＂The Conservatives Are Imploding＂ - Matt Goodwin
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 11 minutes
Words per minute
175.44983
Harmful content
Misogyny
5
sentences flagged
Toxicity
9
sentences flagged
Hate speech
18
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode of Trigonometry, we speak with political writer, author, and political scientist Matt Goodwin about what's happening in British politics right now, and why it's important to be prepared for a Tory government coming to power.
Transcript
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Matt, are we going to have a winter of discontent?
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The new Prime Minister coming in now, this month, they're going to look around and realise,
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actually the Conservatives don't own anything now.
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Not the economy, not law and order, not immigration.
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80% of people say they're managing Brexit badly.
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This, historically, really has only happened when those parties then have been wiped out.
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Like, I'm not convinced that I want some of the people in the House of Commons.
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You know, I look at some of the people on the front bench, both parties, and I just think, really, is that the best that we can produce?
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I'll tell you, I was speaking to a finance director from a major, major company in the country that everybody would recognise.
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They already forecast that by Christmas, a third of them will not be able to pay their bills.
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And these are the kinds of things that are happening in boardrooms across the country, because people can sense that actually what we're going into is going to be massive.
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What we are seeing playing out now is the tension, always there, always at the heart of the Brexit vote,
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between the Liberal-Lever vision of Brexit and what Brexit Britain would be all about,
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and the cultural Conservative vision of what Brexit Britain was going to be all about.
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And this group hasn't yet realised, I think, that this group has just put into place something very different.
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our brilliant guest today is a writer, author, and political scientist who's always on the show
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whenever there's a massive transition happening in British politics.
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He's our go-to guy for analysis and everything that's happening in this country.
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You have been writing and talking a lot about some of the things that are about to happen
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We are sitting here recording this on the eve of what will almost certainly be
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Liz Truss's election as leader of the Conservative Party and therefore Prime Minister.
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And you have just written a couple of pieces, the first one of which is
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the Conservatives are falling apart, basically, on your sub-stack, which I recommend every subscribe to.
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And that is a feeling that I have, but you've got receipts, as the kids say nowadays.
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Yeah, so basically, I was thinking on the way here, when was I last here?
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It was actually the aftermath of the 2019 general election with the big Boris Johnson realignment.
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And we talked a lot about how the underlying axis of politics is changing,
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And I think fast forward to where we are now, and basically what's happened is the,
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let's just pull all the scandals and party gate, let's just put that to one side for a second.
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So basically, what's happened is the Conservative Party has really failed to make the most out of
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About half of the people today that voted for Boris Johnson in 2019 now no longer plan
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to vote for the Conservatives at the next election.
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So a lot of the key groups that were central to that realignment, working class voters, pensioners,
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non-graduates, voters in the North, the Midlands, the Industrial Red Wall,
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a lot of those voters have essentially now stepped away from the Conservative Party.
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They haven't gone to Labour, about one in ten have gone to Labour, but most are now saying
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actually they're not sure who they're going to vote for, or they don't know who they're
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So that unique coalition that kind of came together through Johnson, through the promise
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to get Brexit done, has fractured and fragmented.
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And at the same time, and this is where things start to get really worrying for the Conservative Party,
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the parties lost ownership of all of the big issues in British politics.
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So the only parties historically that have really done well in politics are the parties
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that own the big issues, that seem to be competent managers of the big issues.
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She owned really inflation, unemployment, industrial disputes.
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You then think about Blair in 97, he owned the NHS, he owned education, he owned public services,
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You think about Johnson in 2019, he owned Brexit, he owned migration, all of those big new salient issues.
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The new Prime Minister coming in now, this month, they're going to look around and realise
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actually the Conservatives don't own anything now, not the economy, not law and order, not immigration.
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80% of people say they're managing Brexit badly, cost of living crisis.
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Most people tend now to back Labour, not the Conservatives.
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This historically really has only happened when those parties then have been wiped out.
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So a parallel case would be 97, John Major, 2001, William Hague.
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Both of those politicians would tell you, actually, it wasn't a great experience.
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So whoever comes in, and I think you're right, Liz Truss, they're going to have to get their
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hands around this coalition that's fragmenting, and we'll come back and talk about it, and
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they're going to have to get some ownership over some of these big issues.
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And if they don't do those things, Conservative Party is going to stay where it is, which is
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The only people who are still there are kind of tribal Tories in Surrey, right?
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I mean, that's basically where the party is at the moment.
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Everyone else who kind of got them into that massive majority in 2019 is basically now
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This is, you know, quickly introducing a nightmare scenario.
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And add to that, I mean, you talk about the big issues on the economy.
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There's a gigantic cost of living crisis, the rising cost of fuel and gas and so on.
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On immigration, as you talk about in your second piece, which I want to come to later,
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numbers are higher, frankly, than they have been.
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You know, the idea that Brexit solved that question.
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But again, I don't know that people are all that invested in support for Ukraine at this
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I don't, I mean, how are they, the election would be in 2024, the latest.
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How are the Conservatives ever going to get a grip on any of those issues before,
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in time, to be able to actually make an impact on people's perception?
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I mean, the fundamental problem for the Conservatives is they've become disconnected from this new
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coalition that they've pulled together ever since Brexit, right?
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Now, you could say that's because Boris Johnson was not suited to high office.
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That's because COVID swept through the country and they've managed it, you know, not great at
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It might be because of the war in Ukraine, might be because of cost of living, whatever.
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But I think the broader problem is that the Conservative Party basically inherited this
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realignment after Brexit and then didn't know what to do with it.
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And Conservative MPs and Conservative donors and Conservative activists were both economically
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and culturally in a very different space from any of the people that were voting for them.
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Many of the people who run the Conservative Party essentially want to, or are very supportive
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of this sort of, you know, Davos on Thames, let's slash tax, let's slash regulation, let's embrace
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free trade, let's embrace globalisation, let's look back at the 1980s and say, yeah, let's
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do all of that again and let's put it on steroids.
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They're basically, you know, economic liberals, sometimes hyper-economic liberals, and they
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What they, I think, have failed to really fully grasp is that there is now a large chunk in
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the Conservative electorate, like there is in every other Western democracy, pretty much,
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that actually doesn't really want that, that is quite comfortable with an interventionist
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state, if it means it's going to level the playing field, it's going to fix a rigged economy,
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is just as concerned about cultural freedom as economic freedom.
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It wants to roll back not just the frontiers of the state, but also a radical progressive
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authoritarianism that people are increasingly worried about, women's rights, child welfare,
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and political correctness, what we can say about the nation state, about who we are, and
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also within that, these new identity and cultural issues around migration, borders, security,
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And the Conservatives, I think, in the Johnson era, really never fully reconciled themselves
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And as a consequence, they've rapidly come unstuck.
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And this isn't just unique to the British Conservatives, you can see the same debate in America, where
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US Republicans are basically saying, the answers to the problems that are in politics today are
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not going to be found in 1980s economic liberalism.
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That was a different set of answers to a different set of questions.
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The new Conservatives, who I think are a minority, but the new, interesting, clever Conservatives
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are the ones who are saying, actually, we're going to have to devise a whole new set of answers
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to these problems if we're going to keep this coalition together, if we're going to unite
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middle-class professionals with working-class voters and pensioners, who often share many
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similar values on these big cultural questions, and sometimes on some of these economic questions.
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But it means the Conservative Party is going to have to put itself in a place where it
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feels uncomfortable, and it isn't traditional territory.
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Now, if you're a pessimist, you'd say, actually, the Conservative Party just can never bring
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itself to do that because of path dependency, because of where it's come from, because of
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its donor class, because of its MPs, because of its ideological, you know, straitjacket that
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If you're an optimist, you say, well, actually, increasingly over the last 10 years, the Conservatives
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actually have sort of moved themselves into this position where they have tailored their
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So we'll see, with this new Prime Minister, whether they are going to lean into this realignment
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and keep pushing it forward, or whether actually they're going to revert to their comfort blanket
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and then they'll face a nightmare scenario and they'll lose both of these flanks at the same
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They'll lose the red wall, because they won't be giving those voters what they want, and
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they'll lose the blue wall, which is full of university graduates and millennials and
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Zoomers who, to be frank, are never going to vote Conservative at the next election, no
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I mean, those people are gone for 10 years, probably.
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So I think, you know, the only answer for the party is to lean into this realignment.
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Matt, isn't the problem as well that every political party has its day?
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They've been in power a long time now, and isn't it just that they've just run out of
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ideas, they've run out of steam, and it's time for another party to take office and make
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Well, don't forget you're talking about the most successful political party in the history
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I mean, one of the great puzzles in British politics has been why the Conservatives have
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And if you go from people being given the vote to the next general election, the Conservatives
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will have governed Britain for about 74% of the time.
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The Conservatives have always reinvented themselves.
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They've reinvented themselves at different points in the early 20th century, through to
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Thatcherism, through to David Cameron, through to Boris Johnson.
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And now they are constrained on many of these cultural issues by their activists, their
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MPs, and lots of things you've talked about on your podcast.
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But the Conservatives now, ultimately, will need to reinvent themselves again if they're
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going to have a fighting chance at the next election.
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They're going to have to really tackle some of the sacred values in the Conservative camp.
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The evidence in economics now is overwhelming, I think, that many of the reforms that were brought
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At the time, you could argue they were necessary.
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And at the time, you could argue, and you can still today, they made Britain a more prosperous
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You know, there is a consensus in economics that what I would call hyper-globalisation,
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you know, opening the borders of the country to growing trade from China, from Asia, from
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other parts of the world, had a disproportionately negative impact upon working-class communities,
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And also, crucially, this is something Conservatives always ignore.
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It also undermined the social fabric of community life.
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There's a lot of research to suggest that hyper-globalisation undermined families.
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It undermined the social fabric of, you know, social capital, community engagement, the little
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platoons that Edmund Burke and others have talked about.
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And Conservatives are kind of blind on this spot, right?
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Because they are so wedded to promoting and championing free trade that they really sort
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of, you know, turn away when you say, well, you know, look at some of the consequences that
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So we haven't compensated the losers as well as we should have done.
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And that partly explains why Johnson was able to do what he did in 2019, because he kind
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of gave a nod to lots of those groups who had lost out, that he was a different kind
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Leveling up was really ultimately about compensating losers in the globalisation process, or certainly
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losers in a geographical settlement that has favoured London and the South East for over
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a century, and still does and will continue to do so.
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Like, the Conservatives never kind of embraced this and said, you know, geez, it's not just
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You could have been in power for, you know, 10, 15 years if you just acted competently,
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run number 10 in a fairly disciplined manner, and delivered on the promises that you set forward
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in 2019, even in the face of COVID and the war in Ukraine.
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But even still, they managed to kind of, you know, implode as a result.
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My gut instinct is probably the end result of this is going to be more apathy, more political
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People just saying, well, no one's going to change the dial.
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Because what happens then is you just get disillusioned people who no longer believe in the system,
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which means there's a void in that system, which can then be filled either by a populist
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Well, my, yeah, my concern about British politics now is, so if you go back 10 years, all the
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conditions that we had that were in place for, you know, say, Nigel Farage and the kind
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of UK Independence Party and then the Brexit Party and that sort of, that very turbulent
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A collapse of public confidence over immigration, high levels of distrust in the system, and a
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strong sense among many voters that an issue they really cared about, in that case, the
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EU, freedom of movement, was not being taken seriously by people in Westminster.
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And that found its expression through the Brexit referendum.
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It then found its expression through Theresa May beginning to pull down the red wall and
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And now we are finding ourselves back where we were in 2012, 2013, 2014, because what do
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Public confidence over the new immigration system that we'll come to talk about has collapsed.
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People no longer see Labour or the Conservatives really as the preferred political party.
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There's a palpable sense in the country that politics is no longer speaking to a large chunk
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And there are new issues that people really want to talk about, but they can sense that
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the political establishment doesn't really want to talk about them.
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You know, whether that relates to what's happening to kids in schools, what we're teaching around
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sex, gender, race, whether it's about women's rights, whether it's about political correctness,
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whether it's about immigration, whether it's about the illegal crossings in the English
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All of those issues now, I'm worried actually, are going to become a sort of ideal breeding
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ground for something that may actually end up leaving Nigel Farage looking like quite
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a moderate sort of populist in comparison to what may come later in the 2020s, which is
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why I wrote the piece recently in my substack saying that actually I do think we need to revisit
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the immigration conversation because what we've put in place, what Boris Johnson has put in
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place, I think is going to be a recipe for considerable political turmoil in the years
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Tell everybody, before I ask you the question, I was going to ask you a little bit about what
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he's actually done because it was quite eye-opening reading your piece in which you talk about
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a conservative prime minister actually who promised to reduce immigration along with all of the
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previous Tory prime ministers actually making it way easier for people to come here.
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Yeah, so Boris Johnson's done some interesting things that I don't think many people in the
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So the big promise was to take back control, regain control over the immigration system.
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And to some extent, Boris Johnson and the Conservatives have done that.
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We can now set our own immigration policy and it's independent of the European Union.
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But the specific migration policy that we now have, yes, it's made it harder for EU nationals
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to come and work and stay in the United Kingdom, but it's made it a lot easier for people from
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outside of Europe now to migrate into the UK, whether to work, to settle, or as family, relatives
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of workers and students, and then to remain in the country.
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So things that they've done, for example, employers are no longer having to advertise jobs in the UK
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first and to show that they cannot be done by somebody in the UK, that's gone.
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The Skilled Worker Visa Programme is a very liberal migration policy.
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You can essentially come to the UK if you have found a job that pays as little as about £20,000
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in some sectors, or usually about £24,000, £25,000, which is lower than the median average salary
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Some of the previous limits on international students have been removed.
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Some of the family routes around migration have been eased.
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And the end result, which we're now seeing in the data, because of course COVID disrupted
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this after 2020-21, the data was affected by the big lockdown and so on.
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But now what we're beginning to see actually, I think, is a watershed moment in Britain's
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So the numbers of migrants coming over from India, Philippines, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, whether
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to work or study, is now increasing dramatically compared to 2019.
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And so the source of migration into the UK is also changing.
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It's not European, not Central or Eastern European.
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It is now predominantly coming from countries such as Pakistan, Nigeria, India, Philippines.
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So in the next few years, this will become visible very quickly to lots of people in the
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country who perhaps are currently thinking, well, we've got this new immigration policy and
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it's much more restrictive, when in reality, what I suspect we'll end up having, and I'm
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happy to be wrong on this, but I think our net migration levels are going to be much higher
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I think they're going to end up being significantly higher.
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The source of migration will be very different.
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And I think that's going to raise some really salient and quite tough discussions in the
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country about what this means around the housing crisis, around healthcare, around security,
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But the biggest one of them, Matt, and this is what I always say as someone who's a legal
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immigrant to this country, who's happy with reasonable levels of immigration, who wants
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people who are skilled and talented and who are going to be a contribution to this country
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The biggest issue of all on that list that you gave is actually democracy.
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The problem that we have in this country is that nobody voted for what is happening.
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And I know it will be easy for a lot of people and tempting for a lot of people to say, well,
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yeah, of course, you know, Johnson was a liberal Tory, but these are sequential failures
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over a long period of time on probably one of the most demanded commitments that the
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Tory party made all the way back in 2010, which is tens of thousands.
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So why have the Tories not addressed this issue?
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Well, you could argue that people did vote for the Australian-based points system, which
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My view is a lot of voters, especially Conservatives and Leavers, just didn't understand what that
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And more importantly, he's fucking fictional, mate.
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If he was fictional, then why did Friedrich Nietzsche write about Superman, otherwise known
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as Übermensch, in his seminal work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, published in 1883, but still
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widely quoted today by both students and intellectuals alike.
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Sometimes, Francis, I feel as if I have no clue who you really are.
00:24:03.560
But if you do like journalism, then you have to check out the Epoch Times.
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The Epoch Times, unlike most media organisations, is produced without the influence of any government,
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They distill a story down to the facts and get readers as close to the truth as they
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The articles are free from the influence of big tech, corporate media and socialist and
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The Epoch Times believe the more facts you have at your disposal, the better able you are
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The articles present a factual picture of the news from a conservative and American perspective.
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I feel the Epoch Times is the only publication out there that gives me factual information
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about stories in the news that other outlets and publications blatantly report with liberal
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Go to epochtim.es forward slash trigonometry and click the link.
00:25:08.540
A few things have happened since Brexit and it's important we recognise them.
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Number one is overall, a significant chunk of the country have become more positive about
00:25:19.500
So Remainers have doubled down on their liberal values, partly to disassociate themselves from
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And they say, I'm liberal and I'm proud of it and I like immigration and immigration is
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And Leavers, some Leavers have become more positive too because they're now saying, well,
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I've got the control back and I don't want to be seen as being anti-immigration.
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And, you know, look at us and our new immigration system.
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At the same time, Brits remain overwhelmingly welcoming of Ukrainians, Hong Kongers, Afghan
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So those two things we just, I want to note, they're really important.
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At the same time, I just don't think people have tuned into the reality of just how quickly
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now the country is going to be transformed by this new migration policy where you've seen
00:26:05.000
as a home office release last week, new data showing the number of international students
00:26:13.240
The number of visas being issued to dependents of international students and also workers
00:26:18.500
is now reaching a very high, if not record high levels.
00:26:24.000
We've had over a million visas that have been issued to workers, students, family members
00:26:29.700
and others this year, which again is a record high.
00:26:33.380
And some of the increases in numbers, for example, the percentage increases in students
00:26:47.700
And, you know, most voters out there would say, okay, international students, fine, don't
00:26:54.140
High-skilled migration, okay, don't have an issue with that.
00:26:56.580
But we're not talking about, I don't think we're talking about high-skilled migration.
00:27:00.040
We're talking about workers coming in on visas, on salaries that are between £20,000
00:27:06.080
So this is, I think, going to end up in a big kind of reckoning.
00:27:09.880
The reason why the Conservatives have done this, to answer your question, is because what
00:27:13.160
we are seeing playing out now is the tension, always there, always at the heart of the Brexit
00:27:19.900
vote, between the Liberal-Lever vision of Brexit and what Brexit Britain would be all about.
00:27:26.580
And the cultural conservative vision of what Brexit Britain was going to be all about.
00:27:32.260
This small group, and it is a small group, said lots of immigration, lots of globalisation,
00:27:39.360
And this bigger group, much bigger group, said, okay, outside of the EU, but moderate levels
00:27:45.340
of migration, ideally about 100,000 per year, not 300,000 in terms of net migration.
00:27:52.420
And this group hasn't yet realised, I think, that this group has just put into place something
00:27:59.960
And this is going to find its expression politically.
00:28:03.040
It will either find its expression in something like, you know, Brexit Party 2.0, except the
00:28:12.080
Or it will find its expression in, for example, a new Conservative Party leader, you know, perhaps
00:28:19.280
making up names, for example, saying, actually, we don't want Britain to be doubling down on
00:28:28.760
It's time to perhaps slow things down and start to ensure that we're investing as much as we can
00:28:33.600
in domestic workers and domestic companies and so on.
00:28:39.120
I don't see how this ends without creating some sort of political disturbance.
00:28:46.080
The picture you're painting is very bleak, because what you're effectively saying is we
00:28:52.820
have this group of people who've been ignored for generations.
00:28:56.300
They've got a chance to have their voice heard.
00:29:03.780
Because the Labour Party aren't going to do anything.
00:29:06.000
If anything, they're going to be even more pro-immigration than the Conservatives.
00:29:09.500
Yeah, Labour can't move right on culture because of its activists and its MPs.
00:29:14.120
So there's some great research over the last year that surveyed Britain's MPs.
00:29:19.320
And so it found that Conservative MPs are more economically right-wing and more culturally
00:29:24.860
left-wing than many of their voters, which again is the root of the Conservative Party's
00:29:32.080
Labour MPs were economically comparable to the average voter, but culturally were like in
00:29:40.500
They were like 100 miles that way when it comes to things like law and order, respecting British
1.00
00:29:51.280
The Conservatives on this cultural axis, it is theirs to own as long as they move to it.
00:29:58.860
But there is going to come a point, I think, where voters will realise that actually the
00:30:03.920
Conservative Party is not going to deliver on those issues in the way that they would like
00:30:11.800
And then you're talking about things like what the Canadians have seen, for example, a reconfiguration
00:30:17.160
of the right or what the French have seen more recently, a kind of a much deeper reconfiguration
00:30:23.220
of politics where you have MPs, maybe Red Wall MPs and others saying, actually, this sort
00:30:28.720
of more neoliberal brand of conservatism that is actually quite culturally liberal in many
00:30:33.080
respects is not really what we want the Conservative Party to be about.
00:30:38.320
Very difficult for a new party, a new challenger to become mainstream in the first-past-the-post
00:30:45.480
I mean, you know, Farage tried it for 10 years and really only managed to get where he got
00:30:50.080
because of the first proportional representation under European elections.
00:30:56.420
But I think this is going to find its expression in some form or another.
00:31:00.480
And, you know, a critic of the Conservative Party would say, you know, Conservatives have
00:31:05.900
But on a lot of the cultural issues that you spend your time talking to guests about and
00:31:09.980
so on, often it's been the Conservative Party that has either introduced those changes or
00:31:15.780
And I think that's where you begin to maybe get closer to an American scenario in the later
00:31:23.020
2020s, 2030s, where actually perhaps people start to say, on these cultural issues, the
00:31:28.920
Conservative Party is just simply not able to connect with the country in a way that the
00:31:33.640
country wants their elected leaders to connect.
00:31:36.580
And there's nothing wrong with saying we should have a target or we should have a new policy
00:31:41.480
of having net migration no higher than 100,000 a year.
00:31:50.880
That's a good, progressive, nice, interesting policy that's fair.
00:31:56.060
We don't need, really, to be running net migration at 300,000, 400,000, 500,000.
00:32:04.060
And we don't need to be in a position after Brexit of not requiring employers to first
00:32:10.820
look at whether the jobs can be done in Britain before advertising them overseas.
00:32:13.960
That, to me, just seems completely bonkers, given everything that Brexit was about, which
00:32:18.560
was about reasserting, more broadly, the interests of the national community.
00:32:23.880
Well, a lot of people will agree with you on that.
00:32:27.080
But if I listen to what you're saying and play the movie forward a little bit, that
00:32:32.340
realignment isn't going to be immediate because it's going to take people time to catch up
00:32:36.760
So the most likely outcome is the election in 2024.
00:32:41.160
The Conservatives get booted out simply because of the accumulated frustrations over time.
00:32:46.360
And these people who you're talking about, who are dissatisfied with the Tories for being
00:32:52.260
too liberal, they're going to end up with a Labour government or a Labour-LibDem coalition.
00:33:02.600
Well, for Labour to win a majority, the Labour Party will need to be around 12 points ahead
00:33:06.460
in the opinion polls, which it is comfortably at the moment.
00:33:09.220
It's about 15, 16 points as we're talking today.
00:33:14.460
And that is going to take us closer to where America is at the moment with the Democrats
00:33:19.820
and the Republicans in opposition and will probably, I think, end up increasing the salience
00:33:25.780
of some of the issues that we're talking about.
00:33:28.060
So it's true that everybody in the country wants to talk about cost of living, energy,
00:33:32.680
just getting through a very difficult few years, right?
00:33:35.280
But voters don't just think of these issues and then they don't think of other issues.
00:33:39.020
I mean, other salient issues will include channel crossings, overall migration,
00:33:44.460
levels, what's happening in schools, universities, council culture, freedom of speech, women's rights.
00:33:50.420
And I think one of the interesting things about Conservatives today is that they have accepted
00:33:58.320
They've sort of accepted the language that is used by progressives and Labour activists.
00:34:06.420
And many Conservatives feel the quote-unquote culture wars are beneath them and they don't want to talk about them.
00:34:14.340
And so Conservatives have ceded like this massive amount of territory, you know,
00:34:19.500
when in reality what perhaps they should have said is, well, women's rights isn't culture war.
0.98
00:34:26.520
The ability to speak freely in a modern, mature democracy is not a culture war.
00:34:31.940
Ensuring that our institutions are representative of a wide range of voices is not a culture war.
00:34:39.900
But they've sort of embraced this language and then it's sort of left them with nowhere to go.
00:34:45.060
So now they are terrified often, as we saw with Boris Johnson and his administration.
00:34:50.480
They're sort of terrified of getting involved in these big debates because, you know,
00:34:54.640
they simultaneously think they're above these cultural debates.
00:34:58.900
And at the same time, they don't want to be seen to be the nasty party and for people to say,
00:35:03.180
well, they're a bit racist and, you know, xenophobic and whatever.
00:35:06.680
And like, it's not nice to be in these debates.
00:35:08.400
Anyone who writes on these topics or says anything remotely countercultural,
00:35:13.480
as I'm sure you guys know, it's not nice to be in that position,
00:35:16.920
but sometimes it's absolutely necessary to be making that countercultural position
00:35:21.740
very clearly and very loudly so that marketplace of ideas can exist and can continue.
00:35:28.340
Otherwise, the result is orthodoxy and it's a very narrow marketplace of ideas
00:35:36.360
So I think the Conservatives somehow need to regain their intellectual confidence.
00:35:40.100
I mean, if you look at this current prime minister, the outgoing prime minister,
00:35:44.740
one of the remarkable things about the Johnson government, in my eyes,
00:35:47.580
is there were no real, like, there were no serious thinkers around Johnson.
00:35:52.500
I mean, Thatcher really had a stable of very, very bright, interesting intellectuals and thinkers
00:35:57.540
around her who really did have a well-thought-out ideological blueprint
00:36:05.000
Now, you might disagree with it, but it was there.
00:36:06.880
Johnson really didn't have much of that at all, so he didn't really know where he wanted to go.
00:36:13.320
The new prime minister, I would imagine, I would hope, given any prime minister should have it,
00:36:20.320
will have a stable of interesting, forward-looking thinkers who have a blueprint
00:36:28.000
Because if she or he doesn't have that, it's going to come apart very quickly.
00:36:32.620
Matt, don't you think the problem is, as well, we had Darren McGarvey literally sitting in that very chair
00:36:39.340
a couple of days ago, and he made the point that a large problem with our political class
00:36:45.680
is that they are fundamentally disconnected with the ordinary British public.
00:36:51.060
They don't, they've never really encountered them.
00:36:53.500
They went to different schools, a majority of them went to private schools.
00:36:59.860
They all went into political researchers' jobs, and then they moved their way into government.
00:37:06.560
How can you possibly know what a country needs if you don't have any kind of connection with the ordinary person?
00:37:12.300
Well, I think there's some truth to that, but it's not just politics, right?
00:37:18.200
Most of the institutions that shape and cultivate the conversation about who we are as a country
00:37:25.800
are dominated by a minority of university graduates,
00:37:30.960
typically elite university graduates from Russell Group or Oxbridge universities,
00:37:36.440
So if you look at politics, media, creative industries, cultural institutions,
00:37:44.360
academia, educational institutions, they are overwhelmingly dominated by elite graduates
00:37:51.540
who tend to see the world in a very particular way.
00:37:56.840
Some academics call it diploma democracy, and all of the institutions are basically run by graduates.
00:38:02.000
And so what's happening over time across the West is we are going through what's often called education polarization,
00:38:10.560
which is a fancy way of simply saying that graduates are drifting ever more leftwards on cultural issues.
00:38:16.200
And non-graduates, and some graduates, especially those who don't go through the elite institutions,
00:38:21.120
are drifting further away on those cultural issues.
00:38:24.580
So as that polarization is rippling through on Brexit, on immigration, on women's rights,
00:38:29.640
on trans issues, on gender, sex, kids' education, all that stuff,
00:38:34.740
if the institutions are disproportionately dominated by graduates,
00:38:38.100
then graduates take the institutions with them,
00:38:40.320
and the institutions drift further and further to the left on cultural questions.
00:38:45.680
Like, I feel like I've seen that in my lifetime the last 20 years.
00:38:48.580
If I look at media, if I look at universities, if I look at, you know, how kids are taught at school,
00:38:55.540
like, I feel like that's a point that you can't really dispute.
00:39:00.100
I think the evidence also backs me up, and I'd be happy to discuss it with anybody who thinks that's not the case.
00:39:05.780
And so what I think we need to do is basically reform the institutions
00:39:10.680
so we have a much more diverse array of voices in the institutions.
00:39:16.720
That was the obvious response to Brexit, is to say, look at all these people that feel like they're not in the conversation.
00:39:23.680
Like, let's not have, you know, over half of the journalists in Britain having come from Oxbridge.
00:39:31.820
Or let's ensure that most of the people who are running the BBC
00:39:34.820
and deciding BBC news content behind the headlines,
00:39:38.620
that most of them haven't either gone to private school, gone to an elite university,
00:39:43.320
or their parents also do not come from the graduate class.
00:39:48.100
Let's have some real social mobility in this country.
00:39:53.880
Like, if anything, as you've seen with some prominent journalists in the country
00:40:00.380
like, it's been a real insight into how the media see the last few years.
00:40:03.640
Like, they genuinely see this as a sort of, like, dystopian threat to liberal democracy,
00:40:12.660
Like, I want to be in a conversation about who we are as a country and where we're going.
00:40:17.260
And if you're not going to let me into this conversation, I'm going to go somewhere else,
00:40:20.640
whether it's, you know, GB News, Unheard, Trigonometry.
00:40:25.240
And what's interesting is, and I can't say this is my idea,
00:40:28.540
David Goodhart has made this idea, so I'll attribute it to him.
00:40:31.620
But for the first time in a long time, we now have an economically independent thinking class
00:40:41.620
you think about what's happening on places like, you know,
00:40:47.640
We now have a generation of thinkers who are not wedded to institutions.
00:40:52.620
They don't have to please an editor at The Times to get published.
00:40:55.560
They don't have to please a university to get published.
00:40:58.060
They're out there, they're creating their own revenue,
00:40:59.700
and they're building their own audience, right?
00:41:01.620
And so that economically independent thinking class, interesting, countercultural,
00:41:07.760
I think is a positive sign because those voices are coming back into the marketplace of ideas.
00:41:13.300
And it's up to the legacy institutions now if they want to keep up with that.
00:41:16.700
Or be destroyed in the process, which is what will happen to them if they don't.
00:41:20.320
Well, I mean, I've seen, I can tell you, I've seen the viewing figures of all the TV channels in this country,
00:41:27.120
And I mean, you know, the big players are being challenged in a major way.
00:41:35.580
And I think that, again, is the aftermath of the last 10 years,
00:41:39.340
that people can sense this kind of stifling orthodoxy,
00:41:42.540
orthodoxy, and they can sense that people who don't subscribe to it are being persecuted and harassed.
00:41:53.860
And I think that is all sort of culminating in this push to get a wider array of voices into the conversation.
00:42:05.160
That is a very necessary correction in the system.
00:42:08.420
Let's come back to the political conversation for a moment.
00:42:11.500
You mentioned the cost of living crisis, as it's now called.
00:42:14.820
And what's interesting to me is the short-sightedness with which we're addressing that problem,
00:42:20.560
because Nigel Farage was sitting in that chair many months ago before the war in Ukraine.
00:42:26.640
And halfway through the interview, we started talking about, you know, cost of living, inflation,
00:42:32.420
and we've had people predicting this inflation would come for years since COVID broke out and before, frankly.
00:42:40.360
And Nigel Farage, before the war in Ukraine, said,
00:42:43.160
I still don't think people understand what's about to happen.
00:42:46.500
I really don't think they understand the first week of April when those bills hit the mat for their Q1 gas and electricity bills.
00:42:55.260
There's going to be absolute shock and outrage.
00:42:57.680
I think we've got this hopelessly, catastrophically wrong, and it's about to blow up this year.
00:43:05.380
Then, of course, you add on top of that the war in Ukraine,
00:43:08.300
and suddenly we're all aware that printing money nonstop for 14 years was a bad idea.
00:43:16.920
And because of that, I fear that it's not going to get properly addressed.
00:43:20.120
The inflationary bubble that we ourselves are blowing up by printing all this money to do some very necessary things, people would argue.
00:43:29.860
We're not going to address that because we're going to go, well, evil Putin, agreed, is pumping up the price of gas.
00:43:38.340
How, well, I mean, I was going to say the Conservative Party, whoever.
00:43:42.240
How is that problem going to get resolved politically?
00:43:47.760
It's basically what we're seeing, I think, is an indictment of the last 20, 30 years of political leadership in the country
00:43:53.720
who weren't really thinking, dare I say, a bit like the Chinese in terms of let's have a 30 to 50 year game plan
0.99
00:44:01.380
and let's think about where we're going to be in terms of energy and in terms of resources, you know, come 2040, 2050.
00:44:08.520
We don't think like that in our, you know, liberal Western democracies.
00:44:15.180
He's decided we need to build eight nuclear power plants.
00:44:19.520
I think we get, what, 15% of our energy from nuclear, something like that.
00:44:27.140
Should have been doing that for decades is my point.
00:44:31.520
But again, it's about a lack of, I think it's a lack of long term thinking.
00:44:34.320
But it's also, I just think we are not incentivizing the right people to come into politics.
00:44:42.540
And I really think the more, you know, the more I look at all the problems that are mounting up, I think it just comes back to, like, I'm not convinced that I want some of the people in the House of Commons that we currently have managing our national economy, managing our healthcare system, managing.
00:44:59.720
You know, I look at some of the people on the front bench, both parties, and I just think, really, is that the best that we can produce?
00:45:07.460
You know, and the answer is we're not incentivizing people.
00:45:09.960
Like, if you're, I don't want to pick names, but if you're somebody who's run a major investment bank for 30, 40 years, that has a good handle on the economy, where we're going, and the mistakes we've made in the past, and so on.
00:45:22.540
Why would you go into politics now? Why would you go in for 60 grand, for constant harassment on social media, for this incredibly toxic, combative culture?
00:45:32.260
You wouldn't do it. Like, you have to be pathological, right? Or an extreme narcissist to go into politics today.
00:45:38.500
And I think it's an unpopular point, but maybe what we ultimately need to do is jack up the salaries for MPs, improve the conditions, incentivize business leaders with a significant amount of experience to be involved in public services,
00:45:56.400
or even somehow make more use of people who have spent their lifetime leading public services, who then just drift into retirement and, you know, do nothing for 20 years.
00:46:06.360
I mean, if you look at the NHS, you know, I mean, speaking personally, my father was a chief executive in the NHS for his whole life, you know, and we have a generation of people who have gone through all of the crunch reforms through the Thatcher years, through the major years, through the Blair years,
00:46:20.460
who have a very good handle of where the NHS has gone wrong and how we need to integrate NHS with social care and fix various problems, and we're not making the most out of that talent in the same way we're not making the most out of business talent.
00:46:33.180
So I think it is a supply problem in politics. We're just getting the wrong people into these roles. But you're right to say long-term thinking. Absolutely.
00:46:43.040
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00:48:19.120
Do you find it interesting that we're now seeing more of these sort of old-school, I would call them, left-wing people like the Mick Lynch's, the Eddie Dempsey's?
00:48:29.120
Whereas before, six years ago, all of a sudden, they'd be dismissed as, you know, gammon-y Brexit type.
00:48:36.120
That's basically it, mate. They're back. We're back, baby.
00:48:41.120
If you put that on a t-shirt, you're going to make a lot of money.
00:48:43.120
The gammon's are back in business. Brilliant.
0.99
00:48:45.120
But I find it very interesting that all of a sudden, these people who would, even by their own team, would be seen as, you know,
00:48:51.120
oh, God, they're all, you know, it's a bit old-school.
00:48:53.120
Whereas now, they're embraced, they're invited on all these programs.
00:49:02.120
Well, I think what they do well is they do tap into a sense of authenticity, which some of our politicians have lost.
00:49:08.120
Like, authenticity is an incredibly powerful political drug.
00:49:14.120
And I think, you know, the new prime minister, if she or he were clever, they would hold their hands up immediately,
00:49:20.120
because they're going to get five minutes with the country, right, where they can frame who they are and what they're about.
00:49:24.120
They should hold their hands up and say, you know, conservatives made lots of mistakes over the last 12 years.
00:49:30.120
I'm not perfect. Here are my flaws. Just be real with people.
00:49:37.120
I have just accepted Her Majesty the Queen's kind invitation to form a new government.
00:49:48.120
Boris Johnson delivered Brexit, the Covid vaccine and stood up to Russian aggression.
0.74
00:49:55.120
History will see him as a hugely consequential prime minister.
00:50:02.120
Dump all the spin nonsense. Just be completely real.
00:50:05.120
And I think some of the names that you mentioned, I think those guys do a good job of that.
00:50:08.120
Another person, I do a lot of polling, somebody who always polls, like, leagues above politicians, Martin Lewis.
00:50:15.120
Now, you might not agree with everything Martin Lewis says, right?
00:50:19.120
Compassion, serious concern for people, a sense that actually Westminster is not doing its job.
00:50:25.120
Now, his brand in politics is very, very strong.
00:50:29.120
If you were to give Martin Lewis 10 million quid and a couple of political advisers, he would probably be polling at 10 to 15 percent.
00:50:37.120
Like, that's how volatile the system is at the moment.
00:50:40.120
But it's about conveying that authenticity and that freedom to speak outside of the ideological straitjacket, right?
00:50:51.120
And ultimately, what we are dealing with are two political parties, not just in the UK, but across the West,
00:50:57.120
two political parties or two traditions that were basically forged by the Industrial Revolution
00:51:02.120
and were basically forged by debates that were principally about redistribution.
00:51:08.120
And we are now, I firmly believe, entering into a new era in politics,
00:51:13.120
which is no longer simply about left-right economic redistribution,
00:51:17.120
but is now also about liberal and traditionalist values on the nation and family and community.
00:51:25.120
And the old parties are struggling to adapt to this two-dimensional space, right?
00:51:30.120
So, Labour is struggling and it's kind of doubled down on social liberals
00:51:35.120
and it's said the future is left-wing economics and extreme social liberalism.
00:51:42.120
Geography, those voters are concentrated in the same kinds of areas.
00:51:45.120
And Conservatives have also really continued to double down on free market economics
00:51:51.120
and haven't really made a bet on the value space, right?
00:51:55.120
They're sort of torn between establishment liberals that kind of run the party
00:51:59.120
and their new kind of cultural conservative MPs.
00:52:02.120
So they've kind of struggled, I think, to really adapt to that two-dimensional space.
00:52:09.120
So that, you know, some of these voices are leftovers from a previous era that still have a star quality.
00:52:15.120
But I don't think the next movement, the next leader, the next voice that genuinely cuts through has actually appeared yet.
00:52:26.120
And I don't think if there is another populist wave or whatever you want to call it, it won't look anything like what we've had before.
00:52:33.120
I don't think it will look like a, it won't be a UK Independence Party type movement.
00:52:40.120
Because I think the issues and the context will demand it.
00:52:45.120
You know, Europe as an issue in British politics is basically resolved.
00:52:49.120
I think it's going to be about a new generation who are coming through.
00:53:02.120
But aren't the millennials all mostly quite liberal on many of these issues?
00:53:06.120
Some of them are. Some of them are. Not all of them.
00:53:09.120
There's a bit of evidence to suggest that even some Gen Z Zoomers are actually in some respects quite conservative.
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I mean, I talk to my students on some of these issues.
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They're not as kind of, you know, quote unquote woke as you might think actually on a lot of these issues.
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Especially interesting when it comes to their personal lives.
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Fitness and diet and regime. Incredibly conservative.
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Matt, are we going to have a winter of discontent?
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This is going to be a very, very difficult winter for everybody.
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And it's going to have a lot of social and political effects.
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Whenever we talk to people about, like, it's going to be unpleasant.
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Look, no one's got a crystal ball, et cetera, et cetera.
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Probably the average worker in this country might be pulling about, let's say, 28, 30 grand.
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So it's probably taking home after tax about $1,400, $1,500, something like that maybe.
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If the forecaster writes somewhere between 33% and 40% of their take home pay after tax is going to be going on bills.
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That's going to be a monumental, before you get to rent and mortgage.
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It's going to hit people hard, especially people further down the ladder.
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I can tell you, I was speaking to a finance director for a major, major company in the country that everybody would recognize.
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And they said to me that their forecasts suggest that of their customers, all of their customers, they already forecast that by Christmas, a third of them will not be able to pay their bills to that core service provider.
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And they are already moving on to a retention model of lowering bills as quickly as possible to try and retain customers, even if it means they take massive losses.
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And these are the kinds of things that are happening in boardrooms across the country because people can sense that actually what we're going into is going to be massive.
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I asked a nationally representative sample of voters, do you agree?
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Would you support the calls to refuse to pay your bills until they come down?
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Which is some of the grassroots campaigns that we've had are saying just cancel your direct debits.
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If you can't afford to pay your bills, just do it.
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And I think about 200,000 people have signed this petition for that.
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So one third of people in the country, one third of adults, say they support that action.
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Like if that were to happen, I mean, how many companies would go out of business?
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So there is a sense, a palpable sense that actually we may be on the cusp of something that is going to be very significant and very difficult, right, for people.
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And I think about my, take my students as an example.
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Students arriving this month in university were born in 2004.
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So they were too young to vote in a Brexit referendum, the 2017 election, the 2019 election, right?
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They are the kids that had their, all of their, the last year their GCSE and all of their A-levels were in lockdown, basically were disrupted by COVID.
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So this cohort, this group is a really unique group of students.
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But think about what they've seen, you know, in their life.
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They were four when the global financial crash happened.
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Now they've got the energy crisis and never mind the housing crisis and all the other stuff that we can come to.
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Now, of course, you can point to all generations that have had difficult times.
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So, I mean, I, you know, for me, the 90s were like, you know, great.
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But in the early, every, in my mind, everything until 9-11 was, was good.
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I'm telling you, social media killed everything.
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You know, having to write letters to girls, for example.
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And I feel really worried about them because it's going to be, for that generation, it's
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I mean, even if you took the labor plan on energy and you said, okay, let's, you know,
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spend a hundred billion, which the energy companies think it's going to cost long term to fix this
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We're talking about my daughter and her kids, if she has kids, paying this off.
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So we're talking about massive amounts of debt being built up to deal with this problem.
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Again, we're not solving the problem with any of this.
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We're not going to get off the needle, which is just printing more money to get out
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of our way, to get out of the way of the consequences of our own actions.
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Like to me, this feels like this, these chickens will come home to roost a lot sooner than people think.
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We won't, we won't continue to print on the scale that we have been printing.
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And touch wood, we're not going to have another pandemic in our lifetime.
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I think we are not doing anywhere near enough forward, forward planning.
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We're not thinking about where's the next, where are the next 50 years.
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We're not even thinking about, I mean, how do we fix a productivity problem in this country?
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How do we genuinely get serious regional economic growth?
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I mean, it's, it's been six years since Brexit.
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This moment could have been genuinely revolutionary for the country.
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We could have had, and I think there are two things that went on, actually.
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We could have had a genuinely interesting moment of national renewal.
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One is conservatives didn't really bring big ideas to the table.
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So, yeah, we left the EU, they reformed migration, but that was kind of like about it.
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And then COVID hit and everything got shut down.
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And then I think labor and very intelligent liberal folks didn't really want to play the game.
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They didn't really want to come to the table and bring new, bold, interesting ideas for how we were going to make this moment work.
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And I think probably now the severity of the situation, I would hope, would now push us into a much more interesting national conversation about what we're going to do about what's a 2050 plan?
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But this is a problem because all Labor seem to do is just basically shut their mouths and let the Tories make an ass of it.
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Well, oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them.
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I mean, are you telling me Labor are on 41% of the polls because people have fallen in love with Keir Starmer?
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In all the polling I'm doing, Keir Starmer is weak as he was when he came in.
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But it's the incumbency that is driving them from right to left.
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There is no compelling, you know, I would argue there's no compelling, credible, intellectually interesting, timely alternative.
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In the very leadership election, which is about to finish, was that candidate not being elected.
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But if I was being even critical of, of Kemi, and I'm not, I mean, I was very on the record of saying I think Kemi would be a really interesting conservative leader.
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But even then, like, it's going to take more than the culture stuff to fix these problems.
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I would have loved for Kemi or Suella, Braverman or so on, any others to come out and say, right, you know, just forget the next five years.
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And, you know, go back to 2008 and the financial crash.
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But at least he captured the urgency of the situation, which was, we don't need to think about this domestically.
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We need a much bigger, broader plan than anything that's been put forward.
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And I feel like this crisis isn't generating that same kind of response from our leaders.
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I mean, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak haven't really got into it on the leadership campaign trail in the way that they should have done.
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I mean, remember the U.S. presidential election before the global financial crash.
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You know, I mean, Obama was sitting in meetings with Bush and the economic advisory groups actually talking about what was likely to happen and where things were going.
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We haven't really seen that kind of coordination and, you know, forward thinking this time around.
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It's been very, people have remained in their silos.
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And I think that's worrying given the severity of the problems that are going to come down the line.
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It's a complete lack of vision on all sides, which I think just speaks to the lack of talent.
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Yeah, I think, well, again, I mean, I think we need to incentivize people to better people to come into politics because the risk if we don't is we're going to end up, you know, perpetuating this, you know, and maintaining the status quo as we go forward.
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I mean, you look across Europe at the moment, look at Italy, you know, big election this month in Italy, of course, new parties are popping up left, right and center.
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Look at what just happened in the French election, left, left and right completely imploded, almost replaced by radical left, radical right parties.
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Look at Germany, look at Sweden, look at Portugal, look at Spain.
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We're seeing levels of volatility in politics that we haven't really seen in quite a long time.
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We've seen high levels of fragmentation, lots of new parties coming on board.
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Matt, one of the things that strikes me about the evolution of our political system.
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Now, of course, this was always the case to some extent, but it seems to me that we it's kind of our fault, too, because we massively disincentivize politicians from telling the truth about difficult things.
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And as you talk about, you know, Liz Truss, she will be elected, I'm sure, on Monday.
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And she needs to come out and say, well, these are the mistakes we've made.
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But I actually haven't heard anyone say what you've said on our show today, which is there's definitely going to be a winter of discontent.
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Right. And I think it would actually be quite important for a leader.
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I mean, what do people think is going to happen?
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This is my point, because no one is saying to them the winter will be quite difficult.
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Like, I appreciate a politician has, you know, the challenge of also not panicking people.
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But I also think the politician has a responsibility to level with the country about the nature and the scale of what's coming.
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Well, if you read what's coming out of sort of, you know, team trust, I think the plan seems to be the first hundred days will basically be about survival,
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will be about just deal with the energy crisis, get on top of it.
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And then, you know, into 23, start to lay out, you know, the ideas for the big, big policy stuff.
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And I think it was the FT that did a piece on that.
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And, you know, in all fairness, when you're polling at 29, 30 percent, you know, I think probably that that's the only thing really that she's going to be really incentivized to do is just to make sure she doesn't have a rebellion within the conservative.
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And within the conservative party, first and foremost, because don't forget, I mean, a lot of conservative MPs did not back Truss.
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If she ends up becoming the next leader, a lot of MPs back Penny Morden, which is an interesting decision, a few others.
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And, you know, I think that's, that's going to leave her in a bit of a potentially a vulnerable place.
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But then after Christmas, potentially she wants to get into that situation where she can look back and say, you know, we've got through it.
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So there's going to be that return to the David Cameron narrative of 2015.
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You know, don't let Labour and the SNP ruin it at the next election.
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Yes, things are difficult, but here's what we've done.
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You know, delivered, done what we could with Brexit, with signing trade deals, with trying to do X, Y, Z.
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You know, don't put Nicola Sturgeon into number 10 with Keir Starmer.
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And in a sense, it will be, you know, try and mobilise England again against the SNP and non-London England against the SNP and Labour.
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And that strategy has been successful for them in the past, but it's whether they can reconnect with those groups that I talked about.
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Matt, you're someone who is obviously very knowledgeable about politics.
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But just talking as a human being to a human being, how worried are you about what you're seeing in our country?
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I'm talking about the very fabric of our country.
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We have a remarkable, resilient political system.
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I mean, put all the liberal shrieking of the last two years to one side, right?
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We have never come close to having a serious meltdown in our political system.
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Optimism point two is we remain a very moderate political culture in this country.
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I know it doesn't feel like that sometimes, but compared to our Italian and our American
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and our many other neighbors and counterparts, we have a very moderate political culture.
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And thirdly, we have lots of things that still ultimately bring us together.
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And I think many of the things that Orwell and Blair and Johnson and many others have pointed to are valid.
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We have still many points of unity in this country that are not always political relating to sense of humor,
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our respect for certain institutions that are not always in politics, our sense of fair play,
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which, of course, Boris Johnson discovered what happens when you violate that, as did Dominic Cummings.
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These are things that I think are ingrained, actually, in our national culture.
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And you might say I'm being naive, but I think the British and the English culture is very resilient to many of the things that we have been talking about.
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And, yes, it's going to be a difficult winter and it's going to be a difficult five years ahead.
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And lots of people are going to find it very, very difficult.
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We have also been through things like this before.
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We've had major global depressions, financial crises, credit crunches, you name it.
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And we've not descended into mass revolt and upheaval.
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Well, the only positive note of the interview, and that is why we will end it.
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Before we let you go, we should tell everybody to read your substack and follow your work on Twitter as well.
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But, of course, our last question is always the same, even though it produces a different answer every time,
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which is what's the one thing we're not talking about in our society that we really should be?
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I think we need to talk a lot more about family breakdown.
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I've just finished reading a great new report by the Nuffield, Angus Deaton Review, the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
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I've just put this report out on the scale of family breakdown in the UK and the effects that it is having on children and the effects of this much more fluid environment that we're in.
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And I think in terms of policy, in terms of politics, in terms of society, we need leaders who are going to stand up and say,
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actually, we need to now start putting family at the centre of our politics and our country.
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And the return on investment is enormous. It's enormous. It's a no-brainer from a policy perspective.
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Strong families, stronger society, fewer problems, less addiction, less crime, less mental health issues.
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Absolutely. Matt, thank you so much for coming back and thank you guys for watching and listening.
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We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or Raw Show.
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And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.
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We're going to ask a couple of questions of Matt that you've already submitted for our locals.
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So join our locals to see those. See you there.
01:11:10.120
What is the best strategy for Labour to use in the next election?