00:07:10.060I mean, he could basically see what was coming.
00:07:12.080And I think on the Labour side, there was this entrenched resistance to accepting that their electorate had become structurally unsound.
00:07:21.720But also, the only interpretation they had that could make sense was to draw on the kind of old Marxist lines and say,
00:07:28.940well, this is basically just about economic insecurity and let's just give these people better wages and, you know,
00:07:33.900let's just talk about this in terms of a growth story, an austerity story.
00:07:37.840Whereas what the right had understood was that actually this was much more a story about values and people feeling as though their identities were being challenged by these new issues, migration, EU membership, globalization, and so on.
00:07:54.120And that day, in effect, really tells us a lot about what happened over the next five years, because as we've now discovered, you know, Labour's relationship really has become much weaker with its traditional heartlands.
00:08:06.480And it's a story that's about sequencing, right? I mean, listening to the prospective post-Corbyn
00:08:11.940leadership candidates say, this is just about Brexit. This is just about what happened during
00:08:17.660the 2019 campaign. This is just about Jeremy Corbyn. Actually, the evidence is very clear.
00:08:22.740What happens is basically from the late 90s, early 2000s, you get the rise of New Labour and Blair.
00:08:27.720The differences between the parties become blurred. People stop talking about class differences so
00:08:32.600much, including the media. Post-2001, you then start seeing working class voters abstaining,
00:08:39.100not voting anywhere near the same levels that they had been previously. And as you go through
00:08:44.740the 2000s, you can begin to see something is fundamentally wrong in the Labour heartlands.
00:08:51.900Then enter Farage. UKIP start to cultivate those areas, disrupting those long-term tribal
00:08:58.700allegiances. And you go through the coalition government with Farage going into these labor
00:09:03.640areas, Haywood and Middleton and the Northeast and parts of the Midlands, and basically cultivating
00:09:10.700this disillusionment, this sense that there is this distant metropolitan elite that's no longer
00:09:16.300interested in your life. And then by the time you get into 2015 and Cameron, he actually scoops up
00:09:24.260quite a lot of those voters. But by the time you get to 2016 and the referendum, a lot of those
00:09:29.420areas, as we now know, 60% of Labour-held seats opted to leave the European Union. And a lot of
00:09:36.200people who'd given up on politics came back into politics to vote for Brexit. So then by the time
00:09:41.080Johnson turns up, right, and Dominic Cummings turn up, what they've effectively diagnosed, I mean,
00:09:45.940Nick Timothy reached the same conclusion, but the execution was very poor. But what they'd
00:09:51.600recognized was that, in effect, the stage had been set for a much wider realignment.
00:09:58.560And crucially, they made a strategic change. They held the line on questions of culture and
00:10:04.460identity by saying, we will deliver Brexit. We will reform migration. We will toughen up on crime.
00:10:10.520We will clamp down on Islamists, terrorists. But on the economic axis, they leaned a little bit
00:10:17.300more left. They said, we're going to increase spending on the NHS, increase spending on
00:10:21.140infrastructure, raise the minimum wage, tackle regional inequalities, reboot the northern
00:10:25.720powerhouse. And what they grasped was a fundamental new rule of politics, which is that it's easier
00:10:33.240for the right to move left on economics than it is for the left to move right on identity
00:10:38.620and culture. And David Goodhart and Eric Kaufman and myself and others have been making this
00:10:45.520argument for many, many years. Including on the show. Including on the show, which is that the
00:10:49.840Labour Party simply no longer has the vocabulary that is needed to reconnect with these voters
00:10:57.520that don't just want to talk about economic insecurity, but they want to talk as much about
00:11:02.220cultural insecurity. And this election, to me, I think really hammered home those key messages.
00:11:09.700And that's why I don't think there will be any quick recovery for the Labour Party,
00:11:14.320because listening to the prospective leadership candidates, they just cannot comprehend what's
00:11:22.280happened and why it's happened. So I think we're in for an interesting ride.
00:11:27.900Do you think part of it as well, and I'm going to use quite an unkind word to describe some of
00:11:32.060the Labour Party members, is cowardice, that they're not willing to address these issues,
00:11:38.060that the moment you have working class people come to them and talk about things like immigration
00:11:42.620and their fears, they don't know how to deal with it, so they slap the racism word, the intolerance,
00:11:47.620the bigotry, and therefore they can just dismiss it. Well, I think in effect what's been happening,
00:11:53.180I'm won over by Thomas Piketty, who talks a lot about inequality, but has now I think more recently
00:11:59.320been looking at the way our parties have evolved. I'm won over by his argument that in effect,
00:12:05.420What happened prior to 2019 was that our two main parties had been captured.
00:12:12.040On the left, the Labour Party had been captured by a highly socially, culturally liberal Brahmin left
00:12:19.900that was, in effect, more interested in identity politics, wasn't particularly bothered about economic redistribution,
00:12:27.900had come through the elite universities, the elite social networks, was broadly insulated
00:12:34.860from the effects of globalization, and was really only interested in expressing virtue
00:12:41.780and moral superiority, and certainly not really that interested in expressing class or economic
00:12:48.840solidarity with workers. But on the right, at the same time, the conservative center-right parties
00:12:54.460had been captured by this merchant elite, a business elite that was really only interested
00:12:59.960in deregulation, economic liberalism, putting free market capitalism on steroids.
00:13:07.760And Piketty's argument certainly is convincing in that that basically leaves a large number
00:13:12.500of voters, millions of voters around the world basically not represented because your average
00:13:17.700voter instinctively wants a little bit more economic protection and a little bit more
00:13:23.900cultural protection. That's basically the winning formula of our time. And I would argue that
00:13:29.000culture is in the driving seat and economics is sitting next door in the passenger seat,
00:13:33.500still playing a role, but not quite as dominant as culture. And then what's interesting about that
00:13:39.480is Johnson and Cummings basically then recognized that that wasn't going to be able to get them the
00:13:48.660territory and the seats that they needed. And they needed to, in effect, return more to the
00:13:52.720sort of Israeli tradition of conservative politics and the Thatcher tradition. And that really
00:13:57.100unlocks the door to a lot of those Labour leave seats. And so prior to this election, a lot of
00:14:02.460left-wing parties in Europe, because social democracy is fundamentally in crisis. I mean,
00:14:06.440the people who say this is all about Jeremy Corbyn, this is all about Brexit. I think one
00:14:10.580of the interesting questions they all ignore is, well, why is social democracy in general
00:14:14.400in crisis? Why are centre-left parties across much of Europe in decline? Because this is
00:14:20.480fundamentally about a structural problem within their electorate. You can't hold together
00:14:25.820middle-class liberal professionals, traditional socially conservative workers, and then students,
00:14:34.120sort of Generation Z millennials in this kind of broad tent when they hold irreconcilable values
00:14:42.100and attitudes on these new identity issues. You just can't do that. And so I think Labour
00:14:47.160don't really have an answer to that. Social democracy has been in decline. Lots of people
00:14:51.140on the left were looking to Corbyn as, gee, maybe this guy has the answer. But now actually
00:14:56.420centre-right parties are looking at Johnson and the Conservatives and saying, well, maybe this
00:15:02.380cross-class coalition, this kind of British version of Christian democracy in a strange
00:15:09.080kind of way, maybe this is a compelling formula for conservative parties to navigate through
00:15:16.320these new value divides. And, you know, this was the first culture war, remember, after the
00:15:22.300financial crisis. And the liberal left has lost the first culture war that emerged after the
00:15:30.100collapse of Lehman Brothers, the crisis and austerity. And by extension, it's kind of smashed
00:15:37.060the central thesis that many on the left have held that this is still fundamentally
00:15:42.860about voters who are driven by economic cost-benefit calculations. And ever since we shared
00:15:51.340that research with Miliband, going in countless numbers of times to Parliament to talk to Labour
00:15:56.120MPs about how they needed to change their position on freedom of movement, how they needed to change
00:16:02.620their representation of working class communities, because the party has been basically dominated
00:16:08.860gradually over time by middle class university educated MPs. And they would sort of say,
00:16:16.180oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it, we get it. And then nothing sort of changes, just carries on the
00:16:20.900same because, like I say, they don't have the vocabulary, but also they don't have the everyday
00:16:28.060experience to understand where most voters are on these issues. It's easier to say, you know,
00:16:35.660it's racist, it's ignorance, it's bigotry. And the more and more they do that, which is why identity
00:16:42.200politics is so important here, the more and more they are saying to these communities that you are
00:16:46.960not equal to others or that in effect you know you are you are problematic communities um don't
00:16:54.560be surprised if they abandon abandon you en masse well that was the most common comment that people
00:17:01.000were making on social media i mean you made this point so i'll let you do it well no it's well i
00:17:06.540made the point that you know it's it's amazing that you know you demonize a whole swore you know
00:20:29.780Well, we're all white men struggling with that toxic masculinity.
00:20:33.480And it's kind of, unless the Labour Party actually realistically adjusts, as some centre-left parties in Europe have done, then they will never get over this fragmented electorate.
00:20:45.340And of course, what academics will argue at this point is, some academics will say, oh, well, you're legitimising or you're normalising white supremacism and white nationalism.
00:20:55.460And that is actually part of the problem because the Labour Party and left-wing parties are often most strongly connected to and influenced by thinkers that hold the most extreme interpretation of society and are the most committed true believers to the sort of post-60s identity left school of thought.
00:21:18.260Right. And that's where the first thing the Labour Party should do is completely renew,
00:21:24.380revitalise, refresh the people that it's talking to. I mean, the generation of thinkers that
00:21:30.740produced Corbyn, that produced the modern day Labour Party have fundamentally failed. And they
00:21:36.620need to start putting themselves in rooms with thinkers and analysts that hold a very different
00:21:42.500interpretation of where Britain is and where it's going. And they need to start putting themselves
00:21:47.540outside of their comfort zone. Post-2016, the liberal left, I would argue, has basically
00:23:04.060But none of those are the momentum lot.
00:23:05.940Well, this is a classic. I mean, this is John May's law of curvilinear disparity, in a way, in that he argued in the 70s, a problem with parties is they get captured by activists that are much more radical than the electorate.
00:23:18.920And what Labour is in is this great example, really, of a party that's been captured by an activist base that is mainly London, that is mainly middle class, that is mainly university, educated.
00:23:34.920Yep, socially liberal. It has no resonance understanding of Bolsover and Blythe Valley.
00:23:44.980Academics, I think, have also struggled because there is not much interaction with those
00:23:53.400communities. There's a lot of survey work. There's a lot of desk-based work. There's
00:23:59.420a lot of insular conversations that don't open up to people who perhaps have an on-the-ground
00:24:06.600understanding of those communities. And that's a problem. I mean, it's an intellectual crisis,
00:24:13.240it's a philosophical crisis, it's an existential crisis for Labour. And after 83, it took them
00:24:17.820three elections to get back in the game. And it may take three elections this time.
00:24:22.820Well, they've been out since 2010, right? But let me ask you this, because you mentioned
00:24:28.280that in Europe, some parties have made the adjustment. How does a Labour Party successfully
00:24:34.120make that adjustment now, given that in order to do what you're talking about, they would have to
00:24:39.400completely shed this loony fringe that they've been wagged by as a dog for some time now?
00:24:46.980They would have to let go of them. They would have to start addressing their concerns back to
00:24:52.040the concerns of ordinary people. They would have to start talking to working class voters in the
00:24:57.520north and elsewhere, frankly. How would they beat, let's say, the Tory party under Johnson,
00:25:04.900which is doing pretty much the same things? They're addressing the cultural concerns. And now,
00:25:09.960as you say, the right is moving to the center, and maybe even to the left, frankly, if you look
00:25:15.340at some of the policies on economics. So how are they, is there even room for a Labour party anymore?
00:25:21.920Oh, I mean, there's lots of room for a party that says we need to radically reform the economy
00:25:26.960We need to radically tackle a concentration of wealth and tax avoidance and tax evasion.
00:25:33.300But we also need to do much better at representing communities that aren't part of what you might call the liberal consensus.
00:25:40.280I mean, the liberal consensus was really only ever shared by a minority.
00:25:44.180And that's, you know, liberals routinely exaggerate the size of their tribe.
00:25:49.080The economic social consensus that, in effect, let's open up markets and let's open up borders is actually quite a fringe view.
00:26:01.340The problem is during the 2000s and so on, we sort of bought into this narrative that this was now the dominant view.
00:26:07.820And, of course, we've now discovered, particularly since 2016, that it isn't.
00:26:11.720So I think for the Labour Party, it means that, you know, they need to start asking themselves some pretty tough questions about where has liberalism gone wrong?
00:26:53.300But secondly, it married itself with the most dynamic economic system that man's ever created.
00:26:58.580And we can now see how both of those things have come unstuck because we have generations
00:27:03.060of voters that don't feel recognized, but we also have economic systems that are
00:27:06.680still, as part of their DNA, generating inequalities. And so I think the Labour Party
00:27:13.700needs to step back. I mean, it's remarkable the pace at which they've moved this debate
00:27:18.000into one of leadership and not one of ideas. And ideas have left the building, right? I mean,
00:27:23.800there's no kind of serious discussion about how social democracy can renew and revive itself
00:27:33.800intellectually to navigate through this era of value divides. Because my thesis is we're
00:27:40.780at the beginning of a period of realignment, right? That the toxic debates we've had about
00:27:46.520migration and Brexit, actually, this is the beginning of a new era in which we're going
00:27:53.280to have more of these big, intense debates that are not so much going to be about traditional
00:27:59.860questions of economic redistribution, they are going to be fundamentally questions about
00:28:04.580cultural insecurity and whether or not you feel that you are being protected amid the
00:28:10.700winds of globalization. And that's going to involve things that you talk about on your
00:28:14.400program regularly from minority identities through to demographic change and the future
00:28:22.480of populations that will go through some profound shifts in our lifetime, not over the horizon,
00:28:27.720but in the next 50 years or so. And I think the Labour Party isn't ready to think about that
00:28:33.160because it is a project that was designed to answer economic questions, but is now having
00:28:38.280to rewire itself to answer cultural questions. And as you say, Francis, it doesn't have the
00:28:45.660personnel, it doesn't have the thinkers, the vocabulary through which it can begin to weave
00:28:51.040together answers to those questions. Now, some social democrats in Scandinavia, for example,
00:28:56.180have said, actually, we will be a little bit more socially conservative on these questions
00:29:01.380because actually that will bring us power. And with power, we can tackle economic redistribution
00:29:07.840and we can help workers. But then in other parts of the country, I'd say Britain included,
00:29:13.300there are parts of the left that say, no, that's normalising white nationalism and supremacism.
00:29:18.440That's normalising power is what it is.
00:29:19.880Congratulations, you're in the electoral wilderness. You're in the wilderness. Enjoy
00:29:23.940it. Enjoy it because you're not going to have power for a long period of time until you recognize
00:29:28.720this new law. Will the Tories be able to hold together their coalition? Because it's a very
00:29:34.580new electorate for the Conservative Party as well. And by the way, for our American viewers,
00:29:39.360you think Republicans, Conservatives, Democrat, Labour to some extent. I mean, we'll talk more
00:29:44.600about that later. Maybe it's a false analogy. But how do they hold together now under Boris
00:29:49.680Johnson, this coalition, which is also a coalition, it's a coalition of working class people who are
00:29:54.760small C conservative, who maybe never voted for the Tory party ever before, and the kind of
00:30:01.360economic right, free market people who may have very little in common? Well, the first thing we
00:30:09.960have to recognize, there's always been a tradition of working class voters supporting the conservative
00:30:14.220party. So we shouldn't have been too surprised when we saw Johnson go back to something that
00:30:19.000Thatcher also achieved in the 80s. And this is because conservatives inherently are aspirational
00:30:25.820and optimistic. And the Labour Party at times is really none of those things.
00:30:33.360I love how careful that is being. You've got to wear yourself carefully because you've got to
00:30:38.080play both sides to some extent. Whilst wearing a blue jumper. So I think that's always allowed
00:30:44.020the Conservatives to have a shot at winning over blue-collar Britain. And there are going to be
00:30:51.420fundamental tensions. But I think the advantage, the inbuilt advantage that Conservatives have
00:30:56.600is that the tensions over the economic model, Bolsover saying, give me more intervention and
00:31:01.620protectionism, and Surrey and Hampshire saying, I'm fine. I'm going to Rome this weekend. Just
00:31:07.560give me a bit more economic liberalism. Those economic questions, I don't think the tension
00:31:12.780is as real within the conservative electorate because what those voters share is they have
00:31:17.980a lot more in common on the value dimension. So they are instinctively socially conservative.
00:31:23.500So they prioritize stability and order and in general conformity and they respect tradition
00:31:29.740and they want to preserve ways of life and they have that sort of Burkean view of society.
00:31:35.760And so I think that in general, there is an inbuilt advantage for the conservatives.
00:31:39.580So long as Johnson is doing what he's doing, which is going up to Sedgefield and saying, I get it, you've lent me your vote.
00:31:47.140You know, I'm not taking this for granted.
00:31:48.760I now need to deliver on, you know, reviving coastal Britain and fixing the regions and all of those kinds of things.
00:31:55.940But the conservative tent fundamentally still shares this basic consensus that it is much better to stress stability over constant continual flux.
00:32:10.920And until the liberal left can tell people clearly where it wants to take them, which does not sound like just endless change, endless globalization, endless fluctuation and instability, it's always going to struggle in this era particularly to meet conservatives head on.
00:32:32.960So I think it will be a challenge for the Conservatives to hold the electorate.
00:32:36.200I don't actually think it's going to be as difficult as people think, because underpinning it at a foundational level, these voters actually do have a lot in common.
00:32:44.480If you put somebody from Bolsover in a room with somebody from Kensington and Chelsea, they might disagree on economics a bit, but they will fundamentally agree, those Conservative voters, on let's moderate migration, let's uphold institutions.
00:33:02.620Let's do what we can to stop someone like Jeremy Corbyn getting into power.
00:33:07.660Let's prioritise stability and order and tradition.
00:33:10.700But if you put a Labour voter from Hampstead in a room with a Labour voter from Hartlepool, because one is prioritising social liberalism aggressively and defines itself through this moral superiority complex, then forget about it.
00:33:28.220There's no common ground there at all.
00:33:31.060If anything, there's just going to be this tendency to sort of disdain, look disdainfully and negatively on there.
00:33:38.620It's like a woke comedian going to talk about Brexit for 10 minutes somewhere up north.
00:33:43.940That's basically what you're talking about.
00:33:50.860I think, I mean, what surprised me was the extent to which people were surprised by Brexit.
00:33:55.640And what surprises me now is the extent to which people are surprised by the conservative majority.
00:33:59.600Well, we weren't because we've been talking to people like you.
00:34:02.080But it's amazing how ignorant people were of this issue and the stuff that you talk about more broadly.
00:34:08.580I mean, the vast majority of people I know completely didn't expect this.
00:34:12.040I bet somebody 50 quid that it was going to happen because to me it was just like a no-brainer
00:34:16.400because having had the conversations with you and with David Goodhart and with Eric Kaufman is just transparent, isn't it?
00:34:23.320I mean, you and I had no doubt about it.
00:34:25.280No, no, no. We both knew that it was going to happen. But, you know, what these people do is they ingest a narrative, which, you know, on the far left, the momentum crowd, and then they just regurgitate this narrative. But it doesn't bear analysing, and it's got no basis in reality.
00:34:41.560But if you come in there, what's also been quite clear over the last week is that they don't, I mean, I'd be rude, but they don't read.
00:34:48.520They don't actually engage with the research.
00:34:51.000Like, for example, Capitalism and Social Democracy, which is a great book, 1985, predicted all of this.
00:34:57.120It's said, you know, social democracy's electorate is going to gradually over time become increasingly incoherent and divided between the expansion of the university educated middle class and the remaining socially conservative working class voters.
00:35:12.560And social democrat parties will face a choice about how they manage that.
00:35:16.560And then in this country, for the last 25 years, we've had loads of good research.
00:35:22.800Jeff Evans at Oxford, James Tilly, Oliver Heath, David Cutts and others, who have all shown the coming storm for the Labour Party, that the soil had been cultivated before Johnson even became leader, before May even became leader of the Conservatives.
00:35:43.040But nobody was thinking seriously about how to respond to that in a meaningful sense.
00:35:48.240And the only people who were, you know, Labour and others, the only people who were actually thinking about this were then sort of widely criticised and disparaged as being sort of sympathisers of the right or being, you know, sort of normalisers.
00:36:05.200And then you just realize that, I think you mentioned this earlier, alluded to it, that there are people, you know, the Labour Party needs to have a very serious conversation, but doesn't really seem at all interested in having that conversation.
00:36:16.960It doesn't because it goes back and, you know, I raise Venezuela as an example.
00:36:22.180You know, they have a narrative and once their narrative no longer works, then they either shut down, ignore it or they move on to something else.
00:36:40.480And given what you're saying, it sounds like the Labour Party is going to spend,
00:36:44.480let's say, a decade in the wilderness at least.
00:36:47.920Boris Johnson has got a huge majority.
00:36:50.120Is he going to be able to kind of just bull in the China shop this
00:36:55.000and just do whatever the hell he wants with no one really opposing him properly?
00:36:58.480I think I completely agree with you. What worries me about British politics is the weakness and the incoherence of the opposition.
00:37:10.700I mean, the post-2016 environment has been dominated by a sort of socially conservative worldview, while the Remain camp, the liberal left camp, have essentially been fragmented and divided.
00:37:28.760And I really genuinely don't think that's a good thing.
00:37:31.360I would like to have a vibrant, strong opposition.
00:37:33.220The problem now, I think, for the liberal left parties is the conservatives with the majority they've got, even though they've won the culture war, they've not really won the war that determines cultural hegemony.
00:37:47.180So they are now, I think, going to turn to asking deeper questions, not just about what's the policy program, but how do you push back against the liberal left dominance that is reflected in certain media outlets, is reflected in certain educational establishments, and is the sort of high culture, sort of soft left norms, how do you push back against that?
00:38:13.700So I think the challenge to the left, as we see it now in the rubble of the election, is electoral.
00:38:21.000The challenge that is coming is going to be fundamentally intellectual and cultural.
00:38:27.240And I can see among conservatives after this election, there is now a real appetite for saying there's no point winning elections if over the long term you're still losing the culture war.
00:38:37.900You're still having all of these key institutions and educational establishments and elsewhere.
00:38:42.480They're still being captured by a view that undermines your long term success and credibility.
00:38:52.460So I think the Johnson government will probably now go further than most conservative governments, probably since the Thatcher era, saying it's not enough to pass policy.
00:39:02.800Actually, now there needs to be a broader pushback against many of the things you talk about in your program.
00:39:07.140State funding for non-woke comedians and shows like trigonometry.
00:39:39.540I don't think we're going to get one during this current government.
00:39:43.340I think the Conservative and Unionist Party will do everything within its power to stop that from happening.
00:39:48.760I think as we go into 2020, the SNP is going to have a number of distractions and problems.
00:39:54.780It's going to, I think, expose some weaknesses within the movement.
00:40:03.160And, of course, I think for the Labour Party as well, you know, what happened in Scotland was so devastating because essentially it takes away, firstly, it takes away their ability to win a majority.
00:40:13.020So the best the Labour government can hope, sorry, the Labour opposition can hope for, the Labour opposition can hope for is some form of minority government, hung parliament, coalition in the future.
00:40:24.000But the second thing Scotland reminds us about is just how quickly radical political change can happen and how comprehensive it can be.
00:40:32.160And when you look at other regions of the country, you look at Wales, for example, there was that moment just before the election where it looked like Wales might begin to sort of move toward a similar kind of realignment that we saw in Scotland.
00:40:47.280And that's why I think it's significant.
00:40:49.200I don't think we're going to have a referendum in the next few years.
00:40:51.780But the deeper questions, I mean, you know, the longer this goes on, there is a much deeper question, too, that we're going to have to really interrogate, which is what where does all of this leave England and where does all of this leave Englishness and how are we going to respond to a movement that has for many years felt that it is not represented politically and socially and doesn't have institutions in the same way.
00:46:10.460it's still the old year man it's still the old year you can piss a few people sorry man carry on
00:46:16.380But one of the – if we just take a brief step back, the big debate now of our time in a way and the debate raging in social science and also filtering out into these conversations is, is all of this change about economics or is all of this change about culture?
00:46:30.540And everybody who's smart says that's a ridiculous framework, it's clearly about how they both interact and which one is dominant.
00:46:37.040I think 2020 in the U.S. is fascinating because it gives us really a natural experiment through which we can see these economic concerns on the one hand and these cultural concerns on the other play out in real time.
00:46:51.180The only thing I mean, Trump and Johnson are completely different characters.
00:46:54.500And I won't waste my time explaining why, even though there are lots of journalists, mainly on the liberal left, that like to draw this incredibly simplistic line because the only thing they have is catastrophizing.
00:47:06.000That's the only thing certain people in this debate now have, which is it is the return
00:47:11.620of fascism because that makes them feel like they have this self-importance that they've
00:47:16.920been validated and that their analysis is sort of superior to others.
00:47:23.460They don't have the bandwidth and the thought power to think anything else.
00:47:30.740Anyway, so the U.S. 2020 election, for me, I mean, Trump has an inbuilt advantage, right?
00:47:37.720He's talking about economic protectionism and standing up to China.
00:47:42.620And he's talking about cultural protectionism in terms of building the wall, clamping down on migration.
00:47:51.080He may struggle again to win the popular vote, but in the key constituencies that he's going after, that gives him an inbuilt advantage.
00:47:57.300The Democrats currently, similar to Corbyn and Labour, are offering economic redistribution with cultural social liberalism.
00:48:06.440In fact, it's worse than that. It's like hyper-liberalism.
00:48:09.340As Zach Goldberg and people in the States have been showing on Twitter,
00:48:13.920the liberal sections of the liberal Democrat left have responded to 2016 by doubling down in quite an extreme way on their liberal outlook,
00:48:24.260becoming much more positive toward minority groups, becoming much more hostile toward members of their own group,
00:48:33.700particularly white working class voters, becoming more supportive of open borders and all of these kinds of things,
00:48:39.360in the same way that Remainers, to a lesser degree, double down on their support for migration and freedom of movement and so on.
00:48:45.440But that's not a convincing reply to this moment that we're in because you're never going to get these voters back on side.
00:48:50.820And I think if Trump ends up winning again, the reason I thought he'd win the first time was because he was speaking on these two dimensions that Clinton was unable to meet.
00:49:05.760But if he wins again, I mean, the psychological blow to not just the Democrats, but to liberalism is going to be huge because it's going to tell us that actually, firstly, they've completely squandered.
00:49:19.020and I include myself, I'd say I'm fairly liberal on some issues, but they squandered the post-2016
00:49:27.200moment. They have failed to find a formula that can reconnect with voters and repair those
00:49:35.660relationships. And I think it will be devastating if there is a second defeat in a row, in the same
00:49:43.100way that for Labour and Corbyn. I think it's absolutely devastating that after nearly a
00:49:48.360decade of conservative power, austerity and economic squeeze, ongoing inequality, the best
00:49:54.320they could do was the worst number of seats since 1935. And these are massive problems. And I think
00:50:04.780the US 2020 will give us more evidence of that. Do you think Boris Johnson and Trump, I know you
00:50:10.540say it's facile to make connections between these two, but they tap into something deeper for me.
00:50:15.680I talk to a lot of people on the left and a lot of where they seem to be coming from is that you should essentially should be ashamed to be British.
00:50:23.900You should be ashamed to be American. You should be ashamed to be white, our colonial past, all the rest of it.
00:50:29.440And Johnson and Trump are going, no, you should be proud to be American. You should be proud to be British.
00:50:35.080And that's a far more positive message. And a lot of the times, you know, we were at Kilconomics, an economics festival in Ireland.
00:50:42.780And a lot of what these liberal economists seem to be saying is like, well, it's it's the end of the West.
00:50:48.200It's the end of the Americans. What are you going to do? We're all fucked.
00:50:51.260And then you have someone coming along like Trump going, absolutely not.
00:50:54.440Let's make America great again. I think optimism is definitely part of it.
00:50:59.660We all have an optimism bias. I mean, psychologists talk a lot about this.
00:51:03.720Smokers convince they'll never get lung cancer. They're not optimistic about the outcomes.
00:51:08.240I think where the right or conservatives, what they've recognized, I think, firstly, is that people are far more attached still to the nation than the liberal left recognizes.
00:51:25.340If you ask people in surveys, will you fight for your country if there was a war tomorrow, 80%, 90% say absolutely.
00:51:34.180Do you feel proud to live in your country?
00:51:38.160The nation for most people is still fundamentally one of the chief reference points in their life.
00:51:45.840And the direction of parts of the liberal left is moving very quickly away from that and isn't able then to speak to those voters because it's just promising a sort of diffuse, confusing, kind of incoherent argument about moving to supranational institutions and seemingly not having a problem with more churn and change and the disruption of the few things that voters really, really care about.
00:52:15.240tradition, ways of life, community, and belonging. And then someone at this point usually says,
00:52:22.620well, those things are all proxy for racism. But they're not. They're really not. And there are
00:52:29.640racists who vote for Trump, and there are racists who vote for conservative parties in Europe. But
00:52:35.300most people are not. And most people actively distance themselves from those expressions of
00:52:42.740intolerance and the more that you're simply proclaiming to know what those people are
00:52:48.960and you're adopting this sort of inaccurate portrayal of them, the more they're going
00:52:55.000to backlash. I mean, one of the most popular narratives on the liberal left over the last
00:53:00.12010, 20 years has been that there is an inevitable liberal destiny that is simply going to arrive
00:53:09.460through migration and the rise of the university educated middle class. And that narrative was
00:53:15.920very popular just before Trump was first elected because people like Stan Greenberg and other
00:53:21.020Democrats were arguing there's absolutely no way Trump can win because of this newly ascendant
00:53:26.360liberal majority. But of course, what that sent was a message to voters that really didn't want
00:53:32.760that liberal majority, that this was their last chance, their last chance to push back against
00:53:37.520that liberal consensus, that value set. And they took it in the same way that in the 2019 election
00:53:42.780in Britain, a lot of voters saw this as quite a critical watershed moment in a broader value
00:53:51.220struggle. And so they were willing to override their traditional party loyalties because they
00:53:57.140felt that on balance, Johnson was probably the horse to back in that broader conflict.
00:54:03.280I guess what I'm hearing out of everything that you've said today is that this is a correction that has been coming for a very long time because our mindset, particularly here in London, in the bubble of Westminster and the cultural bubble that Francis and I are in, our views as a society have been shaped by a very small number of people whose views are completely not representative of the rest of the country.
00:54:31.420And the election of Boris Johnson, the election of Trump, the Brexit referendum,
00:54:36.540potentially what might happen in America next year, this is a correction against all of that.
00:54:41.060The way that I would view it is that the 1960s liberal revolutions, there was a lot of overreach.
00:54:48.360There was a lot of overreach that went, you know, what started with very legitimate, you know,
00:54:55.580concerns about minority rights, rights for same-sex couples, environmentalism, and all
00:55:03.620of those things that there needed to be a correction at that point in time. But through
00:55:08.580the 70s, 80s, and the 90s, I think there's a view that I'm sympathetic to that what started
00:55:14.500as an attempt to fix these very legitimate grievances then began to overreach and began
00:55:21.040to ... It sort of couldn't stop itself. It was just looking for any new possible identity,
00:55:28.560any new way of defining people by difference, not by what they had in common. Liberalism
00:55:35.840turned into this really bad version of itself. It just kind of went on steroids and it started to
00:55:42.480overreach. I look at really what's been happening in Europe really since the late 80s through the
00:55:47.920the 90s into the 2000s as a correction to that, as gradually conservative and populist
00:55:54.840parties began to then sort of backlash against hyper-liberalism.
00:56:02.360I think what worries me about where we are today is we're now beginning to see, if you
00:56:07.120like, the backlash to the backlash, which is now liberals in the US and the UK and elsewhere,
00:56:12.340doubling down and saying, actually, I'm not going to do the one thing that will get us
00:56:16.520through this period, which is compromise. I'm not going to acknowledge the things that we have in
00:56:22.200common. Look at even the first few days of Boris Johnson's premiership. You can look at the Johnson
00:56:27.180premiership and you can say, well, actually, there are a lot of things here that we were asking for
00:56:31.360for a long time. The rights of EU nationals guaranteed, more help for international students,
00:56:38.680scrapping the net migration target, adopting very preferable, favorable visa regimes for
00:56:47.260NHS workers and so on and so on and so on. All of these things that we spent three years
00:56:51.040as a liberal left screaming about, shrieking about, actually the conservatives are not
00:56:57.000doubling down on the sort of hostile environment. They seem to be making some concessions.
00:57:01.120Well, why don't we spend some time acknowledging that, focusing on that,
00:57:04.940building some compromise around that instead of saying what they're saying now, which is
00:57:08.460Britain is turning into Hungary, right? The liberal catastrophizing, Britain is sliding into authoritarianism because it's just the view is not able to acknowledge some of the things where there is common ground.
00:57:25.080So anyway, I think in general, what worries me is you're now beginning to see, partly through the politics of climate change, which I think are going to be fascinating, but also through the rise of green movements in Europe, through the direction of the Democrat voters that I've talked to and the Democrat activists, and also I think through the direction of the British Labour Party, you're seeing a backlash to that backlash.
00:57:48.420And the end result of all of that would just be polarization, because you've got these two sides now basically dug in, and they've got representatives, they've got political parties that have adapted to speak on their behalf, and the compromise, the middle ground, the nuance, the ambiguity gets shut down,
00:58:10.460which is why I find some of the academic debates so frustrating because academics often adopt the same binary language as the populace by saying you're either with us on the left or you're legitimizing nationalism and hatred.
00:58:30.520There's no marketplace of ideas there.
00:58:33.140It's just as binary as the populace that many of them are studying.
00:58:36.160So I think that does genuinely worry me because we need to try and figure out a way of propping up.
00:58:44.060Matt, every time, so it's the second time we've interviewed you,
00:58:47.520and every time I come away and I think, I should have asked him that question.
00:58:50.720And I know it's a very difficult question, Charles, and it's predictions,
00:58:53.380and predictions are always obvious because it's so difficult to get wrong.
00:58:56.540But nevertheless, I'm going to ask you it.
00:58:59.180Are we watching the slow death of the EU?
00:59:01.040Not the death of the EU, but the challenges facing the European Union, possibly the contraction
00:59:09.600of the European Union, I think are beginning, not ending. I'm very pessimistic about the European
00:59:16.600Union for many ways. I wouldn't describe myself as a Brexiteer, but I've certainly spent the last
00:59:25.700few years questioning whether the European Union has what it takes to remedy the multiple
00:59:30.880challenges that it's facing. And those challenges are well known. It's aging. It's not productive
00:59:36.080enough. It's divided between being quite crude, but east and west over values, north and south
00:59:42.240over economic redistribution. There has not appeared much solidarity at key moments when it
00:59:48.160was required. And there doesn't appear to be much of an answer coming from sort of elites within
00:59:57.160the EU sphere in terms of what to do about any of that. And then when you look at the longer term
01:00:02.300kind of projections and trends with regards to the pressure that the EU and the Eurozone are
01:00:08.740going to come under from US-China, from population change in Africa, from central and eastern
01:00:16.600European states depopulating, shrinking. The EU needs a radical, forward-looking,
01:00:25.900sensible policy agenda, and foremost needs leadership. And currently, there is a leadership
01:00:31.280vacuum within the European Union. The response to Brexit, I think, has been very revealing,
01:00:36.600kind of inability to really digest what is at the heart, the root of Euroscepticism.
01:00:42.420and populism, if anything, this year, 2019, populism has consolidated. I mean, I was just
01:00:49.080struck on Twitter during the European elections as watching the number of people trying to kind
01:00:53.800of spin this as being a really bad set of elections for parties that are Eurosceptic.
01:01:00.960I mean, when you saw the share of seats in European Parliament for Eurosceptic parties
01:01:04.820has now reached a record high. And we've seen party systems that we were told when I was doing
01:01:10.060my PhD, at least, in the early 2000s, places like Germany and Sweden have basically fragmented
01:01:16.920and have become much less stable kind of political systems. Meanwhile, populists in control of
01:01:23.440Italy, breaking through in Spain, which, again, we were always told wouldn't happen. And
01:01:28.940if anything, the kind of harder right governments in Central and Eastern Europe have become
01:01:33.460stronger. But there's a lot of wishful thinking out there. There's a lot of people that actually
01:01:37.400don't want to, they get very excited about the rise of a couple of green parties, but
01:01:42.960aren't actually, I would argue, at least in the public conversation and discussion, still,
01:01:48.660I mean, we talked about this in national populism, still sort of covering themselves with comfort
01:02:24.340But I just don't think it's sustainable to keep, for example, Italians living the way they're living, not having any significant increase in living standards and not feeling respected.
01:02:36.060And you said earlier on about language, respect, dignity and recognition are words that we don't hear a lot about when we're talking about election outcomes and why people are revolting.
01:03:20.820I think the European Union will struggle to respond to them.
01:03:25.400Matt, it's been a great interview, and thank you so much for coming back.
01:03:28.680You guys can see why we were delighted to have Matt back on the show.
01:03:32.160Before we let you go, which we must do now because you're a busy man,
01:03:34.960you've been all over the TV studios for last week talking to people about what's happened.
01:03:39.900The last question we always ask is what is the one thing that no one's talking about
01:03:44.120that we should be talking about, and it can be absolutely anything at all?
01:03:46.680Well, I think lots of people are talking about it. But I'm now increasingly convinced I think the politics of climate change is going to be the next huge, big, disruptive moment in our political world. I think we haven't even begun to interrogate what that means for traditional party allegiances.
01:04:08.800Give us a 30 second summary of the whole thing. What's going to happen with that?
01:04:12.860Well, I think it's going to become partly a new culture war. I think the conservative parties are going to have to move very quickly on it to say, actually, the most conservative thing in the world is to be thinking about environmentalism in a reasonable, sensible way.
01:04:30.500And I think we're going to have some really entrenched, as an issue, I think it's going to bring out the generational, I don't want to say conflicts, but the generational tensions that we can already see emerging.
01:04:40.420If you look at Generation Z's views on that issue versus the baby boomers, you know, some real interesting tensions emerging there.
01:04:48.760And, you know, in terms of how it's going to disrupt political systems, you know, green parties perhaps eating into traditional left-wing parties to a much greater degree.
01:04:59.660And how the right responds to that, I mean, has to start thinking about that now, because I think the pace of that political change will be will be will be very, very, very big, very quick.
01:05:13.240Fascinating stuff. Make sure if you want an in-depth analysis of all this stuff, make sure to get Matt's book, National Populism, The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy.
01:05:22.480Follow him on Twitter. You're a great follower on Twitter, man. During the election, you're posting all the polls and stuff.