Latest / Thinking Class / #028 - David Goodhart - Post-Brexit & Trump: The Anywhere Class Still Doesn't Understand

Transcript

#028 - David Goodhart - Post-Brexit & Trump: The Anywhere Class Still Doesn't Understand · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, classmates, and welcome back to the show.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with David Goodhart.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: David is a journalist, writer, and think tanker.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: He worked for the Financial Times for 12 years before setting up Prospect Magazine in 1995.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: And David has been involved with issues relating to equality and discrimination for 20 years.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: In 2013, he published a book on race and immigration, The British Dream, which was the runner-up for the Orwell Prize.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: And when director of the Demos Think Tank, he set up the Integration Hub website as a focus for data and debate about ethnic minority integration and segregation.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: In his current role as head of the demography unit at the policy exchange think tank, David has contributed to most of the policy debates on race, including co-writing a report, Bitter Tweet Success, on ethnic minority people in elite jobs.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: His two most recent books are The Road to Somewhere, The New Tribe Shaping British Politics from 2017, and Head Hands Heart, The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the Twenty First Century, published in 2020.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, which is a long one, David and I talk about so much, including the motivations of the political tribes, the Anywares and the Sumheres, and how they influence British politics, the disappointment in how the Anywares have used their power as the dominant class, whether immigration is as economically beneficial as it is frequently claimed to be, the impact of mass immigration on internal migration, how the mass education sector has damaged social cohesion, the impact of the welfare state on productivity, whether the UK has found itself in a doom loop, and how the role and status of the family has been diminished in recent decades, and how we might raise its status once more.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: David is one of Britain's most prized political commentators for a reason.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: He has an almost encyclopedic grasp of research literature, and he really has his finger on the pulse of the political currents that have swept this country's policy making along over many decades.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Before we dive in, you'd be really helping me out if you clicked subscribe on whatever platform you are listening to or watching the show on.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: The more subscribers we have, the more guests we can attract, and the faster Thinking Class grows.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: David Goodha.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Thinking Class.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much for joining me.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for the invitation.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Looking forward to chatting.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, likewise.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Likewise, I think both of us enjoy a good chat about all things that we're interested in.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm delighted that you joined me.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: I I think became aware of you at the beginning of the lockdowns in 2020.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, or at least that's when I had started to read your work.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'd certainly read some of the articles which you shot into the public um consciousness with, for instance, the the too diverse article uh from 2004 in Prospect Magazine, which I think we'll talk about.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: But what I read was uh at a pretty pivotal moment for me as well.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: So in lockdown, I ended up back in Northumberland, which is the place that I'm from.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: I've been living all over the place um when I left home at 19.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't the usual model of going off to university and getting a liberal arts degree and jumping on a graduate programme.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was a bunch of retail and sales jobs for about seven years, trying to climb the greasy pole best I could, jumping around the great cities of the north, Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds, ended up in London, had been in financial services, lockdown hit, and I thought I don't really fancy staying in London for lockdown.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'll go back to Northumberland, but it was never in the plan.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd always tried to avoid going back home.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: But when I got back home, I really enjoyed it.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: And there were a bunch of reasons why I enjoyed it.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I think part of it was this sense of feeling rooted to somewhere again that I started to feel like I was attached to the place and the people I got to know, the history, I was seeing some of my old school friends again.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I realized in that moment that I'd been living as this rootless atom who'd been bouncing around all these different cities trying to grasp onto career things.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I guess I had tried to train myself in that mindset of being a global citizen.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but but I wasn't highly liberal or on trend with the social change.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: And when I came across your book of drawing a distinction between the anywheres, who roughly fit that latter view I just talked about, that I kind of forced myself into and the somewheres, I realised I was somewhere in between, and actually there was a um that there were virtues to being a somewhere person and that they were disregarded.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: And lots of your work is built on that.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: You've talked about how lots of somewhere people might work with their hands or be in caring professions, and they're typically not afforded the same status in society, whereas a lot of the anywhere is the global citizens who are highly liberal, they're part of the laptop class, they can move around, they have this sense of achieved status rather than an ascribed status.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it all just was talking to me, and I thought, wow, he's really he has really nailed it, and it does explain a lot of the political movements going on in Britain.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: So look, that was seven or eight years ago, David.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: What where are we?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: And does it still hold up?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, well, thanks for that.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a good um sort of summary of the thesis through your own personal experience.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I mean, a couple of things I would just add to it is that um partly in response to some of the criticisms in the book, I mean, I would say um both the anywhere and the somewhere worldviews are perfectly decent, at least in their mainstream form.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um the problem is that one of them became, I mean, has has become over-dominant in our political system.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's sort of unbalanced the boat.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and you've had Brexit and Trump, and you you've had various sort of pushbacks against it, rather kind of incoherent, perhaps you might say, pushbacks against it.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um so um I mean and the other thing I would say is that um not only are both of these worldviews perfectly decent, but but they're also quite complex.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, the anywhere-somewhere thing caught the you know, the the the term sort of caught the political imagination and it kind of went into the political vocabulary to some extent.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um but there are um I mean if you read the book, you'll see there are many different kinds of anywheres, there are many different kinds of somewheres.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: There's a big uh in-betweener group, about 25% of the population, the anywhere is about 25%, one-third of the population.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: The somewhere's are a bigger but but less powerful group politically, culturally, economically.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um so yeah, with those with those sort of um small additions, as it were, to your description I guess I kind of regret the extent to I mean I was sort of hoping that that the political upheavals such as Brexit and Trump, which I think are partly sort of expressions of the value divides that I was describing in the book, um the you know the the the priorities of the highly educated, you know, openness, autonomy, comfortable with change, as you were saying, and the very different priorities of of many of the less well educated, more big people who value stability and familiarity more, um who are more connected to place and group, you know, who are therefore more discomforted by rapid social change.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um as I say, it had that expression in in uh in Brexit vote, amongst other things.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: I I guess I had hoped for a higher degree of regret um or or at least a a sort of a a sense of um uh a greater understanding on the part of the Anywares, the kind of liberal graduate class uh of the problems associated with their overdomination of of the political and cultural landscape.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and that with with some notable exceptions um that hasn't really happened.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um on the other hand, you could say that the um that something like the Brexit vote has sort of shifted the balance.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, the the the Anywares never exactly gave up control of the steering wheel.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um we ended up having this um partly because the the you know the vote was very close.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: A majority of people in Parliament, including in the Conservative Party, people often forget this, but I think sort of sixty percent plus of Tory MPs also voted remain.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: And as well, you know, obviously the whole of the civil service establishment and the cultural establishment more generally was deeply um shocked and opposed to to Brexit.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um so we yeah, we didn't cover ourselves in glory, I think, as a country or a political class.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, it took three years to find a way through.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I think you could say that um you know, although almost by definition, anyways, always sort of retain control of the steering wheel, um there has been a uh you know uh uh uh a recognition in some aspects of our politics.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: For example, levelling up.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean you would never have expected if it hadn't been for Brexit, you would not have got a Conservative Party really thinking hard and actually quite creatively.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think uh I think the the Andy Haldane, Michael Gove paper on uh on levelling up is really quite an impressive piece of work.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh going beyond the sort of traditional just pump more money into the post-industrial areas.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's obviously been downgraded, at least the the phrase levelling up has certainly been downgraded since Sunac took over.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but that that did represent, as it were, a kind of um uh you know somewhere priorities uh uh emerging into the mainstream.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um and actually I heard John Crudus, the the Labour MP, talking the other day and saying how um both the previous sort of iterations of the Labour Party under Blair Brown and then Corbyn both kind of located their sort of core support among graduates, different kinds of graduates, perhaps for both groups, perhaps in a way more successful, perhaps Russell Group, university graduates for the Blair Brown, um and and maybe more disaffected uh you know, the kind of graduates who um uh feel um that you know all their hard work of getting to university and um and staying the course and then they leave and they they find they're not in graduate employment, you know, they're in some 22 grand a year clerical job.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: That might be more the base of the um of the sort of Corbinista um Bernie Sanders type um revolt of the semi-educated.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um but actually in the case of Starmer, he's uh making a real attempt to sort of re reposition the Labour Party among you know non-n-graduate, you know, working and lower middle class of uh of this country.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um so um I think the but broadly speaking, I think uh I think uh uh perhaps you know a sense of disappointment that um a dis a sense of disappointment that the the the Anywares uh have sort of failed to kind of acknowledge their their power more.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean just just to finish on this point, I mean I think the um you know that there are a lot of debates these days about sort of the the demise of democracy and uh uh a lot of it is really just an expression of sort of anywhere catastrophism still sort of in in the kind of shock after waves of uh of of Brexit and Trump, Trump won anyway.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that but actually there, you know, there is a um there is a kind of an alternative anxiety about uh if not the death of democracy, then the sort of constraining of it coming mainly from the political right, not so much the the liberal and liberal left um fear of a kind of um aubanism and um um you know the the bending of the rules by somebody like Trump, so they're gonna sort stay in power forever.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: But the the anxiety expressed by people um on parts of the centre and the right is more to do with um the removal from democratic debate and conflict of so many um so many important subjects.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, we saw I mean it was rather an extreme case, but we saw the other day that the um European Court of Human Rights um deciding what Switzerland's net zero policy should be uh after the successful um um action by a group of Swiss women.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean this is um this kind of brings up this the the the theory of the two constitutions.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um I don't know.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know the work of Christopher Caldwell, the uh the Conservative American journalist?
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: I do, I do, but only because I've read his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, which was talking about mass immigration, actually.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well he wrote a book, I think, after that one called The Age of Entitlement, um, which in which he talks about this the sort of theory of the two constitutions.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it's a very simple idea, but I think a powerful one in which you know we have one constitution which is sort of the basics of democracy, you know, voting in elections from the president to the local dog catcher, um and all the things that make um that system work, the rule of law and so on.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um but you then have a second constitution, which is um you know, the civil service, the media, the the judiciary, um and the sort of the cultural world, and that that tends to be the second constitution tends to be dominated by the left, or certainly people one might call liberal, the liberal left.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um the first constitution um the right, certainly in in this country, the right has dominated the first constitution um in since the second world war, um but then um then finds its sort of its ability to um to actually change things um in the you know uh according to the priorities that have got it elected, um stymied by the domination of the second constitution.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you can see that in something like you know our our inability to uh to stop thousands of people um uh a year coming over the channel in small boats.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well let that let's let's linger on that actually, because I think that is a perfect example of an anywhere policy um is you talked about anywheres, you define them as people who are comfortable with more rapid social change, um don't necessarily connect themselves to a rooted local, national culture and see themselves as free and easy across the world.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so the idea of creating an immigration policy which effectively opens your border up, you know, we've seen in the United Kingdom 650 to 700,000 net per year the last couple of years, but really it's 1.2 million new people and we lose 500,000 elsewhere.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the US has seen millions coming across its southern border.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you find people within that second constitution, the media and academia, and lots of people making noises around democracy being in danger because they sense a shift to the right, which is ultimately from most people's reading, down to the fact that people are disillusioned with with the the notion that they can't actually make any change to things that matter to them and which they're actually impacted by with regards to access to jobs and services, changing culture, and and and it's that lockdown of the of all of the decision-making activities by the anywhere folks.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: And often it can be placed upon um economic grounds.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: So you're not allowed to talk about culture that is seen as to be something that is an unsanitary thing to talk about, I would say, and um something which has stopped us from having open policy debates about what kind of a uh controls you would want on your borders.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: But let's linger on that, David, because I know you in your role at policy exchange, you're the head of demography, immigration and integration.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: So you you'll have a view on this.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is we've we've often been told that there is a GDB boost from mass immigration that immigrants will put out more, but put in more than they take out.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: What is that true or is it the myth?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: What what what data do we have to suggest whether that argument holds up if we're not able to talk about culture?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean I think um it is largely a myth.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it um well, I mean, just to pull the camera back a bit, I mean I do think you're right that um mass immigration essentially without consent uh you know is is a massive political fact that kind of underlies a lot of um a lot of political conflict.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think you could even s I mean because the speed of change is just quite phenomenal.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean it's it's really greater than the United States at the end of the 90th, beginning of the twentieth century.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I was reflecting on this recently in the piece I wrote for the um the Saturday Times, I did the Saturday Times essay reflecting on the essay written in 2004, 20 years ago, called Too Diverse Question Mark.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um at that time the uh the non-white British, so the properly described ethnic minority population, which would include white ethnic minorities, you know, people from Poland or Romania or whatever, um the the non-white British population of the UK uh in 2004 um was about uh when there was already a uh obviously, you know, a a lot of anxiety about scale and speed of change.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we'd had huge uh asylum inflows connected with the Olk wars in the Balkans, um, we'd had the the um so-called mill town riots in 2001.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um but the I think minority population of the UK then was about 10%.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: It you know, it is now 26%, you know, just in extraordinary change in in 20 years.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, you could say you know much of that has been absorbed perfectly happily.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you've had um you know a lot of positive changes in many ways.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: You have a you've had much, we now have much higher representation of ethnic minorities uh in the um sort of higher professional class and indeed the political class, you know, we have an ethnic minority prime minister, um, you know, substantial representation in uh in conservative cabinets in recent years.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and you know, for many uh for many parts of the country and for many, particularly the more successful um ethnic minority groups, British Indians, for example, you know, you've you've had um you know broadly a positive story, people have moved out from the inner city to the suburbs.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um many of the kind of flashpoints tend to focus on on the Muslim minority and Muslim sensibilities, but in in many other respects I mean there are there's a a high degree of segregation in the school system, but somewhat less so in uh where people where people live.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um but there are certainly there are certainly things to celebrate.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think um compared to many other countries we've you know we've by uh both accident and design managed to um avoid some of the conflicts that you're seeing in well, you know, a place like sort of Sweden.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um But um that still has left I think a lot of a lot of people um Not just from the white majority, um a lot of ethnic minority people too, thinking that uh that that change has been happening too rapidly.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I think there are there are kind of two issues that I think as it were distinguish uh a a sort of a s a sort of sensible centrist position, you might almost say, on these issues from a more liberal position which which often uh passes itself as the um as the acceptable majority position.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, one is to do with uh um national democracy, I mean the nation-state itself and you know the ability of the nation-state to prioritise existing citizens over non-citizens.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um and this rises, yeah, that that this crops up quite a lot in the immigration and the refugee debate.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, should people be uh and indeed it was called course one of the reasons for the resistance to uh free movement I think the uh what what caused particular dislike of free movement was not so much the the numbers of people coming over, although that was obviously a factor too, that uh the the economic competition, you know, the lack of um um you know competition for scarce public services and so on and so forth.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: But it was also the fact that people could come here and be treated in almost all respects as if they were a British citizen from day one, without, as it were, having paid into the system either economically or one might say almost sort of culturally.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um their grandfathers hadn't died in the First World War.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um they weren't part of the national story.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, they can become part of it over time, but and that you know it's a it's a sort of foundation stone of democracy, you might say, uh in its modern national form, um, is the prioritization of national citizens' rights over non-citizens.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that I think is often blurred by by more liberal-minded people in the debate, you know, who want to who kind of want to imply who want to quickly move to a kind of ethnic or racial element, you know, that you're being um, you know, you're you're buying you're being racist in effect to to decide, I mean, even though we have obviously a multi-ethnic nation, you're being racist to imply that a that a national citizen should take priority over a non-national, uh, or or should even have equal rights to a non-national.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing is just um the uh uh the reason why people most people I mean obviously there are people who who who who think racially um and who who do have a kind of um a race bug about uh about some of these changes, but they're they're a pretty small minority these days.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I think um it's something like sort of four percent of people say that you know you have to be white to be truly British.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and may the people that sort of think in those terms are mainly dying out.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um nonetheless, I think a lot of people will still uh interpret what I think of as mainly a discomfort about loss of familiarity over rapid change, again, as a sort of racist or a nativist reaction.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I don't think that is usually the case or fair to the people that are that are feeling that.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um so um that that's the sort of broader context.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, on the on the economics, I mean you're right, I think a lot of the justification, you know, going back 20 years or so, a lot of the justification for immigration was that we kind of uh you know, we we needed the we needed to be more diverse, we were too boringly homogeneous, um uh, you know, a kind of racial justice argument, um, atonement for empire, uh that that kind of thing.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think people really think like that any longer, that sort of immigration is some kind of moral tonic for the nation.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um But the the the kind of the political class, which has remained you know very, very strongly in favour of high levels of openness, I think both for economic and cultural reasons, now does tend to justify uh a high level immigration in terms of economic arguments.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think they're on very, very weak ground, um, particularly since the um financial crash of 2007-2008.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I think there is an argument to say that um you know obviously in principle immigration can be an economic benefit if it if immigration i involves people who are coming here, who are um bringing skills that don't exist in the country or couldn't you know quite easily um be made to exist through through the training system, if they're bringing uh skills that are lacking, if they're bringing you know capital, entrepreneurship, if they're uh you know if they're coming to do highly paid jobs, um that uh and they're they're paying high levels of of tax, putting into the system more than they take out, uh all of those things are are clearly uh you know beneficial for the average citizen, which is the which is obviously the the view you should take when you're judging these things.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh obviously it's beneficial for the the migrant coming, otherwise they wouldn't come.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um they have a they have a choice that the average citizen doesn't uh doesn't have.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: But no, the the economics um well, you know, we did have a lot of you know higher paid professionals who probably contributed to um the strength of um b both the financial services sector, obviously one of the country's sort of sort of specialist industries um and perhaps the the kind of higher professions more generally, particularly in that boom period or what now, it seems like a boom period of the of the early to early mid-2000s.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um immigration may have may have made probably not a huge positive impact, but some positive impact.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think the East European migration in general was pretty neutral, actually, because um most East Europeans were not in particularly highly paid jobs and they obviously drew on the the welfare state.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: They may not have been educated here, but um uh many of them had children who were.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they they often qualified for tax credits and so on, or they were obviously using the the the the health system and uh and other parts of the welfare state.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I think um I think the East European story was a was a sort of a break-even one.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's true they did often you know often, you know, people from poorer countries often there's a s there's a selection process in who comes here from poorer countries, and it tends to be the kind of you know the the more get up and go, more ambitious people, and and often they have a they have a a strong work ethic, stronger average work ethic possibly than the average British person.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you can see why employers like them.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I mean the economic argument for migration is essentially um one of um holding down wages.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean the Treasury used to be pretty open about that.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's restraining wage inflation.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, if if you have access to to um to a bigger market, you know, it goes back to you know Karl Marx talking about the reserve army of labour in Ireland.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um there was uh you know that was and I think there's been a certain hypocrisy on the part of the economic establishment that kind of know perfectly well that to the extent that um a high level of immigration is an economic boost, it is it is because it is um disadvantaging the you know the existing workforce.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, holding down wages and increasing profits, which then lead to kind of a higher level of investment.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you get into that sort of virtuous circle, but it does require the holding down of wages.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the the that that economic impact it has on existing workforce, citizens, residents of a country, uh I I saw another graph um or another data set, shall I say, depicted in a graph which showed the rate of internal migration tracked against the rate of incoming or immigration.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: And what's pretty remarkable is the Blair years hit, and as the numbers start cre increasing with the numbers of people that are coming into the country, the number of people moving internally started to drop.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: And in the last in the last 10 years or so where it's really shot through, and obviously the last five years in particular, hardly anyone is now moving internally.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so clearly Britain has a history of uh since the second world war of we've lost industry to globalization, we are now focused on the southeast.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: Lots of people have been tempted to move to the southeast in the past, but increasingly people are not doing so, even if it is the economic engine, because the housing supply is so low and it's prohibitively expensive, it's very competitive for jobs, and effectively um people would argue, looking at those graphs, that there's a bit of cue jumping going on here to get to the prime real estate, the prime jobs.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so all of this and what it does to social cohesion when people feel like you know, despite what they're being told about GDP being you know a good thing, is it still cutting them off from somehow moving around if they should so wish?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: So um, where we go, I I don't know.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: But the the the other thing, which I think has been um a big driver of immigration of late is education, and as you know uh very well, is mass education is something that we have pursued as a policy goal since Blair's accession to labor leadership and then prem his premiership of the country, the the key policy tenant of education, education, education.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get 50% of our kids going to university.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was currently it was around 15% at the time.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a whole bunch of effects that had, right?
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: I I felt it as someone who watched all my friends go off and I didn't go to university and suddenly felt very, very inadequate.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then um actually, similar to what you were saying, is many of them came out without the the the panacea having been reached.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they were like, Oh, you probably did a good thing not going to university, but it didn't make me feel any less inadequate.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: So there was that angle, but also uh having effectively pursued this policy goal of moulding people in in the anywhere mould, the liberal metropolitan view, let's get everyone to be global citizens, because you know, we're global Britain, we're cool Britannia, we're compassionate.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: We kind of carried that on.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: Is we also wanted to invite lots of people in to our new university economic model, which costs an awful lot of money if you're an international student.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so all of those rising economically developed areas like China, India, um, and obviously other places like the US and um more distant lands are um paying an awful lot of money to get here to be able to say, I've been to a United Kingdom university.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um but there's been some pretty spurious things being found in that recently, which is despite paying two to three times the amount of a of a home nation student, um, there are much lower entry grades to get in.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's it feels like British or British residents, British citizens, those currently here are being pushed out in another way, which is I have to to get into this university, I need three A's, three B's, but my contemporary from China needs three D's, three E's.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um so the whole model seems to be built on silence, and then you have people there have been various um reports of late that people are just getting access to these courses, they've got no intention of enrolling, they just arrive, they get given a visa, which is pretty open-ended, and then they just disappear off into the gig economy.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so all of these things which are set up with this idea of bringing prosperity to the country has I think I think is whether people know it or not, it's stoking resentment because they feel like the opportunity is taken away from them, it's a back door for people to come and get into the country without having made those contributions in other ways.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it's another example of anywhere policy being very far removed from somewheres.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, I mean I think you know, in both the case of mass immigration and mass higher education, obviously both of these things can be beneficial when properly controlled and and and regulated.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: But in both cases, uh I think we've obviously overshot uh what is in the interests of the uh of the average citizen.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I haven't seen you know uh enough kind of rethinking I mean, you know, there clearly are people in the political class who are um who are who are um rethinking their assumptions about both of these, but both of these sort of overshoots.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean I think just just to go back, I think you're absolutely right about the the to go back briefly to the immigration one, the um I think it you might even argue that one of the reasons for the very close vote in the Scottish independence referendum was was a product of less mixing between between Scots and English people in the last twenty years or so.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um partly because uh large-scale immigration has meant there are kind of fewer jobs for you know a young Scot who thinks, oh well, go down go down and work in London for for two or three years and then come home.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, with normally, you know, one would expect normally quite a few English friends and uh th th those kind of personal connections.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: Sassanach aren't as bad as I thought they were.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I mean just just again briefly on the um I mean as as you probably know, um just over half of UK citizens already take out more from fork from the system than they pay in in terms of sort of tax and taking out benefits, um, tax and national insurance and the benefits that people get.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um as I was saying earlier, East Europeans probably just about break even, but the big surge in legal migration we've had in the last two or three years has been mainly um non-Europeans uh who are um much more likely to draw on the system um than uh draw more out of the system than they're they're putting in.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um and um so the you know the the economic argument is getting even weaker.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at skill shortages, for example, I mean we have again one of the arguments made by employers for bringing people in is that we don't have the skills.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, one of the reasons we don't have the skills is the employees aren't uh aren't investing in training.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um but even there we have um I think when uh you know large-scale immigration um of the first part of this century, I think the the proportion of um uh job vacancies that were skill shortage driven was like 15%.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, 25 years later, very high levels of of immigration and the number of skill shortage jobs is like 32% or something.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um so it it's not it's not helping in that respect either.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: But on the on the um on the university point, yes, I mean this is my in one of my absolute classic cases, as it were, classic examples, classic classic cases for the sort of pro case for the prosecution against the anywhere class was Tony Blair's famous 1999 speech saying fifty percent of school leaves should go to university.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think you know that speech could only have been made by a politician who was surrounded only by people you know who had been to probably quite elite universities and and just had not given a second thought to the fact uh of how this would be received and felt by somebody who was not heading towards university.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I called it the fifteen, fifty percent problem that when f you know when fifteen percent of your classmates or the people you know in your town go to university and you don't, well it's gonna no skin off your nose, you go and work in a local office or factory and life goes on.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the sort of clever kids go off and get uh sort of funneled off into um more kind of academic, um higher cognitive related professional work, that sort of is fine.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: But when fifty percent go and you don't, it's a completely different psychological ballgame.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um and um yeah, perhaps perhaps partly um partly ameliorated by the fact that many of the people that do go and end up feeling pissed off that they have gone.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um see, but you do, you end up then with two groups of of uh discontented people that the the 50% who don't go at all, um you know, who feel like second-class citizens, and then the probably reasonable proportion of the people who do go who aren't getting the um you know the high status professional jobs that they thought that they had been promised.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that's because those higher, you know, that that um those those higher um status professional jobs are simply not expanding at the same rate as we're producing um graduates, you know, many of them with um not particularly useful generalist academic skills uh that that employers are not interested in.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, of course, as we all know, the kind of the higher technical manual skills are are utterly lacking.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, we you know we struggle to employ um you know the the kind of technicians that keep so much of our society ticking over.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um and yeah, we just we just you know made a big mistake.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: We have a huge mismatch.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I mean it it again there are uh there are signs, you know, you know, obviously I mean uh in when it comes to the immigration story, you know, a lot of this was overseen by a party that sort of in principle and traditionally um has been more skeptical of large-scale immigration than than the party of the left.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so some of it was kind of by accident.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean that there there there there seem to be so many biases in the system.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean that the numbers always turn out to be kind of higher than people expected.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, we had the famous example of you know 13,000 East Europeans uh they're gonna come every year, and it turned out to be a million and a half came in the next three or four years.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: We then discover, you know, when we do finally end that system, we find uh we we expect there to be three and a half million um people from the from the EU living here, and we discover that there are almost six million.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean um and then the Tories um create this sort of post-Brexit immigration system uh you know, without giving enough thought to um leaving various loopholes, you know, we've we've had sort of sudden hundreds of thousands of um uh both both students and workers bring bringing independence um and um anyway, I mean there is an element of a of a sort of blip, a relatively temporary blip, about some of the I mean the huge numbers in 2022 and uh when it was like l like 700, you know, net migration of 700, more than 700,000, 2023 will be probably somewhere uh similar as that.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: The numbers will come in so some of that was a post-Brexit thing, perhaps in the student numbers.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: We had the Ukraine and the Hong Kong factors, both of them will be uh will be lower in the years to come.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: Labour will actually benefit, I think, from quite sharply falling immigration, partly partly due to the fact that some of these loopholes have been closed.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um so and it you know they will no doubt claim claim credit for it, even though they won't be responsible for it.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the the the immigration point, um I I don't particularly know what's going on with either of the parties, but the fact that since it shot up to 750,000 is you have um senior conservatives saying what we're gonna do is we're gonna bring this down to 400,000 with almost no sense of uh shame that people were uncomfortable when it was half that figure.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so and e even when they were elected to to office in 2010, it was about getting it.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Down into the tens of thousands.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: So still quite a remarkable uptick.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: If it was highly productive immigration, then people would be much less unhappy about it.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, I think people do often understand what is going on much, much better than they are assumed to.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: And people can see that a lot of the immigration is pretty unproductive.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we have an unproductive, or at least a substantial kind of unproductive drag, you might say, on the higher education system, and a substantial, unproductive drag on uh on the uh on the immigration system.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these two things that were meant to be kind of powering growth are clearly not doing so.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, both of them have been expanding exponentially almost in recent years, and yet we've been living through this period since 2008 of um of very, very slow growth and very low productivity.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the the the the case is made pretty pretty clearly.
• 44:59
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• 45:05
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• 45:13
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• 45:29
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• 45:32
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• 45:35
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and let's think about social cohesion uh for a moment.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we've we've touched on the welfare state, the the uh conditions in which it was it was built post-war, very different social contract.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's obviously grown exponentially since then.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: We we've touched a little bit on um how immigrants, particularly those who will get up and go to a new country, clearly there's something about them that makes them a bit of a go-getter.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: But I do wonder whether Britain's found itself in a bit of a pincer movement where it's created, and I think these are words used by others, this kind of amniotic sack of a welfare state where you're so reliant upon the state for so many different things.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: And any economist, and I know they they don't see everything clearly, but they'll talk about how incentives matter.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: And if you over time in a population disincentivize things like working or take away just responsibility by centralizing it, I can I can see how a population might have less incentive to go working.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_01: But then on top of that, you have to ask yourself the social cohesion question, which is you know, Britain can't surely set itself up for um its point of pride being having a welfare state that isn't just for the nation, but it but now it's into an international welfare state.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think many of those 750,000, 700,000 that came over, I think it was 15% are going into the workforce from the pie chart I saw from an ONS Office of National Statistics, and a huge number aren't.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't know how much of them are going on to the welfare state, but enough that is going to increase the tax burden.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, there are lots of these um uh Centre for Migration Studies think tanks who are going out going, right, what's the what's the fiscal drag?
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: What's being taken out of the system?
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: And in a in an age where Britain feels pretty bust you know economically, um I don't know how this can be sold.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh when whenever I don't know when a party will get to grip with this issue once it moves past, you know, Eric Kaufman believes all of the taboos that are being built around talking about these issues that you've touched on, like accusing people of being racist for wanting to talk about immigration policy, that we won't ever make any progress on it and be able to come to something which people will accept in the country of all stripes and none, um, until we can get past that taboo.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know which party's gonna come and grasp the nettle there, but surely we can't just keep going on thinking, oh, well, even if we can get it down to 400,000 a year, that's great.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: We'll keep growing the welfare state, we'll keep increasing the tax burden.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: We won't we won't skill up those people that are already in the country because that's not gonna lead to anything happy, particularly with the disaffected graduate class that keeps growing in the mix that were with their with their activist um ways.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was Andy Haldane, the guy that used to be the Bank of England, now at the RSA.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh quite I mean quite a sort of centre-left figure in some ways.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I I think I'd think of him as a kind of social democrat.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_00: He uh wrote something the other day I saw saying that we're we're in this kind of doom doom loop.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: He likes doom loops uh of kind of low growth and more and more safety nets.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean we it's if we need a kind of um yeah, we need to sort of clean out the clean out the tubes, as it were, um clean out the um uh the the kind of wiring of our society and uh you know you know Margaret Thatcher is credited with having done that economically, you know, whatever whatever it was, forty or fifty years ago.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think to some extent she did, um you know, we don't know that that also created created much conflict and mass unemployment and um um uh you know a a kind of tilt towards um making making the making the rich and the better off um even richer and and so on.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: So we we don't necessarily want to do it in that way, but some you know almost a kind of sort of social democratic version of of Thatcherism is perhaps what we can build the houses where people want them, we can, you know, build the laboratories and the factories and and get get going.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, as it is, you know, we we seem to have more and more safety nets being imposed on the system.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, whether it's business regulation, I mean the you know extraordinary um you know, you think about all the kind of data protection legislation, money laundering, kind of net zero, you know, particularly bigger companies, but that has an impact on smaller companies who are in their supply chains, you know, let alone DEI and um all of those things may be necessary up to a point, but again we seem to have kind of overshot um in in some ways.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean there's a sort of sense of stagnation about the country at the moment.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, there's quite a sullen mood, and nothing at all like uh 1997.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're on the verge of another big Labour victory, and um um, you know, it's a sort of shame in a way that um often these these sort of big switches in political power from one party to another lead to a sort of sense of renewal and sort of growth.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: And um I mean, you know, I mean I hope that does happen, but it seems pretty unlikely at the moment.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I do wonder whether, you know, that the the the two-party system is sort of is helping to lock in this kind of stagnation.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm certainly converted to uh the idea of proportional representation.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder whether we will in one way or another um kind of work somehow work round the two-party system so that we do get an expression of a um uh a wider range of views, and we do have you know the the somewhere voice um uh finding finding expression.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean, of course that there was the potential for a realignment of politics, as I I kind of touched on at the beginning, uh that the the the great sort of 2019 realignment that didn't happen.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um a kind of uh perhaps not quite in the way that the Republican Party in the United States has sort of become the party of the kind of angry working class.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um but there was certainly that possibility, you know, with the current with all the red wall seats falling to the Tories, um, the focus on levelling up, I mean that sense that the kind of Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove sort of version of a modern, you know, perhaps sort of social democratic Toryism could have could have shifted um and and m you know made the made the Tory party uh at least to some extent a more somewhere party, you know, as it were a sort of pro-business somewhere party, um um leaving the Labour Party as the sort of Liberal graduate party.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um but anyway, that didn't happen.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um like I say, I mean obviously Labour won't have any incentive to introduce proportional representation, but I think that you know that maybe um you know if they if they become very unpopular very quickly, and and I think that is that is one possibility.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's also possible that uh the economy is picking up somewhat, uh immigration is going to be coming down, um, you know, they are they are a new set of faces.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I I don't uh I and I suspect I mean uh you know when New Labour came to power in 1997 they had various s sort of big policy shifts up their sleeve, like the um independence of the Bank of England.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I don't think that this this Labour government is going to But they you know they may they may actually have a a kind of plan for social care, for example, uh which has been a um a real political failure for the last fifteen or twenty years.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um it will require spending a bit more money, but not a huge amount.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that it's possible that um um of course the other the but the sort of equal and opposite fear is that they won't be able to do anything in very much economically for their sort of core supporters, so they'll they'll do things more in the sort of cultural and social sphere, which will just alienate um uh you know at least half of the country.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_00: They'll you know there'll be various sort of gestural, symbolic political things.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I mean l looking more generally, I mean I f what what what I worry about most is that for both kind of both is we do get richer, albeit quite slowly, but and through technological change, you know, we are becoming more fragmented.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's not always a bad thing.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one person's fragmentation is another person's greater choice, you might say.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the fact that um you know you and I probably spend far less time listening to media than listened to by millions and millions of other people, and far more time listening to podcasts that are listened to by a couple of hundred thousand people perhaps.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um so you've got that kind of fragmentation, but then you also have you know uh you know much greater value and ethnic diversity than we had even twenty or thirty years ago.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's not all a bad thing, but it means it means that balancing these more um balancing this the the the greater individualism, the gr the more the way that we sort of curate our lives in a much more individualistic way, um, you know, if we still want to hold on to some notion of of the common good and and and you know political action on behalf of all of us, um then we need you know a form of post-ethnic nationalism, post-ethnic national identity that encompasses the broad majority of people.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we need we need politicians who can sort of inspire us about that.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um because we do have big challenges coming down the road.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, we're going to be a forty percent ethnic minority country by probably 2045 or 2050.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh we're going to have, you know, we've got you know the huge challenge, uh potential economic challenge of of climate change, we've got an aging society, you know, we've got um and and how how we kind of burden share amongst ourselves, uh politicians have to have the legitimacy to make big decisions about those things.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_00: And and then and you know one one of the sort of dismaying things about recent times I think is the way that um that kind of you know benign, useful national identity um uh has one has the sense of it sort of withering somewhat.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean it may still be there and it could, you know, get to to be called upon, but I mean that's that's that's one of the things I worry about.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um maybe I mean and that there is a a kind of elite dislike of um sort of you know using nationalism, national identity.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think that well there was a sort of broader elite problem of um so I actually did a a um point of view BBC radio uh one of those sort of ten-minute talk things a couple of years ago about about this what I call the sort of false outsider syndrome that you know that even the people, even the privileged people, even the people in the you know, the highly educated, people in the political class and um don't really sort of think of themselves as running the country.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um everybody wants to be an outsider.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_00: I remember it was what triggered my interest in it was actually listening to an interview with David Badil, the comedian.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember him in a he described himself in a Sunday Times interview as lower middle class.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember thinking But David Badil went to Habadash's ass private school uh and Cambridge, you know, he's what I mean I mean I you know he his he may he his dad may have was an industrial chemist or something, you know, he didn't necessarily come from a sort of hugely privileged background, but um David Bedeel is not lower middle class.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean they that that kind of wanting to uh not wanting to sort of take responsibility for one's privilege um and perhaps just more generally not taking responsibility not setting an example.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it's a kind of a very old-fashioned, it sounds like a sort of you know William Gladstone era idea that sort of elites should set an example, but I don't think it's such a terrible idea, really.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: No, I think it's uh a blooming good one, to be honest, David's.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_01: I I think if you're in a position of responsibility, authority, you have power.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, clearly there are things that are going to be more um conducive to an individual's benefit, a nation's benefit, a region's benefit, if you were to try to inculcate actual virtue, you know, that idea of character development.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose that's what Queen Elizabeth II represented.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, many people spoke about her as she represented this kind of staid um but um kind of um upright um benevolent figure, but someone who believed in following through, setting an example, and um that's something that was a connection to the the old world, as it were, you know, the pre pre whenever you want to define maternity, but pre pre-1960s, I guess.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't really see anyone aping those kind of um values.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_01: I was I was just speaking with Professor Carl Truman, who um is over in the States, but he's an Englishman.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_01: He's written a lot about the the social imaginary, this idea of all the ideas and values that swirl around in a culture that become um popular over time through arts and literature and what people attach status to.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: And then however long the elites um show that they're interested in those things and and propagate it, it ends up filtering down.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: And in the past, there were things that were more useful to people, regardless of your social status, um, than perhaps now.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, where there's a lot more of a there are no common standards.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone's trying to be a bit of a cool parent, as it were.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes I even look at um old old images of the working class, for example, um, who are coming out of factories or they're working on railroads.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_01: And what I'm always struck by from the elites right down to the lower ranks of society is how well dressed everyone is.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_01: This idea of um wanting to present an appearance and respectability, yeah.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: And in the lockdown, you know, I'm I'm logging on to Teams calls, you know, whether it's in uh uh a professional environment or not, or even walking around professional officers in the city of London if I ever go down there, and people are walking around in knee balance trainers, trousers up, shock socks showing and shirts open, and it's um and there they're actually you know the anywhere's the the middle classes, and I find that quite interesting, you know, athleisure being the thing that CEOs and the like will wear in comparison to folks who used to comport themselves in a different way.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, David, I I know I've probably only got you for a little bit longer, and I want to be able to give some time to your new book, which I think is fair to be.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, actually, oh well, there's a good yink here because actually a characteristic area or where um you know modern elites um behave in one way uh but speak in another way, um is kind of marriage in the family.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, um uh I mean I've just finished writing a book on uh on on the partly at least partly on the family, it's sort of more broad than it's it's broad than that.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's um about the undervaluing of the domestic sphere in general.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um you might I mean I say rather grandly, it's the sort of third in my anywhere um anywhere critique.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_00: The first book was a sort of a general critique of the kind of anywhere worldview, and perhaps particularly to do with sort of openness and the and and migration issues and national identity issues um that um where there's this big gap between uh kind of anywheres and somewheres.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the second was on the uh headhand hard book was more about the um the overvaluing of just sort of one particular human aptitude, the kind of analytical intelligence, the um the sort of um you know data um you know min manipulating information and data.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um and the third I think is is a is is is about the undervaluing of of the domestic sphere and and the family um and and the kind of tension that has emerged between um between care and sex equality.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I think we've we've got a kind of to put it as neutrally as possible, we've got a sort of investment problem.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how do we invest enough in um you know having and raising babies, uh in um you know looking after old people and impaired people um uh you know in the way that we say that we want um when there are fewer people to do the caring.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean partly for good reasons.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean this is an area like like so many areas of political life where the sort of the positive things and negative things are all sort of tied up together.
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_00: So you know, arguably the biggest increase in human freedom since the Second World War has been women's autonomy women's much greater autonomy, um partly inspired by second wave feminism in the 60s and 70s, a lot of the big legal changes, um and the massive movement of women into the um uh work paid workforce out out of the family.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um but that has left a big hole, and we tend to there's a sort of false accounting that goes on here.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_00: We see only the sort of positive benefit, both sort of culturally and economically, of the movement of women into the into the paid economy, and we do not see the gap that has been left behind.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um and um we've ended up with um much smaller and I think weaker families, and that actually means a much bigger state.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's not only the aging society that is that is piling more and more responsibility and cost onto the onto the state and therefore the taxpayer.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we've got the mental fragility epidemic amongst particularly amongst young people, which I think um has, you know, notwithstanding although I think Jonathan Haidt and Gene Twenge and all of the um argument about social media and and and smartphones and so on is clearly a factor.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_00: But I think there's a bigger background factor with Which is the fact that in the UK today, nearly 50% of kids born this century uh are not living with both of their biological parents uh when when they do their GCSEs when they're about 16.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that is in a s and it's a huge change.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that number was less than half that 20, 30 years ago.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_01: And what what are the social outcomes for kids who grow up?
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, massively, massively worse for for people from uh either single parent homes, um, where it's kind of obvious in a way, obviously you have less you have less um resources, both kind of emotional and financial, to go around if you only have one parent.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um But he but from you know those one-parent families often started off as two-parent families.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the the the great sort of turmoil of um of changing faces and places, um uh particularly when children are very young.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, John Balby's attachment theory uh that is sort of premised on the idea that at least in the first sort of two or three years of life, uh you know, infants need a very high degree of stability and and and connection um you know with a with a primary carer.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't always have to be the mother, uh it generally tends to be, it can and and the mother uh obviously can be supported by other um sort of secondary primary carers, if you like, but none of that work has ever really been disproved.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed, it it fed into quite a lot of of British public policy.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um for example, you know, the closure of um uh you know of lots of children's homes, the preference for fostering over putting children in children's homes and so on, um, the way that that um private boarding schools sort of fell out of fashion.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um and yet we are about to spend this government, a conservative government, uh you know, the party of the family supposedly is about to spend, or is in the process of spending four billion pounds extra a year on childcare that um child care that would um um that would encompass infants as young as um as young as nine months, which will also mainly benefit I mean clearly we do need a decent childcare system.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_00: No one is arguing with that, and our child, or despite the fact that we spend um a very large amount of money on it, um it's it's still because of the way that it was originally set up highly overregulated in some ways, the kind of carer-to-child ratios are much higher in certain areas in in certain respects than in much of the rest of the rich world.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um so it's it's it's too expensive uh for parents.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_00: Nonetheless, um you know, investing a huge amount of um taxpayers' money in um child care for for really, really small infants, um, you know, the infants who really are in need of um uh you know of of a of a secure relationship with the primary carer um will mainly benefit um couples, both of whom are working full-time.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_00: The number of people that think this is a good way of raising children below school age is like nine percent uh you know in British Social Attitude surveys.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the areas where there's the biggest disconnect between um sort of elite opinion or political class opinion and majority opinion.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um and um partly because of the way that majority that sorry political class opinion has evolved, we really don't talk very much about the um the huge impact of smaller and weaker families on so many areas I mean so many social problems are um have a huge family dimension, whether it's sort of criminal justice, whether it's housing, um, I mean, you know, you name it, education.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um and um anyway, I'm trying to sort of pull some of these things together in this book.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_00: And like I say, I'm gonna talk about how weaker families mean a bigger state.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's this knock-on effect, I think, into the it's a back big background factor in the mental fragility epidemic.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, we had the falling birth rate, it's another huge factor, um, part partly created by the greater insecurity of modern relationships, not not to mention obviously things like housing and um and and of course this is a very international um phenomenon, the falling birth rate.
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I think you know it's a it's a rich country phenomenon where we put a kind of short-term idea of freedom ahead of other things that really do give us long time, long-term sort of happiness and satisfaction in life.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I think um that's it's very difficult to deal with forces that are kind of, as it were, satisfying people in the kind of immediate short term.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, someone put it quite well the other day that um we're not um that we're sort of we're pro-child but anti-natalist.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean that's partly to do with the kind of intensive parenting, over-intensive parenting in some ways, you know.
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Jonathan Haidt talks about how that we kind of over-regulate children in the real world and we underregulate children in online.
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think he he has uh definitely captured something there.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um but the the idea that um life as a childless individual has uh you know, even somebody on say, you know, ab of average wealth, on average earnings, the the kind of the quality of life for the average person in a rich country has increased enormously, I think, in the last thirty or forty years.
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you just sort of think of you know things like smartphones, our connectivity, you know, the kind of access that you have to, you know, the the cheap travel, the um uh you know, Netflix, I mean you know, all you know, the the kind of entertainment possibilities, the sort of food, you know, the our obsession with ever more sophisticated forms of food, and um there are so many more things we can do with our time.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um parenting, which is a very difficult and time-consuming and boring thing, um, has if anything got harder.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um and um so you know, if you're only valuing, if you're only measuring, as it were, sort of short-term satisfaction, you can see why birth rates are tumbled and why they're going to go on tumbling.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it probably does require, yeah.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there are lots of things the government could can do.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we have a you know, just talking about it as a problem, which of course it is, I mean it's a huge economic problem um because the you know the the the you know as all these sort of dependency ratios start to shift against us, um, you know, more and more retired people per per worker.
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that means more and more taxes on the smaller and smaller number of people who are doing productive work.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um and as we've just been talking about, you know, immigration is not solving the problem, if anything, it's it's making it worse.
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a small a small amount of the right kind of you know, what Neil O'Brien talks about talks about the sort of grammar school type immigration, you know, where you take where you're highly selective might help.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_00: But the you know, to to compensate for the you know, we we've had a below replacement birth rate for more than 50 years now.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's likely to be heading down further, we're below 1.5, uh 2.1 is replacement, um to um to you know to turn that round um is going to be very, very difficult.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And immigration you the the rate of immigration you would require to keep the age structure more or less as it is now becomes absolutely enormous very quickly.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um so it really isn't uh an option.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, of course we can raise the retirement age, I mean that's uh there are things that can be done.
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um but so yeah, I mean I'm sort of trying to bring all of these things well the and the other th the other kind of factor which isn't so directly to do with the family, but you could say it's to do with the with the kind of um uh ideas of sort of care and nurture uh that sort of derive from the family, um, is the recruitment crisis in in public economy care jobs in both in elder care and in um and in look and in um nursery care.
• 1:15:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um so if you all you all of those four things I think are the the the the smaller and weaker family, the mental fragility epidemic, the falling birth rate, the recruitment crisis in care jobs are all expressions of the undervaluing of the domestic sphere and sort of the putting of freedom first, or a a kind of shallow idea of freedom, I think.
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think we're we're particularly bad in this country in some ways.
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_00: We do not, you know, we have a very anti-natalist um public policy.
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, we have this welfare limit on two children, we don't support the family in the tax system.
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_00: And there are there are some very simple things you could do to make it easier for families to stay together in the particularly in that sort of high stress period of um you know when children are very young and often work responsibilities are uh are at their most intense.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um and one thing that it that would be very popular would be to um to basically pay people to stay at home and look after their children at that point.
• 1:16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, make that a respectable paid thing to do.
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there could be a kind of home care allowance uh uh as some other countries already have.
• 1:17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um and actually you wouldn't need to it wouldn't be hugely costly because you could sort of package together quite a lot of the money that's already being spent.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, we spend, as I said earlier, a huge amount on childcare.
• 1:17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Why not give that to individual families rather than having it sort of top down at the moment, um paid by government through the um nursery system?
• 1:17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, if you did that and you did um and you can fr you know if you front-ended child benefit uh so that you know families could get three or four thousand quid a year in child benefit um um rather than the kind of a bit more than a thousand quid you get at the moment, um, and then have it extending for less long into uh you know you can go on getting it to till a child is sixteen or even twenty at the moment.
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um you could front-end child benefit, you could give child care direct to parents.
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um you could introduce this would cost a bit of money, but you could introduce a you know a proper um family tax allowance that almost all other rich countries have, but we don't.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_00: So we're particularly bad and we're not talking about the falling birth rate as a problem in a way that quite a few other rich countries are.
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um France has always been um uh well certain certain since it got overrun um in 1870 by a more populist Prussia, uh it's been very conscious of of the necessity of um of keeping your birth rate up.
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um so you know Macron has been giving speeches about this recently, but um and I think it will I think the economics will force us to start worrying about this much more publicly than we have been so far.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think people are worrying about it publicly, you're one of them.
• 1:18:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm very appreciative of that, and there are a multitude of voices coming at from different angles.
• 1:18:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you bring your very um detailed policy analysis approach to it, which is one of the ways that you can turn this ship around.
• 1:19:01
  SPEAKER_01: There are lots of high-profile voices that um whilst our ministers aren't talking about it, um, I I think they're going to have to soon because you know, when you've got the likes of you talking about it from that angle, Louise Perry, who's giving more of a um let's just let's just love having children because we love having children and we're taking a punt on the future, and there's even a kind of spiritual element to it.
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there's there's the guy taking the data angle, Stephen J.
• 1:19:27
  SPEAKER_01: Shaw, where there's birth gap documentaries.
• 1:19:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's starting to raise the profile.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_01: Whether we turn it around them, I don't know.
• 1:19:33
  SPEAKER_01: But um, you know, there's clearly multiple ways we can go from it.
• 1:19:36
  SPEAKER_01: David, when can we expect the book and what what what's it going to be titled?
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um not till September, actually.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I should probably shouldn't be talking about it um uh already.
• 1:19:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's okay.
• 1:19:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm taking it as a premiere of sorts.
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_01: Anything anything's a boost.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and uh I'm not quite sure about the title, but um um yeah.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I do I I do think this is um and and you know, although I sort of talk about how uh and I it you know it is a kind of anywhere bias, you know, anywhere people tend to be very public realm people, not so much domestic realm people, and that's fine.
• 1:20:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean that's there's nothing wrong with that.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I think there are all sorts of things that may help tilt the balance back to valuing the domestic sphere more.
• 1:20:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're gonna spend more time at home.
• 1:20:31
  SPEAKER_00: We've got working from home as a result of the pandemic.
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the pandemic, although we kind of look back on the pandemic now as a sort of crisis period that's left these deep scars.
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there were actually some very positive things about it too.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, you went back and discovered your roots.
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think a lot of people discovered the family is alive and kicking, and actually, you know, we we all rallied round and saved Granny.
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, children returned home and parents on the whole reported that they um that they kind of enjoyed reconnecting often with their uh their older children.
• 1:21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I think yeah, and AI is presumably going to um in the medium term sort of cut the working week.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um people are gonna people are gonna be at home more.
• 1:21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and you are also seeing a shift.
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah, the response that to quite a lot of what what I've been saying, the response from the traditional sort of feminist response is, well, men have got to step up.
• 1:21:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one of the reasons we have these sort of care gaps, if you like, is that um women are free not to care in the way that they never used to be.
• 1:21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um and of course lots of women are doing care jobs, but at a sort of higher professional level, uh, you know, they're they're training as as medics or or or nurses.
• 1:21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um and um there's been a uh you know the the so that means there are simply fewer people to do the kind of social care work that uh used to um used to have a much bigger potential pool of mainly women to do.
• 1:22:12
  SPEAKER_00: So that you know the response that well men have got to step up, men are stepping up, I think, more than they're generally given credit for in the in the domestic sphere, I mean the sort of balance of childcare in the home, childcare and other sort of domestic labour.
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's not 50-50, but it's sort of gone from sort of 70-30 to sort of forty-sixty, perhaps even forty-five-fifty-five in the Nordic countries.
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um what what isn't happening though is men are not going into um you know traditionally female parts of the public care economy, not yet, not in particularly large numbers anyway.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_00: Social care is when nursing is 89% female, social care is about 81% female, primary schools are about eighty-five percent female, um uh interestingly, the HR department is overwhelmingly female too.
• 1:23:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um and social work and so on.
• 1:23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um But um yeah, I think um I think we will start worrying more about the um the baby bust, um and there will be you know, for the reasons I've just given, there'll be a sort of return to domesticity.
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, and hopefully a more I mean of course one of the things I I I I meant to mention earlier, I mean, that when one is sort of thinking about the balance of power, if you like, between anywheres and somewhere's I mean I was sort of describing that in rather a pessimistic way at the beginning, which I think in some ways is justified given, as I was saying, the re the the kind of response to Brexit and and Trump um being almost to kind of double down on sort of anywhere priorities rather than sort of say, oh yes, um actually democracy does require, you know, at the very least, kind of losers' consent, uh, and you're not going to get losers' consent if you are not taking their interests into account, at least to some extent.
• 1:24:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um but but of course the other thing that um although anywheres retain and kind of almost by definition always will retain control over the sort of the national political steering wheel, they have lost control over the means of communication for good and ill.
• 1:24:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that maybe that will help to sort of rebalance things in some ways.
• 1:24:58
  SPEAKER_00: When my worry is, uh just perhaps as a sort of final point, my worry is on the although I think a lot of the arguments about, you know, is democracy dying is catastrophism uh part are often driven from the kind of liberal left, post-Brexit liberal left catastrophism.
• 1:25:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um and as we were arguing earlier, I think there's just as uh if not a better argument to say that democracy is is being um diluted through um the kind of liberal left initiative of taking too much out of the democratic political sphere and into the s into the sort of the zone of kind of experts and judiciary and so on and so forth.
• 1:25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um but nonetheless I do think there is a um I think there is a real danger that um politics will I mean this is a sort of boring cliche where the politics will become more polarized, but it will become more polarized partly because the kind of cultural issues that that we've been mainly talking about um are much harder to compromise on than socioeconomic issues, the kind of you know, if for the sake of argument one assumes that sort of you know up until the kind of nineteen nineties, two thousands, even most of post-war politics was sort of primarily socioeconomic, you know, based on you know the categories of social class and state and the market and higher or lower public spending and taxes and uh you know how much redistribution and so on.
• 1:26:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean all those things are still there, obviously, and may even have made a bit of a comeback um uh in recent times, but we have a much bigger role for cultural issues on which it's much harder to compromise.
• 1:26:57
  SPEAKER_00: But socioeconomic issues sort of lend themselves to compromise in a way that cultural issues don't.
• 1:27:02
  SPEAKER_00: And when you add to that the sort of social media algorithm problem, the confirmation bias, the the the kind of stereotyping and ridiculing of of of views that you disagree with, um then and if you add to that also the fact that um we may be in for very long periods of of kind of low to non-existent growth.
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean the whole history of democracy has been pretty much one of with occasional blips has been one of increasing standards of living.
• 1:27:38
  SPEAKER_00: So um yeah, I mean I think there there are without being catastrophist, I think there are reasons for worrying somewhat about the future of democracy, particularly given to you know to go right back to the beginning of our conversation.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_01: uh also go that the um you know the the kind of lack of sort of self-awareness the the lack of empathy of the culturally dominant groups in our society yeah yeah democracy means you have to accept dissent and unfortunately we're in an era where the culturally generally brook no dissent so let's but let's live in hope wherever that resides we're we're gonna cling on to it and uh that's yeah I hope you keep fighting the good fight with what you're doing and it seems that there are various conversations going on across all of these things we've spoken about in at least the new media landscape which reaches uh probably a larger number of people of people than the mainstream media these days uh in many respects so let's see where we go uh David apart from the book that's coming out later in the year is there is there anywhere that you can be found in the digital ether that people can follow your work on um I I don't have a substack I don't have a website uh I I do have a uh I'm on Twitter um and I kind of write books and do journalism um yeah I've often wondered whether I should should have a website or or perhaps do a substack but not not yet.
• 1:29:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay okay we'll watch this space well thank you so much for being so generous with your time and getting into all those subjects in such detail it's been an absolute pleasure and I wish you all the best with the book launch.
• 1:29:31
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
• 1:29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks John to keep up to date with all that I am doing please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at thinking classes.
• 1:29:47
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:29:53
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• 1:30:03
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• 1:30:12
  SPEAKER_01: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey