Latest / Thinking Class / #059 - Sam Bidwell - How Britain's Politicians Broke The Social Contract

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#059 - Sam Bidwell - How Britain's Politicians Broke The Social Contract · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Sam Bidwell.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Sam is director of the Next Generation Centre at the Adam Smith Institute and has worked as a parliamentary researcher and as a press and research consultant for the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Sam's writing on foreign affairs has been published internationally, including in Australia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and he was a contributor to the 2023 Commonwealth Security Review.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Sam is also a graduate of the University of Cambridge, where he studied law at Sydney Sussex College, specialising in public law, jurisprudence and legal history.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, Sam and I think out loud about whether Britain's political class are NPCs, the implications of immigration on the social contract in Britain, particularly in light of recent waves of migration, the disconnects between public sentiment and political action, the structural changes needed in immigration policy in Britain, and the cultural implications of demographic shifts, why Britain needs a more coherent immigration strategy that aligns with the expectations of the British public and addresses the challenges posed by changing demographics, what cultural transfer is and why it's important, the political influence of diverse communities on governance in Britain, why Britain has economically stagnated, the implications of immigration on questions of citizenship, the crisis of legitimacy in governance in Britain, and the need for economic growth to support cultural preservation and much, much more.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: Sam is a wonderful chap.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: He is incredibly well polished and comes across as someone who really knows his subject matter.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: I gave him a very rough outline of the conversation, and I think you'll be taken aback at how strong and coherent his responses are with regards to the policy environment in Britain.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: And he has a very clear idea of what ought to happen to deal with some of the big issues that Britain faces today.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: And as ever, let's grow this show together.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Please like, subscribe, follow, share on whatever platform you watch or listen to Thinking Class on.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: Sam Bidwell, welcome to Thinking Class.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Not at all.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's a pleasure to be with you.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Sam, you are making waves, I would say, at least not just in conservative media, but um media more broadly, which uh is because you have this uh very um clear-eyed policy analysis.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: And as we were talking before the show, I think I phrased it that um you are quite good at pointing out where the British state continues to flounder on topics of housing and immigration, and more broadly the social contract.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a good place to start.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Immigration is something that is being spoken about all over the Western world.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Electorates have for many years been trying to vote uh in a way that reduces it, and it hasn't happened.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And indeed, in Britain we have seen huge numbers come, uh, not just since the beginning of the Blair Premiership back in 1997 and Cameron's government coming in in 2010, but particularly under Boris Johnson's leadership and what is now being called the Boris Wave, such are the the giant numbers, and uh indeed I think one of the most recent years um of records, which had initially been estimated of 708,000 net immigrants, which had deducted the the half a million who had who had left the country, has now been revised upwards to closer to 920, 30,000.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: And there's this feeling that over the last five years we might have welcomed in up to six million new people into the country.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: From where you're standing, Stan, what does the Boris wave and perhaps even more repeated waves post-Boris mean for the social contract in Britain?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um thanks so much.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: That was a that was a an unnecessarily glowing intro.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: You've given me far too much credit.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um look, the the social contract point is really salient, and there are a couple of things at play here.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, first thing at play is democracy.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the basic expectations of the social contract, the democratic society, uh, is that when you vote, you're broadly listened to.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and no uh government has won an election since at least 1974 on a promise of higher migration.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: No one has ever won on a promise of higher migration, and everybody since 74 has explicitly promised lower migration.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: So it's all about reading the tea leaves.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: We know exactly what people think and what people want.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, politicians can't say that the public hasn't got a clear will on this.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that, you know, at a basic level, that's kind of step one of where the social contract's going wrong is that people have been promised that if you vote for things repeatedly, you'll get them, and they haven't.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: There's also a deeper problem around the social contract.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: You may have seen this uh this kind of internet meme that floats around.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Nicolas Sertillon, they did the kind of beleaguered French uh professional.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea is basically that that hardworking, working-age taxpayers are being taxed to fund services that they're not using.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's a mixture of things like state pension, which you know we know now is uh is unsustainable.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was based on the idea that each successive generation would be larger than the previous.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: That now isn't the case because of things like uh low birth rates.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's you know, a lot of that money is also going to wealth and to social housing and to um economically inactive people.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you mentioned that um Boris wave.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, really starting in 2021, we've seen a massive uptick.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: We were already very high levels, we're already bringing in uh net hundreds of thousands of people a year.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: We're now bringing in uh net upwards of 700,000 people a year.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: I prefer the gross figure because I think it really drives home how big the waiver's been.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's been at least 4.5 billion people over four years.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: So at least uh a city, the population of Birmingham every year.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the result of that, right?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: We're told it's going to be great for the economy, and of course it hasn't been.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: The economy's flatlined while immigration has skyrocketed.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: The reason is that we're not bringing in uh very high-skilled, very hardworking, taxpaying, uh, you know, go-getting migrants from America or from Europe.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Our migration mix has actually changed as well since Brexit.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because of the rules, uh, post-Brexit rules and the way that those rules have changed, we've seen a massive uptick in non-EU migration.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, a million Indians in the last four years, several hundred thousand people from Pakistan, from Nigeria, from Bangladesh, etc.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And we know that those people are likely over their lifetimes to be net uh to not be net contributors, uh, to be net detractors from the state, particularly if they bring dependents, which many of them bring.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Many of them bring family members over.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Many of them are from countries where it's not normal for women to work.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we're talking about you come over, you do five years of work, uh, you get what's called indefinite leave to remain.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's the settlement status.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: You are then entitled to claim welfare, uh, social housing, to use the NHS, to bring over dependence, etc.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that is being funded by hardworking young professionals in cities like London, in cities like Edinburgh, etc.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: That is the social contract turned on its head.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And there's one more aspect to this as well.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if things couldn't get even worse, believe me, they can, is the British Stoke we're talking about.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, crime is a is a basic one, right?
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, crime and the way that we enforce laws.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: We are stricter than ever on law-abiding citizens, whether that's on things like speech or anybody with a with a white, you know, I've got a friend trying to get married to an American girl, very nice, very high earning, etc.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: The home office has given him hell, he's had to go through uh numerous uh hoops and numerous hurdles, etc.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if he came over on a small boat and then wanted to bring his family five years later, he would have had no problem whatsoever.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the other aspect of the social contract that's going wrong, this whole anarcho-tyranny dimension, which is that the state is kind of tyrannical towards the most law-abiding citizens, but fairly anarchic when it comes to enforcing the law against the least law-abiding.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you think there isn't as much public uproar about these things as you'd expect?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I could probably make slightly snide comments about, well, people will just get locked up if they do, but that won't be helpful.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: But you would think that given there is this clear distinction being drawn between the law-abiding and those who aren't, and potentially even just to put a finer point on it, those not born in the country being given preferential treatment over those born in the country or seeking to marry those who are more culturally aligned.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, is the reason why there's less said about this because we have a taboo that governs us?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: I know Eric Kaufman talks about it.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: People are just afraid to talk about things like differences in race and culture because of the potential social consequences to that.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: And also for those who truly believe in the sacralisation of those groups, is that is that part of it, or is it simply it's just not in the public mind for whatever reason?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the public do talk about it.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I grew up in a kind of ex-brickmaking town in North Wales.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: People there talk about it, believe me.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: They they watch VB News, they read the newspapers, they see the cases, they're outraged.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you you will often hear people say, uh, make comments like, I'm not endorsing the comment, but you will hear people make comments like, you couldn't build a church in Saudi Arabia, why can't you build a mosque in this country?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's something like that.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: I've thought of from normal members of the public numerous times.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: So the the the idea of unequal treatment is actually uh it's it's very widely felt.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is is political.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's that those norms are so distant from the kind of norms that govern political life here in Britain.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: We have one of, you know, we we have quite a closed political culture in terms of what's reddit is acceptable in that world.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: We have a media that is very good at gatekeeping.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's gotten less good at gatekeeping of time, and I think that's why they're worried about things like online safety.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they're concerned about the power that the internet gives ordinary people to access and voice these views.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, things like GB News as well.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, look up how Ofcom has behaved around GB News, trying to shut the channel down, sanction it uh for bringing on Rishi Sunak, uh, just for you know to discuss his views with members of the public, lest we forget that on Good Morning Britain, uh the hype of the riots over the summer, we had Yvette Cuba the home secretary interviewed by her husband, Ed Balls.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not actually about whether these news channels are politically impartial.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think there is a genuinely political angle to the way Sawa regulators behave that is is allowed, is enabled by the the political and ethical norms of people who govern us.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it is only that the public has been talking about this stuff for so long and that it's gotten so bad that people are starting to act on it.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we're seeing in the polls reform doing very well.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, people, you know, even the Conservative Party has come a long way over the last decade in terms of the way it talks about these things.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't uh see David Cameron talking about some of the things that that frontbench conservative MPs now talk about.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: And even the Prime Minister, even Keir Starler, has accepted uh what he calls uh open borders experiment.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And accepted that that was wrong.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we're we're we're moving uh I'm not gonna say inextra b, but we're moving slowly in the right direction.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's not because the public uh is waking up to this, right?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: The public, I think, is actually fairly aware.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's the problem, the problem is politicians, and you know, the other side of that coin is that even those politicians which have advocated for the public mood on this question or on this set of questions have been very bad at thinking about it in systemic terms.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: They've thought about it primarily in individual terms.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: So they they look at uh I wrote a thread yesterday about a Turkish drug dealer who was told that Home Office was told they couldn't deport the man because it would interrupt his right to a family life.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, it's very easy to kind of get annoyed about that case because it's clearly a terrible decision that's going to have a negative impact on the country and on the level of safety that we have in the country.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but even politicians who've been willing to say that have been very poor at identifying the underlying structural factors, right?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of this stuff is legislative.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's the law.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I often say this about free speech too.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: That is the law.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um the law should be different, but it is the law.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And uh advocates in Westminster, uh, you know, such that they are, are only just now catching up to some of the structural causes of things like um high migration, uh the transfer of wealth from working age people to uh people from abroad, etc.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: etc.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: We'll we'll we'll we'll stay on immigration for a bit longer.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: The point you made about Keir Starmer's speech after those immigration figures were revised upwards from north of 700,000 in the year to north of 900,000 in the year, where he he said it's an open border experiment.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: And this has added fuel to what you could say are quite common online right talking points, that replacement migration is going on as the demographics in the country change, but indeed it's not just the online right.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: There are many who are unhappy with open borders, including immigrants and the descendants of immigrants themselves.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm even spotting it amongst the so-called political normies who would typically get that information from BBC News, ITV News and The Times, and things publications and broadcasting organizations that would typically toe the line and not stray too far from whatever is deemed to be polite opinion.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: So you can almost feel that shift.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: I know you've talked about various policy instruments that might be pulled upon to deal with some of these waves of immigrants.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: What are they?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: So let's take it back to the structural.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: So there are some really big things.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think we have to think really seriously about um the human rights architecture we've got.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's broadly more of a problem with illegal, but there is still a problem sometimes with deportation of foreign criminals uh based on uh who come legally and then commit crime.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: So our human rights infrastructure has to change.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's the Human Rights Act.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there are some elements of the Equality Act that have an implication there.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: The tribunal system that we have around immigration cases also is clearly in need of reform.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: But the the most fundamental thing that I think we need to do, we do need to bring down the numbers.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think a parliamentary set cap is a crude way of doing it, but a way that would be broadly effective.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um I, you know, I think keep it, given the current crop of parliamentarians that we've got, keep it crude and easy.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um there are also some short-term things that we need to start thinking about.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: So the current assumption of our migration system was built at a time when we had very few people coming in.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: The assumption therefore was that they would all want to become citizens, and then they could all become citizens.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, let's remember when we're talking about tens of thousands of people a year, uh, as we were at the beginning of the 20th century, then okay, maybe your working assumption can be that people are going to come, they're gonna do a bit of work, they're gonna settle, and then they're gonna become citizens.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, immigration is at its most harmful when it is linked to citizenship.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because what it does is it bakes in some of those decisions that policymakers make.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say we give you a visa at this moment in time, give you a work visa five years.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the automatic track that you're on is now as follows: five years, and then you can access what's called indefinitely to remain.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: That gives you access to welfare, to social housing, waiting lists, to health care, etc.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: You're then on the path to citizenship.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: So you're on the path to being able to stay here permanently, and you can bring you value.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's just five years of work.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: So this is, I mean, you know, as a certain American president would say, this is the worst deal in the history of deals, maybe ever, right?
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: You you come for five years, you do five years of low-skilled work, and then you can access the state support forever, uh, and you could potentially become a voting citizen.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: In many cases, you're already a voting citizen because Commonwealth citizens could vote in the UK as well.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: So Indians who've come over the last four years could all vote automatically in UK elections.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: A million people, right?
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a small number.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a million new voters.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in fact, it's more because you've got people coming from Pakistan, from Bangladesh, from Nigeria.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we've probably added about two million new voters over the last couple of years, all from abroad, or with very few ties to the nation that they are then going to be electing the representatives of.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, the thing you could do on day one is end Commonwealth voting.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Clearly, that's inappropriate.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was again a rule designed at the time when the Commonwealth migrants were primarily a small number coming from Canada or from Australia, you know, countries that had existed for about five minutes and were full of bridge people.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: So we're talking about a very different Commonwealth now, or also talking about a very different immigration situation now.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, second thing you could do, and this has been my big campaign at the moment, is you could just extend that ILR period.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: You could just say, okay, rather than five years, it definitely needs to remain, it's going to say 15.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: And if we want to take your visa away, we can.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you get that five-year visa, there is no term or condition which says that that visa has to be reissued ad infinitum if circumstances change.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: If we decide that we don't want somebody to come and uh work in a coffee shop for the next 15 years and then become a citizen, bring their family, uh, cost the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds over their lifetime, uh, then we can.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: We could just revoke that visa.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have to reissue it, right?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: You have no automatic rights to remain in the UK for the rest of your life.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: That is how immigration looks in large parts of the world.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: There is a severance between settlement citizenship and a visa.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: There is uh no access to state services whatsoever.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and the overall numbers are lower.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm thinking of a country like Singapore.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Singapore is a classic example of a great social contract which works fabulously.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, ordinary Singaporeans feel that they're represented, even though uh many will say that it's not a democratic society.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: There is great popular support for the political settlement in that country.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly in economic terms, they're they're having a pretty good time.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they do use guest labourers from Vietnam or from the other ASEAN countries, you know, the Philippines, Indonesia, etc.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: And you go and you see it, you see uh people from the rest of Southeast Asia working uh in Singapore.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: They are there because a business has sponsored them to come there.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: If that person breaks their immigration uh conditions or they commit a crime, uh, the business is fined and the person goes home.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Guess what?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: The the immigration there is more orderly, right?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because businesses are incentivized to be really careful about who they're bringing over.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: You can't bring dependents, you don't have access to state support, so you've got to be fairly self-reliant.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, there is no link whatsoever because they're very precious about their um about native of their country, which is which is very delicate and which has caused them problems before.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: So they're very cautious around it.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um Japanese are the same, it's actually the same in countries like uh the UAE, Dubai, right?
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Majority of the population of Dubai are immigrants, but not citizens.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: The path to citizenship is very limited.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: What that does is it gives the political community that makes up the core of the nation state continued power over that nation-state, right?
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: It stops the dilution of citizenship and it stops uh immigration from being long-term harmful, and actually, you know, in many ways, allows those company, uh those countries to be more immigration liberal, but within strict confines.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: The citizenship point is remarkable when you see how easily Britain gives out citizenship.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: I came across, it might have been in one of your articles, so I will I will caveat that in case I'm incorrectly uh sourcing this information.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: But side-by-side comparison with Japan, we know culturally a very different beast, but since the 1870s, I think, they have given out 600,000 citizenships, so naturalized Japanese citizens.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas in four the last four years, I think, maybe five years, Britain has given out 1.8 million citizenships.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: Was it yours?
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it was my tweet.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: So it says you're right.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: You'll be pleased to hear it.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Excellent, excellent.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm glad I'm glad it was definitely yours.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm also glad I got it right and I wasn't uh I wasn't spewing rubbish.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I also am struck by and let me know if you think this is also the case.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate that there are lots of people who see the issue, and as you mentioned, in your your uh northern Welsh town uh in the where I'm from in Northumberland, people typically say it how it is, and there's that big disconnect between not just the SW1 Westminster bubble, but just about anyone who.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Passes as a cultural elite, uh liberal metropolitan, and just about everyone else.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: But what's interesting when you speak to people about the scale of immigration is it's almost become so normal to have such large numbers of people come in, and also to talk about something called immigration policy that people see it as an engineering problem.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: And if only we could build more houses, then it's fine, then we wouldn't have the competition for the houses, and it shouldn't really matter.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how they've become blinded by the cultural points and then the points you've raised, which is ultimately you're enfranchising people who may have very different interests and objectives that run in uh uh counter to what a British state might want to achieve for its citizens.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: But it also makes me wonder why no one seems to actually ask what a country is for and what a country is.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I I don't I'm not I don't quite understand why people think the solution is just to tarmac over more of England and build more uh housing estates.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um when when you you you obviously spend quite a lot of time around the political class.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um do you besides those who are more conservatively inclined, do you ever really get a sense that anyone asks that question or or have have have they become blind to what a countr what makes a country and specifically this country, and it's all just an engineering problem?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a really interesting question.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think for most people the the the nation is a kind of economic unit.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's the primary way in which they think about the nation.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean it's worth remembering just on one of the points you made there.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um if you poll people and ask how many migrants they think have come over in the last five years, the figure is like 100,000.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: People have got no idea.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is this is we're we're really talking about a public that is really angry about immigration and thinks that immigration is far lower than it is.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: So if you know if that message were effectively communicated at the real scale, just imagine the tide of public opinion against the current policy that we've gone.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in terms of that question about the nation, um most uh most thinkers, most political thinkers, whether it's politicians, journalists, whatever, don't think about the nation-state in those terms whatsoever, if they think about the nation-state at all.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um there are those on the left who think about the nation-state in terms of economics, but through a slightly different lens.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: They think about it through the lens of workers.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh, you know, many of them will accept the legitimacy of borders, uh, you know, lest we forget that that uh there are passages of Marx where he excoriates the impact of of Irish migration on English workers.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: So there is a kind of Marxist case there for border control.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: But um the vast majority of people don't think about it in those terms whatsoever.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: They think it purely economic terms.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um I say this as somebody who who works for a free market thing today, right?
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: I I care a lot about economics.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: I do think we need to be building more, you know.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: I am a kind of um an economic liberal in some ways, in many ways, um, but I still have a very acute sense of the nation state, partly because I think that that our tradition of economic and social and political liberalism is a feature of our national characteristics, right?
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's not random and nor is it intellectual.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't come at it through liberal philosophy.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: We we have norms which lend themselves towards what we then post hoc call liberalism.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that isn't true for most people in politics.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: They think first about whether we should be, I mean, if they're thinking about this stuff at all, whether we should be a country that is liberal, a country that is socialist, etc.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: But we think about that through primarily economic lens, what what grows the GDP line?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, actually, most of them are already thinking about that.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: They're thinking about their particular policy bugbears, like, you know, if you work in in healthcare policy, all you're thinking about is how do you get the waiting list down.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't need to therefore think about the wider implications of, okay, so if we bring in healthcare workers and then they settle, what are the impacts on the nation state as a whole?
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: They're just thinking, well, as long as it gets the waiting list down, I've done my job, right?
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I I tick the box.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of siloed thinking.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, a nation is it's hard to conceptualize because it's lots of different silos, it's hundreds of different silos, communities, sectors, uh, policy areas, etc.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the number of people thinking holistically about this within the Westminster space is is small.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: They are there, I promise, but there are not very many of them.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: You made a point there, which I think references someone that we both admire and indeed is or has been a guest on this show, uh, Professor Alan McFarlane, who, when we spoke, he made the case that you know culture is the thing that creates technological uh take up, advancement, uh political systems, and so anything that we look at in um the modern world and the various isms that have sprouted from it, whether it's liberalism, as you just pointed out, is because these were part of the natural English settlement, and then as England and then Britain expanded its influence, these things were exported.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: But the ability to be able to make uh all of these great inventions and uh political ideas and the various contributions to the Enlightenment were downstream of English and British sensibilities.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is a concern of, I wouldn't just say the online right.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think there are economic liberals like Garrett Jones, for example, who's who's written the culture transplant, makes the point that culture has a long tail.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so it and it lasts for generations.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: So if you have different peoples from different areas moving into countries, how how economically uh viable they are, or the contributions they make, or the kind of um businesses they even set up is directly linked to their culture.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose uh where am I going with this?
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, is if we have uh demographic change taking place on a on a large scale.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: So you've you talked about a million Indians in the last four years, uh, we've gotten large numbers of Nigerians and uh Pakistanis.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're currently at around 80% white British as a country as a whole, but that's 36% in London.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, is if we're saying that uh political sensibilities, economic systems of downstream of culture, and we know that um large numbers of peoples equals culture, um, then let's think about some of the other reality about whether we can move the dial on some of the immigration questions you've talked about, because we've got a home office that has multicultural networks.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: One of them is a 700-strong Muslim activist base who are trying to change home office policy for Muslim leads.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: We've even got a leader of the opposition who is proudly Aruba Nigerian and is and has spoken about wanting to have uh more people like her around.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: So she wants to open those doors.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: And not saying she said that recently, but that's a paraphrase.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose if we are seeing uh different peoples advocating for their own interests and large-scale demographic change, the collapse within birth rates, is here's the killer question, which everyone always intimates in a doomerist way online, which is like Britain's finished, um, but in a slightly less uh hyperbolic tone.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh is there a risk here that because of all of those factors, that in say 50 years' time when the demographics have changed so much, that our political institutions may well, and and their economics, our culture may look totally unrecognizable?
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's always a risk.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's always been a risk, right?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: Throughout all of history.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: There has always been a risk.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um the risk now is is greater for various reasons.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the reason that we've been able to have a successful country for a millennium is because we've been very careful with it, and we've we've been very cautious, we've been very good at resisting invasion.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, one you know, as uh Professor McFarland rightly identifies, uh, one of the peculiar features of of England and of Britain in general is that we've had a very high level of internal migration, like people moving from Warwickshire to London to Wert in the 1400s, etc.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: But a very low level of external migration.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: So high internal churn, but effectively uh for most of history, very little external migration.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um there is there's a of course there's a huge risk, and we're already seeing it, right?
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's not this is a prospective risk.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is something that is happening.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: And what we can do is we can slow it or we can reverse it, but it's already happening.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll give you some examples.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I wrote an article at the beginning of the last general election campaign arguing that at least four seats would flip to Muslim independents who are campaigning primarily with an eye on the Muslim community rather than on making broad national prescriptions.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: Independent candidates running against the Labour Party.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I was told that I was being hyperbolic and that actually, you know, in these communities the Labour Party was strong, these were people who cared about social democratic ideas, etc.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: Guess what?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: Guess what happened on election?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly the four seats that I identified flipped.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there were a number of others where it was run really, really close.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: Jess Phillips' seat in Birmingham, Bills of North, which is where West Streeting lives, uh, a number of others, high-profile Labour figures, including the Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood in another part of Birmingham.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the, you know, those MPs, we have already seen this in this parliament.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: They do not fit the ideological norms of British politics.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: These are people who voted for the retention of VAT uh carve-outs for independent schools because Muslim schools benefit from those carve-outs.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's traditionally a right-wing idea.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: But they've also voted against restrictions on cousin marriage, which is not a very right-wing idea in the current political climate.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: The reason is that they are appealing to a particular community.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: Their norms align with those of a particular community.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: Generally, it's Pakistani Muslims in the four cases that we can identify here, but it's not exclusively.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: In East London, um, I you know, I encourage everybody to go away and read about Tower Hamlets and what's happening in Tower Hamlets, a borough that is now uh 36% Bangladeshi by origin, and where Bangladeshi patronage networks uh are beginning or have begun for the last decade or so uh to influence the way that government happens at a local level.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um you may be interested to know that you know, while Tower Hamlets is the most corrupt part of Britain, it's probably the least corrupt part of Bangladesh, right?
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: On that cultural transfer point.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um of course its political culture is going to look more like the home country of those who've come over because at that scale there can be no integration.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like we're talking about the Huguenots.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: Came to England, very small numbers over a very long period of time, spread out very thinly, and therefore integrated.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you could know you you you uh and most people listening almost certainly could not identify who was a Huguenot and who is not.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you could probably identify who had come to the country in the last couple of years.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: You probably could have a decent guess at that.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that is because we are talking about uh not just cultural change but cultural transfer.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: Some of these communities are now so segregated from the norm in terms of not just the population and where they're living, but the services that they access.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: So schools becoming uh majority or plurality one community, uh healthcare services tailoring themselves to meet the needs of that community, the media markets that they're engaging with, right?
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the reason that I was uh called hysterical for predicting this uh this big wave of Muslim independent support was that uh most people in the mainstream press don't interact with Muslim media.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: They don't engage with it, right?
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: And and nor do most Muslims in these communities engage the mainstream media, right?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: But we created it is a two-pillar society.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, it's more than two pillars, it's many pillars, um, some of which are larger than others.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just you know, there is a tendency, I think, on the right to pick on the Muslim community.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um not the case.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there are now areas of the country where the Indian community, primarily Hindi, is starting to exercise serious influence over politics.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: In Harrow, uh, 1922 committee chairman Bob Blackman, so the most senior backbencher in the Conservative Party, uh, wins, despite the fact that his constituency is about 55-60% Indian.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: And he does so by doing things like hosting rallies for Narendra Modi in London.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it cuts across a number of communities now.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: We are seeing, you know, not prospectively, we are currently seeing uh cultural transfer from certain other countries to this country as a result of mass migration.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: It will get worse if, you know, first of all, if the immigration wave continues.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: But secondly, if we don't sever that link between immigration and citizenship, uh, or indeed that vote between Commonwealth citizenship and voting, those two links will help to drive and deepen that change uh pretty rapidly over the next couple of years.
• 35:35
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• 35:40
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• 35:48
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• 36:04
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• 36:07
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• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: The examples of these um these uh cultural transfers you talked about are abound, and as you mentioned, it isn't um it isn't strictly um concentrated on Muslim communities.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um indeed I was reading the other day about how there are uh there's a Sikh justice system that also operates within within the country.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: And this again is a bit of a an online talking point, but thinking about the concentrations of um these different peoples that are now making up the majority of lots of uh former industrial towns in uh in the north.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: We obviously have lots uh of our our big cities, including our second city, including London to a degree.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um an online talking point is that we've got a bit of a Danelaw situation going on here with a fragmented country.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um and clearly that was before the formation of England proper.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: But going off into the future, um there seems to be a potential, not potential, probably a quite real possibility of a crisis of legitimacy, where uh this back to that social contract point is if you've got lots of different peoples advocating for their own cultural, ethnic, religious interests, and we've got this centralized taxation system which is continuing to see transfers out to different peoples and potentially client groups, there is that seems like a recipe for political national collapse, and I know it sounds doomerist, but um it's it's happened throughout history.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and I suppose again, as someone who spends time around SW1, certainly more than I do, um can we envisage um a British state uh moving towards solutions like the Swedes and the Swiss have, where not only have they started to aim for a kind of net uh negative migration, and they've started to uh reduce benefits, reduce uh the ability to get access to um state services, citizenship, but they've also started to revoke citizenship from people who are members of families who've been there for generations and have taken more from what they've paid in.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I I think when I speak to people, you'll typically be met with, well, this is Britain, we do things differently.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think people envisage those situations as being a very nasty situation, bad for optics.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: Indeed, Margill Farage spoke to Winston Marshall about this and said, We're not getting near deportations or anything like that.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: We we're gonna we'll we'll alienate people and it's gonna look terrible.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: There's no political will for it to happen.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: Do you envisage a point where the political class may consider that?
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: Or do you think um the British way of uh attempting to govern liberally, even though it's not really doing so at the moment, is so deeply ingrained, the taboo is so ingrained uh with anyone who is non-white that they would never consider those measures?
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: Or do you think we're we're seeing the the rise of a political sentiment amongst people of all types that will make it unavoidable to uh make those those tough decisions in future?
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we're different, but we're not that different, right?
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: We're still a European country facing maybe the same pressures as our European peers.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, do I think we'll move more slowly on it?
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I do.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we we are already moving more slowly on it.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: There are all sorts of institutional and cultural reasons for that.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I I I do I think we will reach uh broadly the position of countries like the Netherlands, right?
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: Famously liberal Netherlands, right?
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the people that we used to look at and say they're crazy liberals, they go too far, right?
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the Netherlands is there now, it's currently in the process of trying to implement such policies.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: They have actually, on that ILR point from before, they have moved their settlement period from five years to ten years in in the last six months.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: So we're we're you know, this is no longer perspective, this is no longer the rise of the right, this is the right beginning to govern.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: And um, one way or another, whether that's through the Danish model, where it happens through uh centre-left party, or whether it's through the more traditional route uh of the right, uh policies like these I think are are essentially uh not an inevitability, nothing is ever inevitable in politics.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: But but I can I can see a world in which we get uh to that kind of policy environment.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I just think it's worth noting on the on the Danelaw point, um, what we have is more like the Ottoman millet system, wherein different communities have parallel institutions, like courts, schools, uh political advocacy organizations, etc.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's it's worth reflecting that that is the way that the British state has decided to deal with multiculturalism, is to take power over certain communities away from the centralized state and towards uh minority communities.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: The difference with the Ossman millet system is that the majority group in the Ottoman millet system was legally uh protected, right?
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas the majority group in the uh British so-called meditation is taxed more heavily uh and treated more strictly by the law.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's not about a particular racial group, it's about a culture.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that culture, you know, the people who are in what you call normal Britain, who engage with Britain through the normal lens of the state, those people are taxed more heavily, uh, or they certainly are more likely to be contributors to tax than detractors.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: They are um certainly uh treated more strictly by the law.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we have not just a minute system, we have the worst minute system possible, which is where in your your most uh productive and your most law-abiding group is treated worse than the minority communities.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so you know, it's even somehow even worse than the Dane law.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: We've been here before, but it's somehow even worse.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, which I think is why we will move to this sort of policy environment.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: Look, you know, a lot of people will find it uncomfortable.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but what will also be uncomfortable is a world in which the streets are not safe, the economy isn't working, uh, people feel totally alien in their own communities, uh, they feel they've got no control over democratic processes or over border control.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's that's that's also a scary world, right?
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's not kinder to allow the experiment to continue to be inflicted upon nearly 70 million people.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's by no means kind.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's it's it's a far worse and more pernicious uh kind of carelessness uh than it would take to be a little bit callous and a little bit tough and to say, look, you know, we expect the level of of participation, uh, we don't want to have the migration system that we've got at the moment, and we certainly don't want to link that migration citizenship.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the experiment you're talking about, I dare say even if people wouldn't necessarily um formulate it in their consciousness that why they left the country.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: But if we look at the half a million people who do leave this country every year, there's every chance it's because they feel like the the the the the system is not working in their favour.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, indeed, we we lose an awful lot of people who Are well educated, uh, would be positive contributors to society in many different ways, culturally and economically, and they all go off to the Anglosphere nations, you know, former former dominions, uh, and often it's couched because you know it's weather and jeb opportunities, but within that, you know, there's a there's a the reason why they've had to get to that point besides wanting to try something new is because things aren't working here.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe that's a place that we turn to now, Sam, which is I I spoke with uh Professor Robert Tubes recently about um the notion of decline, national decline.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: And he actually made a counter-argument to the ones you'd see from the likes of Constantine Kissin on trigonometry, who says, Well, we can't establish Britain isn't just look decline, look at every metric.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, when we do look at basically everything from the Second World War, it has effectively been that trend line.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: Things are not looking good, and even in this century alone, the metrics suggest that people aren't earning any more money, houses are a lot more expensive, taxes are higher, national debt's really high.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we spend most of our tax now on the NHS and servicing uh debt payments, and we don't seem to create that many new jobs, all of those things.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: Robert Teams um made the point that, well, yeah, but if you still compare us to any other point in history, I mean we're still within the top six richest countries in the world.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, if you compare us to most countries in the world, we still have a very good standard of living.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: However, it's also true to say that Britain was once the richest, the healthiest, and the best educated countries.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: People can say that was because of the empire, whatever.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you think Britain has stagnated so much compared to a great many other countries who haven't experienced the same amount of wage stagnation and the various other issues that we've talked about today?
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, look, people's experience with the world is relative.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, yes, in absolute terms, we'll be richer than we were in 1890, like many, many, many times over.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but there is a relative experience point.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there are a couple of different ways in which we could say that Britain's declined.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_00: So there was a there's been a relative power decline since about the 1920s.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's really crystallized by the Second World War.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's in relation to America, but also in relation to other ascendant powers.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason that that matters is that it gives us less control over the world around us.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're a smaller military or a smaller economy, etc., you have less relative control over what happens in the world around you, which can make you feel uh that you're not a country that can kind of sway things in its favour.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_00: There was a level of inevitability to that.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it was inevitable, but there was a level of inevitability.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: Britain wouldn't be the undisputed number one forever.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then we made a number of bad choices over the 1920s that really made sure that was going to happen.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, chief among them, the Washington Naval Treaty.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: But that isn't really what people talk about when they talk about decline.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um there is a there is an economic stagnation, but that really sets in in 2008.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's a 2008 problem, and that's a 2008 problem in every Western European country.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, in fact, we've we've come out of it probably a little stronger uh in terms of relative decline to a country like Germany, which is starting to see a precipitous fall in its uh in its industrial base.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, in economic terms, that stagnation is really a 2008 problem.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, unless we forget, you know, in 2007, we had the same per capita GDP as the Americans.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, British companies like Vodafone had a bigger market cap than a company like Nvidia, right?
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: Go and go away and compare those stock prices now.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: We we were still a serious economic player, and in many ways we still are, right?
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: The City of London and London as a whole is still a huge financial centre.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's still the capital of global forex trading, it's still a massive uh market for all sorts of financial services.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we're the only European country with the real tech sector, we're third or fourth for uh capital investment coming from outside the country.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we have some very good fundamentals, um, as well as institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, which you know I'll go anywhere anytime soon.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_00: But what we've done is we've we've put in place the worst possible policies on top of those good fundamentals, and that has been a choice.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: At every stage has been a choice.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, our failure to tackle crime has been a choice, our decisions on mass migration have been a choice, and I think the worst decision of all has been the project of political reordering since 1997, since the blade is, wherein we've taken power away from ministers who were very, very powerful during the actual major years.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_00: They had a lot of discretionary power.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: We've taken power away from them and we've given it to bureaucrats, to Quangos.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: We've gone from about 25 major economic regulators to about 95 over that period.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: We've uh got about 500 arm's length bodies, 480 or so, um, which have power over regulation in different areas of the economy.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: That makes it very difficult alongside things like the expansion of human rights law, makes it very difficult for elected politicians to actually do things.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: So we've we've, as of other countries in Europe, we've gone up, well, you know, we can't trust the politicians.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_00: They got it wrong on 2008, they got it wrong in the 90s, etc.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Thatcher was far too harsh.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what we're gonna do is we're gonna make sure that the experts can decide.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: We've also experts, regulators, courts, quangos, etc.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's gone terribly.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's been an awful decision.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_00: And you combine that with our dreadful planning system, which is kind of trying to freeze the country in amber as it was in 1947 when we passed the Town of Country Planning Act.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it's no wonder that nothing happens, right?
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: We've made it hard to build stuff.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we're less relatively powerful on the global stage than we were.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, that was maybe going to happen anyway, but but we certainly didn't have to compound it with terrible domestic decisions like we've done uh time and time again, pretty much every year since 1997.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder how deeply this is a policy problem or whether this is a political class problem.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that sounds like a bit of a banal comment to make, but I was reading uh a substract post of Dominic Cummings, which he wrote last December, and it was where he explained how he had spent the last 20 years reading about Bismarck in Germany, the great German statesman that unified the country, you know, this man with the gentle voice but was unbelievably ruthless and was able to bend uh the the world uh political um um uh the political world to his to his will and uh create things um which no other politician would have done.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: And and Cummings suggested, well, this is a man who understands human nature and he knew history.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: And Cummings was explaining how his experience in whether it's Westminster and just politics more broadly, whether it's local or national, is that we're governed by people who are utterly incurious about history, they don't they don't seek to learn the general principles of it, they don't even try to understand how the media works or indeed how politics works.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so you find that we are governed by this Hurz-like mentality, and it makes me wonder whether the system in which we have now just lends itself to that.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, most people who go through the university system end up coming out with a global good view of the world, so every policy has to be about making the world better, and if that means that you know we live a little bit less comfortably, then that's fine, it's a good thing, it's our duty.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but there doesn't really seem to be any forward thinking.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's all reactive to world events and being truly shocked by an invasion over here or whatever over there.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it it makes me wonder whether we are.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: I know people use the NPC, the non-player character uh meme to talk about how this is just how everyday people they get their they get their um uh political leanings from whatever permission is given by the people on screen or in print, but it almost feels like that's our political class too, that we're governed by NPCs.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't know.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how we get out of that.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_00: Oh well the the the the general public are far more conscious thinkers than most people in politics, right?
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: No question about it, because they they don't have any of the pretense that comes up around working in in politics.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um there is truth to this, it's a personnel problem, but it's worth remembering it hasn't always been a personnel problem.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: There has to have been a point where we went from getting the wrong personnel to getting or getting the right personnel to getting the wrong personnel, and and for me again, that goes back to policy, but in hiring terms, we hire differently than we used to for things like the civil service, um, you know, even since the 1980s.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_00: Media is a part of it, the way that we engage in with media.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um the you know, part of Tony Blair's success was in recognizing that the British media in in the late 1990s was actually extraordinarily powerful, um, because it was the tool through which everybody got their news.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I'm relatively hopeful uh about whether we start getting the right people in politics and the right ideas in politics over the next uh say decade uh is that those institutions are all dying.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: The old media organizations are all dying.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's now um people go online to get their news.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_00: There are insurgent offerings like GB News, you know, YouTube is is is a really important way in which people engage with news and ideas.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm always, you know, this idea of in curiosity.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um talk to the normal, you know, you will find people out there, hundreds of thousands of them, who engage with really interesting ideas through whether it's through, you know, could be the Joe Rogan experience, could be this podcast, could be um the rest of history, you know.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_00: The the the but the but this is the way that ideas communicate now.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um the the the fact that the rest is history, which you know is not explicitly political, but it is, let's be real, a kind of curious, centre-right, gently center-right uh podcast.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that they can fill stadiums is pretty interesting, you know.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a stadium full of normal people, they're not full of uh you know, high intellectuals, academics, whatever.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's normal people who want to engage with history because they find it interesting.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we are breaking the media stranglehold, which I think will make it easier for people to access and transmit these ideas, not just radical political ideas, but interesting historical ideas, right?
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: Teaching people about their own national history, teaching them about the world around them.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: And in doing so, we will make it easier for those of us who are unhappy with the SW1 consensus to start getting into politics in a serious and concerted way.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_01: So, I'm I've been meaning to create a testimonial page for my my podcast to say what people have been saying about it and bring more subscribers in.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I've I'm absolutely lifting up the section where you sandwich thinking class in between the Joe Rogan experience and the rest is history.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Sam.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_01: I've really enjoyed our discussion today.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: We covered a lot of ground.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: The one question I'd like to ask every one of my guests to really get into their mind and how they ended up where they are, um, but also just how things have changed for them is if there's anything in your life that you changed your mind about that you once thought was a universal truth absolutely set in stone, but that changed.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: What was it that made you change your mind?
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, so look, I've always been the kind of sounding idea of my politics has always been the nation-state.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: I've always been nationalist, I've always cared about immigration.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, my kind of political, first political moment was Brexit, really, and support for Brexit.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I've become less statist over time.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I wasn't, you know, if you spoke to me at the beginning of my university tenure, I was a bit more of a big stater.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, well, you know, states are very powerful organizations, they can do an awful lot.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and they can, they still can, right?
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_00: They they can, but but what I've what I've come see through the study of history, through the study of of places like 20th century Hong Kong, Singapore, uh, even contemporary examples like uh Naya Bukele in El Salvador, what I've come to see is over time, um, states should focus on doing a few things very well rather than lots of things in a kind of middling way.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, over time I've become probably more I don't like the term libertarian or classical liberal, but I you know I'd become less of a believer that state power is always the way to solve problems.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: I I often try and grapple with that myself, is I I seem to fluctuate between the need to have some kind of uh government intervention, but then when I find myself trying to figure out where that ought to be, I really I really struggle.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then on the same side of things, I realise that by having a really, really small one that things can be ineffective.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_01: I I suppose um I suppose I always grapple with the local and the central government.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: There are times where I think, you know, we could deal with the the power of the states of the US, you know, and the ability to make your own decisions for your own region because you you live there and probably understand it a bit more, and then at the same token look at the impact of the evolution uh on this country.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna say you're in Scotland, aren't you?
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in Scotland.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it's all it's it it's it's interesting, Steph.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_01: I I was speaking to Paul Morland on an episode uh with with Ed West, and one of the things he said he changed his mind on was uh government intervention in various areas.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_01: He he never considered himself to be a libertarian per se, but in the context of culture, he actually thinks there needs to be a more paternalistic government that safeguards safeguards culture.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so he was he was trying to make a few other points which were outside of the uh realm of you know deciding all economic policy and the various angles.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_01: So with your becoming lost statist, where do you where do you think you would where do you think we need state intervention?
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's something that should be governed, and why is it that you think it should be left more open to emergent and emergent uh um cultural uh norms and what have you?
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean again, I I'm I'm not uh kind of ideological libertarian, right?
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's empiricism all the way through.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_00: So national security, the border, policing, roads.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a good thing for a state to do.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, since the medieval times, the state's always done the King's Highway.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we probably can't completely undo uh living in a world where backstops on things like health care and pensions are provided by the state, but it doesn't mean everybody should be receiving primarily their care, whether that's pensions or healthcare, through the state.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think we're seeing the flaws with the current um universal model that we've got.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, culture's an interesting one.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_00: Culture is one of the areas where I've become less statist over time.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think the the depressing thing that I've come to realise is that um the only way that a culture maintains its own national traditions is is by having.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, look, you know, Victorians are a great example.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_00: Victorians didn't have Arts Capital England, it was through the work and support of philanthropists and the third sector that Victorian England and Britain as a whole had a great cultural life and a great civic life.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think it's very hard to be a country that preserves its culture in those very visible ways without also being a growing economy.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think there are all sorts of ways that that um the private sector supports a thriving national culture.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, philanthropic causes is certainly one of them.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I what I don't see as a solution is the state handing out uh grants of cash, whether directly from ministers or from a kind of quango, um, in the hopes of kind of keeping the thing alive.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like unless people have enough disposable income to go to the theatre, then theatres aren't going to survive.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_00: Unless there are enough people who feel that they need to up their own cultural capital, you know, the classic example of those Victorians, once again, who become wealthy from merchant trade or industrialization, and then who feel that to access the the real upper class, right, to become not just Nouveau Reich, but riche, they need to start contributing to cultural courses, right?
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_00: That the you go to any opera house, anywhere in the country, go to any theatre, go to any community hall, go to lots of our civic spaces, you will find that the the bequeath of a up-and-coming, you know, the equivalent of the Essex Man of the 1800s is what supported the growth of that institution.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_00: I I think there is very little prospect for a thriving national culture without some level of economic growth.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely right.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: I was reading an excellent book by a local historian, local in the context of me being a Northumbrian, called Dan Jackson, and it was called the Northumbrians.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: And in there he describes how in 19th century Newcastle, famous of course for all of its industry, shipbuilding, coal mining, is there was this huge amount of interest in literary um affairs.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_01: And indeed, there was four weekly periodicals, more than any other city in the country, that were being produced every week.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes able to talk about how if you went and spoke to the wives of Pittman, you would you would find, and I noticed this growing up, you would find people of the working classes with these really wide-ranging vocabularies, in the particularly of the older type.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, that's all since gone, but then if you think about the context of of Newcastle, is you know, effectively it's a place for a boozy night out now.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I and I hate to diminish it, I love the city.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_01: But if you compare the pictures of today with the pictures of back then, even when everyone was hard-working tradesmen, is you could see that there was a literary and philosophical society.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay, maybe the high society engaged in that, but everyone else was reading the weekly periodicals, and they were they were they were regurgitating the words and the ideas within that, and it became uh a thriving culture.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so long may well not long may it continue.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_01: Let's hope we can see a uh a return to that somewhere along the line.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm I'm with you.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think you do need economic growth for people to decide that they're gonna spend the money on things that they find they find interesting.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Sam, uh I've got a hard stop coming up.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: I know you've got somewhere to be.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's been an absolute delight speaking to you today.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_01: And before I already go, where can listeners find you, follow you, and what can we expect from you next?
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_00: So uh thanks for having me.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a really interesting discussion.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm on Twitter primarily, so at Sam underscore bidwell, B-I-D-W-E-L-L.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm also along all the normal Adam Smith Institute channels, and uh, you know, viewers can expect more uh amateur anthropology about what makes Britain and England in particular so interesting uh historically.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_00: They can also expect uh some more uh policy ideas about how we can shrink the size of uh Britain's sclerotic state.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_01: Sam, it's been a pleasure until next time.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_01: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_01: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_01: Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_01: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.