Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Just Josh: a New UK PM, the New Left, New Right, & Brexit 10 Years On

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Just Josh: a New UK PM, the New Left, New Right, & Brexit 10 Years On · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans
• 0:04
  so we have a new
• 0:06
  are we on the
• 0:08
  webs?
• 0:09
  We got a
• 0:10
  new UK Prime Minister, I mean not exactly
• 0:12
  yet, you know we've got
• 0:14
  we've ousted the last one
• 0:16
  and now we just have to figure out whether or not
• 0:18
  the new guy is going to be
• 0:20
  have any competition or whether he's just going to go
• 0:23
  soaring into the
• 0:24
  into the
• 0:25
  oval office, into the lounge
• 0:28
  of number 10 Downing Street,
• 0:29
  shall we say.
• 0:30
  So are we excited by this?
• 0:32
  Well, it's the sixth prime minister
• 0:35
  in 10 years that they've had.
• 0:37
  And I thought, gee,
• 0:38
  that makes the last 10 years
• 0:39
  very anomalous in UK politics, surely.
• 0:42
  I mean, six prime ministers
• 0:43
  in the past 10 years.
• 0:44
  Then I heard this statistic.
• 0:46
  Get a load of this.
• 0:47
  This will blow your socks off.
• 0:48
  You're sitting down,
• 0:49
  you're holding on to your hat.
• 0:51
  The last time in the UK
• 0:53
  that a prime minister
• 0:56
  became prime minister
• 0:57
  by winning an election
• 0:57
  and then stop being prime minister by losing an election,
• 1:02
  you know, the normal way that a democracy is supposed to work.
• 1:05
  You win an election, you come into power.
• 1:07
  You lose an election, you leave power.
• 1:09
  Guess when the last time that was?
• 1:11
  So just to clarify, we're talking about a situation
• 1:15
  in which so frequently does a prime minister come to power
• 1:20
  by toppling the sitting prime minister,
• 1:25
  you know, in what we call a spill in Australia,
• 1:27
  where they basically just, you know, they oust the prime minister in the middle of his term,
• 1:31
  as has just happened with Keir Starmer.
• 1:33
  And so frequently does the opposite happen, which is that
• 1:37
  once that person is in power, they then get ousted by their colleagues before they have the opportunity
• 1:41
  of facing electoral defeat.
• 1:44
  That the last time a prime minister came into office in an election
• 1:48
  and left office in an election was 1974.
• 1:52
  It's more than half a century in the UK.
• 1:56
  since a prime minister was elected to power
• 2:00
  and then lost power at an election.
• 2:02
  Everybody else has either stabbed someone in the back
• 2:05
  to get the top job or been stabbed in the back
• 2:07
  to be removed from the top job.
• 2:09
  So it's actually not that anomalous
• 2:10
  that the past 10 years has had six prime ministers.
• 2:12
  It's certainly happening faster,
• 2:14
  but it's not actually the case
• 2:17
  that British politics tends to happen
• 2:19
  the way that Americans think of political processes
• 2:21
  as taking place where, for the most part,
• 2:24
  presidents do serve their full term.
• 2:27
  What do we know about the new guy, Andy Burnham?
• 2:30
  To be honest,
• 2:31
  you know, forgive me for being cynical.
• 2:34
  He seems a little bit like Keir Starmer with red lipstick on.
• 2:41
  You know, they're both blocks of cheese on a stick.
• 2:44
  All of the UK prime ministers have been,
• 2:46
  Many Australian prime ministers have been lately.
• 2:50
  And is that enough to save the British political establishment from the insurgent forces of Nigel Farage on the right and Zach Polanski, the new leader of the Greens on the left?
• 3:02
  I doubt it.
• 3:04
  We will see.
• 3:05
  It also is happening at an auspicious time in the United Kingdom because it's the 10th anniversary of Brexit.
• 3:11
  Do you remember Brexit happening?
• 3:15
  I was in the UK.
• 3:15
  I was in London, and I was staying at my friend Sarah's place, and nobody thought that it was going to pass.
• 3:23
  And it was very much like what was about to happen the following year in the US with Donald Trump beating Hillary Clinton.
• 3:32
  I remember sitting on the couch with her
• 3:34
  and was watching the returns come in
• 3:36
  and watching it get more and more likely
• 3:38
  that Brexit is going to pass
• 3:40
  and it was the first moment
• 3:42
  of this kind of political realignment
• 3:43
  this sort of shell shock
• 3:45
  this populist thing of being like
• 3:46
  what the hell?
• 3:48
  just how clueless are we
• 3:51
  in our chardonnay-swilling
• 3:53
  latte-sipping salons
• 3:57
  well, turns out pretty clueless
• 3:59
  because it passed, it took five years to implement.
• 4:03
  Is that right?
• 4:04
  I think 2020 it came in or was the end of 2019.
• 4:07
  And as a result, the UK's economy is by most accounts
• 4:14
  four to 6% smaller than it would have been
• 4:17
  had Brexit not happened.
• 4:19
  And they have a lot more non-European migrants
• 4:22
  than they would have if they'd stayed in the European Union.
• 4:26
  so I can't say it wasn't a bit of an own goal
• 4:29
  and forgive me for crowing here
• 4:32
  but I long didn't understand Brexit
• 4:36
  even prior to Brexit
• 4:37
  I didn't understand how it could work
• 4:38
  and it has turned out that it couldn't work
• 4:40
  it couldn't possibly work
• 4:41
  and I'll give you the reason why you could know in advance
• 4:43
  that it couldn't possibly work
• 4:45
  so what's the European Union about?
• 4:49
  more than anything else
• 4:51
  it's about the promise
• 4:52
  that goods can travel across borders freely
• 4:55
  they're not going to be taxed there's not going to be a tariff there's not going to be some
• 4:59
  impost there's not going to be a customs guy rummaging through things you know figuring out
• 5:04
  how much of this you can bring how much of that you can bring in its original genesis the european
• 5:08
  union was a free trade zone and that is basically what it is you can still have your own security
• 5:15
  arrangements in terms of who comes into your country you can have your own immigration
• 5:18
  arrangements in terms of how many people come in at what pace uh you can check passports at the
• 5:24
  border if you want to.
• 5:26
  You don't have to be in the Schengen zone in order to be part of the EU.
• 5:30
  The monetary union is optional.
• 5:32
  That's not necessarily part of the EU.
• 5:34
  Obviously,
• 5:35
  the UK never had the euro.
• 5:36
  They always kept the pound.
• 5:38
  So you can slice it many different ways,
• 5:42
  being a member of the European Union.
• 5:43
  But the one thing you can't get around is that goods have to
• 5:46
  be able to be traded freely, carried freely across borders within the European Union.
• 5:52
  That is it.
• 5:52
  We do not tariff each other.
• 5:54
  We do not tax each other.
• 5:56
  You can carry a can of soup from Portugal all the way to the Netherlands, and nobody is going to be saying, well, hang on, maybe there's this tariff or that tariff on it.
• 6:04
  Okay, so that's all well and good.
• 6:10
  now a country wants to remove itself from that in order to have control over its tariffs and
• 6:14
  its trade right instead of being being spoken down to by those finger-wagging bureaucrats in
• 6:20
  brussels the british people thanks to nigel farage are going to assert their right to be able to
• 6:27
  decide what comes into whether that or not that's that can of campbell's soup is going to be taxed
• 6:32
  or not, coming in and out of Her Majesty's great United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
• 6:38
  Ireland.
• 6:40
  Okay, fair enough.
• 6:41
  That can sort of work.
• 6:43
  There's no reason why it shouldn't work.
• 6:45
  But it does require that you have a border between you and the European Union, obviously,
• 6:51
  because if you're now saying that we're going to assert the right to exclude ourselves from this
• 6:56
  agreement, this agglomeration of countries whose main purpose, whose primary raison d'etre is to
• 7:04
  permit the movement of goods across borders freely, you're going to exit from that.
• 7:09
  You have
• 7:09
  to have a way of not being connected to that anymore.
• 7:13
  And you might think, well, that's fine.
• 7:15
  The United Kingdom is an island, a set of islands.
• 7:19
  So they've got the whole English
• 7:20
  Channel in between.
• 7:21
  So they can do that.
• 7:22
  They can just intercept ships.
• 7:23
  That would be totally fine.
• 7:26
  but it's not
• 7:27
  it's not just a bunch of islands
• 7:30
  because there's a
• 7:32
  problem country
• 7:34
  in the great British Isles
• 7:36
  and that country is called
• 7:38
  the Republic of Ireland
• 7:40
  and the Republic of Ireland
• 7:41
  was remaining
• 7:43
  a part of the European Union
• 7:46
  Northern Ireland
• 7:47
  Northern Ireland
• 7:49
  the northern bit
• 7:50
  of the island of Ireland
• 7:52
  is of course part of the United Kingdom
• 7:55
  of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
• 7:57
  It's right there in the name.
• 8:00
  And if there was one border,
• 8:01
  and this is something I was saying in 2015
• 8:03
  because I genuinely did not understand it.
• 8:05
  I didn't understand it,
• 8:06
  and nobody who favoured Brexit was able to explain it to me,
• 8:09
  almost as if they hadn't thought of it.
• 8:12
  If there's one border in Europe, within the EU,
• 8:17
  not between the EU and, you know, external countries,
• 8:22
  But if there was one border inside the EU that had been most problematic, most troublesome, most violently fought over, for the past, what, half century?
• 8:34
  Century?
• 8:36
  It was the border between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
• 8:43
  The Troubles, the IRA, Sinn Féin, the Peace Process, all of that
• 8:49
  was about the border between Northern Ireland, which was part of the United Kingdom
• 8:55
  and the Republic of Ireland, which was part of the European Union
• 9:00
  So my dumb brain, turns out it wasn't so dumb after all
• 9:04
  but maybe my literal brain, had always thought
• 9:09
  But how do you remove yourself from a union which is predicated on the free movement of goods?
• 9:16
  If you have a free border on an island which is partially in that union and partially out of that union,
• 9:27
  you need to build a wall.
• 9:31
  You need to build that border back.
• 9:34
  Are you going to put a border, a physical barrier with checkpoints and fences across Ireland, across the most contentious border that exists within the EU because one chunk of it is now exiting?
• 9:51
  That just always seemed to me like a far-fetched prospect.
• 9:56
  There was no way that either the UK or Ireland were going to play footsie with the possibility of restoking the division of Ireland.
• 10:06
  Nobody wanted that by splitting Ireland in two.
• 10:09
  In which case, you've just got, so let's take the can of Campbell's soup, right?
• 10:13
  The can of Campbell's soup has to be able to go from Portugal, from, say, Lisbon to Dublin with unfettered access.
• 10:21
  You're not, it's not, you know, it's in the EU rules.
• 10:24
  They're both EU member states.
• 10:26
  You're allowed to transport a pallet of Campbell's soup cans from Lisbon to Dublin without it being inspected or taxed or impeded in any way.
• 10:36
  So now you've got your can of Campbell's soup in Dublin, and you want to transport it to Belfast, which is in the United Kingdom, not in the Republic of Ireland.
• 10:46
  It is untaxed.
• 10:47
  Let's suppose that the UK has imposed a tariff of 10% on European-produced cans of Campbell's soup.
• 10:56
  Where does that tariff get imposed?
• 10:59
  where does the UK reassert its right to police its own trade borders
• 11:06
  if it is linked in an unfettered way with rolling fields and country lanes
• 11:13
  with the European Union in the form of the Republic of Ireland
• 11:18
  and there was lots of hand-waving after Brexit
• 11:20
  well you know there'll be we'll figure out a there'll be a border between
• 11:25
  sort of in the water between Ireland and the United Kingdom, in which, you know, we'll sort of
• 11:31
  do some interception of things, but then you're intercepting goods between two different countries
• 11:37
  of the UK itself, which is sort of anathema to unionists who believe that the United Kingdom
• 11:43
  should be a cohesive whole.
• 11:45
  You shouldn't be policing the Campbell's soup tin when it goes
• 11:50
  from Belfast to Edinburgh because they're both part of the UK.
• 11:55
  You shouldn't be policing it when
• 11:56
  it goes from Lisbon to Dublin because they're both part of the EU.
• 12:01
  You should be policing it when it
• 12:02
  goes on the road on a lorry from Dublin to Belfast because that's where it's exiting the EU and
• 12:08
  entering the UK.
• 12:09
  But you're definitely not going to because of the history of that border and
• 12:13
  because nobody wants to be standing in line at a checkpoint when they're commuting to and from
• 12:18
  Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
• 12:21
  It was obviously completely unworkable.
• 12:22
  It remains
• 12:23
  completely unworkable.
• 12:25
  Nobody has a solution to this.
• 12:28
  And so anyway, that's just my, I still don't,
• 12:30
  if anyone has an understanding of how that was ever supposed to work or indeed how it currently
• 12:34
  does work, because even the experts who I speak to now, 10 years after the fact say, I mean,
• 12:39
  they just sort of muddle through that.
• 12:40
  There's ostensibly some sort of, you know, check at ports
• 12:43
  when things go in and out, but it's not really, it doesn't really work.
• 12:46
  By the way, if you want
• 12:47
  to chat to us on Substack, then please do.
• 12:50
  I'll be able to see your chats.
• 12:52
  We'll be able to
• 12:53
  get your thoughts, especially if you happen to be in the United Kingdom,
• 12:57
  about Brexit and about Andy Burnham and about Keir Starmer.
• 13:01
  Feel free to do so.
• 13:02
  I want to read you
• 13:04
  a piece that I wrote for the Australian Financial Review back at the beginning of March.
• 13:08
  This was
• 13:11
  essentially about the reaction to the invasion of, well, not invasion, to the,
• 13:18
  should we call it the Iranian troubles?
• 13:20
  Should we call it Trump's troubles in Iran?
• 13:23
  So it was a response to that and also to this shocking win by the Greens at a by-election
• 13:31
  in Greater Manchester.
• 13:33
  And because it's about the realignment of the new left and the new right and
• 13:37
  political forces in the United Kingdom.
• 13:39
  I thought it was apt.
• 13:41
  I could either write an entirely new
• 13:43
  column today about Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer, or I could do the lazy thing and dredge up
• 13:48
  something that I wrote a few months ago about precisely the same phenomenon and present it
• 13:54
  as if it's new.
• 13:55
  I will do the latter.
• 13:56
  I will do the latter.
• 13:57
  Although I must say, I'm also penning
• 13:58
  a piece for the Australian Financial Review for this weekend, which touches on the same thing,
• 14:03
  Not specifically about the UK, but about the way that mainstream centre-left parties are going to have to realign themselves, especially in a post-woke era, and are going to have to grapple with a lot of their assumptions about the centre of gravity of middle Australia, middle America and middle Britain.
• 14:23
  and the way that that contradicts a lot of the shibboleths that we've believed in elite
• 14:28
  cosmopolitan progressive circles the circles that were so shocked by brexit we're going to have to
• 14:34
  have another reassessment and i don't think andy burnham is necessarily the prime minister who's
• 14:39
  going to be able to pull that off we shall see so i wrote on march the 6th in the australian
• 14:45
  Financial Review, a piece entitled Identity, Not the Economy, defines our mosaic politics
• 14:53
  these days.
• 14:55
  Subtitled, The Ballyhoo Around America's Iran Campaign and Britain's By-Election
• 14:59
  is a glimpse into our future and the forces shaping the new hodgepodge political tribalism.
• 15:06
  So when in this article you hear talk about the UK by-election, the British by-election,
• 15:12
  you can just swap in the leadership transition between Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham,
• 15:18
  and it all makes sense because we're talking about deeper forces than the specifics here.
• 15:24
  I wrote, at the time of the 2003 Iraq invasion, you may have been surprised to be told that the
• 15:30
  next Republican president after George W. Bush would go to war with Iran, but you would not
• 15:36
  conclude that the politics of the Western world had been turned upside down.
• 15:41
  If, however,
• 15:42
  You'd been told that the fiercest critics of the future Iran campaign would be right-wingers.
• 15:49
  You might have scratched your head.
• 15:51
  And what if you'd been told that in Australia the party of John Winston Howard would be trailing one nation in the polls,
• 15:58
  while in the UK the greatest threat to the party of Tony Blair would come not from the Tories,
• 16:06
  but from pro-gay lefties teaming up with conservative Muslims to support the Greens.
• 16:16
  You'd have wondered whether in the years between Operation Iraqi Freedom and today,
• 16:20
  a portal in the space-time continuum had cracked open and a whole new politics had crawled out.
• 16:26
  In a way, it has.
• 16:30
  Theatrically transgressive protest politics is replacing the flaccid tweedledum centrism
• 16:37
  that defined mainstream parties since the end of the Cold War
• 16:42
  This is partly a rational response to the failure of mainstream parties
• 16:47
  to grapple courageously with issues like economic dislocation, globalization, immigration and demographic change
• 16:56
  But it's also an emotional response to algorithmic echo chambers that are optimized to pander, demonize, and titillate
• 17:07
  Note that this isn't quite the problem we usually hear trotted out of polarization
• 17:14
  Polarization implies a binary
• 17:18
  But the binary of left versus right that was taken for granted in 20th century politics is splintering into a mosaic of anti-incumbent, anti-establishment identity tribes
• 17:31
  On the right, the economically responsible, culturally traditional, small government conservatism of old is under attack
• 17:40
  from a fiscally profligate, socially reactionary, norm-shattering, anti-woke, anti-immigrant disco
• 17:49
  of nationalists, conspiracists and podcasters.
• 17:53
  On the left, the I-have-a-dream idealism of a colourblind, big government, social democracy
• 18:01
  committed to free speech is passé.
• 18:05
  The energy on the left now comes from a kaleidoscope of tribes obsessed with difference,
• 18:10
  united only in their fight against colonialism, white privilege, unsafe spaces, toxic masculinity, and historical injustice.
• 18:21
  At least both movements, I write, right-wing nationalist identitarians and left-wing social justice identitarians,
• 18:28
  Sanctitarians can agree that Zionists are evil.
• 18:32
  Let's all sing kumbaya about that.
• 18:36
  The past week has starkly exposed these new realities.
• 18:40
  In the US on the right, and in the UK
• 18:43
  on the left.
• 18:45
  And a reminder, if you're just tuning in, I'm reading a piece that I wrote in
• 18:48
  March, so I was talking about a UK by-election, but equally applicable to this week with the
• 18:53
  demise of the British Prime Minister.
• 18:57
  In the US, the reaction of the new right to the military
• 18:59
  campaign against Iran would be unrecognisable to Ronald Reagan or John McCain, or Robert Menzies
• 19:06
  or John Howard.
• 19:08
  Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former Trump devotee and Republican member of Congress,
• 19:13
  called her party's government a bunch of sick fucking liars, and said,
• 19:18
  We voted for America first and zero wars.
• 19:23
  The executive director of the American Conservative magazine
• 19:26
  bemoaned that this is, quote,
• 19:28
  an elite-driven war,
• 19:31
  driven, frankly, by the deep state.
• 19:35
  Former Trump water carrier and Fox News host Tucker Carlson,
• 19:39
  now the new rights biggest podcaster,
• 19:41
  called the Iran strikes, quote,
• 19:44
  absolutely disgusting and evil.
• 19:47
  Whether you agree with these sentiments, what's striking is that they're indistinguishable from traditional leftist positions
• 19:56
  Jane Fonda, an embodiment of bourgeois anti-war activism, spoke at an anti-war rally on Saturday
• 20:04
  and deplored the horror of Trump's, quote, dangerous and insane war
• 20:10
  In Australia, a Muslim Greens candidate who describes himself as an
• 20:15
  quote, award-winning poet, offered these pearls of wisdom on social media.
• 20:21
  Fucking evil cunts, fuck this murderous fascist empire forever.
• 20:27
  Step aside, Les Murray, give the man another poetry award.
• 20:32
  The reflex to put tribal allegiance above political allegiance
• 20:36
  has also erupted in the UK.
• 20:39
  Last weekend, the Greens caused a political earthquake
• 20:42
  by booting the government out of a safe seat
• 20:44
  in an old industrial part of Greater Manchester
• 20:47
  which Labour has held for nearly a hundred years
• 20:50
  Labour didn't even come second
• 20:52
  The silver prize went to Nigel Farage's reform
• 20:56
  The Greens' new leader
• 20:58
  a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed former actor and hypnotherapist
• 21:01
  Zach Polanski
• 21:03
  says he's promising a new kind of eco-populism
• 21:08
  Since Polanski took the helm of the UK Greens, the party says its membership has tripled.
• 21:14
  That's more than the Conservatives' membership.
• 21:16
  It puts the eco-populists within striking distance of the anti-immigrants, Reform UK,
• 21:23
  and the grey-besuited nobodies, Labour.
• 21:27
  Polanski wasn't coy about the scale of his victory.
• 21:31
  Let me be absolutely clear, he said.
• 21:34
  Greens are not here to be disappointed by Labour
• 21:39
  but to replace them
• 21:42
  Um, Mr Starmer, I write
• 21:45
  the lefties are revolting
• 21:47
  insert your own punchline here
• 21:51
  But why would a working class Labour electorate vote for eco-populism?
• 21:55
  Well, at the risk of noting the elephant in the room
• 21:57
  the seat has become about one third Muslim
• 22:02
  and Greens' leaflet boxes were, to be fair, festooned with Palestinian flags
• 22:08
  and Greens' volunteers distributed leaflets at mosques during prayer times.
• 22:14
  Not to be cynical, but Muslim voters may not have been motivated
• 22:18
  by the Greens' wind turbine policies alone.
• 22:23
  In 1992, Bill Clinton won the White House with the message,
• 22:28
  It's the economy, stupid.
• 22:30
  In 2026, that's no longer true
• 22:33
  These days, it's identity, stupid
• 22:37
  The New Left is a coalition of groups who first and foremost
• 22:40
  seek to redress injustices inflicted on identities
• 22:44
  like Muslim, colonised, LGBTQ+, indigenous and migrant
• 22:49
  The New Right is a coalition of groups who first and foremost
• 22:53
  seek to restore the righteousness of identities
• 22:57
  like Christian, male, nationalist and western.
• 23:02
  The old left and right were committed to manufacturing a common identity
• 23:07
  even as they disagreed on policies.
• 23:10
  The new hodgepodge is committed to either dismantling from the left
• 23:16
  or defending from the right western power structures.
• 23:22
  This makes for strange bedfellows.
• 23:26
  In the UK by-election, rainbow greens are in bed with homophobic mullahs
• 23:32
  In opposing the strikes on Iran, America First nationalists are in bed with anti-American pacifists
• 23:40
  Far-right anti-Semites side with ultra-Orthodox Israeli settlers
• 23:46
  Peaceniks apologise for jihadists
• 23:50
  and Tucker Carlson shares more in common with Jane Fonda
• 23:54
  than with his former Fox News colleague Pete Hegseth.
• 23:59
  There are deep cultural, economic and technological reasons for all this.
• 24:05
  Suffice it to say that if the past week's ballyhoo around America's Iran campaign
• 24:09
  and Britain's by-election are a glimpse into our future,
• 24:12
  if the frisson of anti-partisan transgression tempts enough voters,
• 24:20
  then a bit of flaccid tweedle-dum centrism may not, in hindsight, come to look so bad.
• 24:29
  So that was my reaction to the UK by-election in end of February, beginning of March.
• 24:35
  It's pretty much exactly the same with the UK leadership issue today.
• 24:41
  I don't think that centre-left parties are going to solve the problem of rising populism, of dissatisfaction that is leading to anti-immigrant rhetoric on the right and anti-Israel rhetoric on the left, by swapping out one grey suit for another grey suit and hoping that nobody notices that they're not actually reckoning with the dissatisfaction and the grievances that underlie the sort of political earthquake that they're in.
• 25:10
  they're presiding over.
• 25:12
  It's not about which particular person can speak to which particular
• 25:16
  constituency with greater authenticity.
• 25:18
  It's about the fact that people feel like they haven't been
• 25:20
  listened to by elite parties for so long.
• 25:24
  And at the risk of banging on about a, you know,
• 25:27
  wokeness and cancel culture and everything, I really do believe that until the center-left
• 25:33
  finds a way to underline the end of that era, it is going to find it very hard to gain a majority
• 25:42
  of the vote again.
• 25:45
  It needs to put a button in it.
• 25:47
  At the moment, the attitude seems to be that
• 25:49
  as long as elites regard the whole period of the social justice reckoning and the diversity,
• 25:56
  equity and inclusion reckoning and the race reckoning and the gender reckoning and
• 26:02
  transgender, as long as they regard that period of maybe, say, 2012 to 2024 on the left, that
• 26:09
  12-year period as being just an unfortunate footnote in history, something that we can
• 26:15
  just sort of move on from without having a reckoning about, they will not be trusted.
• 26:22
  Because people won't believe, well, people won't know what to believe about what the
• 26:27
  elites believe until they actually announce it.
• 26:31
  You can't just wave it away and pretend that it
• 26:33
  never happened and hope that people forget about it.
• 26:37
  Think about what a good leader does when there
• 26:39
  is sort of an elephant in the room.
• 26:41
  They name it, and they name it in a way that uses the terminology
• 26:45
  not of their allies, but of their enemies, of their opponents.
• 26:49
  So, you know, when Barack Obama
• 26:52
  was sort of haunted during his first run at the White House by the racist insinuations that he
• 27:02
  was too close to a supposedly radical black preacher who had been his pastor all of his life.
• 27:09
  The questions about Obama's race weren't going away.
• 27:12
  And he gave this incredible speech in
• 27:14
  Philadelphia, in which he named the racial problem.
• 27:20
  And importantly, he did not name it
• 27:21
  using the terminology of his own tribe.
• 27:24
  He did not talk the way that the left tends to talk about
• 27:28
  race.
• 27:29
  He did not talk about the white supremacist power structures of America.
• 27:33
  He did not talk about
• 27:34
  racial disadvantage and systemic racism.
• 27:38
  What he talked about was a colorblind vision of what
• 27:42
  America's possibility is.
• 27:45
  He spoke in ways that he knew that a person who is not a member of his
• 27:49
  tribe would be able to hear.
• 27:52
  And he had the courage to be able to not only defy his own tribe, but to
• 27:56
  expand the conversation in generous ways.
• 27:58
  And this happens again and again in politics, when leaders
• 28:01
  take a chance on bucking their own side and clearly articulating whatever the kind of off smell is.
• 28:09
  You don't try to sweep the rotten eggs under the carpet and hope that nobody will notice.
• 28:13
  The room will still pong.
• 28:15
  You know, you have to actually air them out and you have to have the conversation.
• 28:19
  And there's a conversation for a courageous left-wing leader to have, which does not feel like dismissive hand-waving about the woke era, where it's like, ah, yeah, you know, that was all silliness, let's just move on.
• 28:32
  No, where it's actually, okay, what is it that we actually believe about, you know, to take an example, the white settlement or invasion of a country like Australia?
• 28:43
  Because a lot of legacy, there's been an accretion of cultural habits that have developed over the course of the woke period that still live with us.
• 28:56
  So, you know, acknowledgements of country, land acknowledgements, welcomes to country, the beginning of podcasts starting with this podcast was recorded on the land of the Eora people of the Gadigal Nation.
• 29:05
  You know, every single website begins with a pop-up of the traditional owners of the land.
• 29:10
  Now, is that a norm that we want to stand by and that we want to perpetuate forever as being a mandatory beginning to every single meeting, even if it's an HR meeting of middle-aged white women on a Zoom, that they have to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land?
• 29:25
  If so, fine, then the left can live or die by that cause and they can see whether or not it does or does not trigger a populist backlash against it.
• 29:35
  But if you're not going to stand by the extremes of antagonism towards the presence of white Europeans in Australia that you seem to exhibit over the past 15 years, then you do have to say, here's where we got that wrong.
• 29:54
  Here's how we're going to do things in the future.
• 29:57
  And we want to reset this particular relationship.
• 30:01
  the same would go for all of those hot button issues whether it's you know transgender you know
• 30:05
  it's you will still i just filled out a form online for my participation at a particular
• 30:11
  cultural event and it asked uh you know when you're filling out the form with your name and
• 30:16
  your address and everything whether i identify as male identify as female identify as non-binary or
• 30:23
  other you know you do have to get to a point at which you're like are we going to die on on this
• 30:29
  hill are we going to die on the hill of uh you know even i was looking up um some research about
• 30:36
  hormone replacement therapy in women and it was from a reputable website i think it was the mayo
• 30:42
  clinic in the states and uh at the top of the article which was about the biology of the way
• 30:48
  that different hormones impact male and female physiology uh there was a big box that said uh
• 30:55
  for the purposes of this article, we will be treating males and females as a binary.
• 31:01
  In reality, sex and gender exist on a spectrum.
• 31:04
  And then it said, respect is important.
• 31:07
  And I thought, well, what does respect being important have to do with anything,
• 31:11
  really?
• 31:12
  I mean, yes, of course, respect is important.
• 31:14
  What does that have to do with
• 31:16
  the particular question of how estrogen affects female versus male biology?
• 31:23
  so the you know the idea that we're just going to be able to hang on to these accretions of
• 31:29
  of wokeness and cancel culture and pretend that it didn't happen and then they will gradually
• 31:34
  fade away and at the same time retain the or regain the confidence of a public that has lost
• 31:41
  confidence in elites in part because of their obfuscation and equivocation about matters like
• 31:47
  this is naive you don't just you kick out keir starmer and bring in andy burnham and think that
• 31:54
  the people are going to be placated they need to feel i mean i'm not saying that this is i'm not
• 31:58
  being reductionist about this and saying this is all culture war stuff all i'm saying is that in
• 32:02
  order to win back trust from a population that has lost trust in elites you have to bend over
• 32:08
  backwards to appear trustworthy and to appear legit and that's going to be partly economic
• 32:14
  policy, but it's also going to be owning the failings of your own side, calling out the
• 32:20
  elephant in the room, acknowledging the smell of rotten egg, and asking for people to allow you to
• 32:27
  do a reset and to have an actual reckoning.
• 32:30
  Until that happens, I think populism is going to
• 32:34
  continue rising.
• 32:35
  Max on Substack says, Josh, do you think grievances and resentment keep bubbling
• 32:40
  away in perpetuity or will it ultimately boil over if it boils when and what does that look like
• 32:47
  um well if i knew that i would uh i would know where to build my bunker max um i mean it boils
• 32:58
  over in different ways in different places doesn't it in some ways it already did boil over in the
• 33:01
  states in the sense that the conservative center-right party has been completely eviscerated
• 33:09
  co-opted, I mean, a parasite of xenophobic populism and anti-democratic quasi-authoritarianism
• 33:18
  has infected the stately grand old party of old, the party of Mitt Romney and George H.W.
• 33:26
  Bush,
• 33:29
  and has turned it into a European-style populist right-wing party.
• 33:34
  So that is a boiling over.
• 33:38
  there's certainly a boiling over in the UK
• 33:40
  there's some kind of a boiling over electorally
• 33:42
  at least in Australia and Western Europe
• 33:45
  one hopes that the democratic institutions
• 33:47
  are capable of absorbing the shock of that boil
• 33:51
  and that it doesn't need to exist
• 33:54
  outside of democracy and liberalism
• 33:57
  I am fairly optimistic about Australia
• 34:01
  and fairly optimistic about the big countries of Europe
• 34:06
  maybe not France
• 34:07
  but Germany and Northern Europe
• 34:11
  about being able to navigate this
• 34:12
  within their democratic parameters.
• 34:15
  I'm agnostic about the UK
• 34:17
  and I'm somewhat more pessimistic about the US
• 34:20
  just because the US is always a bit extra.
• 34:22
  I mean, Americans are always just a bit extra
• 34:23
  about everything.
• 34:24
  They do wokeness more,
• 34:25
  they do the backlash more,
• 34:27
  they do everything more.
• 34:29
  So where it ends up in the States,
• 34:32
  I know not, unfortunately, Max.
• 34:35
  All right, let's leave it there.
• 34:36
  I just wanted to give you my thoughts about Brexit.
• 34:38
  If you have any contributions about the 10-year impact of Brexit
• 34:41
  or your expectations of British politics
• 34:43
  or how populism and the new left and the new right
• 34:46
  are going to shake out in your neck of the woods,
• 34:48
  chat with us on Substack.
• 34:50
  Have a great week.
• 34:51
  I'll see you next time.