00:01:32.760And from there on, it kind of became this real interest in trying to understand, you
00:01:37.600know, really why people were voting for those movements, where they were coming from, and
00:01:42.340how they were trying to change their countries.
00:01:45.160And then over the years, I started doing some pretty interesting research projects.
00:01:51.920my PhD, I was interviewing the harder end of that scene, talking to a lot of folks on
00:01:58.640the extreme right wing about why they became active, why they joined these parties and
00:02:04.160movements that were even further to the right than national populace. And then, yeah, went
00:02:10.860the academic route, got a job at Manchester and then Nottingham and then ended up where
00:02:16.340I am now at Kent and doing some work with think tanks along the way.
00:02:19.240And 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?
00:02:44.220Yeah, 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.
00:03:12.860And national populism is quite different from left-wing populism.
00:03:16.640Left-wing populists prioritize class allegiance.
00:03:20.240National populists prioritize the nation and a particular conception of the nation.
00:03:26.160And not all of the things that tend to get lumped into that category are necessarily national populists.
00:03:32.960Brexit had elements of national populism, but it wasn't exclusively a national populist revolt.
00:03:38.120In the same way that Donald Trump had elements of national populism, but he was also, too, a Republican candidate at a presidential election.
00:03:46.060But in Europe, it's a bit more different.
00:03:47.900We have movements that are firmly outside of the mainstream that are, I would argue, unequivocally national populist.
00:03:57.400And they all build on a very long tradition in democracy that goes back as long as we've had democracy,
00:04:04.640that as long as we've been participating in elections, voting for parties, we've had national populists.
00:04:10.700So it's been with us for a very long time.
00:04:13.320And national populism has obviously, we've seen a rise.
00:04:15.960How much of that has got to do with the economic crash in 2008?
00:04:20.060Well, this is a million dollar question, right?
00:04:21.700So if you're on the left, you basically argue, and I'm making judgments.
00:04:25.360I don't know where your politics are. I've got an idea.
00:04:28.220But if you lean leftwards, you tend to say all of this is about economic scarcity, right?
00:04:33.620It'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.
00:04:50.260and that usually an extension of that argument is that the people are being manipulated by ruthless elites in society,
00:04:58.520whether it's the media, whether it's these conspiratorial right-wingers trying to divide and rule.
00:05:05.940The evidence, I would argue, and certainly we argue in the book, is pretty overwhelming in pointing in a different direction,
00:05:12.200which is that if you think, for example, about some of the most successful national populists that we've had in the Western world
00:05:18.320coming in places like Switzerland, in Austria, the Netherlands.
00:05:22.880They broke through amid very low unemployment rates,
00:05:26.640some of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe,
00:05:32.660really came into power on the back of a rapid economic expansion.
00:05:38.260Take Britain, Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party
00:05:41.160first really broke through in 2004 after 48 consecutive periods of growth.
00:05:46.520And 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.
00:05:53.980They tend to often be on not amazing wages, but standard, average wages.
00:05:59.520And 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.
00:06:10.520populism. I mean, it's worth remembering even in the 1930s, many people on the left like that
00:06:15.440comparison at the moment. A lot of the unemployed and those who are out of work are actually voting
00:06:19.880for the communists, not for the National Socialists. And National Socialism, National
00:06:25.600Populism are two very different movements. But the idea that the left pushes that this is all
00:06:31.200about economic scarcity, I'm afraid is not actually very convincing when you look at the evidence.
00:06:37.100One 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.
00:06:45.980So if you take Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, his voters actually had a higher average income than any of the other two.
00:06:53.640And I wanted to come back to the fact that you've been talking about this for a long time.
00:06:57.300Actually, you've been predicting this, unlike most people who predicted Brexit and Trump very confidently after it happened.
00:07:03.880Right. You actually predicted it many years before.
00:07:06.060You'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.
00:07:15.880And that is not a time in which we were having these conversations at all.
00:07:19.600So 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?
00:07:30.460Yeah, well, one of my pet frustrations about the public debate is that we focus on the short-term factors, right?
00:07:38.080And we're obsessed about what happens during campaigns.
00:07:41.440I mean, I just finished reading Hillary Clinton's book, What Happened?
00:07:44.360And I realise she still doesn't know what happened, largely because she's obsessed with what happened during that campaign period.
00:07:52.260Now, I would say, actually, if you look not at the last 10 to 15 years, but actually at the last 30 to 40 years,
00:07:58.740you can really see a number of deep currents begin to come forward and start to reshape
00:08:05.560democracies in the West quietly, but in a powerful way from below, creating the conditions that have
00:08:12.460allowed national populism today to get to the levels of support that we're seeing. And this
00:08:20.040is partly about a backlash to the rise of what you might call the new left in the 60s and the 70s,
00:08:26.600which pushed a very liberal agenda, the expansion of rights for minorities,
00:08:33.020the support, if not celebration, of mass immigration,
00:08:37.100the shift towards supranational institutions like the European Union.
00:08:41.580And in the 80s and the 90s, and particularly in countries like France and Austria,
00:08:44.900you began to see the beginnings of a backlash to that new liberal consensus.
00:08:51.900Jean-Marie Le Pen, for example, who used to run on the slogan, Le Pen, the people.
00:08:56.600or the Austrian Freedom Party and Jörg Haider,
00:09:00.120an earlier generation of populists that we now tend to forget
00:09:03.480because we like to think everything is unique to our era.
00:09:06.920Jörg Haider used to say, I say what the people think, right?
00:09:11.400And it was that notion that he's tapping into a concern,
00:09:15.200particularly among an alliance of social conservatives
00:09:18.520that were often quite affluent and blue-collar workers
00:09:22.060who together felt very uncomfortable with both the scale and the pace of change
00:09:28.420that was happening within the broader nation.
00:09:31.060And that was partly about immigration.
00:09:32.420It was also about, in some countries, increasingly a political establishment
00:09:37.960that seemed to be holding the people in contempt, certainly neglecting them.
00:09:43.700And also increasingly, in more recent years, the specific issue of Islam in Europe
00:09:51.480So 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.
00:10:15.700So 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.
00:10:41.400And you begin to see this kind of gradual polarization within a lot of Western democracies.
00:10:47.820And I think what mattered in a big way was the national populace themselves also changed.
00:10:52.940They became more articulate. They became more sophisticated.
00:10:55.920They started to tone down white supremacism.
00:10:58.220They started to basically get a bit more in line with where public opinion really was on these issues.
00:11:04.360People like Gert Wilders started to say, well, let's be pro-LGBT, but also let's be anti-Islam at the same time.
00:11:11.400So you started to see these kind of curious innovations that we didn't really have before.
00:11:15.960And, 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.
00:11:35.280And 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?
00:11:52.760My 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.
00:12:31.680But 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.
00:12:59.020If 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.
00:13:19.540and they hold that very narrow ethnic conception.
00:13:22.880But there are a lot more voters than those within the national populist electorate
00:13:27.660that distance themselves from those very narrow kind of race-based conceptions
00:13:34.240that say actually, you know, when I think about who's in the nation,
00:13:39.040I would like people to speak the language.
00:13:40.960I'd like them to share some of the customs and traditions.
00:13:44.820I'd like them to integrate into the national community.
00:13:47.620And 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.
00:14:15.020And these movements as well, I think, have not just out of strategy.
00:14:21.400I do think part of it is a sincere generational change within the national populist movements themselves.
00:14:27.080You know, they are very different from what we saw in the 60s, 70s and the 80s.
00:14:31.320The likes of Golden Dawn in Greece, which is basically a neo-Nazi party, is very much an outlier.
00:14:38.120Now, 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.
00:14:57.000Many 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.
00:15:09.440And I think the problem for the left is it's drawn a straight line between populism and fascism or populism and racism.
00:15:16.680And 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.
00:15:42.420And 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.
00:15:58.240Are you telling me that calling someone a racist doesn't help the situation?
00:16:01.700Well, 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.
00:16:28.720And these parties are, you know, doing a reasonable job of exploiting that unfortunate strategy on the left.
00:16:38.880And, 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.
00:16:49.240Because if we don't get over it, we're going to end up with incredibly polarized societies.
00:16:54.400And 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.
00:17:11.560You're beginning to see the building blocks of a polarization that actually I find incredibly worrying.
00:17:16.380and in Europe you can begin to see the same
00:17:19.000and this is partly why I'm increasingly perhaps provocative
00:18:10.920I 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.
00:18:33.960that it was a movement that I think was very much around the prioritization of minority rights
00:18:44.440and identity politics that we are all familiar with, and I don't need to rehash what that is
00:18:51.180and how it came here, but very much prioritized that at the expense of sustaining and replenishing
00:18:59.980its relationship with traditional voters on the left and I think that that was a big strategic
00:19:05.140mistake and we're still living through the consequences of that. But it's also exacerbated
00:19:10.560by social networks. So many people on the left kind of constantly within their own bubbles,
00:19:16.200within their own orbits, that they don't have many networks, they don't have many links
00:19:20.720outside of those and that fuels this disconnection. I mean I'm from a, you know, I grew up in
00:19:25.560a working-class community, single-parent household. Most of my mates are in construction or non-academic,
00:19:35.840non-elite, if you like, industries. And I think increasingly we're seeing this sort
00:19:43.560of coming apart, the tearing apart of that centre ground. And it's going to have, I think,
00:19:51.120incredibly negative effects um and so my line on this in terms of where we're going over the future
00:19:58.160is that as we polarize and as we've seen through the brexit debate there are lots of people on the
00:20:04.300left that simply you know who've been used to feeling like winners and now feel like losers
00:20:09.180but consequently have no interest in actually even having a conversation with the other side
00:20:14.480and that's going to make this a lot worse well that's what we tried to do on the show is have
00:20:18.540these conversations with people piss people off yeah well that's definitely part of it but that's
00:20:22.740what that's why we've got you here yeah uh but generally we try to have these honest conversations
00:20:27.020because that's the only way this is ever going to change i mean that that was that's my biggest
00:20:30.800frustration with what's happening around these issues is that we're no longer communicating and
00:20:35.380and then we are going to be more polarized
00:20:37.120but i want to take you back to a chapter in the book which i think is a kind of a key piece of
00:20:51.560it which is the bit where you talk about myths and one of the myths that you you talk about is
00:20:56.960the idea that the support for national populism comes from angry white men basically francis
00:21:01.960ten years from now a lovely slice of gammon yeah uh so you talk about that and there's a whole
00:21:08.280bunch of other myths that you talk about as and and i think you're just reading it i was like yep
00:21:13.620yep yep yep yep because it's just what we're seeing out there in the world right now so tell
00:21:18.320us about that what are the myths about the typical populism supporter yeah so the these are what i
00:21:24.600call comfort blankets right a lot of folks who have been outflanked by this political change
00:21:29.880have thrown comfort blankets over themselves to try and explain it away.
00:21:34.820And one of those is that this is all about angry old white guys
00:21:38.860who are basically going to die in five years
00:21:41.160and they're going to be replaced by, you know, my students,
00:26:20.540And it's good to see the U.S. now having a much more vigorous debate about that and where we're headed.
00:26:24.500But 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.
00:26:36.660that if you're grappling with youth unemployment rates of 10% to 15% in southern Europe,
00:26:41.420if you are struggling to get a £100,000 deposit for a house in London,
00:26:47.240if you are keenly aware, as my students are, that they've got a pretty crap deal
00:26:52.420compared to their baby boomer parents or grandparents,
00:26:56.060then I would argue the conditions, the underlying conditions,
00:26:59.980that partly fuel national populism, that sense of relative loss, relative deprivation,
00:27:04.520And also some concerns over the speed at which societies are being transformed.
00:27:10.420I think these movements are going to continue to have a lot of gas in the tank.
00:27:15.020In Austria, for example, they campaign for votes in nightclubs.
00:27:19.460I mean, something that would be like the equivalent of Nigel Farage going to the Ministry of Sound or something.
00:27:38.840Apparently, there are quite a lot of ethnic minorities.
00:27:40.640For instance, my mother is a Latin American woman, and she loves Trump, and she voted Brexit.
00:27:46.660Well, 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,
00:27:55.360it was a very ill-judged intervention.
00:27:58.520It was also completely disconnected from the evidence, right?
00:28:00.880One in three black or minority ethnic voters in Britain endorsed leaving the European Union.
00:28:07.540And 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.
00:28:20.280But we haven't seen many similar vox pops in Birmingham, Slough, Luton with minority communities that also voted leave.
00:28:29.900In 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.
00:28:56.520And 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.
00:29:11.360And 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.
00:29:33.400also a strong sense of social conservatism, that they, like other social conservatives,
00:29:38.240value stability, group conformity within a quite diverse conception of the nation,
00:29:45.060and aren't really down with this never-ending social change argument that liberals really love.
00:29:52.720The analogy I use, the Tony Blair argument was you're on a train and it's going 300 miles an hour,
00:29:59.980the train is called globalisation, you can't get off.
00:30:03.400And it's inevitable. You just have to stay on.
00:30:05.480And that was effectively Blair's argument in his 2005 conference speech.
00:30:09.500A lot of these voters, I think, now are saying, actually, well, we can get off the train.
00:30:14.060We can try and slow down the pace of change.
00:30:17.240And there's this concept that I think national populism offers,
00:30:20.360which is this idea that there is an alternative state, right?
00:30:24.180You don't have to just be down with this never-ending, constant churn.
00:30:29.780You can try and shift things in a different direction.
00:31:58.560is he far right yeah yeah absolutely is he far right and all these different things i mean where
00:32:03.560do you stand on this with these types of groups are they far right are they racist or is there's
00:32:08.560something more going on there yeah well with those particular groups and also groups like
00:32:13.780pegida in germany it's quite it's they're quite amorphous they don't really have fixed borders
00:32:19.260and they operate outside of electoral politics which makes it quite difficult to understand
00:32:24.040really what they're about. But they are certainly right-wing in that they are prioritizing the
00:32:31.440nation. They're certainly not interested in class allegiance, but they are prioritizing
00:32:36.120issues of migration and identity and culture, which puts them firmly on the right. Are they
00:32:42.860extreme right-wing or are they radical right? And traditionally, the distinction between the two is
00:32:48.680If 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.
00:33:02.720If, 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.
00:33:17.420For 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.
00:33:31.480then I would say they are radical right not extreme right-wing when they trip
00:33:37.480into violence and when they trip into openly undermining the democratic state
00:33:43.300then they trip into that extreme right-wing category the term far-right
00:33:47.980I just think is meaningless because it doesn't really tell us anything it's if
00:33:51.580you're on the far right well is that Greece Greece's Golden Dawn is it the
00:33:55.900UK Independence Party and if you lump them all under far right doesn't really
00:33:58.960give us that nice dividing line that we need.
00:34:02.180I've done a lot of work with police and security services over the years, and I think that's
00:34:08.160where we need to be very careful in how we categorise these movements.
00:34:10.720National Action, for example, which was an extra-parliamentary extreme right-wing
00:34:15.660group that was advocating terrorism and was banned by the UK state, was banned on that
00:34:21.820basis, that it sought to overthrow the democratic system and commit violence, if not murder.
00:34:28.260But there are groups within the radical right orbit, Football Lads Alliance, I would say,
00:34:32.780that are not overtly advocating terrorist activities,
00:34:38.500are not saying let's get rid of democracy,
00:34:41.160but they do feel, they tap into that national populist point,
00:34:44.120which is that they've been neglected in terms of their views about key issues,
00:34:48.620whether that's relating to the role of Islam, its capacity to integrate,
00:34:52.000whether it's about the grooming scandal, because this is an awkward point, right?
00:34:55.920but many of the people on the radical right who were talking about child sexual exploitation in the early 2000s
00:35:03.960have partly been legitimised by the subsequent events that have occurred.
00:35:09.080The Times have brought attention to this, great journalists like Andrew Norfolk and others
00:35:14.060who have really kind of been forerunners on that,
00:35:17.920but groups on the radical right, the BNP, the English Defence League,
00:35:21.760were talking about those issues in the early 2000s.
00:35:24.280And 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.
00:35:36.180I mean, working class anger, disillusionment, you know, was evident in the late 90s, early 2000s.
00:35:42.200If you've been looking at turnout in some communities like in South London or the Midlands, North East, North West,
00:35:50.380you would have seen, particularly after Blair's second landslide in 2001,
00:35:55.280turnout levels among working class voters just start to decline steadily.
00:35:59.940And by the time you get to 2010, many of those voters are basically not voting.
00:36:04.500Some of them came back into the system for the UK Independence Party.
00:36:08.380Some of them then went back into apathy in 2015.
00:36:11.240But 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.
00:36:25.400Turnout, 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.
00:36:35.080And I think partly, and what data can't tell us, but what my suspicion is,
00:36:39.000is that that's partly about this sense that, listen, I want to be listened to.
00:36:44.000I've got concerns. I want to put them on the agenda.
00:36:47.160And Football Labs Alliance and those groups, which are on that borderline,
00:36:52.100I think the risk is if you don't open up this conversation and you have it nationally,
00:36:56.740those are the groups that are closer to that border that will end up having that conversation.
00:37:01.300And they would just control that space.
00:37:03.140And they are significant, right? Those movements are significant.
00:37:06.840And as the Germans are discovering, when you don't get control of that conversation,
00:37:12.200you quickly lay the conditions for a very significant backlash,
00:37:17.660which partly found its expression through Pegida, but also through the alternative for Germany.
00:37:22.480and it sounds like what you're saying really if i'm reading between the lines is
00:37:34.920these movements have been necessary because the elites haven't been listening the media
00:37:39.760the the mps the parliament the government hasn't been listening to the concerns of ordinary people
00:37:45.060things like you talk about grooming games you know there's significant amount of evidence now
00:37:49.320that the reason they were able to thrive in these areas is because of political correctness,
00:37:55.140is because the police, the councils, the social services didn't want to raise the issue
00:37:59.040that there was an ethnic component to this problem.
00:38:03.060And so do you think that the rise of national populism
00:38:06.340has been a necessary wake-up call for the rest of society?
00:38:11.460So I think this is really where the debate is,
00:38:14.620and the key part of the debate is very much around,
00:38:18.040do you view populism as an inherently evil force, which many on the left do,
00:38:23.240and therefore they're not interested in engaging and thinking about it seriously?
00:38:27.300Or do you instead view it partly as a corrective, as a movement that ebbs and flows throughout the history of democracy,
00:38:36.260but it really comes to the forefront when certain groups feel that they're not being listened to
00:38:42.880and certain issues are not being addressed that concern a large number of people.
00:38:48.660So populism, for some writers and thinkers, is a snapback in the system.
00:38:54.360The system has gone too far away from groups or issues
00:38:57.860and it's forced to come back into those areas in order to deal with it.
00:39:03.360So that's why it's a controversial point, but in a way that's why some people argue
00:39:07.720that national populism has a silver lining in that it brings these issues back. It also brings
00:39:14.240groups back into the political system. I mean, if you look at the alternative for Germany,
00:39:19.500you know, the German party system is rapidly imploding, right, in front of our eyes. We're
00:39:24.280seeing mad shifts in Germany, essentially. I mean, the SPD is, the once dominant centre-left SPD is
00:39:31.380collapsing. The AFD is now in 15 of 16 state parliaments, will probably be in all of them by
00:39:37.960the end of October 2018, and is also having quite a clear impact on the policy agenda.
00:39:45.080The number one source of votes for the AFD, non-voters, people who didn't vote at the
00:39:51.720previous election. The Brexit referendum, I was involved with an exit poll on the day of the
00:39:57.500referendum, about 2 million voters turned out who hadn't voted at the previous election. About 30%
00:40:04.300of them then didn't vote at the 2017 election. So they are bringing these non-voters back in.
00:40:11.720That, to me, is something that should be welcomed, right? That we want the marketplace of ideas to be
00:40:17.440as strong as possible. Now, you might not like what national populism is saying about these
00:40:24.360issues you might not like how it frames these issues and sometimes it does frame them in a
00:40:28.600in a xenophobic way but the underlying grievances are legitimate ones and that's certainly the
00:40:35.480argument in the book that if you just think about where the West is heading over the next few
00:40:40.000decades a lot of the trends that are already in place we can't do anything to stop it now
00:40:44.600right a lot of the trends that are in place that are fueling these movements they are going to
00:40:49.100accelerate at speeds that are going to cause a significant sense of alarm among a large
00:44:08.760Europe is moving very quickly to the right in policy terms.
00:44:12.340So a lot of my liberal left academic colleagues are very excited about the Greens in Bavaria at the moment.
00:44:17.620I would say show me one study that shows the Greens having anything like the policy influence that conservatives and national populists are having.
00:44:27.800When you've got left-wing parties advocating more restrictive migration measures,
00:44:31.140even Corbyn has come out and said, well, let's respect the referendum result and let's reform freedom of movement.
00:44:36.460And I think that that's the beginning of a much broader shift.
00:44:41.480It could also be that he loves Brexit.
00:44:58.480Now, the Democrats in the US are an exception.
00:45:00.780But I think the Democrats are going to have a very difficult few years.
00:45:05.400I called Trump quite early. It was quite obvious that I think Trump was going to do surprisingly well.
00:45:11.020And everything since the political shocks of 2016 has told us that many on the liberal left are completely and utterly lost.
00:45:19.300They don't have a meaningful reply to these moments.
00:45:22.560Well, 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?
00:45:32.840Right. 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.
00:45:41.420Like, you know, I was against Brexit and it was a massive wake up call for me when Brexit and Trump happened.
00:45:46.200And it's led to this process of us doing the show because I wanted to understand people from different sides and their opinions.
00:45:52.840But it seems to me like the Democrats in America, the far left here in the U.K., they're doing the opposite.
00:45:59.120They're doubling down on exactly the things that helped to lead to Brexit and helped to get Trump elected.
00:46:05.820Well, I mean, I completely agree, except I wasn't surprised by Brexit.
00:46:13.000I always thought the fundamentals favored Brexit.
00:46:14.960You know, it's just that everyone got lost and they wanted – groupthink triumph.
00:46:18.580People saw what they wanted to see, basically, and they completely lost sight of what was going on around them.
00:46:22.840And 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.
00:46:43.800The 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.
00:46:57.980Now, irrespective of whether you believe it, whether you don't and so on, just from a campaign point of view, it was ruthless.
00:47:03.440Now, what I see in the U.S. today is the emergence of a new strategy that I think might be as effective.
00:47:10.720Donald Trump last week said, the Democrats have moved so far left, they're going to turn us into Venezuela.
00:47:16.880And in a way, it's Trump being Trump, right?
00:47:19.980But on another level, I think that is a message that will resonate among a mainstream American audience
00:47:26.600that is looking at Elizabeth Warren falling over herself to show that she's connected to Native Indians
00:47:32.420Or, you know, over 1024. Never, never ending search for identity, politics, quest for recognition.
00:47:41.740Everybody's a victim. Nobody can be brought together. I think American American voters have had enough of that.
00:47:49.480And I think the the backlash to it may be stronger than we currently anticipate.
00:47:54.280We 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.
00:48:02.100like the new Rise Up movement in Germany, which is trying to say, okay, in order to win back AFD
00:48:08.560voters, we can't argue that this is all about economic scarcity, because clearly it isn't.
00:48:13.940But maybe we need to actually revisit what we're saying about the social and economic model. So
00:48:18.600they've now started saying, well, why don't we have a pause on mass low-skill migration? And
00:48:25.600why don't we try and think about how we can boost productivity, wages, and innovation without this
00:48:31.060never-ending search for endless low-skill workers, because maybe that isn't producing
00:48:36.600a social settlement that is making everybody feel happy, that people do also care about
00:48:42.220community, nation, belonging, and so on.
00:48:46.720And I think that's why, in a way, parts of the left in Europe might be ahead of the curve.
00:48:53.060The Democrats are completely and utterly lost.
00:48:55.120I mean, framing themselves as the resistance, talking about the democracy being hijacked,
00:49:00.700They're using militaristic language in order to frame the response to Trump, and that's a very, very dangerous game to play.
00:49:09.480You know, Trump outplayed the Democrats, Leave outplayed Remain, and I would argue national populism is outplaying social democracy.
00:49:20.460So there needs to be a much more serious period of self-reflection about what's gone wrong.
00:49:26.220And 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?
00:49:40.700If 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.
00:49:49.600They're not even putting themselves in a difficult place.
00:49:53.640They're not even putting themselves in uncomfortable territory.
00:49:56.720Whereas national populism, I think, has actually gone on a far more...
00:50:02.960I mean, it's troubling in a way, but it's gone on a far more rigorous intellectual journey
00:50:08.000over the last 30 years than many people on the left have.
00:50:11.220But if you go back to the 80s and the 90s, the new right in France, in Italy,
00:50:16.000these thinkers were basically trying to explore how the national populist
00:50:20.300could take the ideas of people like Gramsci and left-wing thinkers and apply them from
00:50:26.000their own ideological standpoint, there's not much innovation going on at the moment
00:50:35.180And I don't say that as somebody that identifies openly as being on the right.
00:50:38.720I just say that as somebody who is looking at the intellectual debate, all the momentum
00:50:44.000is with people who are pushing back against identity politics, people who are pushing
00:50:48.800it back against the liberal consensus in a way and saying well what's next you know because
00:50:53.520clearly this social settlement this status quo is unsustainable um so maybe hopefully we'll get
00:51:00.280that renaissance on the liberal left that will come into the marketplace of ideas and bring
00:51:06.640something new because at the moment there's not a lot that's new well i'm actually quite enthused
00:51:10.820by what you're saying i mean take the democrats aside and they have gone absolute apeshit they
00:51:14.780they've just gone crazy you know I see Maisie Hirono telling men to sit down and shut up and I
00:51:19.560think that's not a message that's going to resonate with the wider public it just isn't
00:51:23.480but if you set that aside and the Democrats in America going crazy and you look at the rest of
00:51:28.640it isn't this the brilliant democracy at work where you know something didn't work for 20 or 30 years
00:51:34.060and now we have a movement that's through the democratic system without large-scale violence
00:51:39.220or any of that is getting the voice of the people back into the mainstream of the conversation
00:51:43.660And 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.
00:51:56.500Well, there's certainly a view that I would share.
00:52:00.360But, 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.
00:52:11.280If 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.
00:52:21.300It's all this alarmist stuff about young people giving up on democracy.
00:52:27.140I mean, if you look at the most reliable gold standard research surveys that we have, support for democracy is incredibly strong and entrenched.
00:53:03.920they don't really know how to respond to it
00:53:05.680And as a consequence, it's easier to kind of preach to the audience,
00:53:10.360preach to the Guardian Easter's, I guess, and say, well, actually,
00:53:13.780you know, the world is going to hell in a handcart.
00:53:16.000And it's quite sad to watch, to be honest, because if you look at the British debate,
00:53:21.160I mean, the one or two journalists who are pointing out that actually it's not all bad,
00:53:25.900that we're getting some conversations going that should be happening.
00:53:29.800If you think about people like John Harris at The Guardian, you know, everyone says,
00:53:33.040Oh, isn't he cool by going up to Blackpool and pointing out that they might have a point by voting for Brexit?
00:53:38.460I mean, there should be 20 of those journalists in the British debate, you know,
00:53:42.160but instead we've got this very insular, inward-looking discussion
00:53:46.740that isn't really getting us anywhere near understanding why people are feeling so lost and forgotten.
00:53:54.480You know, one in two columnists even today went through Oxbridge.
00:53:57.200I mean, it's not surprising they didn't see the tide of working class anger coming through 2016, right?
00:54:03.800I mean, it's just, and ever since then, I mean, look what we've had since then.
00:54:06.300It's just like, well, maybe an anti-Brexit centrist party is the answer.
00:54:10.280I 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?
00:54:19.580Like, I don't understand how you could even reach that conclusion, right?
00:54:22.720that there's no interesting intellectual experimentation,
00:55:27.000Well, we're coming to the end of our interview,
00:55:29.440and the question that we always like to ask at the end is,
00:55:32.420what is the one thing that no one is talking about that we ought to be talking about?
00:55:36.440The future, I think, where are we going?
00:55:39.480And I think it's going to be a lot more challenging than we even realize at the moment,
00:55:45.200that the levels of volatility that we've seen,
00:55:48.400And 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.
00:56:12.340and we'll see more polarization as some middle class professionals break off to the greens and
00:56:17.520the radical left. I think the pace of political change over the coming years is going to surprise
00:56:22.560a lot of people. I think we need to start talking a lot more about how to prepare for that, how to
00:56:28.420respond to that, how to ensure that we have the marketplace of ideas and support it as well as
00:56:34.400we can. We have the institutions that do a good job of doing that. Perhaps we need to think about
00:56:38.860electoral reform. Perhaps we need to think about getting rid of the House of Lords and stuff like
00:56:42.920that, having citizens' assemblies. How can we get ready for this period? Because we're going to see
00:56:47.140a level of churn and change in the West over the next 30, 50 years that I don't even think we are
00:56:53.380close to comprehending at the moment. We had someone on the show a couple of weeks ago talking
00:56:58.300about citizens' assemblies. Not quite the future. No, no, no. I'm not dismissing your point. It's a
00:57:03.160very good point. And do you think we're going to see increasing fragmentation of political
00:57:08.700parties. Do you think, you know, the three of us have lived essentially under a two-party system
00:57:13.620for all our lives. Do you think that we're coming to the end of that as a result of some of these
00:57:17.560things? Or when you talk about fragmentation, are you talking about kind of more mental
00:57:21.920fragmentation as opposed to out there? No, no, I'm talking about real fragmentation. I mean,
00:57:26.120I think when I mean volatility, I mean you guys switching your votes from one election to the
00:57:31.520next. And one election, you'll live them, then you're conservative, then you're Labour, then
00:57:35.580you're UKIP, then you're whoever, right? And you're constantly changing. There's no
00:57:38.560tribal allegiances. A little bit like in Central and Eastern Europe, where you have really
00:57:42.340quick changing party systems. And I think what we're going to see is a lot more of that,
00:57:48.380a lot more party systems where the two big main parties come down, smaller parties do
00:57:53.780better. We're already seeing it in Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal. I think we'll
00:57:58.300see a lot more of that, polarization. Maybe over the long term, you get the emergence
00:58:03.180of two new blocs, but they're more radically distinct, more ideologically incoherent, more
00:58:09.360irreconcilable, more polarised. And that will create new problems. But even in the UK, the 2015
00:58:17.080and the 2017 elections were the most volatile that we've had in the post-war period. Now, yeah,
00:58:22.900we had 80% of the vote going Corbyn or May, but underneath that, you had Lib Dems going Labour,
00:58:28.560UKIP going Conservative, Conservative going Labour, some Lib Dems going Green, some Green
00:58:33.560going Labour, you name it, we had a lot more churn. So there is certainly space in the
00:58:39.220British system for a different type of party. It's not an anti-Brexit centrist party, it's
00:58:44.880one that is actually accepting of Brexit, wants to have slightly lower immigration but
00:58:50.040is also a bit more economically interventionist. But it's incredibly hard to break through
00:58:55.760under the current dynamics that we have
00:58:57.820and now without European Parliament elections
00:58:59.740it's even harder because you don't get that