TRIGGERnometry - Matthew Goodwin： Why Labour Lost the Election

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00:00:30.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this is a

00:00:40.000 show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing

00:00:45.400 about at trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts we ask the experts our brilliant guest

00:00:52.020 this week is a returning guest at trigonometry in the wake of the election we're delighted to

00:00:56.180 have him back he's a professor at the university of kent and the author of national populism a

00:01:00.860 revolt against liberal democracy mike goodwin welcome back to trigonometry thanks for having

00:01:05.580 me again yeah it's good to have you back it was a long intro i hope i got all of it right i'm

00:01:09.600 pretty sure i have yeah we're delighted to have you back it's been a week since the election as

00:01:14.200 we're recording this what went wrong or what went right well uh has it been a week already

00:01:21.600 Yes. Okay. I'm still sort of in the whirlwind of post-election chaos. Well, look, I mean,

00:01:29.720 this was a realignment election in many ways. This was the largest conservative majority since 1987,

00:01:37.440 their highest share of the vote since 1979. And interestingly for me, actually, it was the

00:01:42.520 fourth consecutive time that the conservative vote share increased since 2010. Now, we've got

00:01:47.300 a nice whole sort of literature on the cost of governing and incumbency effects and parties

00:01:52.800 that are in government tending to lose. This was a curious case of an incumbent party actually

00:01:57.260 increasing its vote share. But for Labour, I mean, the vote was absolutely devastating.

00:02:02.320 Worst performance since 1935. Has now, you know, people keep saying to me, this is like

00:02:08.820 1983, Michael Foote. It's a lot worse for Labour than 1983. 1983, they still had, there

00:02:16.940 were still the largest party in Scotland. They still had most of their northern heartlands,

00:02:20.620 but now Labour are being really chased out of both of those things. And listening to the

00:02:26.180 prospective leadership candidates this week after the election, I don't think anybody has a

00:02:31.060 convincing, coherent explanation for why the Labour Party is in this mess. And I'm sure we'll

00:02:37.460 come back to that. But the other thing here about this election was just looking at the role of

00:02:42.020 class, looking at just how successful a party led by a graduate of Eton and Oxford was among

00:02:49.740 the working class, going into those Labour heartland areas, you know, Blythe Valley,

00:02:53.600 Don Valley, Wakefield, and converting areas that in some cases haven't been conservative since the

00:02:59.160 1930s, and others, cases haven't been conservative at any other point in our political history. And

00:03:04.760 so on one level, this is about British politics. But obviously, on another level, this is about

00:03:10.060 the broader realignment, the new culture divide in our politics that is sweeping across many

00:03:15.440 advanced Western democracies. And we saw a conservative party really cleaning up in areas

00:03:21.420 that the Labour Party had been founded to represent. And that now really has ushered

00:03:26.800 in an existential crisis to a party that still defines itself as a working class party, but is

00:03:33.540 really no more a party of the working class. It's an incredible transformation. And before 0.76

00:03:37.880 we jump in, Francis, I just want to ask this. You talk about the realignment. And really,

00:03:43.940 I think this is the bit in your book which you talk about all of this. You've been predicting

00:03:48.880 this stuff for 15, 20 years, I think it's fair to say. In fact, you actually advised

00:03:53.580 Ed Miliband and his team about this, right? And it doesn't seem like they particularly

00:03:58.040 listened, did they?

00:03:59.100 Well, that's quite an interesting story. Go back five years ago, we wrote a book,

00:04:05.360 myself and Robert Ford at the University of Manchester, wrote a book called Revolt on the

00:04:09.380 Right, which was basically looking at the rise of new divides in Britain, in particularly the rise

00:04:17.020 of Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party. But it was more about actually how British politics

00:04:22.220 and society were changing. And one of the key arguments of that book essentially is that you

00:04:26.440 have a large number of voters that felt left behind, not just economically, which is where

00:04:31.400 the left goes wrong. They only can view this in terms of economics. But actually they felt

00:04:36.240 left behind in terms of their values, that there had been a new set of socially, culturally

00:04:41.620 liberal values that they neither shared nor respected that was now being imposed upon

00:04:46.220 them by political elites and the media. And they felt like they couldn't really relate

00:04:51.660 to those values, whether it's sort of strong support for the European Union, strong support

00:04:57.660 for large-scale migration and all the new identity politics stuff that you talk a lot about on your

00:05:04.460 show. And when we came out with this book and we said, look, actually, Labour's got to worry about

00:05:10.520 this just as much as the Conservatives, because the dominant view at that point was that Nigel

00:05:14.680 Farage and Yukit were really only hitting the Conservatives. And a lot of Labour MPs are very

00:05:19.760 cross about it. We've got a lot of criticism. And randomly, one day I got an email saying,

00:05:25.840 do you want to come and present the findings of the book to Ed Miliband's team?

00:05:30.960 And this was just before the 2014 European Parliament elections, when, of course, Farage

00:05:38.120 did very well and Labour did very poorly. And anyway, so Rob and I went in and we presented

00:05:45.060 to Ed Miliband's advisors. And we finished this presentation explaining why Labour's

00:05:53.080 relationship with the working class was weakening, and why they were basically in for a long-term

00:05:59.100 problem from Euroscepticism and social conservatism. And it finished, and there

00:06:06.480 wasn't a single question. Just silence. Thank you very much. That's very interesting. See you later.

00:06:13.500 Sounds like one of my gigs. But then on the same day, I think it was, we walked across the street

00:06:18.380 and presented the exact same presentation to Linton Crosby,

00:06:23.300 who at that time was running David Cameron's election campaigning.

00:06:26.440 I think it was on the same day.

00:06:28.360 And because we have to offer a search to all the parties

00:06:30.720 and make sure everybody has a chance to talk about it.

00:06:35.980 And Linton Crosby was the only person in the room.

00:06:39.680 And Rob and I sort of presented it.

00:06:41.100 And at the end of the presentation, I mean, we got a grilling that you really only get

00:06:47.580 if you present papers at the sort of infamous seminars in Oxford or, you know, Cambridge.

00:06:56.080 I mean, he was really on it.

00:06:58.940 You know, how did you measure this?

00:07:00.840 When did that happen?

00:07:02.560 What do they think about this?

00:07:03.980 What do they think about that?

00:07:05.020 And I remember walking out and just thinking, that guy really, really knows his stuff.

00:07:09.540 Really, really.

00:07:10.060 I mean, he could basically see what was coming.

00:07:12.080 And I think on the Labour side, there was this entrenched resistance to accepting that their electorate had become structurally unsound.

00:07:21.720 But also, the only interpretation they had that could make sense was to draw on the kind of old Marxist lines and say,

00:07:28.940 well, this is basically just about economic insecurity and let's just give these people better wages and, you know,

00:07:33.900 let's just talk about this in terms of a growth story, an austerity story.

00:07:37.840 Whereas 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.

00:07:54.120 And 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.

00:08:06.480 And it's a story that's about sequencing, right? I mean, listening to the prospective post-Corbyn

00:08:11.940 leadership candidates say, this is just about Brexit. This is just about what happened during

00:08:17.660 the 2019 campaign. This is just about Jeremy Corbyn. Actually, the evidence is very clear.

00:08:22.740 What happens is basically from the late 90s, early 2000s, you get the rise of New Labour and Blair.

00:08:27.720 The differences between the parties become blurred. People stop talking about class differences so

00:08:32.600 much, including the media. Post-2001, you then start seeing working class voters abstaining,

00:08:39.100 not voting anywhere near the same levels that they had been previously. And as you go through

00:08:44.740 the 2000s, you can begin to see something is fundamentally wrong in the Labour heartlands.

00:08:51.900 Then enter Farage. UKIP start to cultivate those areas, disrupting those long-term tribal

00:08:58.700 allegiances. And you go through the coalition government with Farage going into these labor

00:09:03.640 areas, Haywood and Middleton and the Northeast and parts of the Midlands, and basically cultivating

00:09:10.700 this disillusionment, this sense that there is this distant metropolitan elite that's no longer

00:09:16.300 interested in your life. And then by the time you get into 2015 and Cameron, he actually scoops up

00:09:24.260 quite a lot of those voters. But by the time you get to 2016 and the referendum, a lot of those

00:09:29.420 areas, as we now know, 60% of Labour-held seats opted to leave the European Union. And a lot of

00:09:36.200 people who'd given up on politics came back into politics to vote for Brexit. So then by the time

00:09:41.080 Johnson turns up, right, and Dominic Cummings turn up, what they've effectively diagnosed, I mean,

00:09:45.940 Nick Timothy reached the same conclusion, but the execution was very poor. But what they'd

00:09:51.600 recognized was that, in effect, the stage had been set for a much wider realignment.

00:09:58.560 And crucially, they made a strategic change. They held the line on questions of culture and

00:10:04.460 identity by saying, we will deliver Brexit. We will reform migration. We will toughen up on crime.

00:10:10.520 We will clamp down on Islamists, terrorists. But on the economic axis, they leaned a little bit 1.00

00:10:17.300 more left. They said, we're going to increase spending on the NHS, increase spending on

00:10:21.140 infrastructure, raise the minimum wage, tackle regional inequalities, reboot the northern

00:10:25.720 powerhouse. And what they grasped was a fundamental new rule of politics, which is that it's easier

00:10:33.240 for the right to move left on economics than it is for the left to move right on identity

00:10:38.620 and culture. And David Goodhart and Eric Kaufman and myself and others have been making this

00:10:45.520 argument for many, many years. Including on the show. Including on the show, which is that the

00:10:49.840 Labour Party simply no longer has the vocabulary that is needed to reconnect with these voters

00:10:57.520 that don't just want to talk about economic insecurity, but they want to talk as much about

00:11:02.220 cultural insecurity. And this election, to me, I think really hammered home those key messages.

00:11:09.700 And that's why I don't think there will be any quick recovery for the Labour Party,

00:11:14.320 because listening to the prospective leadership candidates, they just cannot comprehend what's

00:11:22.280 happened and why it's happened. So I think we're in for an interesting ride.

00:11:27.900 Do you think part of it as well, and I'm going to use quite an unkind word to describe some of

00:11:32.060 the Labour Party members, is cowardice, that they're not willing to address these issues,

00:11:38.060 that the moment you have working class people come to them and talk about things like immigration

00:11:42.620 and their fears, they don't know how to deal with it, so they slap the racism word, the intolerance,

00:11:47.620 the bigotry, and therefore they can just dismiss it. Well, I think in effect what's been happening,

00:11:53.180 I'm won over by Thomas Piketty, who talks a lot about inequality, but has now I think more recently

00:11:59.320 been looking at the way our parties have evolved. I'm won over by his argument that in effect,

00:12:05.420 What happened prior to 2019 was that our two main parties had been captured.

00:12:12.040 On the left, the Labour Party had been captured by a highly socially, culturally liberal Brahmin left 1.00

00:12:19.900 that was, in effect, more interested in identity politics, wasn't particularly bothered about economic redistribution,

00:12:27.900 had come through the elite universities, the elite social networks, was broadly insulated

00:12:34.860 from the effects of globalization, and was really only interested in expressing virtue

00:12:41.780 and moral superiority, and certainly not really that interested in expressing class or economic

00:12:48.840 solidarity with workers. But on the right, at the same time, the conservative center-right parties

00:12:54.460 had been captured by this merchant elite, a business elite that was really only interested

00:12:59.960 in deregulation, economic liberalism, putting free market capitalism on steroids.

00:13:07.760 And Piketty's argument certainly is convincing in that that basically leaves a large number

00:13:12.500 of voters, millions of voters around the world basically not represented because your average

00:13:17.700 voter instinctively wants a little bit more economic protection and a little bit more

00:13:23.900 cultural protection. That's basically the winning formula of our time. And I would argue that

00:13:29.000 culture is in the driving seat and economics is sitting next door in the passenger seat,

00:13:33.500 still playing a role, but not quite as dominant as culture. And then what's interesting about that

00:13:39.480 is Johnson and Cummings basically then recognized that that wasn't going to be able to get them the

00:13:48.660 territory and the seats that they needed. And they needed to, in effect, return more to the

00:13:52.720 sort of Israeli tradition of conservative politics and the Thatcher tradition. And that really

00:13:57.100 unlocks the door to a lot of those Labour leave seats. And so prior to this election, a lot of

00:14:02.460 left-wing parties in Europe, because social democracy is fundamentally in crisis. I mean,

00:14:06.440 the people who say this is all about Jeremy Corbyn, this is all about Brexit. I think one

00:14:10.580 of the interesting questions they all ignore is, well, why is social democracy in general

00:14:14.400 in crisis? Why are centre-left parties across much of Europe in decline? Because this is

00:14:20.480 fundamentally about a structural problem within their electorate. You can't hold together

00:14:25.820 middle-class liberal professionals, traditional socially conservative workers, and then students,

00:14:34.120 sort of Generation Z millennials in this kind of broad tent when they hold irreconcilable values

00:14:42.100 and attitudes on these new identity issues. You just can't do that. And so I think Labour

00:14:47.160 don't really have an answer to that. Social democracy has been in decline. Lots of people

00:14:51.140 on the left were looking to Corbyn as, gee, maybe this guy has the answer. But now actually

00:14:56.420 centre-right parties are looking at Johnson and the Conservatives and saying, well, maybe this

00:15:02.380 cross-class coalition, this kind of British version of Christian democracy in a strange 0.87

00:15:09.080 kind of way, maybe this is a compelling formula for conservative parties to navigate through

00:15:16.320 these new value divides. And, you know, this was the first culture war, remember, after the

00:15:22.300 financial crisis. And the liberal left has lost the first culture war that emerged after the

00:15:30.100 collapse of Lehman Brothers, the crisis and austerity. And by extension, it's kind of smashed

00:15:37.060 the central thesis that many on the left have held that this is still fundamentally

00:15:42.860 about voters who are driven by economic cost-benefit calculations. And ever since we shared

00:15:51.340 that research with Miliband, going in countless numbers of times to Parliament to talk to Labour

00:15:56.120 MPs about how they needed to change their position on freedom of movement, how they needed to change

00:16:02.620 their representation of working class communities, because the party has been basically dominated

00:16:08.860 gradually over time by middle class university educated MPs. And they would sort of say,

00:16:16.180 oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it, we get it. And then nothing sort of changes, just carries on the

00:16:20.900 same because, like I say, they don't have the vocabulary, but also they don't have the everyday

00:16:28.060 experience to understand where most voters are on these issues. It's easier to say, you know,

00:16:35.660 it's racist, it's ignorance, it's bigotry. And the more and more they do that, which is why identity

00:16:42.200 politics is so important here, the more and more they are saying to these communities that you are

00:16:46.960 not equal to others or that in effect you know you are you are problematic communities um don't

00:16:54.560 be surprised if they abandon abandon you en masse well that was the most common comment that people

00:17:01.000 were making on social media i mean you made this point so i'll let you do it well no it's well i

00:17:06.540 made the point that you know it's it's amazing that you know you demonize a whole swore you know

00:17:12.280 communities of people

00:17:13.960 as racist

00:17:14.680 intolerant 0.99

00:17:15.660 and thick 0.80

00:17:16.140 and then get a bit upset

00:17:17.100 when they don't vote for you

00:17:18.080 you know

00:17:19.360 and it's as simple as that really

00:17:20.800 but what's ironic is

00:17:22.180 they appointed

00:17:22.940 somebody who

00:17:24.300 you could say

00:17:25.040 on one level

00:17:25.440 was socially conservative

00:17:26.520 pro-Brexiteer

00:17:27.820 old school

00:17:28.880 left wing

00:17:29.520 as we would deem him

00:17:30.840 and then they didn't allow him

00:17:32.520 to be any of those things

00:17:34.000 do you think

00:17:34.780 they would have done better

00:17:35.700 if they just let

00:17:36.620 Corbyn be Corbyn

00:17:38.640 look at his face

00:17:40.220 I had to ask you

00:17:42.180 I think Corbyn will be seen as a very interesting moment in British politics.

00:17:50.960 I think Corbynism, I don't actually disagree with everything that the Labour Party today are saying,

00:17:59.320 particularly on the economy.

00:18:00.580 I think there's a very strong case for going much further with economic reform than we have done.

00:18:06.260 And this, of course, is partly why Blair is still the architect of this period of turbulence and chaos,

00:18:11.600 because when Labour were in power for such a long period of time, they really didn't do enough

00:18:18.280 to reform financial services, to deal with regional inequality, to rebalance what many

00:18:24.680 voters out there see as being a rigged economic settlement. And in some ways, they're right to

00:18:29.540 feel that. But I think Corbyn, the problem with Labour generally today is Corbyn's right in a way

00:18:38.240 to say, we've got to turn up the volume on economic radicalism, but they've matched that

00:18:42.780 with this sort of social, cultural liberalism, which a lot of voters out there now see as being

00:18:49.120 the fundamental problem with the direction of society. So they're constantly now going to be

00:18:56.000 outflanked by a center right that is now going to speak on both of those flanks. It's going to say,

00:19:03.700 we are going to intervene a little bit more to reboot the local economy in the regions,

00:19:11.220 but we also now accept and recognize your desire for an Australian-based point system,

00:19:17.620 a tougher approach on knife crime, whatever it is, right?

00:19:20.720 And so the Labour Party cannot meet the Conservatives toe-to-toe on those issues.

00:19:27.140 What they should do, in my view, at least, I mean, this is where you get into a really

00:19:31.520 interesting debate within academia, because what I think the Labour Party needs to do is basically,

00:19:36.440 at least over the short term, you can hold the economic line, but they're going to have to

00:19:41.580 change the cultural line. They're going to have to accept that we can't have freedom of movement

00:19:46.180 anymore. We can't have this never-ending expansion of social liberalism and identity politics. It's

00:19:52.380 just not going to work anymore. And they can try and get away from this narrative that is obsessed

00:19:58.560 with defining everybody according to how they're different from one another

00:20:02.660 to actually getting back to a narrative that talks about communal and social solidarity

00:20:08.160 and what we share in common, which is what Obama and Blair and now, ironically, Johnson

00:20:14.660 have done so well, which is they're talking about much broader identities

00:20:20.860 that are above just saying, well, you're a white male struggling with toxic masculinity. 0.99

00:20:27.340 Why the fuck do you dress that to me? 1.00

00:20:29.780 Well, we're all white men struggling with that toxic masculinity. 0.99

00:20:33.480 And 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.

00:20:45.340 And 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.

00:20:55.460 And 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.

00:21:18.260 Right. And that's where the first thing the Labour Party should do is completely renew,

00:21:24.380 revitalise, refresh the people that it's talking to. I mean, the generation of thinkers that

00:21:30.740 produced Corbyn, that produced the modern day Labour Party have fundamentally failed. And they

00:21:36.620 need to start putting themselves in rooms with thinkers and analysts that hold a very different

00:21:42.500 interpretation of where Britain is and where it's going. And they need to start putting themselves

00:21:47.540 outside of their comfort zone. Post-2016, the liberal left, I would argue, has basically

00:21:53.260 covered itself in comfort blankets. It's Cambridge Analytica, it's Russia, it's Brexit, it's

00:22:00.040 Corbyn, it's the big Brexit bus, it's 350 million. Nobody has seriously stepped back

00:22:06.740 and looked at how the underlying deeper currents are reshaping our societies and introducing

00:22:14.280 these new tensions into that liberal left electorate.

00:22:18.620 And until they start doing that, they're not going to be able to devise a roadmap back

00:22:22.320 to power.

00:22:23.700 They're just going to be going round and round in these circles, allowing the right 1.00

00:22:28.140 that has recognised these new fundamental rules in politics to enjoy a new period of

00:22:34.720 dominance.

00:22:35.660 I think the problem is as well, Matt, is like you were saying, you know, they need to do

00:22:38.760 that.

00:22:39.060 But I know these people.

00:22:40.720 We are in an industry which is riddled with them.

00:22:44.480 And let's be honest, they show no intention of doing that.

00:22:48.500 I think there are people who get it.

00:22:51.880 I think if you look at the Britain's Labour movement,

00:22:54.340 there have been voices within it.

00:22:56.460 Blue Labour.

00:22:57.320 Blue Labour, John Crudus, John Denham has been very good on Englishness.

00:23:02.500 Paul Embry, who we've got on.

00:23:04.060 But none of those are the momentum lot.

00:23:05.940 Well, 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.

00:23:18.920 And 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.

00:23:34.100 Hyper-liberal.

00:23:34.920 Yep, socially liberal. It has no resonance understanding of Bolsover and Blythe Valley.

00:23:44.980 Academics, I think, have also struggled because there is not much interaction with those

00:23:53.400 communities. There's a lot of survey work. There's a lot of desk-based work. There's

00:23:59.420 a lot of insular conversations that don't open up to people who perhaps have an on-the-ground

00:24:06.600 understanding of those communities. And that's a problem. I mean, it's an intellectual crisis,

00:24:13.240 it's a philosophical crisis, it's an existential crisis for Labour. And after 83, it took them

00:24:17.820 three elections to get back in the game. And it may take three elections this time.

00:24:22.820 Well, they've been out since 2010, right? But let me ask you this, because you mentioned

00:24:28.280 that in Europe, some parties have made the adjustment. How does a Labour Party successfully

00:24:34.120 make that adjustment now, given that in order to do what you're talking about, they would have to

00:24:39.400 completely shed this loony fringe that they've been wagged by as a dog for some time now?

00:24:46.980 They would have to let go of them. They would have to start addressing their concerns back to

00:24:52.040 the concerns of ordinary people. They would have to start talking to working class voters in the

00:24:57.520 north and elsewhere, frankly. How would they beat, let's say, the Tory party under Johnson,

00:25:04.900 which is doing pretty much the same things? They're addressing the cultural concerns. And now,

00:25:09.960 as you say, the right is moving to the center, and maybe even to the left, frankly, if you look

00:25:15.340 at some of the policies on economics. So how are they, is there even room for a Labour party anymore?

00:25:21.920 Oh, I mean, there's lots of room for a party that says we need to radically reform the economy

00:25:26.960 We need to radically tackle a concentration of wealth and tax avoidance and tax evasion.

00:25:33.300 But we also need to do much better at representing communities that aren't part of what you might call the liberal consensus.

00:25:40.280 I mean, the liberal consensus was really only ever shared by a minority.

00:25:44.180 And that's, you know, liberals routinely exaggerate the size of their tribe.

00:25:49.080 The economic social consensus that, in effect, let's open up markets and let's open up borders is actually quite a fringe view.

00:26:01.340 The problem is during the 2000s and so on, we sort of bought into this narrative that this was now the dominant view.

00:26:07.820 And, of course, we've now discovered, particularly since 2016, that it isn't.

00:26:11.720 So 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?

00:26:24.000 Is it too individualistic?

00:26:28.340 Has it failed to satisfy people's struggle for recognition, which we always argued it did a very good job of doing that?

00:26:36.920 And, you know, the reason that liberal democracy, everyone got very excited about the new era

00:26:45.020 of liberal dominance in the 90s was because they said, you know, it makes individuals

00:26:48.640 feel recognized by giving them individual rights.

00:26:51.020 So it makes you, gives you meaning.

00:26:53.300 But secondly, it married itself with the most dynamic economic system that man's ever created.

00:26:58.580 And we can now see how both of those things have come unstuck because we have generations

00:27:03.060 of voters that don't feel recognized, but we also have economic systems that are

00:27:06.680 still, as part of their DNA, generating inequalities. And so I think the Labour Party

00:27:13.700 needs to step back. I mean, it's remarkable the pace at which they've moved this debate

00:27:18.000 into one of leadership and not one of ideas. And ideas have left the building, right? I mean,

00:27:23.800 there's no kind of serious discussion about how social democracy can renew and revive itself

00:27:33.800 intellectually to navigate through this era of value divides. Because my thesis is we're

00:27:40.780 at the beginning of a period of realignment, right? That the toxic debates we've had about

00:27:46.520 migration and Brexit, actually, this is the beginning of a new era in which we're going 0.92

00:27:53.280 to have more of these big, intense debates that are not so much going to be about traditional

00:27:59.860 questions of economic redistribution, they are going to be fundamentally questions about

00:28:04.580 cultural insecurity and whether or not you feel that you are being protected amid the

00:28:10.700 winds of globalization. And that's going to involve things that you talk about on your

00:28:14.400 program regularly from minority identities through to demographic change and the future

00:28:22.480 of populations that will go through some profound shifts in our lifetime, not over the horizon,

00:28:27.720 but in the next 50 years or so. And I think the Labour Party isn't ready to think about that

00:28:33.160 because it is a project that was designed to answer economic questions, but is now having

00:28:38.280 to rewire itself to answer cultural questions. And as you say, Francis, it doesn't have the

00:28:45.660 personnel, it doesn't have the thinkers, the vocabulary through which it can begin to weave

00:28:51.040 together answers to those questions. Now, some social democrats in Scandinavia, for example,

00:28:56.180 have said, actually, we will be a little bit more socially conservative on these questions

00:29:01.380 because actually that will bring us power. And with power, we can tackle economic redistribution

00:29:07.840 and we can help workers. But then in other parts of the country, I'd say Britain included,

00:29:13.300 there are parts of the left that say, no, that's normalising white nationalism and supremacism.

00:29:18.440 That's normalising power is what it is.

00:29:19.880 Congratulations, you're in the electoral wilderness. You're in the wilderness. Enjoy

00:29:23.940 it. Enjoy it because you're not going to have power for a long period of time until you recognize

00:29:28.720 this new law. Will the Tories be able to hold together their coalition? Because it's a very

00:29:34.580 new electorate for the Conservative Party as well. And by the way, for our American viewers,

00:29:39.360 you think Republicans, Conservatives, Democrat, Labour to some extent. I mean, we'll talk more

00:29:44.600 about that later. Maybe it's a false analogy. But how do they hold together now under Boris

00:29:49.680 Johnson, this coalition, which is also a coalition, it's a coalition of working class people who are

00:29:54.760 small C conservative, who maybe never voted for the Tory party ever before, and the kind of

00:30:01.360 economic right, free market people who may have very little in common? Well, the first thing we

00:30:09.960 have to recognize, there's always been a tradition of working class voters supporting the conservative

00:30:14.220 party. So we shouldn't have been too surprised when we saw Johnson go back to something that

00:30:19.000 Thatcher also achieved in the 80s. And this is because conservatives inherently are aspirational

00:30:25.820 and optimistic. And the Labour Party at times is really none of those things.

00:30:33.360 I love how careful that is being. You've got to wear yourself carefully because you've got to

00:30:38.080 play both sides to some extent. Whilst wearing a blue jumper. So I think that's always allowed

00:30:44.020 the Conservatives to have a shot at winning over blue-collar Britain. And there are going to be

00:30:51.420 fundamental tensions. But I think the advantage, the inbuilt advantage that Conservatives have

00:30:56.600 is that the tensions over the economic model, Bolsover saying, give me more intervention and

00:31:01.620 protectionism, and Surrey and Hampshire saying, I'm fine. I'm going to Rome this weekend. Just

00:31:07.560 give me a bit more economic liberalism. Those economic questions, I don't think the tension

00:31:12.780 is as real within the conservative electorate because what those voters share is they have

00:31:17.980 a lot more in common on the value dimension. So they are instinctively socially conservative.

00:31:23.500 So they prioritize stability and order and in general conformity and they respect tradition

00:31:29.740 and they want to preserve ways of life and they have that sort of Burkean view of society.

00:31:35.760 And so I think that in general, there is an inbuilt advantage for the conservatives.

00:31:39.580 So 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.

00:31:47.140 You know, I'm not taking this for granted.

00:31:48.760 I now need to deliver on, you know, reviving coastal Britain and fixing the regions and all of those kinds of things.

00:31:55.940 But the conservative tent fundamentally still shares this basic consensus that it is much better to stress stability over constant continual flux.

00:32:10.920 And 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.

00:32:32.960 So I think it will be a challenge for the Conservatives to hold the electorate.

00:32:36.200 I 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.

00:32:44.480 If 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.

00:33:02.620 Let's do what we can to stop someone like Jeremy Corbyn getting into power.

00:33:07.660 Let's prioritise stability and order and tradition.

00:33:10.700 But 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.

00:33:28.220 There's no common ground there at all.

00:33:31.060 If anything, there's just going to be this tendency to sort of disdain, look disdainfully and negatively on there.

00:33:38.620 It's like a woke comedian going to talk about Brexit for 10 minutes somewhere up north.

00:33:43.940 That's basically what you're talking about.

00:33:45.620 Just a fundamental value divide.

00:33:48.740 But Brexit to me wasn't surprising. 0.53

00:33:50.860 I think, I mean, what surprised me was the extent to which people were surprised by Brexit.

00:33:55.640 And what surprises me now is the extent to which people are surprised by the conservative majority.

00:33:59.600 Well, we weren't because we've been talking to people like you.

00:34:02.080 But it's amazing how ignorant people were of this issue and the stuff that you talk about more broadly. 0.69

00:34:08.580 I mean, the vast majority of people I know completely didn't expect this.

00:34:12.040 I bet somebody 50 quid that it was going to happen because to me it was just like a no-brainer

00:34:16.400 because having had the conversations with you and with David Goodhart and with Eric Kaufman is just transparent, isn't it?

00:34:23.320 I mean, you and I had no doubt about it.

00:34:25.280 No, 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.

00:34:41.560 But 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.

00:34:48.520 They don't actually engage with the research.

00:34:51.000 Like, for example, Capitalism and Social Democracy, which is a great book, 1985, predicted all of this.

00:34:57.120 It'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.

00:35:12.560 And social democrat parties will face a choice about how they manage that.

00:35:16.560 And then in this country, for the last 25 years, we've had loads of good research.

00:35:22.800 Jeff 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.

00:35:43.040 But nobody was thinking seriously about how to respond to that in a meaningful sense.

00:35:48.240 And 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.

00:36:05.200 And 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.

00:36:16.960 It doesn't because it goes back and, you know, I raise Venezuela as an example.

00:36:22.180 You 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.

00:36:30.680 Should we be concerned, Matt?

00:36:32.020 Because I personally believe that whatever government is in power,

00:36:36.060 we need a strong and credible opposition to challenge that government.

00:36:39.160 Absolutely, yeah.

00:36:40.480 And given what you're saying, it sounds like the Labour Party is going to spend,

00:36:44.480 let's say, a decade in the wilderness at least.

00:36:47.920 Boris Johnson has got a huge majority.

00:36:50.120 Is he going to be able to kind of just bull in the China shop this

00:36:55.000 and just do whatever the hell he wants with no one really opposing him properly?

00:36:58.480 I think I completely agree with you. What worries me about British politics is the weakness and the incoherence of the opposition.

00:37:10.700 I 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.

00:37:28.760 And I really genuinely don't think that's a good thing.

00:37:31.360 I would like to have a vibrant, strong opposition.

00:37:33.220 The 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.

00:37:47.180 So 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?

00:38:13.700 So I think the challenge to the left, as we see it now in the rubble of the election, is electoral.

00:38:21.000 The challenge that is coming is going to be fundamentally intellectual and cultural.

00:38:27.240 And 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.

00:38:37.900 You're still having all of these key institutions and educational establishments and elsewhere.

00:38:42.480 They're still being captured by a view that undermines your long term success and credibility.

00:38:52.460 So 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.

00:39:02.800 Actually, now there needs to be a broader pushback against many of the things you talk about in your program.

00:39:07.140 State funding for non-woke comedians and shows like trigonometry.

00:39:11.420 Sounds good to me.

00:39:12.160 Sign me up.

00:39:12.880 Yeah, cancelling gender studies courses.

00:39:15.000 But there's a question I wanted to ask you because we've been focusing a lot on England,

00:39:18.460 which, you know, is fine and it's important.

00:39:21.720 Well, but we haven't spoken about Scotland actually, right?

00:39:25.060 I just thought you were being racist as usual.

00:39:26.720 No, that's just my voice.

00:39:28.520 But we look at Scotland.

00:39:30.440 Scotland voted entirely, almost entirely for the SNP.

00:39:33.700 Are we going to get another referendum?

00:39:35.620 And if we do, are we going to say goodbye to Scotland?

00:39:39.160 Great question.

00:39:39.540 I don't think we're going to get one during this current government.

00:39:43.340 I think the Conservative and Unionist Party will do everything within its power to stop that from happening.

00:39:48.760 I think as we go into 2020, the SNP is going to have a number of distractions and problems.

00:39:54.780 It's going to, I think, expose some weaknesses within the movement.

00:40:03.160 And, 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.

00:40:13.020 So 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.

00:40:24.000 But the second thing Scotland reminds us about is just how quickly radical political change can happen and how comprehensive it can be.

00:40:32.160 And 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.

00:40:47.280 And that's why I think it's significant.

00:40:49.200 I don't think we're going to have a referendum in the next few years.

00:40:51.780 But 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.

00:41:20.140 that other identities do.

00:41:23.500 And so I think Englishness is going to come back onto the agenda quite soon.

00:41:29.760 It's interesting. It's a great question, by the way, about Scotland.

00:41:32.340 I thought you were going to go to America when you were talking about it.

00:41:35.660 Well, let me ask you this.

00:41:36.460 Do you think the United Kingdom will be the same configuration

00:41:41.360 in 20 or 30 years from now as it is now?

00:41:44.940 I mean, who? I don't know.

00:41:47.820 You don't know?

00:41:48.200 I don't know. I think we have a fragmenting settlement, and that's very clear. And I think

00:41:55.000 the union in general is going to struggle in a very significant way. And it comes back

00:42:02.680 to that point about sort of commonality and what are the shared bonds that people in the

00:42:07.380 United Kingdom now have. And with these value divides, because there's a very strong regional

00:42:14.960 dimension to them. What you've seen over the last few years is that leave seats have gradually gone

00:42:19.660 further and further to the Conservatives. Remain seats have gone further and further towards Labour

00:42:25.220 and the Lib Dems. And of course, in Scotland, there is a sort of a very strong kind of Remain

00:42:31.100 majority anchored partly through the SNP. And I think you're seeing the kind of growing cracks,

00:42:41.120 the widening cracks, and it's not easy to see how those are going to be put back together,

00:42:46.260 especially when you consider that Brexit was only one manifestation of these value divides.

00:42:53.500 So we've become obsessed with the idea that Brexit is kind of all-encompassing and exclusive,

00:42:58.200 but Brexit is really only one spinoff from these underlying value divides between liberals and

00:43:04.480 conservatives, right? So there are going to be many others, and those two will hit the union,

00:43:10.100 and they will challenge the traditional left-right allegiances that we've had.

00:43:15.380 And they may involve questions, again, about migration and demographic change.

00:43:19.460 They might involve questions around new minority identities.

00:43:23.580 They might involve questions around security and terrorism.

00:43:26.700 We don't know where we'll be 30, 40 years from now.

00:43:29.600 But I think that is going to be something, again, the main parties,

00:43:34.460 the parties that win during this period of value change

00:43:37.160 are the parties that are going to adapt.

00:43:38.580 And the parties that don't adapt, aka Labour, are going to struggle.

00:43:43.320 And do you think, moving on from that, are we going to face further pressure for a United

00:43:49.040 Ireland as well?

00:43:51.200 Yeah, I think so.

00:43:55.220 I think so.

00:43:56.700 And I think watching how Ireland responds over the next year or two years with regards

00:44:01.940 to the Brexit now being formalized, and post-January, Remain is going to transition into rejoin.

00:44:11.660 And certain things that we spent three years debating will be now final.

00:44:15.820 And certain tactical battles will turn into generational battles.

00:44:21.200 And that's why, actually, by the way, I think a lot of people have found the 2019 election

00:44:25.860 so difficult because the magnitude of what's being changed by the result, also with regards

00:44:32.220 to Ireland, is so huge that people are only now beginning to sort of think about it and

00:44:38.620 digest it.

00:44:39.740 Let's look forward, Matt. One of the biggest, I think, events of next year will be the election

00:44:46.820 campaign in the United States, where all of this is going to play out on what is a much

00:44:54.260 bigger stage. What do you see, having, again, just to be clear for our viewers and listeners,

00:45:02.080 you've been vindicated on all this stuff after talking about it for many, many, many, many years,

00:45:06.780 not the last five years. You've been talking about it for 15 years at least. What do you see

00:45:11.580 for that going forward? And are we going to see a kind of massive Trump victory,

00:45:17.080 Bojo-style defeat for the Democrats? And first of all, actually, let me ask you this. How do you

00:45:23.780 think they're going to respond? Is the question for them going to be, the lesson for us from this

00:45:30.080 labor loss is they didn't go far enough left? Is that what they're going to think? Or are they

00:45:35.160 going to say, no, no, we're going to actually come back to the center?

00:45:39.540 Well, I hope the Democrats realize that going to the radical left is not a vote winner. Telling a

00:45:45.260 working class family in Wisconsin that you might now have to pay more tax in order to make 0.90

00:45:49.840 reparations for the sins of your ancestors that kind of stuff is not going to be a vote winner

00:45:55.400 hold on is it not a good idea to ask a working class person about their pronouns

00:45:59.420 but i think also

00:46:01.140 i'm desperately trying to make more enemies

00:46:06.380 that's my 20 my new year's resolution

00:46:10.460 it's still the old year man it's still the old year you can piss a few people sorry man carry on

00:46:16.380 But 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?

00:46:30.540 And everybody who's smart says that's a ridiculous framework, it's clearly about how they both interact and which one is dominant.

00:46:37.040 I 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.

00:46:49.640 Trump, as I've explained, similar.

00:46:51.180 The only thing I mean, Trump and Johnson are completely different characters.

00:46:54.500 And 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.

00:47:06.000 That's the only thing certain people in this debate now have, which is it is the return

00:47:11.620 of fascism because that makes them feel like they have this self-importance that they've

00:47:16.920 been validated and that their analysis is sort of superior to others.

00:47:23.460 They don't have the bandwidth and the thought power to think anything else.

00:47:30.740 Anyway, so the U.S. 2020 election, for me, I mean, Trump has an inbuilt advantage, right?

00:47:37.720 He's talking about economic protectionism and standing up to China.

00:47:42.620 And he's talking about cultural protectionism in terms of building the wall, clamping down on migration.

00:47:48.440 So he has an inbuilt advantage.

00:47:51.080 He may struggle again to win the popular vote, but in the key constituencies that he's going after, that gives him an inbuilt advantage.

00:47:57.300 The Democrats currently, similar to Corbyn and Labour, are offering economic redistribution with cultural social liberalism.

00:48:06.440 In fact, it's worse than that. It's like hyper-liberalism.

00:48:09.340 As Zach Goldberg and people in the States have been showing on Twitter,

00:48:13.920 the liberal sections of the liberal Democrat left have responded to 2016 by doubling down in quite an extreme way on their liberal outlook,

00:48:24.260 becoming much more positive toward minority groups, becoming much more hostile toward members of their own group,

00:48:33.700 particularly white working class voters, becoming more supportive of open borders and all of these kinds of things,

00:48:39.360 in the same way that Remainers, to a lesser degree, double down on their support for migration and freedom of movement and so on.

00:48:45.440 But 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.

00:48:50.820 And 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.

00:49:05.760 But 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.

00:49:19.020 and I include myself, I'd say I'm fairly liberal on some issues, but they squandered the post-2016

00:49:27.200 moment. They have failed to find a formula that can reconnect with voters and repair those

00:49:35.660 relationships. And I think it will be devastating if there is a second defeat in a row, in the same

00:49:43.100 way that for Labour and Corbyn. I think it's absolutely devastating that after nearly a

00:49:48.360 decade of conservative power, austerity and economic squeeze, ongoing inequality, the best

00:49:54.320 they could do was the worst number of seats since 1935. And these are massive problems. And I think

00:50:04.780 the US 2020 will give us more evidence of that. Do you think Boris Johnson and Trump, I know you

00:50:10.540 say it's facile to make connections between these two, but they tap into something deeper for me.

00:50:15.680 I 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.

00:50:23.900 You should be ashamed to be American. You should be ashamed to be white, our colonial past, all the rest of it. 1.00

00:50:29.440 And Johnson and Trump are going, no, you should be proud to be American. You should be proud to be British. 0.67

00:50:35.080 And that's a far more positive message. And a lot of the times, you know, we were at Kilconomics, an economics festival in Ireland.

00:50:42.780 And a lot of what these liberal economists seem to be saying is like, well, it's it's the end of the West.

00:50:48.200 It's the end of the Americans. What are you going to do? We're all fucked.

00:50:51.260 And then you have someone coming along like Trump going, absolutely not. 1.00

00:50:54.440 Let's make America great again. I think optimism is definitely part of it.

00:50:59.660 We all have an optimism bias. I mean, psychologists talk a lot about this.

00:51:03.720 Smokers convince they'll never get lung cancer. They're not optimistic about the outcomes.

00:51:08.240 I 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.

00:51:25.340 If you ask people in surveys, will you fight for your country if there was a war tomorrow, 80%, 90% say absolutely.

00:51:34.180 Do you feel proud to live in your country?

00:51:36.280 All of those kinds of metrics.

00:51:38.160 The nation for most people is still fundamentally one of the chief reference points in their life.

00:51:45.840 And 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.

00:52:15.240 tradition, ways of life, community, and belonging. And then someone at this point usually says,

00:52:22.620 well, those things are all proxy for racism. But they're not. They're really not. And there are

00:52:29.640 racists who vote for Trump, and there are racists who vote for conservative parties in Europe. But

00:52:35.300 most people are not. And most people actively distance themselves from those expressions of

00:52:42.740 intolerance and the more that you're simply proclaiming to know what those people are

00:52:48.960 and you're adopting this sort of inaccurate portrayal of them, the more they're going

00:52:55.000 to backlash. I mean, one of the most popular narratives on the liberal left over the last

00:53:00.120 10, 20 years has been that there is an inevitable liberal destiny that is simply going to arrive

00:53:09.460 through migration and the rise of the university educated middle class. And that narrative was

00:53:15.920 very popular just before Trump was first elected because people like Stan Greenberg and other

00:53:21.020 Democrats were arguing there's absolutely no way Trump can win because of this newly ascendant

00:53:26.360 liberal majority. But of course, what that sent was a message to voters that really didn't want

00:53:32.760 that liberal majority, that this was their last chance, their last chance to push back against

00:53:37.520 that liberal consensus, that value set. And they took it in the same way that in the 2019 election

00:53:42.780 in Britain, a lot of voters saw this as quite a critical watershed moment in a broader value

00:53:51.220 struggle. And so they were willing to override their traditional party loyalties because they

00:53:57.140 felt that on balance, Johnson was probably the horse to back in that broader conflict.

00:54:03.280 I 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.

00:54:31.420 And the election of Boris Johnson, the election of Trump, the Brexit referendum,

00:54:36.540 potentially what might happen in America next year, this is a correction against all of that.

00:54:41.060 The way that I would view it is that the 1960s liberal revolutions, there was a lot of overreach.

00:54:48.360 There was a lot of overreach that went, you know, what started with very legitimate, you know,

00:54:55.580 concerns about minority rights, rights for same-sex couples, environmentalism, and all

00:55:03.620 of those things that there needed to be a correction at that point in time. But through

00:55:08.580 the 70s, 80s, and the 90s, I think there's a view that I'm sympathetic to that what started

00:55:14.500 as an attempt to fix these very legitimate grievances then began to overreach and began

00:55:21.040 to ... It sort of couldn't stop itself. It was just looking for any new possible identity,

00:55:28.560 any new way of defining people by difference, not by what they had in common. Liberalism

00:55:35.840 turned into this really bad version of itself. It just kind of went on steroids and it started to

00:55:42.480 overreach. I look at really what's been happening in Europe really since the late 80s through the

00:55:47.920 the 90s into the 2000s as a correction to that, as gradually conservative and populist

00:55:54.840 parties began to then sort of backlash against hyper-liberalism.

00:56:02.360 I think what worries me about where we are today is we're now beginning to see, if you

00:56:07.120 like, the backlash to the backlash, which is now liberals in the US and the UK and elsewhere,

00:56:12.340 doubling down and saying, actually, I'm not going to do the one thing that will get us

00:56:16.520 through this period, which is compromise. I'm not going to acknowledge the things that we have in

00:56:22.200 common. Look at even the first few days of Boris Johnson's premiership. You can look at the Johnson

00:56:27.180 premiership and you can say, well, actually, there are a lot of things here that we were asking for

00:56:31.360 for a long time. The rights of EU nationals guaranteed, more help for international students,

00:56:38.680 scrapping the net migration target, adopting very preferable, favorable visa regimes for

00:56:47.260 NHS workers and so on and so on and so on. All of these things that we spent three years

00:56:51.040 as a liberal left screaming about, shrieking about, actually the conservatives are not

00:56:57.000 doubling down on the sort of hostile environment. They seem to be making some concessions.

00:57:01.120 Well, why don't we spend some time acknowledging that, focusing on that,

00:57:04.940 building some compromise around that instead of saying what they're saying now, which is

00:57:08.460 Britain 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.

00:57:25.080 So 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.

00:57:48.420 And 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,

00:58:10.460 which 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.

00:58:30.520 There's no marketplace of ideas there.

00:58:33.140 It's just as binary as the populace that many of them are studying.

00:58:36.160 So I think that does genuinely worry me because we need to try and figure out a way of propping up.

00:58:44.060 Matt, every time, so it's the second time we've interviewed you,

00:58:47.520 and every time I come away and I think, I should have asked him that question.

00:58:50.720 And I know it's a very difficult question, Charles, and it's predictions,

00:58:53.380 and predictions are always obvious because it's so difficult to get wrong.

00:58:56.540 But nevertheless, I'm going to ask you it.

00:58:59.180 Are we watching the slow death of the EU?

00:59:01.040 Not the death of the EU, but the challenges facing the European Union, possibly the contraction

00:59:09.600 of the European Union, I think are beginning, not ending. I'm very pessimistic about the European

00:59:16.600 Union for many ways. I wouldn't describe myself as a Brexiteer, but I've certainly spent the last

00:59:25.700 few years questioning whether the European Union has what it takes to remedy the multiple

00:59:30.880 challenges that it's facing. And those challenges are well known. It's aging. It's not productive

00:59:36.080 enough. It's divided between being quite crude, but east and west over values, north and south

00:59:42.240 over economic redistribution. There has not appeared much solidarity at key moments when it

00:59:48.160 was required. And there doesn't appear to be much of an answer coming from sort of elites within

00:59:57.160 the EU sphere in terms of what to do about any of that. And then when you look at the longer term

01:00:02.300 kind of projections and trends with regards to the pressure that the EU and the Eurozone are

01:00:08.740 going to come under from US-China, from population change in Africa, from central and eastern

01:00:16.600 European states depopulating, shrinking. The EU needs a radical, forward-looking,

01:00:25.900 sensible policy agenda, and foremost needs leadership. And currently, there is a leadership

01:00:31.280 vacuum within the European Union. The response to Brexit, I think, has been very revealing,

01:00:36.600 kind of inability to really digest what is at the heart, the root of Euroscepticism.

01:00:42.420 and populism, if anything, this year, 2019, populism has consolidated. I mean, I was just

01:00:49.080 struck on Twitter during the European elections as watching the number of people trying to kind

01:00:53.800 of spin this as being a really bad set of elections for parties that are Eurosceptic.

01:01:00.960 I mean, when you saw the share of seats in European Parliament for Eurosceptic parties

01:01:04.820 has now reached a record high. And we've seen party systems that we were told when I was doing

01:01:10.060 my PhD, at least, in the early 2000s, places like Germany and Sweden have basically fragmented

01:01:16.920 and have become much less stable kind of political systems. Meanwhile, populists in control of

01:01:23.440 Italy, breaking through in Spain, which, again, we were always told wouldn't happen. And

01:01:28.940 if anything, the kind of harder right governments in Central and Eastern Europe have become

01:01:33.460 stronger. But there's a lot of wishful thinking out there. There's a lot of people that actually

01:01:37.400 don't want to, they get very excited about the rise of a couple of green parties, but

01:01:42.960 aren't actually, I would argue, at least in the public conversation and discussion, still,

01:01:48.660 I mean, we talked about this in national populism, still sort of covering themselves with comfort

01:01:52.400 blankets.

01:01:53.080 It's all about imports from China.

01:01:55.160 It's all about austerity and the legacy of the financial crisis.

01:01:58.440 Whereas I think actually this era of disruption is just beginning.

01:02:01.700 You know, and there's not going to be an easy answer for the European Union.

01:02:08.400 I don't think it will collapse at all.

01:02:10.080 I think it will have to contract further.

01:02:13.940 And I suspect one or two states in southern Europe probably won't be in the European Union 20, 30 years from now.

01:02:22.960 And I'm happy to be wrong about that.

01:02:24.340 But 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. 1.00

01:02:36.060 And 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.

01:02:50.160 But they're incredibly important.

01:02:51.700 And emotion in politics is incredibly important.

01:02:54.340 And in my world, in political science, we really don't talk about emotion in as big

01:02:59.320 a way as psychologists do because we think it's all about institutions and party vessels

01:03:04.780 and leaders.

01:03:05.780 But when you think about emotion as a potent tool of voting behaviour, then in Europe,

01:03:11.960 I think it's potentially going to be very significant, blame, hope, aspiration and all

01:03:19.820 of these things.

01:03:20.820 I think the European Union will struggle to respond to them.

01:03:25.400 Matt, it's been a great interview, and thank you so much for coming back.

01:03:28.680 You guys can see why we were delighted to have Matt back on the show.

01:03:32.160 Before we let you go, which we must do now because you're a busy man,

01:03:34.960 you've been all over the TV studios for last week talking to people about what's happened.

01:03:39.900 The last question we always ask is what is the one thing that no one's talking about

01:03:44.120 that we should be talking about, and it can be absolutely anything at all?

01:03:46.680 Well, 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.

01:04:08.800 Give us a 30 second summary of the whole thing. What's going to happen with that?

01:04:12.860 Well, 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.

01:04:30.500 And 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.

01:04:40.420 If you look at Generation Z's views on that issue versus the baby boomers, you know, some real interesting tensions emerging there. 0.59

01:04:48.760 And, 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.

01:04:59.660 And 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.

01:05:13.240 Fascinating 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.

01:05:22.480 Follow him on Twitter. You're a great follower on Twitter, man. During the election, you're posting all the polls and stuff.

01:05:26.500 and I'm sure there'll be

01:05:27.160 lots of stuff

01:05:27.700 that you're putting out

01:05:28.460 so follow him out

01:05:29.420 on Twitter

01:05:29.680 we'll put his username

01:05:31.800 in the video

01:05:32.720 and we will see you

01:05:33.880 in a week's time

01:05:34.560 with another brilliant episode

01:05:35.560 take care

01:05:36.740 see you next week guys

01:05:37.840 We'll be right back.

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01:06:14.160 The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

01:06:16.980 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.

01:06:21.900 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.

TRIGGERnometry - December 22, 2019

Matthew Goodwin： Why Labour Lost the Election

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