TRIGGERnometry - Matthew Goodwin: Why Labour Lost the Election

Episode Date: December 22, 2019

2019 general election breakdown with, returning guest, Matthew Goodwin. We recommend Matthew's book:  National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy https://www.amazon.co.uk/National-Populism-Against-Liberal-Democracy/dp/0241312000 Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts. Our brilliant guest this week is a returning guest to Trigonometry in the wake of the election. We're delighted to have him back. He's a professor at the University of Kent and the author of National Populism, A Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. Mike Goodwin, welcome back to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me again. Yeah, it's good to have you back.

There was a long intro. I hope I got all over right. I'm pretty sure I have. We're delighted to have you back. It's been a week since the election as we're recording this. What went wrong or what went right? Well, has it been a week already? Yes.

Okay. I'm still sort of in the whirlwind of post-election chaos. Well, look, I mean, this was a realignment election in many ways. ways. This was the largest conservative majority since 1987, their highest share of the vote since 1979. And interestingly, for me, actually, it was the fourth consecutive time that the conservative vote share increased since 2010. Now, we've got a nice whole sort of literature on the costs of governing and incumbency effects and parties that are in government tending to lose. This was a curious case of a incumbent party actually increasing its vote share. But for Labor, I mean,

The vote was absolutely devastating, worse performance since 1935, has now, you know, people keep saying to me, this is like 1983, Michael Foote. It's a lot worse for Labor than 1983. 1983, they still had, they were still the largest party in Scotland. They still had most of their Northern heartlands. But now Labor are being really chased out of both of those things. And listening to the prospective leadership candidates this week after the election, I don't think anybody has a convincing, coherent explanation for why the Labor Party is in this mess. And I'm sure we'll come back to that.

But the other thing here about this election was just looking at the role of class, looking at just how successful a party led by a graduate of Eaton and Oxford was among the working class, going into those Labor heartland areas, you know, Blythe Valley, Don Valley, Wakefield, and converting areas that in some cases haven't been conservative since the 1913. 30s and others cases haven't been conservative at any other point in our political history. And so on one level, this is about British politics, but obviously on another level, this is about the broader realignment, the new culture divide in our politics that is sweeping across many advanced Western democracies.

And we saw a conservative party really cleaning up in areas that the Labor Party had been founded to represent. And that now really has ushered in an existential crisis to a part of the party. that still defines itself as a working class party, but is really no more a party of the working class. It's an incredible transformation. Before you jump in France, I just want to ask this,

you talk about the realignment, and really, I think this is the bit in your book, which you talk about all of this. You've been predicting this stuff for 15, 20 years, I think it's fair to say. In fact, you actually advised Ed Miliband and his team about this, right? And it doesn't seem like they particularly listened, did they?

Well, that's quite an interesting story. Go back five years ago, we wrote a book, myself and Robert Ford at the University of Manchester, wrote a book called Revolt on the Right, which was basically looking at the rise of new divides in Britain, in particular the rise of Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party, but it was more about actually how British politics and society were changing. And one of the key arguments of that book, essentially, is that you have a large number of voters that felt left behind, not just economically, which is where the left goes wrong. They only can view this in terms of economics. But actually, they felt left behind in terms of their values, that there had been a

new set of socially, culturally liberal values that they neither shared nor respected that was now being imposed upon them by political elites and the media. And they felt like they couldn't really relate to those values, whether it's sort of strong support for the European Union, strong support for large-scale migration, you know, and all the new identity politics stuff that you talk a lot about on your show. And when we came out with this book and we said, look, actually, Labor's got to worry about this just as much as the conservatives because the dominant view at that point was that Nigel Farage and UKIP were really only hitting the conservatives. And a lot of Labor MPs are very cross about it. We've got a lot of criticism. And randomly, one day I got an email saying,

you know, do you want to come and present the findings of the book to Ed Miliband's team? And this was just before the 2014 European Parliament elections when, of course, Farage did very well and Labor did very poorly. And anyway, so Rob and I went in and we presented to Ed Miliband's advisors. And we finished this presentation explaining why Labor's relationship with the working class was weakening. and why they were basically in for a long-term problem from Euroscepticism and social conservatism.

And it finished, and there wasn't a single question. Just silence. Thank you very much. That's very interesting. See you later. Sounds like one of my gigs, man. But then on the same day, I think it was we walked across the street and presented the exact same presentation to Linton Crosby,

who at that time was running David Cameron's election, campaigning, I think it was on the same day. And because, you know, we have to offer a search to all the parties and, you know, make sure everybody has a chance to talk about it. And Linda Crosby was the only person in the room. And Rob and I sort of presented it. And at the end of the presentation, I mean, we got a grilling that you really only get if you present papers at the sort of infamous seminars in Oxford or, you know, Cambridge. I mean, he was really on it. How did you measure this?

When did that happen? What do they think about this? What do they think about that? And I remember walking out and just thinking, that guy really, really knows his stuff. Really, really. I mean, he could basically see what was coming. And I think on the Labor side, there was this entrenched resistance to accepting that their electorate had become structurally unsound. But also, the only interpretation they had that could make sense was to,

draw on the kind of old Marxist lines and say, well, this is basically just about economic insecurity and let's just give these people better wages and, you know, let's just talk about this in terms of a growth story and austerity story. Whereas what the right had understood is that actually this was much more a story about values and people feeling as though their identities were being challenged by these new issues, migration, EU membership, globalization and so on. And that day, in effect really tells us a lot about what happened over the next five years, because as we've now discovered, you know, Labor, Labor's relationship really has become much weaker with its traditional heartlands. And it's a story that's about sequencing, right? I mean, listening to the

perspective of post-Corpon leadership candidates say, this is just about Brexit, this is just about what happened during the 2019 campaign, this is just about Jeremy Corbyn. Actually, the evidence is very clear. What happens is basically from the late 90s, early 2000. You get the rise of new Labour and Blair. The differences between the parties become blurred. People stop talking about class differences so much, including the media. Post-2001, you then start seeing working-class voters abstaining, not voting anywhere near the same levels that they had been previously.

And as you go through the 2000s, you can begin to see something is fundamentally wrong in the Labour heartlands. Then enter Farage. U-KIPs start to cultivate the labour heartlands. start to cultivate those areas, disrupting those long-term tribal allegiances, and you go through the coalition government with Farage going into these labour areas, Hayward and Middleton and the northeast and parts of the Midlands, and basically cultivating this disillusionment, this sense that there is this distant metropolitan elite that's no longer interested in your life.

and then by the time you get into 2015 and Cameron, he actually scoops up quite a lot of those voters. But by the time you get to 2016 in the referendum, a lot of those areas, as we now know, 60% were then, 60% of Labour held seats opted to leave the European Union. And a lot of people who had given up on politics came back into politics to vote for Brexit. So then by the time Johnson turns up, right,

and Dominic Cummings turn up, what they've effectively diagnosed, I mean, Nick Timothy reached the same thing. conclusion, but the execution was very poor. But what they, what they'd recognized was that in effect, the stage had been set for a much wider realignment. And crucially, they made a strategic change. They held the line on questions of culture and identity by saying, we will deliver Brexit, we will reform migration, we will toughen up on crime, we will clamp down on Islamists, terrorists. But on the economic axis, they leaned a little bit more left. They said we're going

to increase spending on the NHS, increase spending on infrastructure, raise the minimum wage, tackle regional inequalities, reboot the northern powerhouse. And what they grasp was a fundamental new rule of politics, which is that it's easier for the right to move left on economics than it is for the left to move right on identity and culture. And David Goodhart and Eric Kaufman and myself and others have been making this argument for many, many years. Including on the show. Including on the show, which is that the Labour Party simply no longer has the vocabulary that is needed to reconnect with these voters that don't just want to talk about economic

insecurity, but they want to talk as much about cultural insecurity. And this election, to me, I think, really hammered home those key messages. and that's why I don't think there will be any quick recovery for the Labour Party because listening to the prospective leadership candidates, they just have a, they just, they cannot comprehend what's happened and why it's happened. So I think we're in for an interesting ride. Do you think part of it as well, and I'm going to use quite an unkind word to describe some of the Labour Party members, is cowardice, that they're not willing to address these issues,

that the moment you have working class people come to them and talk about things like immigration and their fears, they don't know how to deal with it, so they slap the racism word, the intolerance of bigotry, and therefore they can just dismiss it. Well, I think in effect what's been happening, I'm won over by Thomas Pucketti, who talked a lot about inequality,

but has now, I think, we're recently been looking at the way our parties have evolved. I'm won over by his argument that, in effect, what happened prior to 2019 was that our two main parties had been captured. On the left, the Labour Party had been captured by a highly, socially, culturally, liberal Brahmin left that was in effect more interested in identity politics, wasn't particularly bothered about economic redistribution, had come through the elite universities, the elite social networks, was broadly insulated from the effects of globalization and was really only interested in expressing virtue and moral superiority and certainly not really that interested in expressing class or economic solidarity with workers. But on the right at the same time, the conservative center-right parties had been captured by this merchant elite, a business elite, that was really only interested in deregulation,

economic liberalism, putting free market capitalism on steroids. And Piquetti's argument certainly is convincing in that that basically leaves a large number of voters, millions of voters around the world, basically not represented because your average voter instinctively wants a little bit more economic protection and a little bit more cultural protection. That's basically the winning formula of our time. And I would argue that culture is in the driving seat and economics is sitting next door in the passenger seat, still playing a role, but not quite as dominant as culture.

And then, you know, what's interesting about that is Johnson and Cummings basically then recognized that that wasn't going to be able to get them the territory in the seats that they needed and they needed to, in effect, return more to the sort of Israeli tradition of conservative politics and the Thatcher tradition. And that really unlocks the door to a lot of those Labor leave seats. And so prior to this election, a lot of left-wing parties in Europe because social democracy is fundamentally in crisis. I mean, the people who say this is all about Jeremy Corby, this is all about Brexit, I think one of the interesting questions they all ignore is, well, why is social democracy in general in crisis?

Why are centre-left parties across much of Europe in decline? Because this is fundamentally about a structural problem within their electorate. You can't hold together middle-class liberal professionals, traditional socially conservative. workers and then students, you know, sort of Generation Z, millennials, in this kind of broad tent when they hold irreconcilable values and attitudes on these new identity issues. You just can't do that. And so I think Labor don't really have an answer to that. Social democracy has been in decline.

Lots of people on the left were looking to Corbyn as, gee, maybe this guy has the answer. But now actually, center-right parties are looking at Johnson and the conservative. conservatives and saying, well, maybe this cross-class coalition, this kind of British version of Christian democracy in a strange kind of way, maybe this is a compelling formula for conservative parties to navigate through these new value divides. And, you know, this was the first culture war, remember, after the financial crisis. And the liberal left has lost the first culture war that emerged after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the crisis and austerity.

By extension, it's kind of smashed the central thesis that many on the left have held that, you know, this is still fundamentally about voters who are driven by economic cost benefit calculations. And ever since we shared that research with Miliband going in countless numbers of times to Parliament, to talk to Labour MPs about how they needed to change their position on freedom a movement, how they needed to change their, change their representation of working class communities, because the party has been basically dominated gradually over time by middle class university educated MPs. And they would sort of say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it, we get it. And then

nothing sort of changes. Just carries on the same because, like I say, they don't have the vocabulary, but also they don't have the, they don't have the everyday experience to our, you know, understand where most voters are on these issues, it's easier to say, you know, it's racist. It's ignorance, it's, it's bigotry. And the more and more they do that, which is why identity politics is so important here, the more and more they are saying to these communities that you are not equal to others or that in effect, you know, you are problematic communities. Don't be surprised if they abandoned, abandon you en masse. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about

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Well, no, I made the point that, you know, it's amazing that, you know, you demonize a whole swore, you know, communities of people is racist, intolerant, and thick, and then get a bit upset when they don't vote for you. Yeah. You know, and it's as simple as that, really. But what's ironic is they appointed somebody who you could say on one level was socially conservative, pro-brexiteer, old social. school left wing as we would deem him, and then they didn't allow him to be any of those things.

Do you think they would have done better if they just let Corbyn be Corbyn? Look at his face. I had to ask you. I had to ask the question. I think Corbyn was in it, would be seen as a very interesting moment in British politics. I think Corbinism, I don't actually disagree with everything that the Labour Party today are saying, particularly on the economy, I think there's a very strong case for going much further with economic reform than we have done. And this, of course, is partly why Blair is still

the architect of this period of turbulence and chaos, because when Labor were in power for such a long period of time, they really didn't do enough to reform financial services, to deal with regional inequality, to rebalance what many voters out there see as being a rigged economic settlement. And in some ways, they're right to feel that. But I think, you know, Corbyn, the problem with Labor generally today is Corbyn's right in a way to say, we've got to turn up the volume on economic radicalism, but they've matched that with this sort of social, cultural liberalism, which a lot of voters out there now see as being the fundamental problem with the direction of society. So they can't, they're constantly now going to be outflanked.

by a centre right that is now going to speak on both of those flanks. It's going to say, we are going to intervene a little bit more to reboot the local economy in the regions, but we also now accept and recognize your desire for an Australian-based point system, a tougher approach on life crime, whatever it is, right? And so the Labour Party cannot meet the Conservatives toe to toe on those issues. What they should do, in my view, at least, I mean, this is where you get into a really interesting debate within academia, because what I think the Labour Party needs to do is basically, at least over the short term, you can hold the economic line, but they're going to have to change the cultural line.

They're going to have to accept that we can't have freedom of movement anymore. we can't have this never-ending expansion of social liberalism and identity politics. It's just not going to work anymore. And they can try and get away from this narrative that is obsessed with defining everybody according to how they're different from one another, to actually getting back to a narrative that talks about communal and social solidarity and what we share in common, which is what Obama and Blair and now, ironically, Johnson, have done so well. which is they're talking about much broader identities that are above just saying, well, you know,

you're white male struggling with toxic masculinity. Why the fact do you address that to me? Well, we're all white men struggling with that toxic masculinity. And it's kind of, unless the Labour Party actually realistically adjusts, as some centre-left parties in Europe have done, then they will never get over this fragmented electorate. And of course, what academics will argue at this point is some academics will say, oh, well, you're legitimizing or you're normalizing white supremacism and white nationalism. And that is actually part of the problem because the Labor Party and left wing parties are often most strongly connected to and influenced by thinkers that hold the most extreme interpretation of society and are the most committed true believers to the sort of post.

60s, identity left school of Thor, right? And that's where the first thing the Labor Party should do is completely renew, revitalized, refresh the people that is talking to. Because the generation of thinkers that produced Corbyn that produced a modern day Labor Party have fundamentally failed. And they need to start putting themselves in rooms with thinkers and analysts that hold a very different interpretation of where Britain is and where Britain is and where it's going and they need to start putting themselves outside of their comfort zone. Post-2016,

the Liberal left, I would argue, has basically covered itself in comfort blankets. It's Cambridge Analytica, it's Russia, it's Brexit, it's Corbyn, it's the big Brexit bus, it's 350 million. Nobody has seriously stepped back and looked at how the underlying deeper currents are reshaping our societies and introducing these new tensions into that liberal left electorate. And until they start doing that, they're not going to be able to devise a roadmap back to power. You know, they're just going to be going round and round in these circles, allowing the right that has recognised these new fundamental rules in politics to enjoy a new period of dominance.

I think the problem is as well, Matt, is like you're saying, you know, they need to do that. But I know these people. We are in an industry which is riddled with them and let's be honest they show no intention of doing that I don't think I think there are people who get it

I think if you look at the Britain's Labour movement there have been voices within it Blue Labor Blue Labor John Crudus John Denham has been very good on Englishness Paul Embry who we've got on But none of those are them a momentum lot

Well this is a classic I mean this is John May's law of curvilinear disparity in a way in that he argued in the 70s a problem with parties as they get captured by activists that are much more radical than the electorate. And what Labour is in is this great example really of a party that's been captured by an activist base that is mainly London, that is mainly middle class, that is mainly university educated. Hyper-liberal.

Yep. Socially liberal. has no resonance understanding of Bolsover and Blythe Valley. I came, I mean, academics, I think, have also struggled because there is not much interaction with those communities. There's a lot of survey work. There's a lot of desk-based work. There's a lot of insular conversations that don't open up to people who perhaps have an on-the-ground

understanding of those communities. And that's a problem. I mean, it's an intellectual crisis. It's a philosophical crisis. It's an existential crisis for Labor. And after 83, it took them three elections to get back in the game. And it may take three elections this time. Well, they've been out since 2010, right?

But let me ask you this, because you mentioned that in Europe, some parties have made the adjustment. How does a Labour party successfully make that adjustment now, given that in order to do what you're talking about, they would have to completely shed this loony fringe that they've been wagged by as a dog for some time now. They would have to let go of them. They would have to start addressing their concerns back to the concerns of ordinary people. They would have to start talking to working class voters in the north and elsewhere, frankly.

How would they be, let's say, the Tory party under Johnson, which is doing pretty much the same things. They're addressing the cultural concerns and now as you say, the right is moving to the center and maybe even to the left, frankly, if you look at some of the policies on economics. So how do, how are they, is there even room for a Labour party anymore? Oh, I mean, there's lots of room for a party that says we need to radically reform the economy. We need to radically tackle a concentration of wealth and tax avoidance and tax evasion. but we also need to do much better at representing communities that aren't part of what you might call the liberal consensus. I mean, the liberal consensus was really only ever shared by a minority.

And that's, you know, liberals routinely exaggerate the size of their tribe. The economic, social consensus that in effect let's have, you know, let's open up markets and let's open up borders is actually quite a fringe view. The problem is during the 2000s and so on, we sort of bought into this narrative that this was now the dominant view. And of course, we've now discovered, particularly since 2016, that it isn't. So I think for the Labour Party, it means that, you know, they need to start asking themselves some pretty tough questions about where has liberalism gone wrong? Is it too individualistic? has it failed to satisfy people's struggle for recognition, which we always argued, it did a very good job of doing that. And, you know, the reason that liberal democracy, everyone got very excited about the new era of liberal dominance in the 90s was because they said, you know, it makes individuals feel recognized by giving them individual rights.

So it makes you, gives you meaning. But secondly, it married itself with the most dynamic economic system that man's ever created. And we can now see how both of those things have come unstuck because we have generations of voters that don't feel recognized. But we also have economic systems that are still as part of their DNA generating inequalities. And so I think the Labour Party needs to step back. I mean, it's remarkable the pace at which they've moved this debate into one of leadership and not one of ideas. And ideas have left the building, right? I mean, there's no kind of serious discussion about how social democracy can renew and revive itself intellectually to navigate through this era of value divides.

Because my thesis is we're at the beginning of a period of realignment, right? that the toxic debates we've had about migration and Brexit, actually this is the beginning of a new era in which we're going to have more of these big, intense debates that are not so much going to be about traditional questions of economic redistribution. They are going to be fundamentally questions about cultural insecurity and whether or not you feel that you are being protected amid the winds of globalization. and that's going to involve things that you talk about on your program regularly from, you know, minority identities through to, you know, demographic change and the future of populations that will go through some profound shifts in our lifetime, not, you know, not over the horizon, but in the next 50 years or so. And I think the Labour Party isn't ready to think about that because it is a project that was designed to answer economic questions, but is now having to rewire itself to answer cultural questions. And as you say, Francis, it doesn't have the personnel, doesn't have the thinkers, the vocabulary, through which it can begin to weave together answers to those questions. Now, some social democrats in Scandinavia, for example, have said, actually, we will be a little

bit more socially conservative on these questions because actually that will bring us power. And with power, we can tackle economic redistribution and we can help workers. But then in other parts of the country, I'd say Britain included, there are parts of the left that say, no, that's normalising white nationalism and supremacism. It's normalizing power is what it is. Congratulations, you're in the electoral wilderness. Yeah. You're in the wilderness.

Enjoy it. Enjoy it because you're not going to have power for a long period of time until you recognize this new law. Will the Tories be able to, sorry, Francis, will the Tories be able to hold together their coalition? Because it's a very new electorate for the Conservative Party as well. And by the way, for our American viewers, you think Republicans, conservatives, Democrat, labor to some extent. I mean, we'll talk more about that later and maybe it's a false analogy. But how do they hold together now under Boris Johnson, this coalition, which is also a coalition. It's a coalition of working class people who are small C conservative, who maybe never voted for the Tory party ever before.

And the kind of economic, right, free market, people who may have very little in common. Well, the first thing we have to recognize there's always been a tradition of working class voters supporting the Conservative Party. So we shouldn't have been too surprised when we saw Johnson go back to something that Fatcher also achieved in the 80s. And this is because conservatives inherently are aspirational and optimistic. And the Labour Party at times is really none of those things. I love how careful that is being.

You've got to wear yourself carefully because you've got to play both sides to some extent. Whilst wearing a blue jumper. So I think that's always allowed the Conservatives to have a shot at winning over blue collar, blue collar Britain. And there are going to be fundamental tensions, but I think the advantage, the inbuilt advantage that conservatives have is that the tensions over the economic model, bolsover saying, give me more intervention and protectionism, and Surrey in Hampshire saying, you know, I'm fine, I'm going to Rome this weekend, just give me a bit more economic liberalism.

Those economic questions, I don't think the tension is as real within the conservative electorate because what those voters share is they have a lot more in common on the value dimension. So they are instinctively socially conservative, so they prioritize stability and order and in general conformity and they respect tradition and they want to preserve ways of life and they have that sort of, you know, Berkian view of society. And so I think that in general, there is an inbuilt advantage for the Conservatives. So long as Johnson is doing what he's doing, which is going up to Sejfield and saying, I get it, you've lent me your vote. You know, I'm not taking this for granted. I now need to deliver on, you know, reviving coastal Britain and fixing the regions

and all of those kinds of things. But they now, the Conservative tent fundamentally still shares this basic consensus that it is much better. to sort of stress stability over constant continual flux. And until the liberal left can tell people clearly where it wants to take them, which does not sound like just endless change, endless globalization, endless fluctuation and instability, it's always going to struggle in this era particularly to meet conservatives head on. So I think it will be a challenge for the Conservatives to hold the electorate.

I don't actually think it's going to be as difficult as people think because underpinning it at a foundational level, these voters actually do have a lot in common. If you put somebody from Bolsover in a room with somebody from Kensington and Chelsea, right, they might disagree on economics a bit, but they will fundamentally agree those conservative voters on, you know, let's moderate migration, let's uphold institution. let's do what we can to stop someone like Jeremy Corbyn getting into power. Let's prioritize stability and order and tradition. But if you put a Labour voter from Hampstead in a room with a Labour voter from Hartleyport. I just imagined it. Because one is prioritising social liberalism, right, aggressively and defines itself through this moral superiority complex, then forget about it. There's no common ground there at all, if anything.

there's just going to be this tendency to sort of disdain, look disdainfully and negatively on there. It's like a woke comedian going to talk about Brexit for 10 minutes somewhere up north. That's basically what you're talking about. It's a fundamental value divide. But Brexit, I mean, Brexit to me wasn't surprising. I think, I mean, what surprised me was the extent to which people were surprised by Brexit. And what surprises me now is the extent to which people are surprised by the conservative. Well, we weren't because we've been talking to people like you.

but it's amazing how ignorant people were of this issue and the stuff that you talk about more broadly. I mean, the vast majority of people I know completely didn't expect this. I bet somebody, 50 quid, it was going to happen because to me it was just like a no-brainer because having had the conversations with you and with David Goodhart and with Eric Kaufman is just transparent, isn't it?

I mean, you and I had no doubt about this. No, no, no. We both knew that it was going to happen. But, you know, what these people do is they ingest a narrative. which you know, on the far left, the momentum crowd, and then they just regurgitate this narrative, but it doesn't bear analyzing, and it's got no basis in reality. But if it's come in there, what's also been quite clear over the last week

is that they don't, I mean, I'd be rude, but they don't read. They don't actually engage with the research. Like, for example, capitalism and social democracy, which is a great book, 1985, predicted all of this. It said, you know, Social Democracy's electorate, is going to gradually over time become increasingly incoherent and divided between the expansion of the university educated middle class and the remaining socially conservative working class voters and social Democrat parties will face a choice about how they manage that.

And then in this country, for the last 25 years, we've had loads of good research. Jeff Evans at Oxford, James Tilly, Oliver Heath, David Cuts and others, who have all shown the coming storm for the Labour Party that the soil had been cultivated before Johnson even became leader, before May even became leader of the Conservatives. But nobody was thinking seriously about how to respond to that in a meaningful sense. And the only people who were, you know, Blue Labor and others, the only people who were actually thinking about this were then sort of widely criticized and disparaged as being sort of sympathizers of the right or being, you know, sort of normalizers.

And then you just realize that I think you mentioned this earlier, alluded to it, that there are people, you know, the Labor Party needs to have a very serious conversation, but it doesn't really seem at all interested in having that conversation. It doesn't because it goes. goes back and, you know, I raise Venezuela as an example, you know, they have a narrative. And once their narrative no longer works, then they either shut down or ignore it or they move on to something else.

Should we be concerned, Matt, because I personally believe that whatever government is in power, we need a strong and credible opposition to challenge that government. And given what you're saying, it sounds like the Labour Party is going to spend, let's a decade in the wilderness, at least. Boris Johnson has got a huge majority. Is he going to be able to kind of just bull in the China shop this and just do whatever the hell he wants with no one really opposing him properly?

I think, I think, I completely agree with you. What actually worries me about British politics is the weakness and the incoherence of the opposition. I mean, the post-2016 environment has been dominated by a socially conservative worldview, while the Remain camp, the Liberal Left camp, have essentially been fragmented and divided. And I really genuinely don't think that's a good thing.

I would like to have a vibrant, strong opposition. The problem now, I think, for the Liberal Left parties is the conservatives with the majority they've got, even though they've won the culture war, They've not really won the war that determines cultural hegemony, right? So they are now, I think, going to turn to asking deeper questions, not just about what's the policy program, but how do you push back against the liberal left dominance that is reflected in certain media outlets, is reflected in certain educational establishments and is the sort of high culture, you know, sort of soft left norms, how do you know, you push back against that? So I think the challenge to the left, as we see it now, in the rubble of the election is electoral, the challenge that is coming is going to be fundamentally

intellectual and cultural. And I can see among conservatives after this election, there is now a real appetite for saying there's no point winning elections if over the long term you're still losing the culture war. You're still having all of these key institutions and educational establishments and elsewhere, they're still being captured, right, by a view that undermines your long-term success and credibility. So I think the Johnson government will probably now go further than most conservative governments, probably since the Fatscher era, it's saying it's not enough to pass policy. Actually, now there needs to be a broader pushback against many of the things you talk about

in your program. State funding for non-woke comedians and shows like trigonometry. Sounds good to me. Sign me up. Oh, yeah. Canceling Gender Studies courses. But there's a question that I wanted to ask you, because we've been focusing a lot on England, which, you know, is fine and it's important. Bruton.

Well, but we haven't spoken about Scotland, actually, right? I just thought you're being racist as usual. No, no, that's just my voice, but we look at Scotland. Scotland voted entirely, almost entirely for the SMP. Are we going to get another referendum? And if we do, are we going to say goodbye to Scotland? Great question. I don't think we're going to get one,

during this current government, I think the conservative and unionist party will do everything within its power to stop that from happening. I think as we go into 2020, the SMP is going to have a number of distractions and problems that's going to, I think, expose some weaknesses within the movement. And of course, I think for the Labour Party as well, you know, what happened in Scotland was so devastating because essentially it takes away. Firstly, it takes away. Firstly, it takes away their ability to win a majority. So the best the Labour government can hope, sorry, the Labour opposition can hope for.

The Labour opposition can hope for is some form of minority government, hung parliament, coalition in the future. But the second thing Scotland reminds us about is just how quickly radical political change can happen and how comprehensive it can be. And when you look at other regions of the country, you look at Wales, for example,

there was that moment just before the election where it looked like, Wales might begin to sort of move toward a similar kind of realignment that we saw in Scotland. And that's why I think it's significant. I don't think we're going to have a referendum in the next few years. But the deeper questions, I mean, the longer this goes on, there is a much deeper question, too, that we're going to have to really interrogate, which is where does all of this leave England? And where does all of this leave Englishness?

and how are we going to respond to a movement that has for many years felt that it is not represented politically and socially and doesn't have institutions in the same way that other identities do. And so I think Englishness is going to come back onto the agenda quite soon. It's interesting. It's a great question, by the world, Baz Codlin. I thought you were going to go to America when you were talking about it. Well, let me ask you this. Do you think the United Kingdom will be the same configuration in 20 or 30 years from now as it is now?

I mean, who? I don't know. You don't know. I don't know. I think we have a fragmenting settlement and that's very clear. And I think the union in general is going to struggle in a very significant way. And it comes back to that point about sort of commonality and what are the Union. the shared bonds that people in the United Kingdom now have.

And with these value divides, because they're becoming so, because there's a very strong regional dimension to them, what you've seen over the last few years is that leave seats have gradually gone further and further to the Conservatives. Remain seats have gone further and further towards Labour and the Lib Dems. And of course in Scotland there is a sort of a very strong kind of remain majority anchored, you know, partly through the SMP. And I think you're seeing the kind of growing cracks, the widening cracks, and it's not easy to see how those are going to be put back together,

especially when you consider that Brexit was only one manifestation of these value divides. So we've become obsessed with the idea that Brexit is kind of all-encompassing and exclusive. But Brexit is really only one spin-off from these underlying value divides, between liberals and conservatives, right? So there are gonna be many others, and those two will hit the union and they will challenge the traditional left-right allegiances that we've had, and they may involve questions again

about migration and demographic change. They might involve questions around new minority identities. They might involve questions around security and terrorism. We don't know where we'll be 30, 40 years from now. But I think that is going to be something again, main parties, the parties that win during this period of value change are the parties that are going to adapt. And the parties that don't adapt, aka Labor, are going to struggle? And do you think, moving on from that, are we going to face further pressure for a United

Ireland as well? Yeah, I think so. I think so. And I think watching how Ireland responds over the next year or two years with regards to the, you know, Brexit now being formalised and post-January Remain is going to transition into rejoin and certain things that we spent three years debating will be now final. And certain tactical battles will turn into generational battles. And that's why actually, by the way, I think a lot of people have found the 2019 election so difficult because the magnitude of what's being changed by the result. Also, with regards to Ireland, it's so huge that people are only now beginning to sort of think about it and digest it.

Let's look forward, Matt. One of the biggest, I think, events of next year will be the election campaign in the United States, where all of this is going to play out on what is a much bigger stage. what do you see having again just to be clear for our views and listeners you've been vindicated and all this stuff after talking about it for many many many many years not the last five years you've been talking about it for 15 years at least what do you see for that going forward and are we going to see a kind of massive trump victory bojo style defeat for the democrats and first of all actually let me ask you this how do you think they're going to respond are they

going to, is the question for them going to be the lesson for us from this labor loss is they didn't go far enough left? Is that what they're going to think? Or are they going to say, no, no, we're going to actually come back to the center? Well, I hope the Democrats realize that going to the radical left is not a vote winner, telling a working class family in Wisconsin that you might now have to pay more tax in order to make reparations for the sins of your ancestors, that kind of stuff is not going to be a vote winner. Hold on. Is it not a good idea to ask a working class person about their pronouns? But I think also...

The only way might just ignore any questions he doesn't like. Desperately trying to make more enemies. That's my New Year's resolution to make more friends. It's still the old year, man. You can piss a few people. Sorry, man, carry on. But one of the... If we just take a brief step back, the big debate now of our time in a way and the the debate raging a social science and also filtering out into these conversations is,

is all of this change about economics or is all of this change about culture? And everybody who's smart says that's a ridiculous framework. It's clearly about how they both interact and which one is dominant. I think 2020 in the US is fascinating because it gives us really a natural experiment through which we can see these economic concerns on the one hand and these cultural concerns on the other play out in real time. Trump, as I've explained, similar, the only thing, I mean, Trump and Johnson are completely different characters, and I won't waste my time explaining why, even though there are lots of journalists, mainly on the liberal left, that like to draw this incredibly simplistic line, because the only thing they have is catastrophizing. That's the only thing certain people in this debate now have, which is it is a return of fascism, because that makes them feel like they have this self-importance that they've been validated.

that they are, their analysis is sort of superior to others and they can't, they don't have the bandwidth and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, thought power to think anything else. And it's, um, anyway, so the US 2020 election, for me, I mean, Trump has an inbuilt advantage, right? He's talking about economic protectionism and standing up to China. And he's talking about cultural protectionism in terms of building the wall, clamping down on migration. Um, so he has, um, um, so he has, um, um, um, he has, um, um, um, um, he has, an inbuilt advantage. He may struggle again to win the popular vote, but in the key constituencies that he's going after, that gives him an inbuilt advantage. The Democrats currently, similar

to Corbyn and Labor, are offering economic redistribution with cultural social liberalism. In fact, it's worse than that, it's like hyper-liberalism. As Zach Goldberg and people in the states have been showing on Twitter, the liberal sections of the liberal Democrat left have responded to 2016 by doubling down in quite an extreme way on their liberal outlook, becoming much more positive toward minority groups, becoming much more hostile towards members of their own group, particularly sort of white working class voters, becoming more supportive of open borders and all of these kinds of things, in the same way that Remainers, to a lesser degree, double down on their support for migration and freedom of movement and so on.

But that's not a convincing reply to this moment. that we're in because you're never going to get these voters back on side. I think if Trump ends up winning again, the reason I thought he'd win the first time was because he was speaking on these two dimensions that Clinton was unable to meet. But if he wins again, I mean the psychological blow to not just the Democrats, but to liberalism is going to be huge because it's going to tell us that actually, firstly they've, completely squandered, and I include myself, I'd say, I'm fairly liberal on some issues, but they squandered the post-2016 moment.

They have failed to find a formula that can reconnect with voters and repair those relationships. And I think it will be devastating if there is a second defeat in a row in the same way that for Labor and Corbyn, I think it's absolutely devastating that after Nearly a decade of conservative power, austerity and economic squeeze, ongoing inequality, the best they could do was the worst number of seats since 1935. And these are massive problems. And I think the US 2020 will give us more evidence of that. Do you think Boris Johnson and Trump, I know you say it's facile to make connections between

these two, but they tap into something deeper for me. I talk to a lot of people on the left, and a lot of where they seem to be coming from is that you should essentially should be ashamed to be British. You should be ashamed to be American. You should be ashamed to be white, our colonial past, all the rest of it. And Johnson and Trump are going,

no, you should be proud to be American. You should be proud to be British. And that's a far more positive message. And a lot of the times, you know, we were at Kilconomics, a economics festival in Ireland. And a lot of what these liberal economists seem to be saying, It's like, well, it's the end of the West. It's the end of the Americans.

What are you going to do? We're all fucked. And then you have someone coming along like Trump going, absolutely not. Let's make America great again. I think optimism is definitely part of it. We all have an optimism bias. I mean, psychologists talk a lot about this. Smokers convinced they'll never get lung cancer.

They're not optimistic about the outcomes. I think where the rights or conservatives, what they've recognized, I think firstly is that people are far more attached still to the nation than the Liberal Left recognises. If you ask people in surveys, will you fight for your country if there was a war tomorrow? 80, 90 percent say, absolutely, do you feel proud to live in your country? All of those kinds of metrics. The nation for most people is still fundamentally the, one of the chief reference points

in their life. And the direction of parts of the Liberal Left is moving very quickly away from that and isn't able then to speak to those voters because it's just promising a sort of diffuse, confusing, kind of incoherent argument about moving to supranational institutions and seemingly not having a problem with more churn and change and the disruption of the few things that voters really, really care about, tradition, ways of life, community and belonging. And then someone at this point usually says, well, those things are all proxy for racism. But they're not.

They're really not. And there are racists who vote for Trump and there are racists who vote for conservative parties in Europe, but most people are not. And most people actively distance themselves from those expressions of intolerance. And the more that you're simply proclaiming to know what those people are and you're adopting this sort of inaccurate portrayal of them, the more they're going to backlash. I mean, the one of the most popular narratives on the liberal left over the last 10, 20 years has been there is an inevitable liberal destiny that is simply going to arrive through migration and the rise of the university education. middle class. But what and that narrative was very popular when Trump was first, just before Trump was first elected, because people like Stan Greenberg and other Democrats were arguing,

there's absolutely no way Trump can win because of this newly ascendant liberal majority. But of course, what that sent was a message to voters that really didn't want that liberal majority, that this was their last chance, their last chance to push back against that that liberal consensus, that value set. And they took it in the same way that in the 2019 election in Britain, A lot of voters saw this as quite a critical watershed moment in a broader value struggle. And so they were willing to override their traditional party loyalties because they felt that on balance, Johnson was probably the horse to back in that broader conflict. I guess what I'm hearing out of everything that you've said today is that this is a correction that has been coming for a very long time,

because our mindset, particularly here in London, in the bubble of Westminster and the cultural bubble that Francis and I are in, our views as a society have been shaped by a very small number of people whose views are completely not representative of the rest of the country. And the election of Boris Johnson,

the election of Trump, the Brexit referendum, potentially what might happen in America next year, this is a correction against all of that. The way that I would view it is that the post- The 1960s liberal revolutions, there was a lot of overreach. There was a lot of overreach that went, you know, what started with very legitimate, you know, concerns about minority rights, rights for same-sex couples, environmentalism,

and all of those things that there needed to be a correction at that point in time. But through the 70s, 80s and the 90s, I think there's a view that I'm sympathetic to that they're what started as an attempt to fix these very legitimate grievances then began to overreach and began to it was sort of couldn't stop itself it was just looking for you know any new possible identity any new way of defining people by difference not by what they had in common and and sort of liberalism turned into this kind of really bad version of itself it just kind of you know went on steroids and And it started to overreach. And I look at really what's been happening in Europe, really since the late 80s, through the

90s, into the 2000s as a correction to that, as gradually conservative and populist parties began to then sort of backlash against hyper-liberalism. I think what worries me about where we are today is we're now beginning to see, if you like, the backlash to the backlash, which is now liberals in the US and the UK. and elsewhere doubling down and saying, actually, I'm not going to do the one thing that will get us through this period, which is compromise. I'm not going to acknowledge the things that we have in common. Look at even the first few days of Boris Johnson's premiership. You can look at the Johnson premiership and you can say, well, actually, there are a lot of things here that we were asking for for a long time.

The rights of EU nationals guaranteed. More help for international students, scrapping the net migration target. it, adopting very preferable, favourable visa regimes for NHS workers and so on and so on and so and all of these things that we spent three years as a Liberal Left screaming about, shrieking about, actually the Conservatives are not doubling down on the sort of hostile environment. They seem to be making some concessions. Well, why don't we spend some time acknowledging that, focusing on that, building some compromise around that instead of saying what they're saying now, which is Britain is turning into Hungary,

right. The liberal catastrophizing, Britain is sliding into authoritarianism because it's just, the view is not able to acknowledge some of the things where there is common ground. So anyway, I think in general, what worries me is you're now beginning to see partly through the politics of climate change, which I think are going to be fascinating,

but also through the rise of green movements in Europe, through the direction of the Democrat voters, that I've talked to in a Democrat activist and also I think through the direction of the British Labour Party, you're seeing a backlash to that backlash. And the end result of all of that would just be polarization

because you've got these two sides now basically dug in and they've got representatives, they've got political parties that have adapted to speak on their behalf and the compromise, the middle ground, the nuance, the ambiguity,

down, which is why I find some of the academic debates so frustrating because academics often adopt the same binary language as the populace by saying you're either with us on the left or you're legitimizing nationalism and hatred. There's no marketplace of ideas there. It's just as binary as the populace that many of them are studying. So I think it's that that does genuinely worry me because we need to try and figure out a way of propping up. Matt, every time, so it's the second time we've interviewed you, and every time I come away and I think, I should have asked him that question. And I know it's a very difficult question to ask us, and it's predictions, and predictions are always owed us because it's so difficult

to get wrong. But nevertheless, I'm going to ask you it. Are we watching the slow death of the EU? Not the death of the EU, but the challenges facing the European Union, possibly the contraction of the European Union, I think, are beginning, not ending. I'm very pessimistic about the European Union for many ways. I wouldn't describe myself as a Brexiteer, but I've certainly spent the last few years questioning whether the European Union has what it takes to remedy the multiple challenges that it's facing. And, you know, those challenges are well known. It's aging. It's not productive enough. It's divided between, I mean, being quite crude, but east and west over values, north and south over economic redistribution. There has not appeared much solidarity at key moments when it was required.

And there doesn't appear to be much of an answer coming from sort of elites within the EU sphere in terms of what to do about any of that. And then when you look at the longer term kind of projections and trends with regards to the pressure that the EU and the Eurozone are going to come under from US China, from population change in Africa, from central and eastern European states depopulating, shrinking, the EU needs a radical, forward-looking, sensible policy agenda and foremost needs leadership. and currently there is a leadership vacuum within the European Union. The response to Brexit, I think, has been very revealing, kind of inability to really digest what is at the heart, the root of Euro-scepticism, and populism, if anything, this year, 2019, populism has consolidated. I mean, I was just struck on Twitter during the European elections

is watching the number of people trying to kind of spin this as being a really bad set of elections for, parties that are Eurosceptic. I mean, when you saw the share of seats in European Parliament for Euro-Sceptic parties has now reached a record high, and we've seen party systems that we were told when I was doing my PhD at least, in early 2000s, places like Germany and Sweden, you know, have basically fragmented and have become much less stable kind of political systems. Meanwhile, you know, populists in control of Italy, breaking through in Spain, which again

we were always told wouldn't happen. and if anything, the kind of harder right governments in Central and Eastern Europe have become stronger. But there's a lot of wishful thinking out there. There's a lot of people that actually don't want to, you know, they get very excited about the rise of a couple of green parties, but aren't actually, I would argue, at least in the public conversation and discussion, still, I mean, we talked about this in national populism, still covering themselves with comfort blankets. It's all about imports from China. It's all about austerity and the legacy of the financial crisis, whereas I think actually this era of disruptions just beginning, you know, and

there's not going to be an easy answer for the European Union. I don't think it will collapse at all. I think it will have to contract further, and I suspect one or two states in southern Europe probably won't be in the European Union 20, 30 years from now. I'm happy to be wrong about that, but I just don't think it's sustainable to keep, for example, Italians living the way they're living, not having any significant increase in living standards and not feeling respected. You said earlier on about language, respect, dignity and recognition are words that we don't

hear a lot about when we're talking about election outcomes and why people are revolting, but they're incredibly important. And emotion in politics is incredibly important. And in my world, in political science, we really don't talk about a lot. emotion in as big a way as psychologists do because we think it's all about institutions and party vessels and leaders. But when you think about emotion as a potent tool of voting behavior, then in Europe, you know, I think it's potentially going to be very significant, you know, blame, you know, hope,

aspiration and all of these things. I think the European Union will struggle to respond to them. Matt, it's been a great interview. and thank you so much for coming back. You guys can see why we were delighted to have Matt back on the show. Before we let you go, which we must do now, because you're a busy man.

You've been all over the TV studios for last week talking to people about what's happened. The last question we always ask is, what is the one thing that no one's talking about that we should be talking about? And it can be absolutely anything at all. Well, I think lots of people are talking about it. But I'm now increasingly convinced.

I think the politics of climate change is going to be the next huge, big, disruptive moment in our political world. I think we haven't even begun to interrogate what that means for traditional party allegiances. Give us a 30 second summary of the whole thing. What's going to happen with that? Well, I think it's going to become partly a new culture war. I think the conservative parties are going to have to move very quickly on it to say actually

the most conservative thing in the world is to be thinking about environmentalism in a in a reasonable, sensible way. And I think we're going to have some really entrenched as an issue, I think is going to bring out the generational, I don't want to say conflicts, but the generational tensions that we can already see emerging. If you look at Generation Z's views on that issue versus the baby boomers, you know, some real interesting tensions emerging there. And, you know, in terms of how it's going to disrupt political systems, you know, green parties,

perhaps eating into traditional left-wing parties to a much greater degree and how the right responds to that, I mean, has to start thinking about that now because I think the pace of that political change will be very, very big, very quick. Fascinating stuff. Make sure, if you want to de-in-depth analysis of all this stuff, make sure to get Matt's book, National Populism, the revolt against liberal democracy.

Follow him on Twitter. on Twitter, man, during the election, you were posting all the polls and stuff, and I'm sure there will be lots of stuff that you're putting out. So follow him out on Twitter. We'll put his username in the video. And we will see you in a week's time with another brilliant episode. Take care. See you next week, guys.