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Helen Lewis: The State of Britain · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, the UK has an election.
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  They are officially in election campaign mode after the deeply unpopular conservative
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  prime minister Rishi Sunak surprised everybody by announcing that the election was going
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  to take place in just a matter of weeks, he could have announced at any time this year,
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  he is woefully behind in the polls and if you believe polls, there are many reasons not
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  to believe polls at this point in time, but if you believe polls, then this will bring
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  an end to 14 years of conservative rule in the UK and the resurrection of a centre-left
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  government under Keir Starmer, who is currently the opposition leader, presumably soon to
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  be prime minister.
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  What does this tell us about the state of Britain, the state of Australia and the US,
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  the sort of political waves that may wax and wane across the course of history, it's
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  a momentous moment for Britain coming out of the shadow of Brexit and trying to find
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  itself in the world, so I wanted to turn to my favourite UK commentator, Helen Lewis.
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  You may remember in 2018, Helen interviewed Jordan Peterson for GQ, the video of which
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  went viral worldwide, it was not the catastrophic Jordan Peterson interview of the same time,
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  it was the brilliant one, the Asurbaq one, where Helen managed to pounce on Jordan in many
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  a way that brought her up in my estimation immensely, and I've loved her ever since.
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  She's a regular panellist on the BBC television show, have I got news for you?
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  She has a bunch of great podcasts, which sadly are quite difficult to listen to unless
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  you have the BBC player, but I'm going to plug them here because I loved them.
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  One is called The Spark, the other is called Great Wives, another is called The New Guru's
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  and the latest is called Helen Lewis has left the chat.
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  She also co-hosts the private eye podcast for British political wanks.
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  The book is Difficult Women, a history of feminism in 11 fights.
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  She was the deputy editor of New Statesman, she is now a staff writer at The Atlantic,
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  we go all over the place and turn to where Britain is at, immigration, Brexit, the economy,
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  I hope you enjoy.
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  As much as I did, the one I know me, Helen Lewis.
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  So, we have an election, and we had to have an election at some point before the end
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  of the year, right?
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  And so, why is everyone so surprised that there's an election coming, and now there's an
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  election.
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  Everyone's over all the Brits are running around with their pants on fire.
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  Well, yeah, a British parliament can't go longer than five years, so the last one was
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  in December 2019, and so that means that we knew that Richie Sennett, the Prime Minister,
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  would call an election by December, it's just his 20 points behind in the polls.
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  And classically, you'd try and call it at the moment of maximum advantage, and the
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  tragic thing is that he's obviously decided it's not going to get any better.
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  This is the point of maximum advantage.
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  20 points down is the point of maximum advantage.
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  Get it over and done with.
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  Exactly.
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  I mean, even just the fact that there was a 20 point difference in the polls, Americans
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  must be so envious, like, you know, even if you hate Donald Trump, I can argue that
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  you'd rather have Donald Trump 20 points ahead in the polls than spend the entirety of
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  2024 absolutely terrified about these ridiculous polls that are always 47, 48, 49, 50, 51,
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  52, 53.
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  How is it that there's a 20% gap?
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  But it's amazing, given the fact that the last election in 2019, Labour went down to
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  just over 200 MPs out of 650, you know, if they're worse results than the 1930s, absolute
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  catastrophic.
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  That was a big Brexit election, that was Boris Johnson with Prime Minister saying, I need
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  to get a big majority in order to get Brexit done.
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  But this was also Jeremy Corbyn, a grey, anti-Semitic or leftist alienating the entire
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  country on the left.
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  I mean, there was a kind of big push by people, you know, the catchphrase of the Corbyn
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  Act left became like F off and joined the Tories and it turned out that just, yes, a lot
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  of people did it.
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  I think that's the election.
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  Yeah.
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  The Stammer has done an incredible job, you know, if the polls are not the most wrong
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  polls have ever been, in not only...
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  Which has not been on the realm of possibility in 2024, one must say.
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  Right.
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  I mean, the only thing I would say is that if you look at all the other signals as well,
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  they all are pointing in the same direction.
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  So Stammer's net post-certivity ratings are, you know, he's got a plus three advantage,
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  Sunak is a minus 20, net favourability.
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  More people trust labor with the economy than the Tories.
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  The May local elections were pretty grim for the Conservatives.
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  There's not a kind of load of contrary evidence that you'd say, oh, this is a very mixed picture.
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  Like, it all just looks uniformly grim for the Conservatives.
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  What about the blue collar working class parts of the country that had been Tories, sorry,
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  that had been traditionally labor voting electorates and that went Tories during Brexit?
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  Yeah, there was a lot of discussion at the last election about the so-called Red Wall,
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  which is a kind of band of Northern English constituencies that were traditionally working
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  class X industrial towns, X mining towns.
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  And lots of those went, you know, as I've been voted for Brexit and then lots of them
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  followed through on that by voting for the party they thought get Brexit done in 2019.
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  They look like they've all switched back to labour.
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  Basically Brexit is not a factor in this election.
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  You know, Keir Starmer whipped his MPs to go through the lobbies to vote for that Brexit once,
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  you know, Boris Johnson got that massive majority.
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  So no one is looking to unravel it.
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  And so the discussion really has switched to either immigration,
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  on which those voters don't seem to really trust the Tories to actually do anything,
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  despite their promises, or the economy, which has been really sluggish.
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  We've borrowed a huge amount of money during COVID.
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  Now we're paying back at very high interest rates.
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  The advantages have gone up.
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  So for working people, that's been really tough the last couple of years.
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  So basically, all of those people who sort of,
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  the question was whether or not those people have switched decisively,
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  or they're not, they kind of lent their votes to the Tories for one election.
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  And it looks more like they're doing that.
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  The other thing that some of those people are doing is perhaps they'll either stay at home
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  because they're disillusioned with the whole process, or they'll vote for reform,
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  which is the next version of the Radical Right Party,
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  a successor to UKIP, neither Farajid Party.
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  Right.
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  And so that's tricky for the Conservatives,
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  because they're getting nicked from both sides.
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  Yeah, and I read your piece in the Atlantic where you were saying
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  that that may be part of the rationale for the calling of the election this early,
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  which is that the Prime Minister feels like maybe there's probably less of a chance
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  that he's going to hemorrhage voters to the Radical Right.
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  Yeah, reform didn't do particularly well in the local elections in May.
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  Their ground operation is pretty sort of sketchy and patchy.
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  Nigel Faraj announced that he's not going to stand as a candidate.
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  He says the US election is more important.
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  It's just a very funny thing for a nationalist to say.
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  I go like, I'm here.
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  I'm a British politician, all these politicians that I care about you.
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  I'm all about Britain, PS, and by.
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  I'm asking you to hang out.
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  Amazing.
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  I mean, he dedicated his entire life to the pitch in Brussels that the United Kingdom
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  is the greatest country in the world, and we don't need the European Union.
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  We don't need all you frogs and you, but you're going to do it alone.
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  And by the way, I'll look over here.
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  It's America.
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  It's rather good.
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  Yeah.
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  We can go and hang out with Donald Trump and go on the big plane and, you know,
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  make speeches where people find, you know, cannons full of ticket tape.
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  Rather than what's happening looks like in Britain, right?
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  I mean, awful leisure centers on a Monday night.
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  The risk of trying to lead you into saying something controversial, what the fuck is going
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  on with Nigel Farage?
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  Like, who, I don't mean right now, I just mean as a human being, as an individual human
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  being who lives in this world, he's one of the most baffling people I have ever encountered.
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  Like, I don't know, I don't mean personally, I just mean what's motive that, what drives
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  that man?
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  I think quite a, you know, my long standing theory of politics, which is that people
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  don't have political beliefs.
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  They have psychological traits.
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  Yeah.
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  I think a lot of, a lot of Nigel Farage can be explained by the fact that he just likes
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  attention.
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  I mean, it's not a shock.
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  There's a, you know, the, you have the programme, I'm a celebrity.
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  Get me out of here, right?
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  We don't just go to Australia and laugh at your terrible animals, but haven't given
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  you the format.
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  Is that right?
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  Yes, but you just throw literally the worst possible point because you said the thing
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  about Nigel Farage is he, and then you switch right to, I'm a celebrity, get me out
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  of here.
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  So just really run.
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  Okay.
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  Let me say that again.
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  The thing about Nigel Farage is I think he just likes the attention.
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  So the TV programme, I'm a celebrity, get me out of here in which Britain, British TV
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  producers send celebrities to Australia, hopefully to be attacked by your absurd animals.
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  It's so funny, until this moment, I didn't realise that the Brits got sent to Australia
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  because there's an Australian version of I'm a celebrity, get me out of here where people
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  get sent to, I would like to say Britain, but actually just to eat for wilder part of
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  Australia.
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  Right.
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  Okay.
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  Yeah.
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  It's people from the suburbs of Sydney get sent to the prop route back.
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  Exactly.
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  Right.
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  So yeah, there are version of it, Nigel Farage within last year, and there was an incredible
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  moment when he got caught on camera saying it was annoying to him that he wasn't getting
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  selected for any of the bush-tucker trials, you know, where you have to be at Kangaroo
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  Aiders.
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  Because the people who do them end up getting all of the airtime, and it was a really fascinating
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  insight.
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  And actually, at that point, lyrical, the British public began to punish him by not voting
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  for him to have to eat any Kangaroo Aiders because they discovered that actually he wanted
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  the attention.
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  He wanted people to look at him and if he had to drink a bucket of dog and seaman to
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  do so, that was a price he was willing to pay.
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  That's his psychology.
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  Right.
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  I do like that in your brain, Australia is a wash with donkey seaman, as well as Kangaroo
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  Aiders.
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  Which it is a wash in, I will confess, and every other part of a Kangaroo, I just remember
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  in the wake of Brexit, and this is just an aside, the video of him on the floor of the
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  European Parliament saying, for years you've been laughing at me, well, who's laughing now?
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  And all these shell-shocked Belgian diplomats all sitting around politicians with ashen
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  faced.
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  And I thought, that's the most ungracious thing I've ever seen.
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  Like there was a club, you didn't like the club, so you convinced your co-patriots to
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  leave the club.
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  The gracious thing to do is to stand up and go, look, it was good while it lasted, didn't
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  work out for us, go, you know, Godspeed, you go and do your little Europe gig if you like
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  that, that's not that, you know, it was never my bag.
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  And then to pivot into, I mean, I don't give a shit about Nigel for us, I don't even know
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  why I'm talking about him, but I obviously, this is triggered, it's not like deep inside
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  my psyche.
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  You know, I don't know, the fact, the fact of his-
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  There's a terrible clip.
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  Have you seen the terrible clip in which he's acting like a complete Yahoo, like a
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  table Brit aboard on holiday, and then a guy from Latvia stands up and delivers this
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  incredibly, you know, like quite a moving speech about what the EU means.
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  And it turns out this man didn't see a tree until like he was a teenager because he grew
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  up in a gulag above the tree line, just like, you know, it's just kind of like, you
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  know, or like maybe that may have been his father, but certainly like we're living
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  European memory, right?
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  People have these memories of really dark things happening across Europe and they're
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  very keen for those things not to happen again because they can still remember how bad
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  it was.
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  And I think the point of view of Britain, our memories of World War II are sort of universally
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  positive.
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  It was a time when we were amazing, we saved the free world, everyone had a parade
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  and a favour of us.
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  And that is just not the experience of lots of people and lots of different countries
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  across Europe.
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  And so the EU doesn't never really mean something very different to them.
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  Yeah.
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  I mean, what strikes me in that example is that these are, you know, the kind of, the
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  far right are fundamentally unserious people, you know, they like a lot.
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  They think things are fun, everything's sort of shit posting, everything's done with
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  a shideon and grin.
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  I can totally imagine that scenario where, you know, the child of someone who lived in
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  a gulag is up against this ninkam poop who thinks that everything's all a bit of fun.
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  And that worries me a bit.
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  Yeah.
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  Go for it.
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  It's one of the funnest things about, you know, when you read about, that was well
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  mostly the great, that, you know, British fascist leader of the 1930s who, you know, got married
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  in Goebbels front room, had a, you know, wedding present from Hitler, would have happily
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  have turned Britain over to the last year he could.
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  And then you read it, some, it's PG Woodhouse, does this, it has his character called Roger
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  Expode and who is basically just, any swanning around in his putter bags, that's the, he's
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  just got, he's just laughing at his, laughing at his trousers.
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  And there is something that's quite, quite sort of, yeah, I think, I think it's one
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  of the reasons I, that the far right has struggled to catch on in Britain to some extent,
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  is there's the kind of sense of it, it's kind of slightly camp and we just, we can't
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  take it seriously because it just, I don't know, but you're right.
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  I mean, that's the kind of ironic phase.
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  That speaks well to Britain, to the maturity of Britain's because I think one of my worries
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  about the rise of the far right more generally is that I tend to believe that people will
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  go, people tend to go for the political side that they think is having more fun.
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  Like nobody wants dour, you know, and at the point of which politics becomes really dour
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  and earnest and finger waggy is the point which people sort of lose interest and go, there
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  must be something, you know, it doesn't have to be facile, it doesn't have to be stupid,
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  but there has to be a bit of wind at its back, there has to be a sense that like, you
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  know, we're the ones who are playing the game and the others are the ones who are the
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  scolves.
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  And one of the things that's happened in the past decade or so, I think is that culturally
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  we've flipped from, and you know, if you were a punk rocker in the past, you're on the
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  left.
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  And now if you're an alt-right shitpost, you're on the right and if you're a finger wagging
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  scold, you're more likely to be on the left.
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  So I'm glad that it's not translating in the UK at least in the way that it seems to
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  be in the US into the side with greater live winners and vitality being the right.
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  Yeah, there was a brilliant Michelle Goldberg column in New York Times about this, about
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  the night that Trump won.
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  And it was about a couple, I think it was a couple, a gay couple, two men who were at
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  the Hillary Clinton, what was supposed to be the victory rally and very quickly turned
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  into the sort of defeat parade.
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  And she records that they just, they just went, this is a bit of a downer and they left
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  and went to the Trump rally.
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  And she said, people who follow politics can't understand that mentality, right, which is
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  I just want to be one of these parties.
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  You would just, you know, the way that lots of people who are involved in politics is
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  alien to actually have everyone else experience politics, which is just not that invested in
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  the same way as they are.
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  And then we have to try and understand those people who just, like you say, just want
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  to be on the winning side, just want to be with the cool people, just want to be with
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  the fun is.
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  And you're right, definitely, I think the sense that the latter's been scaldy is sort
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  of looking to kind of nanny you and reproach you has been the complete turn off to vote
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  to just point, electoral poison across many different countries.
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  And is it the case that in terms of the two big parties in the UK at the moment neither
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  is cool or fun?
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  Yeah, I think, I think all of the adjectives I would apply to Kirstalma, you know, a 61
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  year old former human rights lawyer from North London, he, Groovy is not hit is not one
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  of them.
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  But you're right.
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  The thing is that the difference in the concept party now is Boris Johnson was unbelievably
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  optimistic, right?
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  He was always going on about great British that and great British that this and getting
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  stuck on a zip line, but smiling through it and, you know, talking, doing weird speeches
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  about pepper pig world, but, but it was all like optimistic Britain's the best country
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  know, it was amazing.
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  And there is a real problem on the populist right wing of the Tory party at the moment,
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  which is it's characterized by people like Suther Brabham and the former home secretary
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  that it's kind of really miserable and you sit in daily telegraph, which is the big
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  right wing broadsheet newspaper as well, like the West is doomed, you know, we're all
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  heading for extinction.
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  It's all over.
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  And you're right.
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  I think it is just a massive turn off to people that you get a lot of clicks for it.
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  I think having seen trends over lot, that sort of miserableism, but I think it's a
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  electoral proposition.
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  People sort of, you know, the same way that there is a problem with climate change stories
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  right?
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  If your message on climate change is we're all going to be incinerated, people just check
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  out.
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  Yeah.
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  Well, all right.
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  OK, but I can't do the amount of it.
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  Like there is an attraction to kind of things can get better.
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  That is like the promise of politics, rather than we're all, we're all doomed basically.
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  Yeah.
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  And when you, when you say there's this strain on the, on the conservative right of we're
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  all doomed and, you know, England's going to hell in a hand basket, let's just take
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  a few of the issues that you were alluding to earlier about reasons why that may be.
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  It strikes me that immigration is front of mind for Brits at the moment and is the, are
• 17:28
  boat crossings across the channel still a big boogie man that the right is whipping up?
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  Yeah.
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  I mean, I think that's a really interesting story.
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  I read about it first and I think even 2020.
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  And in a way, it sort of all accidentally happened because Nigel Farage wanted to get
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  out of his house during lockdown.
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  So going on, going on with that back out, wait.
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  I genuinely believe this to be true.
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  So boat crossings, you know, weren't a big feature of, you know, it's been happening
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  for a long time.
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  There have been refugee camps at Calais for a long time.
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  And while we were part of the EU, you know, the idea is you have to claim asylum in the
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  first place you reach, but people would deliberately wouldn't do that.
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  They'd wait and they'd try and get to Britain and the belief that, you know, lots of people
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  speak English or they've got maybe family here already, or they feel that the benefit
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  regime is more favorable, the asylum regime is more favorable.
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  So there were, you know, there's been throughout the 2010s, there were people doing that crossing,
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  but Nigel Farage was the one who put the whole idea of it as a big political problem, really
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  made it into the discourse.
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  And the reason he did that is during lockdown, he said, I'm actually, I'm a journalist now,
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  I'm not a politician, I'm a journalist and therefore I'm allowed out of my house because
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  I'm doing my work, which is reporting, and he went down to Dover and the South Coast
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  and he went and went out on a rib boat and looked at these small boat crossings.
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  At some point, someone in the Conservative Party thought, this is a really interesting
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  issue.
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  We can campaign on this.
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  And so, Rishi, son, I've adopted this slogan, Stop the Boat, which at the point at which
• 18:56
  Nigel Farage is standing on the cliffs of Dover, is he or is he not eating a kangaroo
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  anus?
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  At that point, unless he'd kept one about his person just for personal consumption, then
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  no.
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  This is pre-Kangaroo.
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  Very good.
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  You know, he injected it into the kind of, into the discourse and the Conservative seized
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  upon it as a way of saying, look at us, you know, immigration is a real problem.
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  The problem we're doing that is if you say something is a real problem and you're the
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  governing party, people sort of expect you to fix it.
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  Funny that.
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  Yeah.
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  And so, Stop the Boats, I just thought from the start was a really terrible slogan because
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  unless you are literally willing to do what sometimes the Greek and Italian authorities
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  are kind of essentially let people drown, you're not going to stop those boats because
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  people are.
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  Now you completely lost me because I don't understand that I absolutely don't understand
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  this coming from the country that coined the term Stop the Boats.
• 19:48
  I don't know if you know, in the 2013 election and the Conservative government that I was
• 19:53
  not a fan of under a Prime Minister who I was not a fan of, Tony Abbott did do that.
• 19:58
  At the cost of Australia's moral credibility and perhaps our soul, but we didn't do it
• 20:02
  by letting Boats drown.
• 20:05
  So I don't want to just talk me through this because I was doing some research last night
• 20:09
  about how I was like, oh, there are probably only a hundred boats a year that crossed the,
• 20:13
  you know, this is probably all whipped up.
• 20:15
  I mean, it was 45,000 people in 2022 coming across the channel.
• 20:21
  I don't understand.
• 20:23
  So are they coming literally from France?
• 20:25
  Yeah, from usually from Mexico.
• 20:27
  How is the UK government and like body politics so useless that they can't bribe and cajole
• 20:36
  the French to stop them?
• 20:38
  Well, we did.
• 20:39
  You can fact check me on this, but I believe that British government did at some point hand
• 20:43
  over quite a lot of money to the French in order for them to do the removals.
• 20:47
  I believe it was 500 million pounds according to my reading last night.
• 20:50
  And so the whole thing coming from, coming from a large island nation that had,
• 20:58
  a persistent problem of Boats and solved that problem by sending out the Navy into international
• 21:03
  waters, intercepting Boats and turning them around and saying, you will never settle
• 21:06
  in Australia.
• 21:07
  If you arrive by boat, you have to come by another means.
• 21:10
  And if needs be, we will resettle you in another country while you're processed.
• 21:15
  And I suppose we have, we have the benefit of being surrounded by poor countries who we
• 21:19
  can bribe.
• 21:21
  So and authoritarian countries who do things that we won't do, we're not authoritarian
• 21:26
  countries.
• 21:27
  I'm thinking about Indonesia.
• 21:28
  But you know, they're going to do things that the French probably won't.
• 21:31
  And obviously detention centers in places like Papua New Guinea and Nauru are able to
• 21:37
  be built in ways that you probably can't put detention centers in the Hebrides or, well,
• 21:41
  it would have to be a different country, I suppose, so in the Azores or something.
• 21:45
  But I don't quite get how there are people from Iran and Albania walking across the continent
• 21:52
  and there's no point at which the power of the, the British crown can't like do deals
• 22:01
  with other English, with other European countries and go, okay, this isn't working.
• 22:05
  People can't just wander across the dozen countries, get on a boat while they're a French,
• 22:11
  like farmers and people walking around with baguettes and, like, French jondarms, like,
• 22:17
  stop them at some point before they get to Dover.
• 22:21
  Yeah, I mean, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I think there's a certain amount to which
• 22:25
  the French police have just turned a blind eye.
• 22:27
  Like, you know, there's quite recently of, you know, people getting into the boats and
• 22:31
  the French police all standing around are not interfering.
• 22:35
  So, yeah, but, you know, this was, there were all kinds of EU kind of discussions about
• 22:40
  what should happen.
• 22:41
  People, like you say, say before, people should be forced to settle in the first country
• 22:43
  they arrived in.
• 22:44
  There was a feeling in, in Italy, in Greece that they were bearing the front of people
• 22:48
  because people mostly coming from North Africa or through, you know, from Syria and onwards
• 22:53
  into the Mediterranean, through Turkey, into the Mediterranean.
• 22:56
  But this was the whole idea of what's called in Britain, the Rwanda Plan, which is a copy
• 23:00
  of that Australian plan you've talked about, which is the idea that you send your asylum
• 23:04
  seekers, not just resettlement elsewhere, but while their claims are being processed,
• 23:08
  you have them processed in a third country.
• 23:11
  And we've paid an enormous amount of money to the Rwandan government.
• 23:13
  We haven't actually managed to send anyone there.
• 23:15
  We sent one guy, but he volumptuarily the staff of the three programs is like, this is
• 23:22
  a Marx brothers routine, you know, like talk about the carry-on films, I mean, I've all
• 23:26
  the places when I heard that it was Rwanda, I was like, it's not a good look, Britain.
• 23:31
  It's not a good look.
• 23:32
  But it's exactly like Nauru, it's exactly the point of it is to not be in Nauru, so we
• 23:37
  get away with it.
• 23:38
  Right, but the idea is that this isn't going to be a holiday camp, you really don't want
• 23:42
  to do this.
• 23:43
  But to come back to what I was saying, the problem about it is, is not one of these boats
• 23:47
  has left yet.
• 23:48
  You know, we haven't stopped the boats, and not one of the Rwanda resettlement schemes
• 23:52
  is up and running yet.
• 23:53
  Now the Tory right has sort of said that this is a reason not just to leave the EU, which
• 23:57
  we've already done, but to leave the European Court of Human Rights, because they think
• 24:00
  that these new judges in Strasbourg are slowing everything down and blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 24:05
  There was a bill passed in Parliament to say that Rwanda is a safe country, so that's
• 24:10
  the official position of Britain, to stop, to try and head off the idea of a human rights
• 24:16
  challenge on that brand that we were resettling people to a country with potentially
• 24:19
  danger.
• 24:20
  No, and if you declare it to be so, especially in Parliament, then it's true, Helen.
• 24:23
  Just a fact.
• 24:24
  It's a fact.
• 24:25
  But yeah, but Piers Morgan, if you're familiar with his works, he offered Rishi Sen at
• 24:32
  the Prime Minister of Bet, and said, you know, I bet you a thousand pounds that not
• 24:34
  a single one of these Rwanda flights is going to take up before the election.
• 24:38
  Rishi Sen at foolishly took the bet, which again was a really bad look.
• 24:41
  You're betting at the lives of, you know, people who have absolutely nothing, who are trying
• 24:45
  to put, you know, their kids onto a boat to get a better life.
• 24:49
  And then he's now Rishi Sen at his refused to pay up on the bet because he claims that
• 24:52
  one guy.
• 24:53
  Well, it would look, it was a pretty empty flight.
• 24:58
  It was a little focker friendship or a sessner with, it was a single person plan, but
• 25:03
  he got there to row under in the end.
• 25:05
  But why I don't, is there something that I'm not understanding about?
• 25:09
  I also googled, is there any international water in the English Channel series to try
• 25:15
  to figure out?
• 25:16
  No, I don't think there is.
• 25:17
  No, there is.
• 25:18
  There's not at the snarrow as part, right?
• 25:19
  So there's probably not at the bit that they're going.
• 25:20
  There's not at the Calade over a bit.
• 25:22
  Right.
• 25:23
  Is there 22 miles between Calade?
• 25:25
  Yeah.
• 25:26
  And then basically what the French Navy apparently does is escort the boats all the way to the
• 25:30
  board a bit just to check that, you know, they're definitely left and then, and then
• 25:34
  steam's on back again.
• 25:35
  So they're basically taking a big kangaroo ain't as shit on Britain, the French.
• 25:41
  I mean, they have an laugh to some extent.
• 25:43
  Why is it, why does it have to be Rwanda?
• 25:46
  I mean, I understand that these issues are complicated and nobody wants to have to deal
• 25:51
  with this, but we all have to deal with it.
• 25:54
  And I would have thought that a competent government would be able to do diplomacy.
• 25:57
  I mean, is this, I'm just sort of inventing this possible reason, but is the dearth of diplomacy
• 26:04
  in the UK because of 40 years of the European Union, partly an explanation for why the UK
• 26:10
  has been so bad at negotiating with other countries on this issue, because I would have
• 26:15
  thought there's another country other than Rwanda.
• 26:18
  Like there are a lot of closer countries, like talk to Albania, talk to Morocco, talk
• 26:23
  to Tunisia, I don't know, get like there are lots of places around or even, you know,
• 26:29
  where you could process these people and then you could take a number of them and bash
• 26:33
  people's heads together, like talk to Australia, look, I look, you guys have to take some
• 26:37
  of your, some of ours and we'll take some, like in terms of the resettlement plan, we're
• 26:41
  going to have all these people, they will have been processed, many of them will be legitimate
• 26:44
  refugees, like we're, we're going to cut off all of our, you know, aid to, I don't
• 26:50
  know, we're some sort of medium income country that gets lots of British aid, unless you
• 26:56
  take just 20 of these people who we know, who have passed all the security things and
• 27:01
  they're not a threat and they are refugees, but in order to save face, in order for our
• 27:04
  stop the boats plan to work, they have to be settled with you and we'll do some kind
• 27:08
  of a swap, it doesn't sound to me like those deals are happening.
• 27:11
  Yeah, that was, that was talk to Albania and I think that was just because they're very
• 27:16
  keen to join the European Union, so I think they're very keen to be seen as a kind of
• 27:19
  collaborative partner and diplomacy, but I think what you're, I think your strategy
• 27:25
  is the one you'd pursue if you wanted to not give out the deterrent message and I think
• 27:30
  the thing that Rwanda, because it's a country really that people have written have only heard
• 27:35
  of as the, you know, having that's a terrible genocide, people think of it as a country
• 27:41
  they probably wouldn't like to go to, right?
• 27:42
  Right, but the deterrent only works, Helen, if the Rwanda plan actually happens.
• 27:48
  Yes, that is, I mean, I've so far more British home secretaries have been on flights to
• 27:52
  Rwanda to look at this defensive center than people have actually ended up in it, but this
• 27:58
  is what I mean, this is the problem that the Conservative's have is that it's not just like
• 28:02
  that the policies are unpopular, it's that people don't believe that they can do anything
• 28:06
  that they promise, that's the thing, you can say, you can take a position where Rwanda
• 28:10
  policy for against, I'm against it, I think it's, it seems deliberately cruel and
• 28:15
  yeah, and that is my problem with it, and I also think, you know, Britain has an even bigger problem
• 28:20
  with deciding what it wants an actual rate of legal immigration to be, right? Because we have,
• 28:26
  we've just turned down the requirements on carers visas to mean that cars can't bring
• 28:30
  dependence with them, and their most carers tend to be women, so not allowing them to bring
• 28:34
  their kids over them is going to, is going to staunch that part, but we haven't solved the problem
• 28:38
  in that case, who is going to work in care homes? Maybe we have now with Rishi Simex plan for
• 28:43
  all 18 yons to do national service, and they'll have to work in the care homes, but you know,
• 28:48
  I mean, like this is the same problem is about the fact that there is an established problem with
• 28:52
  people, for example, also coming over on visas to study for degrees here, and then dropping
• 28:56
  out of the degree and into the grey economy and becoming like, you know, gig economy workers or
• 29:01
  whatever, but if we stop letting universities take foreign students, the university funding
• 29:07
  model collapses because they're all reliant on that extra money, people who are paying £30,000
• 29:12
  or £9,000 a year. So we've got this situation, but this is why I don't think Brexit will come up a lot,
• 29:17
  where all the reasons that people voted for Brexit are still there, right? I don't think by
• 29:22
  large people really voted for Brexit because they cared about our land deal with New Zealand,
• 29:26
  by and large it was a gesture of an expression of cultural unhappiness, and anxiety about
• 29:32
  immigration and the changing demographics of the UK, and the problem is we have built an economy
• 29:37
  that makes it very hard to change those immigrants. Right, yes, yes.
• 29:44
  I mean, the last thing to say about refugees and immigration is the only reason why I think
• 29:51
  that policies like this should work, you know, turn back the votes policy to the extent that I do,
• 29:56
  I don't disagree with the harshness with which they were implemented in Australia in terms of
• 30:00
  like, it got really nasty where like the government wouldn't even allow people to be
• 30:05
  medevacked by playing off Nauru when they were in had serious illnesses to be treated in Australia
• 30:13
  because they were like, no, we made a pledge that you're never going to come set foot on
• 30:16
  Australian soil if you arrive by boat and you go, well, yeah, but it's a seriously ill child,
• 30:21
  like, can't we make an exception there? So I disagree with all that, but as the son of a refugee
• 30:26
  myself, I'm like a big big supporter of, I mean, I think we need to sort out the resettlement of
• 30:32
  refugees and be much, much more generous. And I think countries should be taking in many more
• 30:37
  refugees and we should really be working hard to create an international alliance where countries
• 30:41
  bear more of their fair share and we don't have countries like, you know, poor old Turkey and
• 30:46
  Albania and whatever, which are dealing with these massive amounts of refugees. When obviously
• 30:51
  we have the resources to to resettle far more people than we do and we should be leaning on
• 30:56
  mean countries like Japan and other countries that have massive resources and take no refugees.
• 31:03
  That being said, you only get any kind of consensus around a willingness to raise immigration
• 31:09
  when people feel like the borders are secure. And so it's a bit of a faustian pact, like,
• 31:14
  you know, Australia has Australia in terms of refugee resettlement. It's the US number one,
• 31:19
  Canada number two, Australia number three. And as a as a per capita basis, Australia is miles ahead
• 31:26
  of other countries. So, and I don't think that would be the case if it wasn't for the fact that
• 31:31
  Australians felt secure and just knew that everybody who comes in had been approved and has gone
• 31:36
  through a proper process. That's my so my fear is that the sort of shambles in the UK actually
• 31:41
  doesn't serve the refugees either. Yeah, it was a thing that came up quite a lot during the
• 31:45
  referendum is that there was an all talk on the pro-Brexit side of an Australian point-based system
• 31:50
  and everybody used to repeat this like it was a mantra like what we need is an Australian point
• 31:53
  based system. And then people did point out that that has left Australia with a higher per capita
• 31:58
  immigration than we have. And it's just the fact that if you sort of say yes, but it's like we're
• 32:03
  only getting skilled people and better people, that's the bit that you can say that makes people
• 32:07
  feel much more okay with it. Yeah, and safe people and you know, you can you can construct the point
• 32:13
  system to favour whatever you want. Only redheads or whatever, well, you probably legally can't, but
• 32:17
  you're not. Britain has taken quite a lot of people from Hong Kong on the basis of pro-democracy
• 32:22
  actually. They're not redheads at all, have them. I think probably not, but people from Ukraine as
• 32:27
  well, that's quite a few, in a Ukrainian women actually, there was a very bad photo op with Humsie
• 32:31
  Yusuf, the now departed leader of the Scottish National Party, where he went to meet a group of
• 32:36
  Ukrainian women and he went, oh, where are all the men? And it was like, yeah, they're on the battle.
• 32:44
  These are the widows of Ukraine, New Idiot. Well, it was, it was a very, I mean, you feel for
• 32:50
  someone when they just, because I think the incident that came out this marathon must have
• 32:53
  thought, oh, I, yeah, the whole Russia thing. And you mentioned Brexit. I read there was an
• 33:02
  interesting, there was a almost funny piece in the economist recently saying that the the polling
• 33:07
  shows that significant majorities of Britain's regret Brexit and wish that it had never happened,
• 33:14
  but equally high or higher majorities just never want to hear about it again and don't want to go
• 33:19
  back to it and wouldn't undo it and just want to bury their heads under the blanket and go,
• 33:23
  no, no, no, no, no, it never happened. Is it a factor anymore? What do you make of it now that
• 33:29
  it's all not the dust has settled? What the fuck was that? I mean, I think the thing I would say about
• 33:34
  Brexit is that it wasn't just the vote. It was the fact that it took three full years of dominating
• 33:40
  the whole of British politics and parliamentary time to pass it. Like, whatever you think about
• 33:45
  the rights and wrongs of part, you know, of the vote itself, the fact that the opportunity cost
• 33:51
  of the fact that how much of British political time at eight is something that I think has been
• 33:54
  really tragic. You know, that was, that was years in which we could have been sorting out our
• 33:58
  public services. And instead we just had night after night of people trying to pass various bits
• 34:03
  of things that got called, you know, the multi house compromises coming or like the Windsor agreement
• 34:08
  is there, you know, there was just lots of very nerdy stuff. But you're right, I'm in my hunch
• 34:13
  about what Labour will do if they get in as the poll suggests, is that they will move
• 34:16
  closer and closer back to Europe because all the logic is there in terms of, you know, economic
• 34:21
  and trade benefits is of being very close to the kind of big market on our doorstep.
• 34:27
  And particularly when you think that, you know, China is rising so much and is much more aggressive
• 34:32
  about using its technological power and to spy on people and steal IP, you know, I think the era
• 34:38
  of like super free market, whatever you want to call neoliberalism is really, it feels like it
• 34:43
  ended, doesn't it? You know, the idea that we were just kind of global trading and the free markets,
• 34:47
  I think people are much more tending back towards who can we trust, who's in our neighbourhood,
• 34:52
  let's be really protectionist, let's look after ourselves. So my assumption is I don't think
• 34:57
  the Labour Party is in a place where it feels like it can say to people, let's open that question
• 35:01
  up again. Hey guys, let's revisit it. You know, the campaign for a second referendum,
• 35:05
  the people's vote never really got anywhere. And I think most people aren't sick of it.
• 35:10
  But I also think if you ended up doing more and more stuff that align us with Europe, I don't,
• 35:15
  I mean, I don't think the majority of people would be against that. The fact that we've papers
• 35:20
  and Nigel Farage would then have a kind of case as well, I, that would revitalise them, I'm sure.
• 35:25
  But I also discussed back to my theory that people didn't vote for Brexit on basis of trade
• 35:30
  negotiation. So actually, they're not good, you know, if our fisheries policy changes,
• 35:36
  some nerd are going to care, but it's not, you're not going to win an election on that basis,
• 35:40
  it's my theory. Right. And why hasn't the, I mean, I feel like immigration then is the thing
• 35:46
  that people, you know, people look conservative Brits always shouted me when I say that,
• 35:53
  when I even hint that Brexit was a xenophobic gesture, you know, they always, they always
• 35:59
  think it's about, they like to believe that it's about fishery tariffs. But with those big
• 36:05
  billboards of Syrian refugees, you know, flooding towards the UK that say enough is enough,
• 36:11
  and all that sort of stuff, make me feel like it was really just a cry for some control over
• 36:18
  the demography of Britain as much as anything else. And has anything changed on that just to
• 36:23
  close the chapter on our conversation about immigration? Is there any sense that Brexit has given
• 36:28
  greater license to the United Kingdom to structure its immigration policy in an orderly way?
• 36:34
  Yeah, I mean, you used to get people from the pro-Brexit side saying that we're not necessarily
• 36:38
  favourable lower immigration, we're not anti-immigration, we just think we should be able to
• 36:40
  control it. And then like I say, if you look at the immigration figures over the last couple
• 36:44
  years, they just have not, you know, David Cameron once said he wanted to reduce immigration to
• 36:48
  the tens of thousands, so sub-100,000 year. And my last reading net, what net migration was,
• 36:54
  he said, it's way, way above that. So like I say, but it's tens of times that in a country like
• 37:01
  Australia, which has a third the population. Right. And I think that the thing is that, you know,
• 37:07
  and as I say, legal migration as well as illegal migration is still really hyped, simply because
• 37:12
  we want foreign students to come in and be in our universities, we want foreign nurses and
• 37:18
  carers to work in our social services in the NHS. We want still want Eastern Europeans to come and
• 37:23
  pick our strawberries seasonally and go home again. You know, the prices are already incredibly
• 37:29
  high here. And I'm yet unconvinced that people want immigration down enough to pay twice as much
• 37:35
  for care home places and twice as much for fresh fruit. Do people understand that try it off?
• 37:41
  Right. I think they do, to some extent, because if you look at the polling now about what issue
• 37:46
  people are most worked up about, cost of living has now outstripped immigration. You know,
• 37:52
  I think those cultural issues tend to come to the fore maybe when the economy is going slightly
• 37:58
  better. And also when I think there's a really strong feeling, you know, post the economic crash,
• 38:05
  you know, the Conservatives did a very good job of blaming that on labour and over spending,
• 38:08
  which wasn't entirely fair, but it was very much, you know, the kind of, that's the last
• 38:12
  government they screwed up the economy. The job of the Conservatives now is the feeling that
• 38:15
  Liz Trust and her disastrous mini budget, where she thought she was going to put, you know,
• 38:20
  scrap the high rate of tax and then didn't, and then she was going to, you know, do more supply
• 38:25
  several forms and then the markets kind of panicked. You know, there is a very obvious kind of
• 38:30
  boo word and boo words, which is Liz Trust, Liz Trust, tank economy. That is really an analysis
• 38:36
  that actually a huge number of people in Britain have set. So, and is that true? You know,
• 38:42
  did, well, I, in the same way that I think Labour is unfairly blamed for the global financial crisis,
• 38:50
  I think there is a point to say that energy prices went up incredibly high because of Russian
• 38:55
  gas restrictions and because of the war in Ukraine also pushed up food prices. So, it's not entirely
• 39:03
  fair. I just think the thing is that Liz Trust did just come into office, go, you've all been
• 39:07
  incredibly wrong. I've got some incredible ideas. I'm going to enact this. You've never seen
• 39:11
  anything like this. Didn't prepare the terrain as far as at all. And then, like I said, to completely
• 39:17
  spooked the markets. And so, you know, there were structural factors behind it, but she certainly
• 39:25
  didn't make it any better. And did she, I don't even remember, I mean, she was only in power for
• 39:30
  a few weeks. Did she actually pass on a budget that did anything in that time? No, she had to ditch
• 39:35
  all the measures a bit, sack her Chancellor quasi-quarcing and then a point Jeremy Hunter is now
• 39:40
  still the Chancellor. And you can tell that she was particularly bad, right? Because although
• 39:44
  Rishis and I hadn't had the best economic outlook, Jeremy Hunt stabilized everything. Everyone
• 39:49
  sort of calmed down. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't Liz Trust's problem, not a British problem.
• 39:55
  I mean, I'm skeptical of any localized explanations for economic malaise at the moment because there's
• 40:01
  just been such huge, roiling global effects, right? I mean, there was a pandemic and inflation.
• 40:06
  Every single country blames its own leaders parochially for inflation, even though it's obviously
• 40:12
  a global phenomenon. I mean, economic growth is a bit more sluggish in the UK than it should be,
• 40:18
  but in terms of house prices and all the other stuff, I mean, that's happening everywhere,
• 40:22
  right? Interest rates. That's happening everywhere. So what's the, the only thing I can see that
• 40:28
  would damn the current government economically is the fact that they were irresponsible enough to
• 40:32
  pass tens of billions of pounds worth of tax cuts. So now the ladder is there for spending,
• 40:38
  which is just monumentally stupid thing that right wing parties like to do.
• 40:45
  Well, it's really interesting because of polling when you asked people about the polling and
• 40:48
  said, which would you rather have tax cuts on more investment in public services? They said
• 40:52
  more investment in public services. And they passed, as you said, this two-pents cut in the
• 40:57
  national insurance, which is basically essentially functions of income to, and add on to income
• 41:02
  tax here, not paid by pensioners. But they said they cut that headline rate last year and got
• 41:08
  no credit. No one said, oh, thank you so much. It was really weird to see the fact that it was
• 41:15
  a classic conservative electoral sweetener and just it just did not shift the polling at all.
• 41:21
  And if you look at the polling, basically, the line, you know, people loved Boris Johnson for a
• 41:26
  bit. And then they hated the, you know, the COVID parties, but you know, the vaccine was quite good.
• 41:31
  And then this trust comes in and it just falls up a cliff. And it has never really recovered
• 41:36
  from that. It was one of those odd moments where everybody's just, if anything, I think everybody's
• 41:41
  just gone, you've had your turn. Do you feel a little bit sorry for Rishi Sunak because he hasn't
• 41:47
  actually had his turn, but his party has. And so he's just sitting around with his dick in his hand
• 41:52
  going, it's not really my fault. I mean, it was an ill-advised photo opportunity with the
• 42:00
  campaign trail in Richard Brett Josh, but he's going to do anything to get attention, I understand
• 42:05
  that. Yeah. And yeah, I think it's from writing about him for the Americans, which obviously
• 42:11
  I do when I'm writing for the Atlantic. It's quite funny because I just genuinely think they're
• 42:14
  like, who's this guy? You know, Boris Johnson had been around in British politics for a really
• 42:18
  long time. Rishi Sunak only became an MP in 2015. And he's only been British Prime Minister for
• 42:26
  like 19 months. And he was like, there's nothing objectionable about him as there is with so many
• 42:32
  politicians of the 21st century. He's clean-cut, he speaks well, he looks nice, he's fierce,
• 42:39
  he's got a nice, a sharp suit, he knows his staff, he's well-educated. What's not to like?
• 42:43
  That's the sort of sense if you don't know anything.
• 42:47
  I was saying, well, we found the world's only Rishi Sunak family. It should have been like,
• 42:51
  I know nothing about the man, nothing. He's got one big problem, which is that he's incredibly rich,
• 42:57
  right? He was a hedgie and his wife is the daughter in Indian telecoms billionaire, so they are
• 43:02
  rich. So every time busy voters behind the scene, he's got like 120 pan self-eating mug.
• 43:08
  I mean, just like, you know how that Robin Williams joke about how cocaine your skulls were
• 43:14
  telling you, you've got too much money. That's how I feel about it. It's 120 pan self-eating mug.
• 43:19
  Just use the microwave or boil the kettle again. Right. Now that you've got me talking about it,
• 43:24
  though, I've got a cup of tea, which has got no, I don't have a self-eating mug. What I have is a half
• 43:31
  cup of lukewarm tepid tea, which, you know what, you know what I need now. Rishi Sunak can't sort
• 43:38
  out the row under policy, but he can sort out your lukewarm tea problem. Yeah, I think
• 43:44
  he also has just got very, very bad political instincts, I think. He just, like the thing about
• 43:51
  taking the row under bet, you know, just in that moment, he shouldn't have taken that to casually.
• 43:59
  Same thing with when he made his election announcement, he did it in the pouring rain. You must have
• 44:03
  seen these papers. They're looking like a sort of frame. But that's why I said that I felt sad for him.
• 44:09
  It was like a, like we've got a, we got a kitten last year, Helen, for my twins. And sometimes she'll
• 44:15
  accidentally fall in the bathtub and scramble out. And I thought, oh, there's Rishi Sunak, my little
• 44:20
  kitten in the rain all wet and helpless. Right, but you wouldn't let that kitten be in charge of,
• 44:25
  yeah, your household budget, wouldn't you? Well, the kitten does pretty much run the house in
• 44:29
  cooots with my six-year-old daughter, but that's, that's a problem for me, not so much a problem
• 44:33
  for the people of the United Kingdom. And what about Kia Starmer? So, oh, sorry, do you want to
• 44:38
  just finish the thought about Rishi? Well, that was the thing is that I think he could have,
• 44:42
  he could have played that off if he had made a forest onsen, that happened to Boris Johnson,
• 44:45
  right? He would have made a joke about it. And he would have acknowledged it.
• 44:49
  One of the great things about Britain is its rain, the lush countryside.
• 44:53
  Yes, but you're right. That's interesting, isn't it?
• 44:57
  Boris Johnson impression, I should have any amount about that was unexpected and delightful.
• 45:02
  I just can see him with his little umbrella. He'd probably ditch the umbrella and just have his
• 45:06
  pasty blonde hair stuck to his forehead. Yeah, that's, and the, I mean, the thing that you said
• 45:13
  that's interesting about the lack of caution or the lack of kind of political awareness about
• 45:19
  the hazards of political optics that Rishi Senag has is interesting because, you know, the
• 45:26
  taking of the bet of the Rwanda bet, every political operative hack life-long sort of, you know,
• 45:37
  one gray wanderer of the halls of power will know that you don't take such a bet.
• 45:43
  And the fact that so many politicians listen to those aides and PR people is a source of
• 45:48
  enormous frustration for many voters and they are craving an authenticity, they're craving,
• 45:54
  you know, I mean, if Trump took the bet, he'd take the bet and then he'd deny that he ever took
• 45:57
  the bet and he'd say that the bet's a skewer, but then it wasn't, you know, we'd be
• 46:01
  wore off a ducts back. No one would give a shit because he has this affect of not being controlled
• 46:07
  and not being controllable and being his own man and love him or hate him. He's going to do what he
• 46:12
  wants to. And so I wonder whether you have any thoughts about this sort of clash between authenticity
• 46:19
  and risk, like, why are voters punishing Rishi Senag for being an idiot, you know, proving
• 46:25
  politically incompetent when political competence seems to be the thing that so many voters are
• 46:30
  rejecting. That's a really interesting question, isn't it? I was just thinking about the fact,
• 46:34
  you know, PJ walks a kind of great right wing American satirist said something like
• 46:40
  in America, the right, say, government doesn't work and then get elected and prove it.
• 46:44
  So I always attribute that to our franken, but I might be misremembering because they're both
• 46:49
  gods of the comedy gods of my youth. Well, would you have one of them said it? I think there is
• 46:56
  a point that's baked in about the fact, but as you say, there's a kind of thing about those
• 46:59
  populist politicians that they don't treat government seriously. You know, it's interesting when you
• 47:06
  get those kind of conspiracy-minded people who sort of say, you know, vote doesn't matter,
• 47:10
  it's all being decided by the deep state anyway. And I think if you do genuinely thinking like that,
• 47:15
  it's easier to vote for a populist politician because you think, I might as well vote to someone
• 47:19
  just turn over the table and tear it all up. But that's not really the pool of Rishi Senag is
• 47:25
  fishing in on, but the conservatives have traditionally fished in, right? They are supposed to be
• 47:29
  the grown-up party, you know, the natural party of government. They're supposed to be the grown-ups
• 47:36
  and that was their selling point for a long time, like, we're quite, you know, we're just going to
• 47:40
  try and cut taxes and grow the economy. And they're experiencing the same fissure that I think
• 47:45
  lots of parties are, I'm sure this is happening Australia too, of those instincts cutting against
• 47:50
  the more populist radical right instincts. And people who want to talk about more culture stuff,
• 47:55
  they want to talk about the birth rates, they want to talk about, you know, gender, but, you know,
• 47:59
  they're more animated by those kind of cultural issues than they are by what the optimum tax rate
• 48:04
  is for people who earn over 100,000 pounds a year. That's interesting. I mean, I think that's a
• 48:10
  fun honor and that's happening much more in the UK and the US than thankfully so far than it is
• 48:17
  in Australia because yeah, where is the the small sea conservative establishment
• 48:26
  center of gravity then? Because in the US, it's in this, you know, you talk to the David
• 48:31
  Frums of the world and, you know, they feel lost and adrift completely adrift because the
• 48:40
  party of the Mitt Romney's and the John McCain's has been swamped. Is it 50% as bad in the UK,
• 48:48
  20% as bad, 80% as bad if you're a small sea conservative? I think there's a really
• 48:56
  interesting question about the scale of the conservative defeat. If we presume that the polls are
• 49:00
  right, then depending on how efficiently the vote is distributed, how many people vote tactically,
• 49:07
  you are looking at anything between a kind of hung parliament to a Tory defeat up to an absolute,
• 49:12
  one of the Canada 1992 was the one everyone talked about, like a almost like a total party
• 49:16
  annihilation. How much of a political wonk do you have to be for Canada 1992 to mean anything to
• 49:23
  a non-Canadian? Everybody in Britain gets, that's the thing you have to, if you want to send smart
• 49:28
  and Britain you have to wander around and go, it could be Canada 1992 of course. It's true,
• 49:34
  everybody's not doing it, but the point about it is, where in 1992 I wasn't in Canada 1992,
• 49:39
  I don't even know, I couldn't even tell you who a 1990s Canadian Prime Minister was, but
• 49:45
  no, I mean presumably Pierre Trudeau was it, but anyhow, that's right, yes, some French.
• 49:50
  That will be how I win the game show, but yeah, but the point about that is that what precipitated
• 49:58
  the remaking of Labour under Keir Starmer is the scale of the defeat in 2019. Going down to only
• 50:06
  203 MPs allowed him to say this party's got to change, obviously, you know, Corbynism was defeated
• 50:14
  at the ballot box, people had a chance to look at it and they didn't want it, and that was,
• 50:19
  you know, that was the way that he managed to buy the, you know, get the buy-in in order to radically
• 50:24
  meet the party to a much more centre-left, or even centrist, you know, disciplined, more like
• 50:30
  blare-right machine. So the question arises that if the Tories have a bad result, do they do the
• 50:36
  same thing and you get a new David Cameron star lead who comes and says, guys, we really the party
• 50:41
  of the centre-right that looks very sensible and promises to cut people's taxes and the
• 50:44
  gaff to be economy? Or do they go, let's go full Titi bonkers, as if he's just going to say,
• 50:51
  let's just have exactly what we want, which is what basically laboured it after 2015.
• 50:55
  They felt that Ed Miliband had been a kind of, you know, soft left candle, but he'd been a kind
• 50:59
  of compromise with the reality to some extent. And they went, what if we just had hope and change
• 51:03
  and everything that our heart absolutely desires and a leader who's never made any compromises
• 51:08
  at all and is incredibly left-wing and we can just have what we want? And I wonder if the Tories
• 51:15
  that might be what they do. Well, it depends who's articulating the what we want
• 51:21
  to be at, doesn't it? Helen, I mean, because different parts of the right want different things.
• 51:26
  Yeah, but the Tory members are, I think the average age is probably 70 and there's really,
• 51:31
  no one knows exactly how many of them there are, but they picked Liz Trass over Rishi Sonak.
• 51:36
  That was a contest, was between the two of them and they weren't, let's have Liz Trass.
• 51:41
  And so the next, when she got booted out after 49 days in office, the Tory MPs,
• 51:46
  members of parliament went, we are not letting you bastards have another go at choosing our leader.
• 51:50
  We're going to show this one up among ourselves. Right. Right. And so that's the question.
• 51:55
  Is, will there be enough of a Tory party to coordinate doing that? And basically the MPs
• 52:00
  who are kind of a break on the, on the populist instincts? Or will it go to the membership
• 52:04
  who will go, we want literally, you know, whoever, you know, Genghis Khan reincarnated
• 52:12
  because we want to, we want to have a proper leader who says the things that we agree with.
• 52:17
  And sorry, Helen, why is it up in the air who gets to pick the party leader? Why is this even a
• 52:22
  matter of contention? I mean, in Australia, it's just the party room. It's the politicians.
• 52:26
  You know, you don't throw it out to the rank and file.
• 52:30
  Oh, right. Okay. So the way that the Tory party works is that the MPs have a ballot and they have to,
• 52:35
  they can set the number of MPs you need to nominate someone to get on the ballot. And then,
• 52:40
  then all the people who are on the, make it onto the ballot, get enough MPs nominating them.
• 52:44
  They go forward to the membership and the membership then votes on them.
• 52:48
  And that's always been the case. It, no, it has changed throughout history that the MPs used to have
• 52:53
  more control over the process. But essentially, if the MPs can rig the nominations process to say,
• 53:00
  over, say, you know, 100, say, you know, there's only 200 Tory MPs that makes an exception. They say,
• 53:05
  you've got to get 100 MPs to nominate you to get you on the ballot. Then you're going to end up with
• 53:10
  only one person getting nominated and they will be, you know, the broad, the candidate of the broad
• 53:15
  maybe of the party. If you put a nomination threshold at 30, you're going to get like the Star Wars
• 53:20
  Cantina scene or just everyone thinking that they might have a, might as well have a go. And then
• 53:26
  you release, this is what happened with Jeremy Corbyn. This is where Jeremy Corbyn became
• 53:30
  Labour leader because some of the other candidates lent him their votes in order to get him on the
• 53:36
  ballot because they thought it would be nice for him to have a kind of camp around the paddock.
• 53:40
  Bad idea because Labour members went, oh, you all of you sang kind of strangulated and boring
• 53:46
  and centrist and like careerist and dull. Let's have that guy who was, you know, consistently stood
• 53:52
  up against wars and, you know, has never been part of any government that we didn't like.
• 53:57
  And this is the same thing with Trump, right? Trump as an independent candidate would pull
• 54:01
  about the same as RFK probably because he's equally charismatic if not more. The problem was
• 54:07
  letting him latch on to an existing political party and take it over and use all of its structures.
• 54:14
  And so the real, like I've been having this argument about the fact, you know, everyone sort of
• 54:17
  hand rings about the liberal media making Trump happen and how they should report it more and say
• 54:22
  more that he's a bad person and then that will somehow magically solve the problem of his
• 54:26
  existence. And I'm like, no, the problem is the Republican party that let him be the Republican
• 54:31
  candidate. That's when it, that's when it all went wrong, really. And you can't unwind
• 54:37
  like that. I think in the phrase the Republican party let him be their candidate. There's a lot
• 54:42
  of work being done by the word let in the sense that like the American political system doesn't have
• 54:48
  the same capacity. And the party system doesn't have the same capacity as it does in the parliament
• 54:53
  tree democracy to let or not let a person become like what would you have had the Republican party
• 55:01
  like system the party qua party do? Well, I mean, part of many of us run a more appealing
• 55:08
  opposition term than Ted Cruz, but it's been a great, I mean, just as a star. But yeah, I know,
• 55:14
  yeah, okay, maybe that's an overstatement, but you know what I mean in the sense of I think it's
• 55:18
  something that all the way along, like the fact that the Republican only Mitt Romney was the only
• 55:24
  senator who voted for him to impeach him, for example. I see. Yeah, right. There could have been
• 55:28
  all kinds of pushback chances to reject him and say, no, I'm willing to. Yeah, all the way that
• 55:34
  Liz Cheney stood up against him. You know, the fact the committees at investigative so few Republicans
• 55:39
  did that as soon as they decided that the like the train was coming to station. Did you know,
• 55:44
  the, you know, the, you know, and JV Vance, the senator pro hire who said he was terribly into jump
• 55:49
  as that was going into court with him as part of his sort of weird squad. Oh, no, I see what you're
• 55:53
  saying. Yes, no, I completely agree with that. They've been totally spineless. But in terms of the
• 55:57
  actual political process of him getting elected, it's an open question to me whether or not a quote
• 56:03
  unquote, which hunt from the establishment Republican party would be an electoral asset or liability
• 56:08
  for Trump. Oh, no, I think it, you know, the time or even would or even would have been, I mean,
• 56:14
  like, you know, it may have been the case that the more enemies he has, even within his own party,
• 56:18
  the more his base loves it. And he only needs, you know, plurality plus one to become a candidate.
• 56:24
  So yeah, but yes, I certainly take that point. I mean, it strikes me then that if the UK is allowing
• 56:31
  the rank and file members, and what do you have to do to become a member of a political party?
• 56:35
  You have just a little fee and send off a ticket checkbox. Yeah, yeah, basically. So then you're
• 56:40
  halfway to primaries kind of in a sass. I mean, you halfway to in other words, regular non-politicians
• 56:49
  are deciding who the candidates are going to be, which strikes me that like there's an upside
• 56:53
  and a downside to the highly democratic American system where anybody can put up their hand and
• 56:59
  become a and become the president, which is that it's more democratic. I think it's more directly
• 57:04
  democratic and it can yield a Trump, but it can also yield an Obama who would have had to spend 20 or
• 57:11
  30 years working his way up through, you know, the back slapping political system in a in a place like
• 57:16
  Australia. In Australia, it's a stitched up job, the leader of the of a political party. I mean,
• 57:24
  you have to be elected by your peers and what always ends up happening is in terms of like the
• 57:31
  tussle between the conservative right and the sort of populist right. After the last election in
• 57:37
  Australia, which was a landslide against the conservative government, the conservatives set came up
• 57:43
  with this, I think, foolish idea that the problem is that we haven't been conservative enough,
• 57:48
  which is what conservative parties like to do after they get kicked out of power. We weren't true
• 57:53
  enough to our principles. And you go, well, actually, all the ones of you who were super, super,
• 57:58
  you know, crazy that you, you're not the reason why, you know, we didn't we didn't want you to
• 58:03
  stay in power like the, we didn't want you, what you took over the conservative party and it
• 58:10
  didn't resonate with people. So it'll be interesting to see if there is a conservative wipe out,
• 58:16
  whether or not the lesson goes more towards the central or more towards the right.
• 58:20
  Yeah, I think in Australia, to some extent, you have some of the same issues that we have about
• 58:25
  the fact that there is a right wing media kind of echo chamber, which is, you know, both very
• 58:31
  powerful and very influential in some ways and policy terms, but ultimately maybe a bit of a drag
• 58:36
  in the sense of that you kind of, here we have GB news, we have the, you know, the papers like
• 58:43
  the sun and the telegraph and the mail are print papers are predominantly right leaning.
• 58:48
  And so they're uninterested in much, you know, they like spicy copy, like as any journalist does,
• 58:54
  they like the MPs who go on and argue about plans and statues and whatever it might be.
• 58:59
  Yeah, the same, the same cultural issues that come up anywhere, but the point about that is that
• 59:04
  people do care about those, they really care about, you know, what does a politician see to share
• 59:08
  their values, but they don't generally care about them so much that they will keep someone in that
• 59:12
  they feel is economically failing. Like it's, it's a lever, but it's not the only lever. And
• 59:18
  that's the, that's the problem again, there's the same way as having the very small selecture
• 59:22
  as an issue of the Tory politicians who prosper and get a lot of air time, you know, are often the
• 59:29
  ones who are the wilder ones, because they just make better copy, they make better guests on the
• 59:33
  studio discussion program. The other big cultural issue, which you mentioned in passing earlier
• 59:40
  is trends. I mean, people, you know, people like to whip that up. And I noticed that J.K. Rowling
• 59:44
  has a piece in the Times, I believe, about why she's decided to stand up for women. And then we
• 59:51
  had the CAS report, which everyone's been babbling about for many months. Have we reached the tipping
• 59:56
  point on that issue in the, in the UK? Is it now possible just to have a sane conversation about
• 1:00:02
  gender without fear of being sort of hounded by extremists?
• 1:00:06
  Yeah, I think it has. And I think actually some people are sort of struggling, you know, like,
• 1:00:10
  I'm people who overuse the metaphor of the kind of last Japanese soldier stumbling out of the
• 1:00:14
  jungle, not realizing the Fekama war was over, but I do think there is a bit of that going on.
• 1:00:20
  Yeah, so there's an essay, there's an essay collection called The Women Who Wouldn't Weathe,
• 1:00:23
  which is Weathe being a Scottish word for shut up.
• 1:00:27
  I saw that, and I, I immediately thought of quif, and then I thought, well, it can't be bad word.
• 1:00:32
  It must be a, it must be a strange, it must be a strange British word that I haven't heard before,
• 1:00:36
  but it did make me momentarily chuckle and then move on.
• 1:00:43
  Yeah, it's a very different political movement, but I mean, no, it wouldn't quif, yeah.
• 1:00:47
  It was, um, it was really, originally, the phrase was weached for indie, which was basically
• 1:00:52
  Scottish independence. I mean, I do was don't complain about the Scottish national party,
• 1:00:56
  don't, you know, we just needed people to shut up and be disciplined until we get
• 1:01:00
  Scottish independence. So it kind of got appropriated by the Scottish feminists.
• 1:01:05
  But yeah, um, I think it's drastically changed a couple of things. First of all,
• 1:01:09
  is the fact that Labour, particularly Labour's Hell Spokesman was treating, used to work for
• 1:01:13
  Snowmore, which was the big, you know, it still is the big LGBTQ charity.
• 1:01:18
  He's had a kind of, uh, damocene revelation about the fact that women talking about single sex
• 1:01:22
  faces, that was a legitimate thing, you know, they had a legitimate political interest,
• 1:01:27
  agree with it or disagree with it was a legitimate thing to say.
• 1:01:31
  Labour has promised to reform gender recognition, which is not to pure self-ID,
• 1:01:36
  but it has talked a lot about the need to keep safeguards. Labour has accepted the cash report,
• 1:01:42
  which you mentioned before, Hillary Cass is reporting to you, gender medicine, which found that
• 1:01:45
  puberty blockers were an experiment, treatment found that people being rushed into treatment
• 1:01:49
  without full consideration of anything else they might have going on in their lives.
• 1:01:53
  So the fact that Britain's main opposition party has, A, just moved a long way and B,
• 1:01:58
  stopped the policy that was, anybody raising questions about this is inherently figured it,
• 1:02:04
  has just changed the outlook completely. And what's, you've seen as a result, is that some people
• 1:02:09
  have greatly accepted the kind of new settlement, and some people have felt that they need to go
• 1:02:13
  a bit further and be a bit more extreme. So, you know, that, that always kind of happens to
• 1:02:19
  political movements when they win, right? They fracture to some extent. And so that's where I would
• 1:02:24
  say that the British gender-critical movement is. But it has kind of been an astonishing thing to
• 1:02:30
  watch. You know, you mentioned that Scottish book. That's full of stories of women who,
• 1:02:35
  for example, weren't invited to give testimony at Hollywood committees at the Scottish Parliament
• 1:02:39
  committees, because their evidence would have been counter to what the S&P, the ruling party wanted
• 1:02:44
  to hear. The idea that all of these people, they're inconvenient bits of testimony,
• 1:02:48
  were just tidied away, was, that was the reality of the last 10 years in British policy.
• 1:02:53
  And explain this, the Scottish context for us, Helen, for people who aren't, you know,
• 1:02:58
  click close observers of the UK, because I do remember the Scottish First Minister,
• 1:03:04
  like being very, very pro-trans ideology on this, and was there a former Scottish First
• 1:03:11
  Minister who came out and spoke out against her, or like there was some cafferly or two ago
• 1:03:16
  about exactly this matter, and it seemed that Scotland was getting its knickers in and not.
• 1:03:21
  Yeah, so Nicholas Surgeon, he was the first minister for most of the, you know, the second half
• 1:03:27
  of the 2010s. Which for Americans, he's the leader of the country. Right, so it's just a funny
• 1:03:32
  thing. The largest party in the Scottish Parliament. And, you know, in the devolution, they have
• 1:03:38
  quite a lot of power. So she said she was a feminist to her fingertips. And, you know, I think
• 1:03:45
  when they lost the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, they were looking for another issue
• 1:03:51
  that they could campaign on that would seem to be making progress that would position them as
• 1:03:56
  a more progressive forward-looking government than the British, then the English Tory government.
• 1:04:01
  And they thought that transgender law reform was probably that one, right? You know, in a context
• 1:04:07
  in a country in which gay marriage was passed by conservative government, you needed to find the
• 1:04:12
  kind of next frontier of where equality's law was. And so they came up with the idea of
• 1:04:19
  completely self-ideed. So you just made a statutory declaration, changed your gender, you know,
• 1:04:24
  there was no requirements to live in roll, which there is no requirement for a die case in gender
• 1:04:28
  dysphoria. It was just a kind of, you know, tick box, make a serious declaration, and then you kind
• 1:04:35
  of, you were good to go. And that was incredibly resisted by Scottish feminists, predominantly on the
• 1:04:40
  left, actually, you know, it's a real difference between the way things that pan'd out in America where
• 1:04:45
  this is a much more left-wing, right-wing issue. And Stagen had the greatness fortune at the time
• 1:04:49
  that this was going on, that there was a case of a male rapist who had been a tradition.
• 1:04:55
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  rob yourself of the rest. Well, let your phone light now, and search for uncomfortable conversations
• 1:05:22
  in the substep of America.