The Dispatch Podcast - Conservatives Abroad

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Robert Tyler, senior policy advisory for New Direction, joins Dispatch executive editor Adam O’Neal to sample the different flavors of the European right. -America the good, America the bad -Is Italy's Meloni fascist? -Fusionism and the Czech Republic -Brexit and deregulationLike what we're doing? Please consider becoming a member of TheDispatch.com. You'll be getting a suite of newsletters (including Kevin Williamson's Wanderland, our news-breaking Dispatch Politics, and our flagship daily newsletter The Morning Dispatch), access to additional podcast episodes and exclusive shows, and be invited to members-only live Dispatch events. But most importantly: you'll be helping us keep the lights on. So if you believe in our mission, we hope you'll consider joining us. Show Notes: -Robert Tyler for The Dispatch -About New Direction Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This week I spoke with Robert Tyler, a senior policy advisor at the New Direction Foundation. Robert is based in Brussels, but travels throughout Europe to help build an intellectual framework for conservatives in Europe. In the first half of the podcast, we take a tour of the most interesting European countries that are currently being governed by the right. After a quick break, we turn around to focus on Robert's native United Kingdom for a closer look at the governing record of the UK Conservatives. If there are any other areas in foreign policy that you'd like us to explore more, let me know in the comments. Anyway, let's get into the show. Robert Tyler, welcome to the Dispatch podcast. Thanks for coming by.

Thanks so much for having me. So Robert Tyler, we've said you work at New Direction, a think tank based in Brussels. What do you do all day? What is it that a senior policy advisor does at this think tank? So New Direction is in this kind of weird position where what's described as a political foundation. So that's to say we work directly with center-right to conservative think tanks, or center-right political parties across Europe. So we're talking about people like Georgia Maloney in Italy,

Peter Fiala in the Czech Republic, or Prime Minister Mautaisozo Moravitsky in Poland. And what we do is effectively offer the intellectual backing to the European Conservative movement. We kind of work together with different academics and intellectuals and foundations to come up with what can be described as a coherent European conservatism.

Yeah, I remember meeting you at a conference in Brussels. I won't mention the name, but I always am amused when I go and talk to conservatives in Europe because sometimes I'll meet someone who basically would be in the left wing of the Democratic Party, but has one conservative position maybe. In Europe, they're considered a conservative, right? Do you think it's sort of even possible to have a coherent European conservative position, given how different the countries are? I mean, I just think about the United States and what a California Republican looks like

compared to a Florida one, for example. Yeah, and I think you're right to be skeptical because, you know, conservatism isn't just as diverse as every single country. It's as diverse as even regions. You know, we find in some countries there are even regional. identities of conservatism or flavors of conservatism. What's interesting, though, is you find, I would say, common themes. There's like a thread that runs through different conservative political parties in Europe,

and they draw from similar inspiration. And sometimes that inspiration can be quite surprising. For example, one of the things that unifies Czech, Italian, and Swedish conservatism is their love of the British philosopher Roger Scruton. Right, right. And what, aside from the late Roger Scruton, what are the issues that unite sort of the European conservatives, if you could say that? I think there's several areas, the first of which is obviously a skepticism towards the European

project, this idea that the European Union is effectively taking too much power away from the individual member states, it's drawing it towards Brussels, it's becoming a more of a centralized blob that controls different facets of daily life. And what you find in the European conservative movement is that they want to break away from it. They want more power back in the hands of the member states and the people. A second facet to all of this is a kind of common view of foreign policy. The conservative movement in Europe is fundamentally inspired by transatlanticism. They look a lot to the United States for ideas. They're deeply inspired by the history of people like Ronald Reagan, for example. And on top of that, it's not just

their love of the English-speaking world. It's also a kind of fear and loathing of authoritarianism abroad, for example, Russia and China. I guess that would be the ideal conservative movement because you also have the sort of backlash, like the disdain for America in a way that they say, well, if we were American, we would behave that way, but we're European. We protect our sovereignty, so we don't necessarily like this whole NATO thing that's going on. But it's interesting that you mentioned looking to America for ideas because it seems here in Washington, D.C., so many Americans are constantly talking about this little central European country

with the GDP of Kansas, Hungary. And with maybe way too many words have been written about that. Many too many, way too many hours of podcasts have been recorded about. it but i was thinking maybe we could just go down and check in on some of the european conservatives who are in power now aside from that tiny little insignificant country that's a bit of a thorn people's sides uh and see what someone listening to the dispatch someone looking for sane conservatism often maybe they feel like there's not much of that left in the united states outside of this little oasis we've created but looking beyond that where in italy where's a

a bright spot in terms of center-right governance and something that American conservatives is they're going through it and figuring out what they want. Maybe Italy, we could start there. I think Italy is a very interesting place to start because it's ultimately one of the younger conservative governments in Europe. And if you look at Italy's recent history, it has been plagued by a series of technocratic governments that have been imposed where there's been no real ideology behind it. You know, you might have had people from the center who identify normally as center right or center left in charge, but fundamentally what these were were governments that didn't really have any particular ideological sway. They just did things to keep things ticking

over. They were managed from abroad almost in terms of finances during the financial crisis. So what Maloney has done is... Let's take a step back. Who is Maloney? Who's in charge of Italy right now? We're the party. Who are the players? So you have Georgia Maloney, who is the leader of what's called the Brothers of Italy Party, which is a kind of national conservative-leaning political party. It's a fairly young entry into Italian politics, having only been founded about 10 years ago. And at the last election, they only got around 4% or 5%, so they were relatively small.

What happened, though, is that Maloney, who is this... very, she's sort of a young upstart. She came to prominence originally under Belisconi's government when she was a minister for youth and education, but has since risen in her own right and with a lot of support from traditional conservatives, but also from classical liberals, which is kind of new in Italian politics. And what happened is, as the leader of this party, She was very outspoken on topics that other people wouldn't dare to talk about. She was very open about immigration, about talking about the fact that too many people were crossing the Mediterranean into Italy. She was outspoken on Europe, basically saying that enough is enough.

We can't keep having this sort of austerity imposed on us from Brussels. She has been very good on economic matters, where she has basically said that the state budget is too big and too reckless. And she basically took the principled stance in 2020 when the government collapsed and reformed as a multi-party coalition of basically saying, I'm going to be the only party in opposition. Everyone else from the communists to the far right formed one coalition government, and Maloney said, I'm going to sit on the outside. And what inevitably happened is people who were dissatisfied and disaffected with this super coalition government started turning to her. And they started listening to her. Because rather than being a populist in the same way Belisconi was, she actually had a clear... You should say, Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire playboy businessman who recently died.

And I think he was the longest serving post-war minister or prime minister in Italy, if I'm not saying. I think so. A giant in Italian politics. Basically, he was the Italian right for 20, 25 years. Exactly. I mean, he was such an enormous figure. But he never really had a clear ideology. He was in some ways like Donald Trump in that he was a...

a kind of populist who lent to the right. And Maloney, on the other hand, came in and said, no, I'm inspired by people like Roger Scruton. I believe in market values. I believe in real conservatism in a kind of Anglo-Saxon tradition. And people started to connect to it. They started to think, yes, all of this talk about being proud of your country and your homeland, but because it's something that, you know, because it's a country that we can love. because it's not corrupt and so on, it started to resonate with people who switched to her.

They started to vote for her. In the end, she scored one of the highest results for a center-right party in recent Italian history when she got around 30% of the vote. Right. And so she's governing in a coalition, but she's clearly the top dog in Italian politics. What is, and if you were reading about her and some folks that some of our listeners were sort of interested in these things, might have seen some headlines a fascist party gets elected into parliament or the the fascist georgia maloney or the far far right but she seems to have governed quite differently where so one

where does the fascist label come from and that's a it's a recurring theme more in the united states but it's always been in europe and the difference usually is we can debate the united set that set that aside for a second but some of them actually are fascists in europe on the rights you know you and i've met them. We know them. So how does she distinguish herself from that old perception of being a far-right fascist or, you know, a little Mussolini or something like that? Well, the first thing to understand is that within Italy itself, no one has referred to her as a fascist. This idea of the fascist Maloney really comes, I would say, from outside of Italy. It comes from people who don't really understand Italian politics or the Italian tradition.

The label comes from a predecessor party of the brothers of Italy called the Italian Social Movement, which was founded in the 1950s. And it was really a party that dominated southern Italian politics. It was very statist, but still conservative. It attracted members of former fascist parties, but very quickly shed them and shed the label and became more of a convention. conservative party that took an interest in kind of the more working-class people who had been disaffected because one of the things about Italian politics is that the north is incredibly rich, whereas the South is incredibly poor and feels very isolated from politics in Rome. And they played to that.

Now, that party merged into Sylvia Belisconi's Forza Italia. A lot of the members of parliament stayed with Forza until Maloney eventually split. and created the brothers of Italy. So people tried to associate the split by saying, well, you know, it's the descendants of the fascist wing. But actually, it's not. They are very much from a more anglophile branch of conservatism. As I said, she's a big supporter of the ideas of Roger Scruton.

She's certainly admirer of people like Russell Kirk. And she's a disciple of people like Ronald Reagan as well. Well, the one thing about her governance that I think has surprised a lot of people given Italy in their, frankly, pro-Russian disposition of the average Italian, is that Maloney, who you would expect to be associated with Vladimir Putin, given Salvini, the previous rock star of the Italian right, and also Berlusconi and his great friendship with Putin, you would think that she would follow in that tradition of the Italian right, bear hugging, mad vlad but in reality what's happened is she has been arguably the most pro ukraine the most pro ukraine european politician outside of let's say poland or the baltic states one what does this say for conservatives who are kind of grappling conservatives in america who are grappling with the ukraine issue and what is what of the what has the result been for her in italy is that damaged her position or is it uh how has it changed things since she's taken

power. So the interesting thing about Maloney's position on Ukraine is she's very much going against the grain of her own country. According to most opinion polls, a majority of the Italian public are either indifferent or hostile to the idea of arming Ukraine in its fight against Russia. She's very much setting the tone in saying, no, this is our fight as well as theirs. And the reason she comes to that is actually from her kind of more nationalist side. Her belief that of the sort of in the sovereignty of the nation state, this idea that states have boundaries and borders and they need to be protected. And what she sees in Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty. And she believes that the only reasonable position that a nationalist and

a conservative should take is the defense of the territorial integrity of another country. There's another kind of smaller, and I was needling the small countries, you know, not like Italy with its 60, 70 million people. But the Czech That's one that's particularly interesting because it's really, as far as I know, on pretty much no one's radars here, but you were saying we're chatting before that actually some interesting things happening with the center right party that's in power now. What's the background? When did they come to power? What's the agenda? What are they up to over in the Czech Republic? Or is it Chetia? Or do we not want to go down that? We won't go down the naming thing because even in the Czech Republic, it's controversial. What's interesting about the Czech Republic is that for the last decade, politics has been dominated by a kind of populist oligarch who was corrupt. He defrauded the state.

He put his own people in charge of all of the key institutions, including the media. He's very much governed out of a kind of vague populism that can't really be defined. You know, you can't tell if he's right or left. And he was incredibly popular for that. However, the opposition, because it was so disunified, kept failing to oust him, even though he was corrupt, even though there were criminal cases against him, they couldn't break through. So what happened is the center-right parties of different degrees. So you have libertarians, classical liberals, neocons, and national conservatives formed a joint list to take. take him on. And they managed to win a majority out of it. And what I think is interesting

about the Czech Republic and what it provides a kind of model of is this idea that fusionism on the center right isn't dead. There's a lot of people in the English-speaking world who will say, well, we tried fusionism. It doesn't work. We need to move on. We need something different. You have people like Vermewell who are sort of saying, well, we should only have a kind of Christian right. You have people at Yerom Hasni saying we can only have national conservatives. You have even the libertarians saying, well, let's cut ourselves off from the conservative movement. What the Czech Republic has done is proved a kind of proof of concept that fusionism is still there, that you can not only win by being unified, but you can govern

successfully. And the new Czech government has actually become incredibly popular. It's put through market reform. It has been very vocal in support for Ukraine. But above all, it's been very hawkish on China, which is something that you haven't seen in a lot of European countries yet. So they've followed the kind of American line on support for Taiwan. Do you see that increasingly, not just there, but in Europe, the European right outside of, you know, that little country that everyone talks about that has really embraced China and kowtowed kind of in an embarrassing fashion? My words, not yours. But do you see this more on the European right, the understanding that, actually the Americans are probably right and maybe we shouldn't be so dependent on China and

maybe they're actually not a force for good in the world and they're more important things than selling them lots of cars yeah there's been a very slow awakening in Europe I think there's in the last three years been a realization that overdependence on China is a threat and it's interesting that all of this has started first in the countries that was subject to Soviet communism. It started in the Baltic states and Poland and the Czech Republic, as these are countries that remember what it was like to live under communism, and they're watching suddenly as Europe becomes, once again, dependent on a communist country.

So they've been very vocal in not just the calling out the regime in Beijing, but also in defending places like Hong Kong and Taiwan. There used to be a platform in which these countries had a special economic relationship with China. Famously, all three Baltic states withdrew, the Czech Republic withdrew, Poland withdrew. I think Romania has frozen their membership of it. There's a real backlash now. And it's starting to pick up a bit in the rest of Europe. So Georgia Maloney, again, has been the sort of surprise spokesperson for the anti-China movement in Europe.

I think she withdrew from the big Chinese industry. infrastructure project, the Belt and Road initiative, right? Which, it was controversial even when the Italian left joined it a few years ago. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is, the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious.

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I'm so used to writing. The story is giving me a look here. our listeners might enjoy the conservatives on paper in the UK, pretty impressive. You are a Brit. You're from the UK. You're, if I recall, a member of the Tory Party. And I think that's what our readers might find interesting because here in the United States, we're struggling as conservatives, as people on the right, whatever you want to say, to have a cohesive movement and to retake power and to use it responsibly. something that last happened in 2017, not that it was used responsibly or cohesive,

but the last time conservatives were in power. Whereas it's almost the reverse in the UK where the conservatives have complete domination numbers-wise of parliament and they keep running through prime ministers, but they're in a great position, but you're kind of down on what they've done since they came into power. So why don't we go back to 2010 when there's this guy named Gordon Brown, the labor leader, running the country. What happens and how do the conservatives first get into power? What are they running on? What is the agenda? What does British politics look like in 2010, way before this whole, this new word called Brexit was invented? So the conservative party under David Cameron was a kind of

liberal conservative party. It was very much running on a platform of we've had 13 years of the Labor Party. Let's have something new. And I think the campaign slogan in 20, was vote for change. Where have we heard that one before? But it was basically a, the conservatives had been in opposition for so long. They had been through several leaders. They had been through factional infighting. And finally, David Cameron seemed like the person who would deliver them victory. And we went into the election in 2010 with this idea that we would come out with a conservative majority government. And you said a liberal conservative party, you mean classically liberal, right? Although there are some things that in the

American political context would be liberal, right? If I recall correctly, Jim Messina, who worked for Barack Obama, helped run David Cameron's re-election in 2015. So we'll get to that in a second. They come into power in 2010 and what's the agenda? How are they trying to reshape the UK after 13 years of the center left party running the show? So the first thing to understand is that when the conservatives came in in 2010, they never actually achieved that majority at the election. So it was the 2010 election was the first election where they had TV debates. And what happened was that the conservatives were there, the Labor Party were there, but the broadcasters insisted that there should be a third party. And so you had Nick Clegg, who was the leader of

the liberal Democrats. And despite all of the polls showing the conservatives in the lead, as soon as the TV debate started and people started tuning in, they started going, oh, well, maybe we should vote for this third party as well. And what happened is we ended up with something called a hung parliament, which is that the Conservatives lacked a majority, the Labor Party lacked a majority, and the Liberal Democrats became the kind of kingmaker. So we ended up with our first coalition government since the Second World War between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives. And what happened was that the Cabinet had to be balanced between liberals and conservatives. So it meant that some of the more traditionally conservative values

that the Conservative Party had stood on had to be put to one side. Like what? Things like judicial reform that were on the books that didn't come through. Things like tougher line on immigration didn't come through.

This sort of more Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party was sidelined because the Liberal Democrats were a traditionally pro-European party. Even some of the sort of tougher welfare reform was held back. But what happened

was that in the coalition, you had this extra degree of scrutiny. You would have Parliament, the cabinet, and then you would have what was kind of described as the quad, which was David Cameron, Nick Clegg, and then you had the finance minister, George Osborne, and the business secretary, Alexander Hammond. And between the four of them, they decided what the agenda was. And it meant that there was extra caution taken with everything. And so we did get some really good reform out of that coalition. What did they do?

Like specifically, because this coalition building, that's obviously not a problem we have here in America. But putting together an agenda, a lot of it is actually the same issues that conservatives might be talking about here. What were they, what did they accomplish in that first five-year term? So one of the big things that I think is still a kind of flagship policy for the coalition was what they called free schools, which I think here in America you would call charter schools. It was this idea that they introduced a degree of choice into the system before it was kind of what we call the postcode lottery. Kids had to go to the nearest school within the district they were living in, which meant that sometimes, you know, there would be bad schools and there was no choice but to send kids there. What they did was basically introduced what they called academies and free schools, which were funded by the state but managed privately. and parents were able to choose which school they sent their kids to.

And this became a big issue. The other thing that came through in those years was welfare reform. They really rolled back on a lot of the generous benefit system that had existed before. They introduced a kind of single system for welfare payments, which saved the state a huge amount of money. And then finally, there was pension reform, which was, whilst boring, kind of necessary, because there was a bubble that was waiting to burst after the financial crisis. Yeah, the conservatives in this country have decided that pension or what we would call entitlement reform is not something they're super keen on, at least at this moment.

But it turns out that they got school choice done, they got welfare and pension reform done, and voters rewarded them for that now in 2015. What did that election look like? So the 2015 election was interesting in that the liberal Democrats having been in coalition for five years with the Conservative Party were punished by the electorate. The public didn't forgive them for what they saw as the wrong of austerity of all these budget cuts and tax cuts. So the Conservative Party were basically given a clean path to victory, because without the Liberal Democrats, a lot of the voters actually switched to the Conservative Party. So they ended

up with a kind of surprised majority. One of the other reasons that happened is that in the intervening years, you had the rise of UKIP, which was Nigel Farage's party. And they... The UK Independence Party, right? Yeah. And they had had this big push for a referendum on our membership of the European Union. David Cameron felt like he was under so much pressure from UKIP to the right of him that the only thing he could do was offer an in our referendum during the election.

And that brought UKIP voters to the Conservative Party. So with that kind of coalition of liberals and more national conservatives, he won a majority in 2015 that no one expected. And he, of course, spent the next five years passing even more conservative reforms and left as a successful two-term prime minister with a long legacy of conservative reform and didn't get distracted by anything else, right? That's the story. Unfortunately not. Oh, no. What was that other thing that happened? Was it like 2015, 2016?

So in 2015, he passes the EU Referendum Act. Oh, okay. For an in-out referendum on EU membership by 2016. And so we end up with a referendum that divides the country and a half. The final result is 52-48. So you couldn't have asked for a closer result if you wanted to. And suddenly, David Cameron is faced with the idea. He, having campaigned to remain, was suddenly faced with the prospect that he would have to

lead the country out. So rather than standing there and taking the country out of the European Union, he announced almost two days after the referendum that he was resigning. You know, I remember when that happened. I was in the newsroom, and it was on TV, and Cameron came out with his lovely little family. And I remember his little kids were crying, either crying or they looked very sad. And a friend turned to me and said, they have no idea how rich dad is about that. to become. So Cameron gets out of government, he just becomes a rich guy. And what happens to the party?

So the party, which had itself been split down the middle by the referendum with about half of the MPs backing leave and half backing remain, were thrust into a leadership election. And what happened is they thought that Boris Johnson was going to stand. At the last minute, one of his allies, the education secretary, Michael Gove, stepped in and announced he was standing. Boris got cold feet and backed out, and we were left with a choice between three candidates, which were Michael Gove, who was the education secretary, Andrea Ledson, who I think was leader of the House of Commons at the time, and Theresa May, who was the Interior Minister or the Home Secretary. And in the leadership election, Michael Gove was very quickly knocked out. So we ended up

with Andrea Ledson, who was for leave, and Theresa May, who was for Remain standing. And within the days, Andrea Ledson also withdrew, and Theresa May effectively became Prime Minister without a challenge. The challenge for her, though, was that because she had voted Remain, she didn't really understand what Leave voters wanted. And so she triggered Article 50, which was the withdrawal mechanism from the European Union, and entered negotiations with the EU without a real understanding of what they wanted. And so what happened is she started negotiating a kind of caricature of Brexit.

She negotiated what she thought leave voters wanted rather than what they actually wanted. And that included leaving the EU single market. I think this is an important lesson because this is kind of when the, it's been, that was six years ago, but it's been all downhill from there, I think with a quick bump up,

we'll talk about in a second. But I think that that's an interesting lesson. because I remember at the time thinking, Theresa May, reading the coverage, what she was trying to do was kind of calculate and build this complicated puzzle and eventually she would get all of the right positions together and everyone would agree. And she didn't believe anything herself. I think there's something to be said for ignoring whatever the political calculations are and saying, this is my goal and this is what we're going to do and trying to change the trajectory of the country and not just trying to follow polls in the way that. so many different political writers or pundits do or leaders as well is i mean do you think that that was the the main reason for her downfall and kind of the beginning of the it's not the end yet but the beginning of the end for the contories in this in this bout of uh power yeah i think that's

exactly the issue the problem was that she didn't understand how to find a middle way between the various factions because whenever she gave a concession to the leave side of the conservative party, the Remain side got upset. Whenever she gave something to the Remain side, the Leave side tried to claim that she was frustrating Brexit. And ultimately, that became her downfall because both Leave and Remain MPs became disaffected by her and basically said, that's it. You don't have our confidence. You can't lead us anymore. And so she gave up. And one of the things that really, I think, was the final nail in the coffin is because the negotiation had gone on so long, the UK ended up participating in a European level election that it had thought that it would

avoid. And the Conservative Party was delivered its worst ever result since about 1911. And then this other guy comes onto the scene, and he, at least when Brexit was the issue, seemed to have a pretty clear idea of what he wanted, right, which was get Brexit done. That was the slogan of the campaign. I think this is also where it gets more interesting for Americans because we have, I don't want to say we, many American conservatives, I'm not one of them, have this fascination with Boris and they just love him, even though he often advocates things that American conservatives kind of roll their eyes at higher taxes, more statism, green New Deal, that sort of thing. But what was the key to Boris's success? Because for a minute there, it looked like he had remade British politics. and it was kind of a revival of this moribund Tory party. So to understand Boris, you first need to understand the Conservative Party,

which is that in its history, the Conservative Party has always been made up of three factions. You have what are described as one-nation conservatives, which follow the kind of legacy of Benjamin Disraeli and the Victorian idea of a sort of compassionate conservative state that looks after people. You have what's described as the kind of traditional conservatives. These are people who are aristocratic leaning.

They're very traditional. They support social conservatism and religious right. And then you have what's described as the liberal conservatives, which are the kind of economic liberals inspired by Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. These are the people that really came to prominence under Margaret Thatcher. And the Conservative Party has always been made of these three, of two of three. factions banding together behind a leader. So David Cameron had the liberal conservatives and the one nation conservatives. Theresa May had the one nation conservatives and the traditional

conservatives. What Boris Johnson did was try and marry all three of them. But not only that, he, in his campaign, managed to bring in a whole new constituency to the conservative party, which you could, I think, describe as working class populists. These are the people that we describe as the red wall voters. These are people who are traditionally labor voters who felt disaffected by the progressivism of the Labor Party and switched to voting conservative. And so he had these four factions behind him and seemed unstoppable. So he goes into the 2019 election. At first, it seems close. It seems like they could lose. And he comes out of it with the largest majority since the 1980s. And he gets Brexit done, as it were. I mean, there was

still, not just a few weeks ago, there was still some loose ends to tie up, but he essentially, the project of leaving the European Union is complete under Boris Johnson. And what happens next? Because for American listeners, they're probably thinking, well, great, like, it's too bad we don't have a Brexit. I mean, I guess Trump ran on leaving NAFTA, but that's not free movement of people. It's just an economic deal. But once he loses that organizing principle, it seems like it's the same story again of wasting away in power. What happens? What happens then?

So Britain finally leaves the European Union at the very beginning of 2020. And it seems like the party is getting ready to gear up to pursue free trade agreements around the world to burn red tape and deregulate and pursue a kind of conservative limited government. approach to things. But the global pandemic suddenly arrives on Britain's shores. And the conservative party, as the party of government, is thrust into a sort of crisis mode. How do you react to this? We've just left the European Union. Do we continue on what we're doing, or do we react to pandemic? So there's an emergency budget. They talk about measures to protect against the virus, and it seems like they've headed off, but then suddenly the numbers start to rise. And Boris Johnson is faced with the decision of whether to lock down the country or not.

Now, there were a lot in the Conservative Party who wanted to follow Sweden, which, like Florida here, decided not to have any kind of mass lockdown. There was a lot of pressure, but eventually Boris caved and went with the idea of lockdowns. So the country locks down. The entire act of government and everything that was in the pipeline is frozen to deal with the pandemic only. Even Parliament becomes Parliament via Zoom. And meanwhile, Boris enthusiastically embracing the lockdowns after, if I recall, like a month of letting a rip, like let a rip, and then that goes away. And he's he's having parties secretly during the lockdown.

That slowly comes out. He has to resign. He gets replaced. I don't know if there are any lessons from the very quick Liz Trust premiership. And now we have the new prime minister and the current state of British politics. Where are we at now? How popular are the conservatives? What are they pursuing?

What are they doing? Because they still have this huge majority in the parliament, whatever the polls might say, right? Theoretically, they could be doing things. So from an outsider's perspective, the conservative party looks like a party that's run out of ideas. It's sitting on a huge majority, but it's not doing anything with it. It seems to be struggling against things like rising inflation, like the rise. a spike in illegal immigration from boats arriving on the British shore. But the reality is the opposite.

The problem with the Conservative Party today is that the factions that Boris had unified are now desperate and splitting apart, and they now have too many ideas. And I think the warning that you need to take from the sort of story of the British Conservative Party is that once party discipline starts to break down, once the common message and ideological cohesion disappears, you end up in a kind of death spiral. It becomes inevitable that you're going to lose the next election. And that seems to be where the conservatives are heading at the moment. Do you see any hope for the right in the UK, any way they can turn this around before the next election, which is due next year, if I'm not mistaken, right? Yeah. So Rishi, when he became

prime minister, set out five tasks that he wanted to achieve as prime minister. I weren't list them all, but they included stopping the boats and tackling inflation and promoting growth. The boats are illegal migrants coming to the UK. And if he's able to achieve maybe two of those before the next election, there's a reasonable case for him to go to the British public and say, look, I've managed to get these two issues under control. Give me another mandate and I'll get the rest of it sorted. Because Rishi fundamentally is a very – where Boris is a kind of –

of entertaining figure. Rishi is a much more serious, grounded and pragmatic figure. You gave some good advice a couple minutes ago for what the Americans could learn from the Brits and how they kind of essentially wasted these big majorities and this opportunity to really change the direction of the country. Is there anything, and maybe this will sound kind of insane, given how insane so much of the American right has become, but is there anything? that you see in America, the way that conservatives interact and organized, you're here in

D.C. meeting people, American conservatives and asking them these questions. But is there anything that you see for your own country, a lesson for your party in the way that, if not the Republican party, maybe the conservative movement operates? I think the experience of the recent Republican party and all the difficulty they had with the election of the Speaker of the House and And the dealing with the kind of factional groups like the Freedom Caucus, that that's a kind of warning almost to the British Conservative Party that they need to get their act together, that they need to return to this kind of grounded fusionism, this idea that the conservative movement isn't just one faction, it's several factions pulling in the same direction towards a common

cause and that's of course the sort of cause of freedom individual freedom free markets and strong nation states robert tyler thanks for coming on the podcast thank you for having You know,