The New Yorker Radio Hour - U.K. Edges Closer to the Cliff of a No-Deal Brexit

Episode Date: March 26, 2019

Since the minute that British citizens voted, in a 2016 referendum, to leave the European Union, confusion and disorganization has consumed the U.K. Three years later, little has changed: confusion and disorganization may carry the U.K. over the cliff of a no-deal Brexit with devastating economic consequences.   While we can’t predict what will happen on the deadline of March 29th, we continue to learn about what brought the U.K. to this precarious position. Like the 2016 presidential election in the U.S., the campaign for Brexit employed divisive social media campaigns, mysterious sources of financing, Cambridge Analytica, and questionable meetings with Russians. At the center of it was a man named Arron Banks, an insurance magnate who is happy to take credit for his efforts to promote Brexit by whatever means necessary. Ed Caesar has reported on Banks’s outsized role in the referendum, and found that Banks is had been under investigation in Britain and in South Africa, where he has business interests in diamonds, as well as a person of interest in the Mueller investigation. Caesar spoke with David Remnick about the shady past and the uncertain future of Brexit.  Plus, a visit with Roomful of Teeth, the Grammy-winning vocal octet that’s building a unique repertoire and redefining classical singing for the future.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. From the moment that British citizens voted in a referendum to leave the European Union, confusion and disorganization has absolutely consumed the U.K. And three years later, nothing much has changed. Confusion and disorganization may yet carry Britain over the cliff, so to speak,

to a no-deal Brexit with devastating economic consequences. But if we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, we're learning a little bit more about what brought Great Britain to the edge of the cliff in the first place. Much like our 2016 election, the pro-Brexit vote employed divisive social media campaigns, mysterious sources of financing, Cambridge Analytica, and meetings with Russians.

At the center of it is a man named Aaron Banks, an insurance magnate. Reporter Ed Caesar has been digging into Banks's outsized role in the referendum, and Ed joins me now from Manchester. Ed, I think when many Americans think about Brexit, when they can focus on it at all, they think of figures like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage, but they don't think about the person that you've written about

at such great length in the New Yorker, a person named Aaron Banks. Who is that? Aaron Banks is perhaps the single biggest political donor in UK history. And he helped to fund both Nigel Farage, but also a rambunctious outlier organization called Leave. And Aaron Banks gave about $13 million in all to anti-EU causes. And there have been a few questions about where his money comes from. because there are big disputes about how rich he actually is. He says 250 million pounds.

Financial journalists who have seen publicly available information for him think it's about 10% of that figure. So the implication is that he's a conduit somehow for the money for a third party? That has been an implication, and that's what the National Crime Agency of the United Kingdom, which is our version of the FBI, is now looking into an investigation. What's the evidence that he might have done something wrong?

Well, he has given various accounts of his donations and his portfolio of business interests. And the Electoral Commission, who referred him to the National Crime Agency, said the story of his donations had changed dramatically over time. There was also the question of this very opaque, sprawling business empire that he has, where so much of it is in offshore locations, which are secrecy jurisdictions, the Isle of Man, Bermuda, Gibraltar. And the very fact of having businesses there leads to many more questions about why you would headquarter in those places. Among the many reasons that your story about Aaron Banks and Brexit has a resonance with the American situation and the situation with the investigation into the Trump administration, is you, well, we could summarize it by saying A, Cambridge Analytica and B, Russia. In what degree does Cambridge Analytica, is it mixed up with Aaron Banks and Leave.E.U?

Well, Cambridge Analytica and Leave.E.U had a relationship of some kind, and, you know, Banks has not been entirely straightforward about that. However, I don't think that's the biggest part of the story here. But to me, the much, you know, bigger angle in this is the Russia angle because Banks has a Russian wife because she has a somewhat intriguing past. What is her past? Why is it intriguing? Well, her past is she was deported from Dubai before she married her first husband, who was a much older man in Portsmouth. That lasted a matter of months and attracted the attention of special branch officers of the police.

who are interested in national security. And she married Aaron Banks a couple of years after that. She has a very interesting history in that her ex-husband told me that she had had an affair with a member of parliament called Mike Hancock, who also had an affair sometime later with another young Russian woman called a Katerina Sutulevator, who MI5 thought had been spying for. the Russian foreign intelligence services. And eventually a panel cleared here of espionage on the balance of probabilities, but still large questions remain over why these two young women

had an affair with a member of parliament who at one time chaired the all-party group on Russia that has raised a few eyebrows. Now, let's dig into what Russia's motivation would be to get involved in Brexit at all. Why would Vladimir Putin care about Brexit one way or the other? Well, he says he doesn't care about it, but all the evidence points the other direction. So he is interested in weakening the European bloc. Brexit is a big part of that weakening. He is interested in chaos in people that he perceives to be somewhat his geopolitical enemies. And in 2016, certainly Britain was at odds with Russia over things like the invasion of Crimea and sanctions.

There is also this question of, Russia feels that the West has been meddling in Russian affairs, you know, at least for 10 years and actively pursuing, you know, destabilizing measures against Russia. And they have pushed back in this asymmetric way by supporting far-right and populist groups within Europe. Now, the question is, what did they do about it? There seems to be no doubt in the minds of people who watch Russia closely that they were certainly interested in the destabilizing, nightmare of Brexit as we're now witnessing it. Now, you write about an incredibly long, boozy lunch held between the Russian ambassador in London and Aaron Banks.

Now, how common is it for a Russian ambassador to have a six-hour boozy lunch with a businessman of Aaron Banks' scale? Well, I wouldn't speak to his, you know, preferences for dining partners, but it seems to be unusual at the very least that this figure who was until, you know, shortly before the referendum, quite a minor figure in British public life, is suddenly treated to this, you know,

great and lavish lunch. And not only that they have this lunch where they finish up drinking vodka supposedly made for Joseph Stalin, but that's, you know, a few days later, there's another meeting at which the ambassadors introducing banks to a Russian businessman who's offering him a part

in a multi-billion, in gold deal in Russia and that this chain of events leads to various other business deals being dangled in front of Aaron Banks. You know, all of that seems quite unusual. And having spoken to people who worked in the CIA, you know, with a special interest in Russia, they say that it would be, it's almost impossible to believe that there was not some kind of ulterior motive in this courting of banks. Well, is there any hard evidence, documentary evidence, that Banks was offered any business

opportunities with Russian companies as a quid pro quo? Well, we don't know about the quid pro quo, but he was offered business opportunities with the Russian state diamond producer Al Rosa. He was offered to be an investor in this consolidation of six Russian gold companies. Which banks does not deny? He does not deny. So you yourself had a long meeting with banks and his PR guy, and you've gotten on the phone with him subsequently for any number of conversations. how does banks answer accusations that he promoted Brexit on behalf of Russia or used Russian money to promote Brexit? He says it's nonsense. He actually uses a slightly stronger language than that. He says that you shouldn't be judged on business deals that you don't do. And he gave me a very long and detailed interview and we went back and forth on all the details of this. The fact is that on its face, a lot of this stuff does look suspicious. and, you know, it seems worthy of further investigation.

You know, he refutes that anything nefarious was going on. Now, any number of people in your piece say that we, meaning the British government, should have a Mueller-type investigation directed against Brexit and specifically Aaron Banks. Is that taken hold at all, or is that just something that three or four commentators say for the purposes of sounding off? Well, I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon because... Why not? Well, as you may have noticed, we're having a constitutional crisis and, you know, we're still, you know, we're eight days away from crashing out of the European Union with no deal.

Yeah, but wait a minute. The United States is having crises all over the place, but we're having investigations at the same time. That's true. I just, the way it was explained to me, even by people who, you know, members of parliament who really want this, is just there's no appetite. certainly with Theresa May, there's no appetite. Jeremy Corbyn has no appetite. You know, the most senior figure to have called for this investigation who called for it again after my piece was published on Monday is Tom Watson, who's the deputy leader of the Labour Party, who is, you know, he says it, you know,

this piece makes a, you know, a cast iron case for a Mueller-style inquiry. Now, whether we're going to get it in six months, possibly when all of this is over, who knows? Now, we're talking on a Thursday afternoon in Britain. What's the current status of Brexit? What's the possibility of no deal? And is there any possibility of a kind of do-over in which there's another referendum, or has that just been ruled out?

I don't, well, Tories of Mayers ruled it out, which isn't to say that it's not going to happen. I think it's an outside chance. You know, Macron was just talking to a, President Macron or France, sorry, was just talking to a reporter on the way to an EU summit saying, you know, as it stands,

you know, no deal in eight days is the clear favorite. So I feel quite pessimistic. You know, no deal would be a really poor outcome for the UK, even for people that were really into the Brexit project. I'm not sure many of them wanted food shortages and shortages of medicine and chaos at the borders. You know, that wasn't the thing that was sold to the British people. So I, you know, Aaron Bank says no deal was his preferred

option because no deal means we leave. It's the clearest rupture that you could have. But to me, it feels like vandalism. And finally, when this drama ends, if it ever ends, who inherits the earth politically in Britain? Oh, that is a very good question. Because both sides, conservative and labor, the two biggest parties, have been ripped in two by the I think we could see a much more fragmented political landscape in which coalitions become much more normal. Because the Brexit disaster, nightmare, has ripped the Conservative Party and the Labor Party in two. I feel like history will judge this period of our politics extremely badly. Ed Caesar, thanks so much.

So kind. Thanks so much. Enjoy. I guess I can't say enjoy, but survive. Thank you so much. Be well. You can find Ed Caesar's piece on Aaron Banks and his role in Brexit at New Yorker.com. Burkhard Bilger is a staff writer and a man of wide interests, technology, science, nature, sports, food, southern culture,

German history, and much more. Burke also happens to be a good musician. He's been singing in choir since he was young and he keeps a guitar in his office where he's always noodling on it. He taught his kids to play old-time music and launched the Bilger family band. And as his kids grew up, they in turn expanded his musical horizons.

So my son is a bassist, upright bassist and jazz bassist, and was the first one who told me about Roomful of Teeth. So, I don't know, a few years ago, he played me Partita, the Caroline Shaw piece, and I just thought it was astonishing. I've been listening to choral music my whole life, and I'd never heard anything like this before. Every year, the members of Room Full of Teeth gather for a few weeks,

and they rehearse new pieces and bring in composers who are going to write their repertoire for the following year. The residency is at Mass Mocha, a museum in an old industrial town in Massachusetts, and last time, Burke Bilger tagged along. Room Full of Teeth is a vocal octet, so four men, four women, who sing contemporary classical music. They sing only newly composed pieces. So we're sitting in a loft space on the second floor of one of the mill buildings in MassMoka.

It's a huge room with enormous high ceilings, I don't know, 12, 13 feet high. And there's some onlookers, but also kind of a semi-circle of composers with a singer in the middle. And this is a process that always happens at Mass Mokka with a room full of teeth, where they'll spend a day just having each singer introduce themselves to the composers and giving them a sense of exactly what their abilities are, what they like to do, what they don't like to do, where their voice can go, where it can't go, what their range is. Yeah, yeah.

So, like, it would be really easy to have little bits of breaks like that if it were. Because that would be felted, and then I was like, it's just high. Esley Gomez is the highest soprano in the group. He was the youngest member of the group when she joined. Yeah, it was my first year. out of undergrad when I heard about the premise

and took a train from New Haven to New York and did a Skype audition with Brad and I did a Bulgarian folk song, a jazz song, a Schumann art song and I handled like rage art and it was like so

relieved that I wasn't auditioning for grad schools. It's like, I don't have to fit in this weird box that doesn't make sense yet. And then I heard about this and was like, that sounds like me. That sounds better. It's better for it. Maybe you think give us an example of you singing the styles you were talking about

for the beginning. All the members of the group are trained classical singers, but they incorporate techniques, vocal techniques from all of the world. Over the course of the day, as the singers come in one by one, they'll showcase all kinds of different techniques. Some people are expert, tube and throat singers. Some people can do the deep. car car carot.

Yodling or belting, so you get a whole range of just astonishing capabilities of the human voice. I've been singing my whole life, and I'm used to what vocal music sounds like, and suddenly it's like hearing a saxophone sound like a violin, and sound like a kettle drum, and sounding like a bassoon. It's like, how did, I didn't know the voice could do that. It's funny. Western classical singing has for centuries been divided into essentially two techniques.

There's choral singing, which is meant to blend and what we call straight tone without vibrato. And then there's belcanto, which is what we hear in opera, which is a very powerful athletic vocal technique, which is designed to kind of vault over the sound of an orchestra and fill an entire concert hall. What's excluded from those two techniques is everything, else in the world that people have done with the human voice. All these wonderful throat singing techniques and yodeling and belting and ways in which the voice can be rough or gritty or kind of mess with all what we think of as kind of pure classical technique. The way composers have used choirs over the last hundred years, I started to feel like there

was a certain sense of straightjackedness. Now Brad Wells is the founder and artistic director a room full of teeth. He founded this group in 2008 in order to bring in these new techniques. And part of that was inviting singers from all over the world to instruct them in these techniques. We can reach out and bring somebody from Central Asia and hear them sing and ask them questions and have them teach us for a while about a completely different way of using their voice, you know, where the larynx sits, how much constriction, how much air. All those things are really just basic physiological things and they manifest in all these different ways around the world and I thought if composers could could get their hands on this and see what's possible and singers could play with it

and stretch the color range of their own voices then what we understand as choral music might become much more variegated so it's really not about we're going to become tube-and-throat singers or pansori singers or kentot-tonori singers not at all no it's really just a kind of pushing the bounds, pushing the walls of what's beautiful in a way. It's like finding what people consider as beautiful and letting composers play with that and see what emerges. One of the composers at MassMocca this week is Eve Begillarian, a really adventurous New York composer. She's setting a piece by Walt Whitman to music. But in the meantime, she's trying to see what new kinds of sounds she could make with the group.

So what's your plan for this after? What are you going to do with the group to get ready for this? Driving down, I happened to hear Elvis Presley's cover of Blue Moon. And it's so held back. I mean, he's very close-miked. And from what I can tell, there's different processing on the two double tracks. One of them has a really striking slapback echo. So I'm thinking we can try setting up our own.

Our own cover of Elvis's cover. And try having different people paired to do different aspects of the tune. I mean, it may be totally dumb. I don't know. We'll see. see. So I thought what we could do is set up the accompaniment for now, right? Let's start with you.

It's late in the afternoon in the loft, and Biglaran is working with the group. She's playing around with the sounds they can make, trying to see what tools might end up working in the piece she's composing. And I put up the lyrics, maybe the two of you to start. To start. Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone without a dream of my house. Right? So that you can use all the breath you need to do the whispery consonanty thing.

I think you're just by yourself what you're doing. Ooh. You saw me start it. It's really weird. Can we try this with everybody for, let's just try that. On the top? Do the breathy thing. I've just sewn out my jam.

I'm sorry. I'm with you entirely. Entirely. I'm so with you. Okay, let's hold off on that. Let's you two trade the whispery consonanty thing, and let's just see what happens. Bagelarian and the Roomful of Teeth Singers are kind of feeling their way together

through these new sounds, these new techniques. You might say that what comes out of it are compositions that only a roomful of teeth can sing because it's designed so specifically for their voices and their techniques. But the truth is that composers have always been pushing the bounds of the human voice. Mozart, when he wrote the Queen of the Night aria, did it for a specific soprano who could go very high and at a very mobile voice. And little by little, other sopranos learned to do the same thing.

Brad Wells hopes that the same thing will happen with a roomful of teeth compositions in the future. If the songs are good enough and the techniques are appealing enough, then more and more classical singers will learn how to throat sing, We'll learn how to yodel and belt and do Korean pansori. And Roomful of Teeth songs will start to sound like yesterday's classical music. Burkhart Bilger, a staff writer with the New Yorker. We heard from members of Room Full of Teeth, as well as composer Eve Beglarian. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for being with us today. We've got one more story this hour. We're going to go shopping or maybe just browsing with pre-year-exam. Patricia Spears Jones. Jones is the winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize, and recently she published one of her poems in the magazine. She's a native of Arkansas, living for many years in New York, and a little while back, when it was still quite cold out, we asked Patricia Spears Jones to show us one of her favorite places in the city, and so she took us just around the corner

from home. I'm now thawing. Oh, come on this side. It's a little either. Oh, that's all right. The name of this shop is Calabar Imports. I like neighborhood spaces, and this is a neighborhood space. When I think of Bedford-Stuyvesant, I think of the place where U.B. Blake's and Lena Horn were raised. So I've been coming to the shop since 2004, I guess, yeah. At every caliber import store, there's always a yellow door. In this very small, very bright shop where there are many paintings, jewelry, there's very colorful garments. One of the things I know about the store and all of those stores is that the owner, Atom, is also an architect.

And so they're all sort of interestingly done. designed. There is a partition that sort of opens up the space so you can see the front of the space and then the back of the space. But you can also, from the back of the space, you can look out to the window, which looks out to the street. It's like the usefulness of portals. The bracelets I'm wearing, which are all from Africa, and they're all beaded and they're all pretty, are from Calvarn. I think I bought all of the bracelets that I like because they're not here.

There are Frida Kahlo mirrors. And this looks like a Haitian mirror but I'm not sure. Oh, it's my Peru. Oh. So she has these Peruvian mirrors. They're really beautiful. I am a poet because I started writing

when I was 12 years old. I'm a poet because I love words and sound. I'm a poet because it is a very complicated and difficult art form. I like to go to places where I know that I may find something of interest that if I have enough coin, I can purchase, but also that there are moments of community, that people come in and they sit and chat and talk about things where people know that if I come here on a Wednesday, three weeks from now, it'll be here.

We need those kinds of places that sort of look like the ideas about how we like the world, that we like color and texture and things that are pretty or odd. or in some cases utterly beautiful and that can be found literally around the corner from where you live. All right, darlands.

Okay. Thank you. I'm going to go across the street and get a cup of coffee and read some more June Jordan. That's Patricia Spears-Jones in Brooklyn, and you can hear her read her poem, Serafim, at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's

it for this week. Thanks for listening. And I hope you'll join us next time for a visit with a musician who appears behind the scenes on a vast number of contemporary records, including hits by Kendrick Lamar. He's a producer and singer and bassist, and he goes by the name, Thundercat. Till then, have a great week.

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