that I think might be as effective.

00:47:10.720 Donald Trump last week said, the Democrats have moved so far left, they're going to turn us into Venezuela.

00:47:16.880 And in a way, it's Trump being Trump, right?

00:47:19.980 But on another level, I think that is a message that will resonate among a mainstream American audience

00:47:26.600 that is looking at Elizabeth Warren falling over herself to show that she's connected to Native Indians

00:47:32.420 Or, you know, over 1024. Never, never ending search for identity, politics, quest for recognition.

00:47:41.740 Everybody's a victim. Nobody can be brought together. I think American American voters have had enough of that.

00:47:49.480 And I think the the backlash to it may be stronger than we currently anticipate.

00:47:54.280 We can see what will happen at the midterms. And in Europe, I think at least it's more interesting to see people on the left.

00:48:02.100 like the new Rise Up movement in Germany, which is trying to say, okay, in order to win back AFD

00:48:08.560 voters, we can't argue that this is all about economic scarcity, because clearly it isn't.

00:48:13.940 But maybe we need to actually revisit what we're saying about the social and economic model. So

00:48:18.600 they've now started saying, well, why don't we have a pause on mass low-skill migration? And

00:48:25.600 why don't we try and think about how we can boost productivity, wages, and innovation without this

00:48:31.060 never-ending search for endless low-skill workers, because maybe that isn't producing

00:48:36.600 a social settlement that is making everybody feel happy, that people do also care about

00:48:42.220 community, nation, belonging, and so on.

00:48:46.720 And I think that's why, in a way, parts of the left in Europe might be ahead of the curve.

00:48:53.060 The Democrats are completely and utterly lost.

00:48:55.120 I mean, framing themselves as the resistance, talking about the democracy being hijacked,

00:49:00.700 They're using militaristic language in order to frame the response to Trump, and that's a very, very dangerous game to play.

00:49:09.480 You know, Trump outplayed the Democrats, Leave outplayed Remain, and I would argue national populism is outplaying social democracy.

00:49:20.460 So there needs to be a much more serious period of self-reflection about what's gone wrong.

00:49:26.220 And my last criticism is that these parties, movements, groups, think tanks on the left only really invite thinkers and speakers to their events who confirm what they already think, right?

00:49:40.700 If you look at all the keynote talks, the guest speakers, you name it, it's people who already, you know, they're preaching to the converted.

00:49:49.600 They're not even putting themselves in a difficult place.

00:49:53.640 They're not even putting themselves in uncomfortable territory.

00:49:56.720 Whereas national populism, I think, has actually gone on a far more...

00:50:02.960 I mean, it's troubling in a way, but it's gone on a far more rigorous intellectual journey

00:50:08.000 over the last 30 years than many people on the left have.

00:50:11.220 But if you go back to the 80s and the 90s, the new right in France, in Italy, 0.85

00:50:16.000 these thinkers were basically trying to explore how the national populist

00:50:20.300 could take the ideas of people like Gramsci and left-wing thinkers and apply them from

00:50:26.000 their own ideological standpoint, there's not much innovation going on at the moment

00:50:30.740 on the left.

00:50:31.740 In fact, all the interesting ideas that are going on in the West in general are on the

00:50:34.180 right.

00:50:35.180 And I don't say that as somebody that identifies openly as being on the right.

00:50:38.720 I just say that as somebody who is looking at the intellectual debate, all the momentum

00:50:44.000 is with people who are pushing back against identity politics, people who are pushing

00:50:48.800 it back against the liberal consensus in a way and saying well what's next you know because

00:50:53.520 clearly this social settlement this status quo is unsustainable um so maybe hopefully we'll get

00:51:00.280 that renaissance on the liberal left that will come into the marketplace of ideas and bring

00:51:06.640 something new because at the moment there's not a lot that's new well i'm actually quite enthused 0.56

00:51:10.820 by what you're saying i mean take the democrats aside and they have gone absolute apeshit they 0.95

00:51:14.780 they've just gone crazy you know I see Maisie Hirono telling men to sit down and shut up and I 0.85

00:51:19.560 think that's not a message that's going to resonate with the wider public it just isn't

00:51:23.480 but if you set that aside and the Democrats in America going crazy and you look at the rest of

00:51:28.640 it isn't this the brilliant democracy at work where you know something didn't work for 20 or 30 years

00:51:34.060 and now we have a movement that's through the democratic system without large-scale violence

00:51:39.220 or any of that is getting the voice of the people back into the mainstream of the conversation

00:51:43.660 And as you make the point in the book, even if these parties aren't necessarily getting elected, they're changing the conversation that we're having and they're bringing it to the right or further to the right of the far left that has been on for so long.

00:51:56.500 Well, there's certainly a view that I would share.

00:52:00.360 But, of course, the dominant view is that that would be that's an apologist's line on what's happening in the West, that actually what we're seeing is the collapse of democracy around us.

00:52:11.280 If you go to Waterstones and you just look at the latest wave of books that have come out post-Trump, post-Brexit, it's how democracies die, the end of the world.

00:52:21.300 It's all this alarmist stuff about young people giving up on democracy.

00:52:25.940 It's all nonsense.

00:52:27.140 I mean, if you look at the most reliable gold standard research surveys that we have, support for democracy is incredibly strong and entrenched.

00:52:36.580 85-90% of people saying

00:52:39.120 I want to live in a democracy

00:52:41.140 I value representative democracy

00:52:43.280 I don't really want to go into

00:52:45.360 an authoritarian regime

00:52:46.740 but we have a lot of writers now

00:52:48.880 particularly coming from the left who

00:52:50.660 really like to push this alarmism

00:52:52.660 this idea that the world is collapsing around us

00:52:55.240 I think partly because it's

00:52:57.040 because they don't really know what else to say

00:52:59.640 I think their world is collapsing

00:53:01.160 because their world is collapsing

00:53:02.600 they don't really know what to say

00:53:03.920 they don't really know how to respond to it

00:53:05.680 And as a consequence, it's easier to kind of preach to the audience,

00:53:10.360 preach to the Guardian Easter's, I guess, and say, well, actually,

00:53:13.780 you know, the world is going to hell in a handcart.

00:53:16.000 And it's quite sad to watch, to be honest, because if you look at the British debate,

00:53:21.160 I mean, the one or two journalists who are pointing out that actually it's not all bad,

00:53:25.900 that we're getting some conversations going that should be happening.

00:53:29.800 If you think about people like John Harris at The Guardian, you know, everyone says,

00:53:33.040 Oh, isn't he cool by going up to Blackpool and pointing out that they might have a point by voting for Brexit?

00:53:38.460 I mean, there should be 20 of those journalists in the British debate, you know,

00:53:42.160 but instead we've got this very insular, inward-looking discussion

00:53:46.740 that isn't really getting us anywhere near understanding why people are feeling so lost and forgotten.

00:53:54.480 You know, one in two columnists even today went through Oxbridge.

00:53:57.200 I mean, it's not surprising they didn't see the tide of working class anger coming through 2016, right? 0.66

00:54:03.800 I mean, it's just, and ever since then, I mean, look what we've had since then.

00:54:06.300 It's just like, well, maybe an anti-Brexit centrist party is the answer.

00:54:10.280 I mean, who seriously can look back on the last two years and think the answer to this, the reply to this, is more economic and social liberalism?

00:54:19.580 Like, I don't understand how you could even reach that conclusion, right?

00:54:22.720 that there's no interesting intellectual experimentation,

00:54:28.480 there's no new project.

00:54:29.600 The third way in the 90s was kind of a neat response,

00:54:32.880 partly by some on the left.

00:54:34.800 It went way too far,

00:54:35.780 and it wasn't perhaps as economically interventionist

00:54:37.840 as it should have been.

00:54:38.620 But for that particular time,

00:54:40.820 it was quite an interesting response by some on the left.

00:54:44.580 Now there is no similar response.

00:54:47.680 There's sort of nothing.

00:54:48.460 It's just a kind of vacuous space,

00:54:50.420 and then we wonder why these alternative movements

00:54:53.120 that are meeting the left are on economics now, right?

00:54:56.540 So when Le Pen says,

00:54:58.060 I'm anxious about savage globalisation,

00:55:00.240 a lot of people on the left in France are going,

00:55:01.980 oh, yeah, yeah, I'm row two, you know. 0.66

00:55:03.900 Amazon is taking the piss. 1.00

00:55:05.500 Ikea are taking the piss. 0.98

00:55:06.660 Maybe we should prioritise domestic workers. 1.00

00:55:09.260 But they're also outflanking the left

00:55:11.160 on the cultural axis too

00:55:13.480 because the formula today is very much

00:55:15.980 economic security and cultural security.

00:55:19.940 And if you can unlock both, then the audience is very big.

00:55:25.340 Fantastic stuff.

00:55:26.600 Yeah.

00:55:27.000 Well, we're coming to the end of our interview,

00:55:29.440 and the question that we always like to ask at the end is,

00:55:32.420 what is the one thing that no one is talking about that we ought to be talking about?

00:55:36.440 The future, I think, where are we going?

00:55:39.480 And I think it's going to be a lot more challenging than we even realize at the moment,

00:55:45.200 that the levels of volatility that we've seen,

00:55:48.400 And if you buy my argument, and I don't mind if you don't, but if you buy my argument that the bonds between voters and the main parties have now broken down to such an extent that we're only going to see a lot more volatility going forward and that the issue agenda in the West with these big complex identity issues on which the left doesn't really have much of a response is going to also favour the right and national populism.

00:56:12.340 and we'll see more polarization as some middle class professionals break off to the greens and

00:56:17.520 the radical left. I think the pace of political change over the coming years is going to surprise

00:56:22.560 a lot of people. I think we need to start talking a lot more about how to prepare for that, how to

00:56:28.420 respond to that, how to ensure that we have the marketplace of ideas and support it as well as

00:56:34.400 we can. We have the institutions that do a good job of doing that. Perhaps we need to think about

00:56:38.860 electoral reform. Perhaps we need to think about getting rid of the House of Lords and stuff like

00:56:42.920 that, having citizens' assemblies. How can we get ready for this period? Because we're going to see

00:56:47.140 a level of churn and change in the West over the next 30, 50 years that I don't even think we are

00:56:53.380 close to comprehending at the moment. We had someone on the show a couple of weeks ago talking

00:56:58.300 about citizens' assemblies. Not quite the future. No, no, no. I'm not dismissing your point. It's a

00:57:03.160 very good point. And do you think we're going to see increasing fragmentation of political

00:57:08.700 parties. Do you think, you know, the three of us have lived essentially under a two-party system

00:57:13.620 for all our lives. Do you think that we're coming to the end of that as a result of some of these

00:57:17.560 things? Or when you talk about fragmentation, are you talking about kind of more mental

00:57:21.920 fragmentation as opposed to out there? No, no, I'm talking about real fragmentation. I mean,

00:57:26.120 I think when I mean volatility, I mean you guys switching your votes from one election to the

00:57:31.520 next. And one election, you'll live them, then you're conservative, then you're Labour, then

00:57:35.580 you're UKIP, then you're whoever, right? And you're constantly changing. There's no

00:57:38.560 tribal allegiances. A little bit like in Central and Eastern Europe, where you have really

00:57:42.340 quick changing party systems. And I think what we're going to see is a lot more of that,

00:57:48.380 a lot more party systems where the two big main parties come down, smaller parties do

00:57:53.780 better. We're already seeing it in Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal. I think we'll

00:57:58.300 see a lot more of that, polarization. Maybe over the long term, you get the emergence

00:58:03.180 of two new blocs, but they're more radically distinct, more ideologically incoherent, more

00:58:09.360 irreconcilable, more polarised. And that will create new problems. But even in the UK, the 2015

00:58:17.080 and the 2017 elections were the most volatile that we've had in the post-war period. Now, yeah,

00:58:22.900 we had 80% of the vote going Corbyn or May, but underneath that, you had Lib Dems going Labour,

00:58:28.560 UKIP going Conservative, Conservative going Labour, some Lib Dems going Green, some Green

00:58:33.560 going Labour, you name it, we had a lot more churn. So there is certainly space in the

00:58:39.220 British system for a different type of party. It's not an anti-Brexit centrist party, it's

00:58:44.880 one that is actually accepting of Brexit, wants to have slightly lower immigration but

00:58:50.040 is also a bit more economically interventionist. But it's incredibly hard to break through

00:58:55.760 under the current dynamics that we have

00:58:57.820 and now without European Parliament elections

00:58:59.740 it's even harder because you don't get that

00:59:01.640 injection of PR politics

00:59:03.780 once every five years

00:59:05.300 but we will across the West see a lot of churn

00:59:07.660 and change and it might be that

00:59:09.520 look at Five Star in Italy, you could start

00:59:11.740 a party tomorrow, the trigonometry

00:59:13.640 party and within ten years

00:59:15.860 you could

00:59:16.400 you could win an election

00:59:19.200 or you could be Emmanuel Macron and you could say

00:59:21.400 I'm stepping out of the party system

00:59:22.980 and you could become president within 18 months.

00:59:26.080 Or you could be Matteo Salvini in Italy

00:59:29.240 and you could be the only political party now that's growing.

00:59:33.580 What started as a pretty small northern separatist movement

00:59:36.740 is now eating its way south through Italy,

00:59:40.140 eating up the rights vote,

00:59:41.460 now beginning to attract five-star voters.

00:59:44.180 So we're seeing changes that are truly historic

00:59:46.920 and we're living in them, which is exciting,

00:59:49.980 but also quite challenging.

00:59:51.240 Isn't that the Chinese curse, I think? 1.00

00:59:53.660 May you live in interesting times? 0.62

00:59:55.960 I think that's what we're doing now, right?

00:59:56.920 I think I've got a fridge magnet on.

00:59:59.160 Well, that's where all the wisdom is nowadays.

01:00:01.320 Anyway, as you can see, the future is bright,

01:00:03.120 the future is trigonometry.

01:00:04.960 In that vein, subscribe to our channel,

01:00:07.080 as always, follow us at TriggerPod.

01:00:08.780 Follow Matt, you're on Twitter,

01:00:10.160 and very active user on Twitter, by the way.

01:00:11.940 You're pretty prolific on that.

01:00:13.000 I like it, I like it.

01:00:14.480 It's the marketplace of ideas.

01:00:16.080 Absolutely, and you're there at?

01:00:18.660 GoodwinMJ.

01:00:19.600 GoodwinMJ.

01:00:20.080 and tell us your book is called

01:00:22.540 National Populism, The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy

01:00:25.520 which is out on October 25th with Penguin.

01:00:28.740 Perfect, which is a couple of days

01:00:30.340 after this interview comes out.

01:00:32.040 Get the book, I've read big chunks of it.

01:00:33.880 It's very, very interesting and well written.

01:00:36.080 You'll enjoy it.

01:00:37.100 And as always, tune in next week

01:00:38.520 for another fantastic episode.

01:00:39.720 Thanks so much, Matt, for coming on.

01:00:40.800 Thanks for having me.

01:00:41.960 Wonderful stuff.

01:00:43.180 Don't forget to subscribe.

01:00:44.580 Click the little bell icon

01:00:45.860 and that will tell you when our videos are released.

01:00:47.720 And also as well,

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01:00:53.160 See you next week guys, thank you very much

TRIGGERnometry - October 22, 2018

Matt Goodwin on National Populism, Immigration, Brexit & the Future of Politics

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