TRIGGERnometry - "The Conservatives Are Imploding" - Matt Goodwin

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

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Matt, are we going to have a winter of discontent? Yes. The new prime minister coming in now this month, they're going to look around and realize, actually, the Conservatives don't own anything now, not the economy, not law and order, not immigration. 80% of people say they're managing Brexit badly, cost of living crisis. This historically, really has only happened when those parties then have been wiped out. Like, I'm not convinced that I want some of the people in the House of Commons.

You know, I look at some of the people on the front bench and both parties, and I just think, really, is that the best that we can produce? I'm speaking to a finance directive from a major, major company in the country that everybody would recognize. They already forecast that by Christmas, a third of them will not be able to pay their bills. And these are the kinds of things that are happening in boardrooms across the country, because people can sense that actually what we're going into is going to be massive. What we are seeing playing out now is the tension, always there, always at the heart of the Brexit vote,

between the liberal lever vision of Brexit and what Brexit Britain would be all about and the cultural conservative vision of what Brexit Britain was going to be all about. And this group hasn't yet realised, I think, that this group has just put into place something very different. different. Hey Francis, do you need new investment ideas? No thanks. I've got all my cash tied up in Venezuelan crypto. Ah, how is Gringo coin doing? It's pronounced Gringo coin. My portfolio is now worth a billion Venezuelan Bolivars. That's about three quid then. Uh, you're right. I should have got new investment ideas. Well, if you want to take back control of your finances, then fortune and freedom is for you. It was founded by Nigel Farage, who has over 40 years of experience in

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and sign up for a free newsletter that will help your money work for you. The link is in the description. Hello and welcome to trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishon. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a writer, author and political scientists who's always on the show whenever there's a massive transition happening in British politics. He's our go-to guy for analysis and everything is happening in this country. Matt Goodwin, welcome back. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you back. You have been writing and talking a lot about some of the things that are about to happen and have already happened. We are sitting here recording

this on the eve of what will almost certainly list trust's election as leader of the Conservative Party and therefore Prime Minister. And you have just written a couple of pieces, the first one, of which is the Conservatives are falling apart, basically, on your substack, which I recommend every subscribe to. And that is a feeling that I have, but you've got receipts, as the kids say nowadays. So tell us what's going on. Yeah, so basically, you know, I was thinking on the way here,

when was I last here? It was actually the aftermath of the 2019 general election with the big Boris Johnson realignment. And we talked a lot about how the underlying axis of politics is changing, not only in Britain but across the West. And I think fast forward to where we are now. And basically what's happened is the, let's just pulled all the scandals and party gate.

Let's just put that to one side for a second. So basically what's happened is the Conservative Party has really failed to make the most out of this moment that we're in politically. About half of the people today that voted for Boris Johnson in 2019 now no longer plan to vote for the Conservatives at the next election.

So a lot of the key groups that were, central to that realignment, working class voters, pensioners, non-graduates, voters in the north, the Midlands, the industrial redwall, a lot of those voters have essentially now stepped away from the Conservative Party. They haven't gone to Labor, about one in ten have gone to Labor, but most are now saying actually they're not sure who they're going to vote for, or they don't know who they're going to support at the next election. So that unique coalition that kind of came together through John Searn, through the promise to get Brexit done, has fractured and fragmented. And at the same time, and this is where things start to get really worrying for the Conservative Party,

the parties lost ownership of all of the big issues in British politics. So the only parties historically that have really done well in politics are the parties that own the big issues that are seen to be competent managers of the big issues. So you think about 79 and Thatcher. She owned, really, inflation, unemployment, industrial disputes. You then think about Blair in 97. He owned the NHS. He owned education. He owned public services. All the things people wanted to talk about. You think about Johnson in 2019. He owned Brexit. He owned migration. All of those big, new salient issues. The new prime minister coming in now this month, they're going to look around and realize, actually, the conservatives don't own anything

now, not the economy, not law and order, not immigration. 80% of people say they're managing Brexit badly. Cost of living crisis, most people tend now to back Labor, not the Conservatives. This historically, really has only happened when those parties then have been wiped out. So a parallel case would be 97, John Major, 2001, William Haig, both of those politicians would tell you, actually it wasn't a great experience. whoever comes in, you know, and I think you're right, this trust, they're going to have to get their hands around this coalition that's fragmenting, and we'll come back and talk about it, and they're going to have to get some ownership over some of these big issues. And if they

don't do those things, Conservative Party is going to stay where it is, which is averaging about 29% of the vote in the polls. I mean, this is like rock bottom. This is like core vote. The only people who are still there are kind of tribal Tories in Surrey, right? I mean, that's basically where the party is at the moment. Everyone else who kind of got them into that massive majority in 2019 is basically now sitting out. This is, you know, quickly introducing a nightmare scenario. And add to that, I mean, you talk about the big issues. On the economy, there's a gigantic cost of living crisis, the rising cost of fuel and gas and so on. On immigration, as you talk about in your second piece, which I want to come to later,

numbers are higher, frankly, than they have been. You know, the idea that Brexit solved that question. and absolute nonsense. I mean, maybe defense, but again, I don't know that people are all that invested in support for Ukraine at this point. I don't, I mean, how the election would be in 2024, the latest. How are the conservatives ever going to get a grip on any of those issues before in time to be able to actually make an impact on people's perception? Well, it's going to be difficult.

It's not impossible. I mean, the fundamental problem for the conservatives is they've become disconnected. from this new coalition that they've pulled together ever since Brexit. Right. Now, you could say that's because Boris Johnson was not suited to high office. That's because COVID swept through the country and they've managed it, you know, not great at some points. It might be because of the war in Ukraine, might be because of cost of living, whatever.

But I think the broader problem is that the Conservative Party basically inherited this realignment after Brexit and then didn't know what to do with it. It didn't know where to take it. And conservative MPs and conservative donors and conservative activists were both economically and culturally in a very different space for many of the people that were voting for them. Many of the people who run the Conservative Party essentially want to, or are very supportive of this sort of, you know, Davos on Thames, let's slash tax, let's slash regulation, let's embrace free trade, let's embrace globalization, let's look back at the 1980s and say, yeah, let's do all of that again, and let's put it on steroids. They're basically, you know, economic liberals, sometimes hyper-economic

liberals, and they want to roll back the frontiers of the state. What they, I think, have failed to really fully grasp is that there is now a large chunk in the conservative electorate, like there is in every other Western democracy, pretty much, that actually doesn't really want that that is quite comfortable with an interventionist state if it means it's going to level the playing field, it's going to fix a rigged economy, is just as concerned about cultural freedom as economic freedom. It wants to roll back not just the frontiers of the state, but also a radical progressive authoritarianism that people are increasingly worried about, women's rights, child welfare, political correctness, what we can say about the nation-state, about who we are. And also within that,

these new identity and cultural issues around migration, borders, security, a sense of belonging. And the conservatives, I think, in the Johnson era, really never fully reconciled themselves to what that realignment was all about. And as a consequence, they've rapidly come unstuck. And this isn't just unique to the British Conservatives. You can see the same debate in in America, where U.S. Republicans are basically saying the answers to the problems that are in politics today are not going to be found in 1980s economic liberalism. Like, that's not where we are now. That was a different set of answers to a different set of questions. The new conservatives, who I think are a minority, but the new interesting, clever conservatives are the ones who are

saying, actually, we're going to have to devise a whole new set of answers to these problems if we're going to keep this coalition together, if we're going to unite middle class professionals with working class voters and pensioners who often share many similar values on these big cultural questions and sometimes on some of these economic questions, but it means the Conservative Party is going to have to put itself in a place where it feels uncomfortable and it isn't traditional territory. Now, if you're a pessimist, you'd say actually a conservative party just can never bring itself to do that because of path dependency, because of where it's come from, because of its donor class,

because of its MPs, because of its ideological, you know, straight jacket that it's in. If you're an optimist, you say, well, actually, increasingly over the last 10 years, the conservatives actually have sort of moved themselves into this position where they have tailored their message for this new moment. So we'll see with this new prime minister, whether they are going to leave. into this realignment and keep pushing it forward, or whether actually they're going to revert to their comfort blanket and then they'll face a nightmare scenario and they'll lose both of these flanks at the same time.

They'll lose the red wall because they won't be giving those voters what they want, and they'll lose the blue wall, which is full of university graduates and millennials and zoomers, who, to be frank, are never going to vote conservative at the next election, no matter what Liz Truss or the next leader does. I mean, those people are gone for 10 years, probably. So I think, you know, the only answer for the party is to lean in to this realignment. Matt, isn't the problem as well that every political party has its day? They've been in power a long time now.

And isn't it just that they've just run out of ideas, they've run out of steam, and it's time for another party to take office and make an absolute ass of it? Well, don't forget you're talking about the most successful political party in the history of modern democracy. I mean, one of the great puzzles in British politics has been why the conservatives have been so successful for so long. And if you go from people being given the vote to the next general election, the conservatives will have governed Britain for about 74% of the time. The answer to that riddle is reinvention.

The conservatives have always reinvented themselves. They've reinvented themselves at different points in the early 20th century through to Thatcherism, through to David Cameron, through to Boris Johnson. They've constantly reinvented. Labor have always struggled to reinvent. They're a much more rigid party, and now they are constrained on many of these cultural issues by their activists, their MPs,

and lots of things you've talked about on your podcast. But the Conservatives now, ultimately, will need to reinvent themselves again if they're going to have a fighting chance at the next election. They're going to have to really tackle some of the, you know, sacred values in the conservative camp. You know, take free trade and globalization. The evidence in economics now is overwhelming, I think, that many of the reforms that were

brought in in the 80s and the 90s, at the time you could argue they were necessary, and at the time you could argue and you can still today, they made Britain a more prosperous country overall. But they came with massive costs, and we can now see that. There is a consensus in economics that what I would call hyper-globalization, you know, opening the borders of the country to growing trade from China, from Asia, from other parts of the world had a disproportionately negative impact upon working-class communities, working-class men. It undermined jobs. It lowered wages. And also, crucially, this is something conservatives

always ignore. It also undermined the social fabric of community life. There's a lot of research to suggest that hyper-globalization undermine families. It undermined the social fabric of social capital, community engagement, the little platoons that Edmund Burke and others have talked about. And conservatives are kind of blind on this spot, right? Because they are so wedded to promoting and championing free trade that they really sort of, you know, turn away when you say, well, look at some of the consequences that have actually happened. And they've been pretty negative. So we haven't compensated the losers as well as we should have done. And that partly explains why Johnson was able to do what he did in 2019.

because he kind of gave a nod to lots of those groups who had lost out, that he was a different kind of conservative, and they responded to that. Leveling up was really ultimately about compensating losers in the globalization process, or certainly losers in a geographical settlement that has favored London and the Southeast for over a century, and still does and will continue to do so. But they weren't revolutionary about it. The conservatives never kind of embraced this and said, you know, geez, it's not just we've demolished half the red wall.

You could have been in power for 10, 15 years if you just acted competently, run number 10 in a fairly disciplined manner and delivered on the promises that you set forward in 2019, even in the face of COVID and the war in Ukraine. But even still, they managed to kind of implode as a result. And now will those voters come back? Maybe my gut instinct is probably the end result of this is going to be more apathy, more political disengagement, people just saying, well, no one's going to change the dialysis. And that's a real problem because what happens then is you just get disillusioned people who no longer believe in the system, which means there's a void in that system, which can then be filled either by a populist movement or something more nefarious. Well, my concern about British politics now is, so if you go back 10 years, all the conditions that we had that were in place for, say, Nigel Farage

in the kind of UK Independence Party and then the Brexit Party in that very turbulent period in British politics, what did you have? A collapse of public confidence over immigration, high levels of distrust in the system, and a strong sense among many voters that an issue they really cared about, in that case, the EU, freedom of movement,

was not being taken seriously by people in Westminster. Those were basically the conditions. And that found its expression through the Brexit referendum. It then found its expression through Theresa May beginning to pull down the red wall and then Boris Johnson. So you had this kind of trilogy of events. And now we are finding ourselves back where we were in 2012, 2013, 2014, because what do we see in the polls and the surveys?

Public confidence over the new immigration system that will come to talk about has collapsed. People no longer see Labor or the Conservatives, really as the preferred political party. There's a palpable sense in the country that politics is no longer speaking to a large chunk of the country. And there are new issues that people really want to talk about, but they can sense that the political establishment doesn't really want to talk about them,

whether that relates to what's happening to kids in schools, what we're teaching around sex, gender, race, whether it's about women's rights, whether it's about political correctness, whether it's about immigration, whether it's about the illegal crossings in the English Channel. All of those issues now, I'm worried, actually, are going to become a sort of ideal breeding ground for something that may actually end up leaving Nigel Farage looking like quite a moderate sort of populist

in comparison to what may come later in the 2020s, which is why I wrote the piece recently in my substack saying that actually I do think we need to revisit the immigration conversation because what we've put in place, what Boris Johnson has put in place, I think is going to be a recipe for considerable political turmoil in the years ahead. Tell everybody, before I ask you the question, I was going to ask you a little bit about what he's actually done, because it was quite eye-opening reading your piece in which you talk about a conservative prime minister, actually who promised to reduce immigration, along with all of the previous Tory prime ministers, actually making it way easier for people to come here.

Yeah, so Boris Johnson's done some interesting things. things that I don't think many people in the country have properly noticed yet. So the big promise was take back control, regain control over the immigration system. And to some extent, Boris Johnson and the Conservatives have done that. We can now set our own immigration policy and it's independent of the European Union. But the specific migration policy that we now have, yes, it's made it harder for EU nationals to come and work and stay in the United Kingdom. But it's made it a lot easier for people from outside of Europe now to migrate into the UK, whether to work, to settle, or as family, relatives of workers and students, and then to remain

in the country. So things that they've done, for example, employers are no longer having to advertise jobs in the UK first and to show that they cannot be done by somebody in the UK. that's gone. The skilled worker visa program is a very liberal migration policy. You can essentially come to the UK if you have found a job that pays as little as about 20,000 pounds in some sectors or usually about 24, 25,000 pounds, which is lower than the median average salary in this country. Some of the previous limits on international students have been removed. Some of the family routes around migration have been eased. And the end result, which we're now seeing in the data, because of course, COVID disrupted this. After 2020, 2021, the data was affected by, you know,

the big lockdown and so on. But now what we're beginning to see, actually, I think, is a watershed moment in Britain's immigration stories. So the numbers of migrants coming over from India, Philippines, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, whether to work or study, is now increased. dramatically compared to 2019. And so the source of migration into the UK is also changing. It's not European, not Central, Eastern European. It is now predominantly coming from countries such as Pakistan, Nigeria, India, Philippines. So in the next few years, this will become visible very quickly to lots of people in the country who perhaps are currently thinking, well, we've got this new immigration policy and it's much more restrictive, when in reality,

what I suspect will end up having, and I'm happy to be wrong on this, but I think our net migration levels are going to be much higher than they were before COVID. I think they're going to end up being significantly higher. The source of migration will be very different, and I think that's going to raise some really salient and quite tough discussions in the country about what this means around the housing crisis, around healthcare, around security, around national culture. But the biggest one of them, Matt,

and this is what I always say, as someone who's illegal immigrant to this country, who's happy with reasonable levels of immigration, who wants people who are skilled and talented, and who are going to be a contribution to this country to come, the biggest issue of all on that list that you gave is actually democracy. The problem that we have in this country

is that nobody voted for what is happening. And I know it will be easy for a lot of people, people and tempting for a lot of people to say, well, of course, you know, Johnson was a liberal Tory. But these are sequential failures over a long period of time on probably one of the most demanded commitments of the Tory party made all the way back in 2010, which is tens of thousands. So why have the Tories not addressed this issue? Well, you could argue that people did vote for the Australian-based point system, which is what Boris Johnson was promoting. My view is a lot of voters, especially conservatives and levers,

just didn't understand what that would mean in practice. Hey, Francis, do you like journalism? Of course! So who's your favourite journalist then? Superman. What? Superman? Superman isn't a real person, Francis.

He's an alien. He's not a journalist. And more importantly, he's fucking fictional, mate. If he was fictional, then why did Frederick Nietzsche write about Superman, otherwise known as Ubermensch, in his seminal world, thus spoke Zarathustra, published in 1883, but still widely quoted today by both students and intellectuals alike. Sometimes, Francis, I feel as if I have no clue who you really are.

But if you do like journalism, then you have to check out the Epoch Times. The Epoch Times, unlike most media organisations, is produced without the influence of any government, corporation or political party. They distill a story down to the fact and get readers as close to the truth. as they can. The articles are free from the influence of big tech, corporate media and socialist and communist forces as well. The Epoch Times believe the more facts you have at your disposal, the better able you are to preserve your rights.

Here's what the readers say about them. The articles present a factual picture of the news from a conservative and American perspective. I feel the Epoch Times is the only publication out there that gives me factual information about stories in the news that other outlets and public placately report with liberal political biases. Go to epoch t.m.es forward slash trigonometry and click the link. That's epoch tim, eP-O-C-H-T-I-M dot E-S-S-trigonometry. A few things have happened since Brexit and it's important we recognise them.

Number one is overall a significant chunk of the country have become more positive about immigration. So, Remainers have doubled down on their liberal values, partly to disassociate themselves from Brexit and Boris Johnson. And they're saying, I'm liberal and I'm proud of it and I like immigration and immigration is positive. And levers, some levers have become more positive too because they're now saying, well, I've got control back. And I don't want to be seen as being anti-immigration and, you know, look at us on our new immigration system. So those things have happened. At the same time, Brits remain overwhelmingly welcoming of Ukrainians, Hong Kongers, Afghan.

interpreters, refugees and so on. So those two things, I want to note, they're really important, we need to recognize them. At the same time, I just don't think people have tuned into the reality of just how quickly now the country is going to be transformed by this new migration policy, where you've seen, as a Home Office release last week, new data showing the number of international students has just now reached a record high, the number of visas being issued to dependence of international students and also workers is now reaching very high, if not record high levels. We've had over a million visas that have been issued to workers, students, family members and others this year, which again is a record high.

And some of the increases in numbers, for example, the percentage increases in students from Nigeria is around 600%, Indians is around 100, 150%. So we're seeing pretty significant increases. And most voters out there would say, okay, international students, fine, don't have an issue with that. High-skilled migration, okay, don't have an issue with that. But we're not talking about, I don't think we're talking about high-skilled migration. We're talking about workers coming in on visas on salaries that are between $20,000

and $25,000 a year. So this is, I think, going to end up in a big kind of reckoning. The reason why the Conservatives have done this, to answer your question, is because what we are seeing playing out now is the tension, always there, always at the heart of the Brexit vote, between the liberal lever vision of Brexit and what Brexit Britain would be all about and the cultural conservative vision of what Brexit Britain was going to be all about. This small group, and it is a small group, said lots of immigration, lots of globalisation, but not in the EU. And this bigger group, much bigger group, said, okay, outside of the EU, but moderate levels of migration,

ideally about 100,000 per year, not 300,000 in terms of net migration. And this group hasn't yet realized, I think, that this group has just put into place something very different. And this is going to find its expression politically. It will either find its expression in something like, you know, Brexit Party 2.0, the conversation won't be about Europe, it will all be about migration and borders, or it will find its expression in, for example, a new Conservative Party leader, you know, perhaps making up names, Kemi Badenog, for example, saying, actually, we don't want Britain to be doubling down on mass immigration in this way. It's time to perhaps slow things down and start

to ensure that we're investing as much as we can in domestic workers and domestic companies and so on. I don't see how this ends without creating some sort of political disturbance. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a US-based restoration agent who will stick by your side from start to finish. Phone calls, filing documentation, preparing insurance claims, your agent handles it all. In fact, we're so confident restoration is guaranteed, pour your money back. to have someone like that on your side? Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash Spotify.

Terms apply. It's the what the picture you're painting is very bleak because what you're effectively saying is we have this group of people who've been ignored for generations. They got a chance to have their voice heard. They're being ignored again. So where do we go from here? Because the Labor Party aren't going to do anything. If anything, they're going to be even more pro-immigration than the Conservatives? Yeah, Labor can't move right on culture because of its activists and its MPs. So there's some great research over the last year that surveyed Britain's MPs.

And so it found that conservative MPs are more economically right-wing and more culturally left-wing than many of their voters, which, again, is the root of the Conservative Party's problem. Labor MPs were more economically, well, were economically comparable. to the average voter, but culturally, well, like in this other galaxy. They were like 100 miles that way when it comes to things like law and order, respecting British values, attitudes towards migration. So Labor won't move into this space. The conservatives on this cultural axis, it is theirs to own as long as they move to it. But there is going to come a point, I think, where voters will realize that actually the Conservative Party is not going to deliver on those issues in the way

that they would like the Conservative Party to deliver. And then you're talking about things like what the Canadians have seen, for example, a reconfiguration of the right or what the French have seen more recently, a kind of a much deeper reconfiguration of politics where you have MPs, maybe Red Wall MPs and others saying, actually this sort of more neoliberal brand of conservatism that is actually quite culturally liberal on many respects is not really what we want the Conservative Party to be about. Very difficult for a new party, a new challenger to become mainstream in the first pass or post system, almost impossible. I mean, you know, Farage tried it for 10 years and really only managed to get where he got because of the first proportional representation

under European elections. So very difficult to do that. But I think this is going to find its expression in some form or another. And, you know, a critic of the Conservative Party would say, you know, Conservatives have been in power for 12 years. But on a lot of the cultural issues that you spend your time talking to guests about and so on, often it's been the Conservative Party that has either introduced those changes or has failed to slow those changes down. And I think that's where you begin to maybe get closer to an American scenario in the, you know, later 2020s, 2030s where actually perhaps people start to say on these cultural issues, the Conservative Party is just simply not able to connect with the country in a way that the

country wants their elected leaders to connect. And there's nothing wrong with saying we should have a target or we should have a new policy of having net migration no higher than 100,000 a year. That's a pretty good policy. And you could have high-skilled migration. You could prioritize NHS, social care workers. That's a good, progressive, nice, interesting policy that's fair. We don't need really to be running net migration at 300,000, 400,000, 500,000. We don't need to be doing that. And we don't need to be in a position after Brexit of not requiring employers to first look at whether the jobs can be done in Britain before advertising them overseas.

That to me just seems completely bonkers, given everything that Brexit was about, which was about reasserting more broadly the interests of the national community against... A lot of people will agree. We'll agree with you on that. But if I listen to what you're saying and play the movie forward a little bit, that realignment isn't going to be immediate because it's going to take people time to catch up to what's going on. So the most likely outcome is the election in 2024.

The conservatives get booted out simply because of the accumulated frustrations over time. And these people, who you're talking about, who are dissatisfied with the Tories for being too liberal, they're going to end up with a Labour government or a Labor Lib Dem coalition. How is that going to go? Well, for Labor to win a majority, the Labour Party will need to be around 12 points ahead in the opinion polls, which it is comfortably at the moment, about 15, 16 points as we're talking today.

So more than enough for a Labour majority. And that is going to take us closer to where America is at the moment with the Democrats and the Republicans in opposition. and will probably, I think, end up increasing the salience of some of the issues that we're talking about. So it's true that everybody in the country wants to talk about, cost of living, energy, just getting through a very difficult few years, right? But voters don't just think of these issues and then they don't think of other issues. I mean, other salient issues will include channel crossings, overall migration levels, what's happening in schools, universities, council culture, freedom of speech, women's rights.

I think one of the interesting things about conservatives today is that they have accepted this culture war framing, right? They've sort of accepted the language that is used by progressives and labor activists and many conservatives feel that quote-unquote culture wars are beneath them and they don't want to talk about them and so conservatives have seeded like this massive amount of territory you know, when in reality what perhaps they should have said is, well, women's rights isn't cultural war. Child welfare isn't cultural war. The ability to speak freely in a modern, mature democracy is not a cultural war. Ensuring that our institutions are representative of a wide range of voices is not a culture war. It's the foundation of civilization, right? But they've sort of embrace this language and then it's sort of left them with nowhere to go. So now they are terrified

often, as we saw with Boris Johnson and his administration, they're sort of terrified of getting involved in these big debates because, you know, they simultaneously think they're above these cultural debates and at the same time they don't want to be seen to be the nasty party and for people to say, well, they're a bit racist and, you know, xenophobic and whatever. And, like, it's not nice to be in these debates. Anyone who writes on these topics or says anything remotely countercultural, as I'm sure you guys know, it's not nice to be in that position. but sometimes it's absolutely necessary to be making that countercultural position very clearly and very loudly. So that marketplace of ideas can exist and can continue.

Otherwise, the result is orthodoxy, and it's a very narrow marketplace of ideas, and everyone else gets shut out. So I think the Conservatives somehow need to regain their intellectual confidence. I mean, if you look at this current prime minister, the outgoing Prime Minister, one of the remarkable things about the Johnson government in my eyes is there were no real, like there were no serious thinkers around Johnson. It wasn't like Fatcher. I mean, Fatcher really had a stable of very, very bright, interesting intellectuals and thinkers around her who really did have a well-thought-out ideological blueprint for what they wanted to do with the country. Now, you might disagree with it, but it was there. You know, Johnson really didn't have much of that at all,

so he didn't really know where he wanted to go. The new prime minister, I would imagine, I would hope, given any prime minister should have it, will have a stable of interesting, forward-looking thinkers who have a blueprint for where they want to take the country. Because if she or he doesn't have that, it's going to come apart very quickly. Matt, don't you think the problem is as well? We had Darren McGarvey, literally sitting in that very chair a couple of days ago. And he made the point that a large problem, with our political class is that they are fundamentally disconnected with the ordinary British public. They've never really encountered them. They went to different schools, majority that went to private

schools. They went to elite universities. A lot of them haven't even had a job. They all went into political researchers, jobs, and then they moved their way into government. How can you possibly lead a country? How can you possibly know what a country needs if you don't have any kind of connection with the ordinary person? Well, I think there's some truth to that. But it's not just politics, right? Most of the institutions that shape and cultivate the conversation about who we are as a country are dominated by a minority of university graduates, typically elite university graduates from Russell Group or Oxbridge universities who tend to hold the same values.

So if you look at politics, media, creative industries, cultural institutions, institutions, academia, educational institutions. They are overwhelmingly dominated by elite graduates who tend to see the world in a very particular way. Now the data on this is pretty clear. Some academics call it diploma democracy and that all of the institutions are basically run by graduates. And so what's happening over time across the west is we are going through what's often called education polarization, which is a fancy way of simply saying that, graduates are drifting ever more leftwards on cultural issues. And non-graduates, and some graduates, especially those who don't go through the elite institutions, are drifting further away on those cultural issues.

So as that polarization is rippling through on Brexit, on immigration, on women's rights, on trans issues, on gender, sex, kids' education, all that stuff, if the institutions are disproportionately dominated by graduates, then graduates take the institutions with them, and the institutions drift further and further. to the left on cultural questions. And you can see that. Like I feel like I've seen that in my lifetime the last 20 years. If I look at media, if I look at universities, if I look at how kids are taught at school, I feel like I, that's, that's a point that you can't really dispute. I think the evidence also backs me up and I'd be happy to discuss it with anybody

who thinks that's not the case. And so what I think we need to do is basically reform the institutions. So we have a much more diverse array of voices in the institutions. Like, that was the obvious response to Trump. That was the obvious response to Brexit is to say, look at all these people that feel like they're not in the conversation. Let's make sure they're in the institutions. Like, let's not have, you know, over half of the journalists in Britain having come from Oxbridge. Like, that to me is, you know, crazy. Or let's ensure that most of the people who are running the BBC and deciding BBC news content behind the headlines, that most of them have, you know, haven't either gone to private school, gone to an elite university, or their parents also do not come from the graduate class.

Like, let's break it up a bit. Let's have some real social mobility in this country. Let's get some real voices in the mix. But that hasn't happened. Like, if anything, as you've seen with some prominent journalists in the country who have given very prominent lectures, like it's been a real insight into how the media see the last few years. Like, they genuinely see this as a sort of like dystopian threat to liberal democracy, as opposed to voters simply. saying, I want to be in a conversation. I want to be in a conversation about who we are as a country and where we're going. And if you're not going to let me into this conversation, I'm going to go somewhere else, whether it's, you know, GB News, unheard, trigonometry. And what's interesting is, and I can't say this is my idea, David Goodhart has made this idea, so I attribute it to him. But for the first time, in a long time, we now have an economically

independent thinking class that isn't beholden to the institutions. If you think about what you guys are doing, you think about what's happening on places like, you know, a substack, medium, blogging, all of that, we now have a generation of thinkers who are not wedded to institutions. They don't have to please an editor at the Times to get published. They don't have to please a university to get published. They're out there. They're creating their own revenue and they're building their own audience, right?

And so that economically independent thinking class, interesting, countercultural, I think is a positive sign because those are very important. voices are coming back into the marketplace of ideas. And it's up to the legacy institutions now if they want to keep up with that. Or be destroyed in the process, which is what will happen to them if they don't. Well, I mean, I've seen, I can tell you, I've seen the viewing figures of all the TV channels in this country. And I can say, like, it's not, it's not what you think. I mean, you know, the big players are being challenged in a major way. And it's visible and it's palpable. And I think that, again, is the aftermath of the last 10 years that people,

People can sense this kind of stifling orthodoxy, and they can sense that people who don't subscribe to it are being persecuted and harassed. And we've talked about cases in universities. We've talked about cases in comedy and media. And I think that is all sort of culminating in this push to get a wider array of voices into the conversation. That's positive. No, that's great.

That's a correction. I agree with it. That is a very necessary correction in the system. Let's come back to the political conversation for a moment. You mentioned the cost of living crisis, as it's now called. And what's interesting to me is the short-sightedness with which we're addressing that problem, because Nigel Farage was sitting in that chair many months ago before the war in Ukraine. And halfway through the interview, we started talking about cost of living inflation,

and we've had people predicting this inflation would come for years since COVID broke out and before, frankly. And Nigel Farage, before the war in Ukraine, said, I still don't think people understand what's about to happen. I really don't think they understand the first week of April when those bills hit the mat for their Q1, gas and electricity bills. There's going to be absolute shock and outrage. I think we've got this hopelessly catastrophically wrong, and it's about to blow up this year.

It's about a blow up. Then, of course, you add on top of that the war in Ukraine, and suddenly we're all aware that printing money nonstop for 14 years was a bad idea. But that isn't being framed in that way. And because of that, I fear that it's not going to get properly addressed. The inflationary bubble that we ourselves are blowing up by printing all this money to do some very necessary things people would argue. We're not going to address that because we're going to go, well, evil Putin agreed,

is pumping up the price of gas. This is why we've got this problem now. How, well, I mean, I was going to say the Conservative Party, whoever, how is that problem going to get resolved politically? But it's not just the Conservatives, it's left, right, and the centre. It's basically what we're seeing, I think, is an indictment of the last 20, 30 years of political leadership in the country who didn't, who weren't really thinking, dare I say, a bit like the Chinese in terms of let's have a 30 to 50 year game plan and let's think about where we're

going to be in terms of energy and in terms of resources, you know, come 2040, 20, 50, we don't think like that in our, you know, liberal Western democracies. We're incredibly short term. Well, I just saw Boris Johnson. He's decided we need to build eight nuclear power play. Just like, you know, just, just put, you know. I think we get, what, 15% of our energy from nuclear, something like that. I think the French get about 70%. Yeah. And there's a matter, you know, and I think you should have been doing that for decades, is my point. Well, you're preaching to the choir. I mean, I agree with you. But again, it's about a lack of, I think it's a lack of long-term thinking. But it's also, I just think,

we are not incentivizing the right people to come into politics. And I really think the more, you know, the more I look at all the problems that are mounting up, I think it just comes back to, like, I'm not convinced that I want some of the people in the House of Commons that we currently have managing our national economy, managing our healthcare system, managing, you know, I look at some of the people on the front bench and both parties, and I just think, really, is that the best that we can produce? And the answer is we're not incentivizing people. Like if you're, I don't want to pick names, but if you're somebody who's run a major investment

bank for 30, 40 years, it has a good handle on the economy, where we're going and the mistakes we've made in the past and so on, why would you go into politics now? Why would you go in for 60 grand, for constant harassment on social media, for this incredibly toxic, combative culture? You wouldn't do it. Like you have to be pathological, right? an extreme narcissist to go into politics today. And I think it's an unpopular point, but maybe what we ultimately need to do is jack up the salaries for MPs, improve the conditions,

incentivise business leaders with a significant amount of experience to be involved in public services, or even somehow make more use of people who have spent their lifetime leading public services, who then just drift into retirement and, you know, do nothing for 20 years. I mean, if you look at the NHS, you know, speaking personally, my father was a chief executive in the NHS for his whole life. You know, and we have a generation of people who have gone through all of the crunch reforms through the Thatcher years, through the Major years, through the Blair years, who have a very good handle of where the NHS has gone wrong

and how we need to integrate NHS with social care and fix various problems. And we're not making the most out of that talent. in the same way we're not making the most out of business talent. So I think it is a supply problem in politics. We're just getting the wrong people into these roles. But you're right to say long-term thinking. Absolutely. We hope you're enjoying this incredible interview.

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and we're about to release details of our tour, so you'll want to know about that as well. On the higher tiers, you get monthly supporter calls and the opportunity to have a meal or a call with us. Click the link below or go to trigonometry.com and join the community. That's trigonometry. Dotlocals.com. We'll see you there. Do you find it interesting that we're now seeing more of these sort of old-school, I would call them left-wing, people like the Mick Lynch's, the Eddie Dempsey's. Whereas before six years ago, all of a sudden they'd be dismissed as, you know, gammonie Brexit type. The gamins are back in business. That's basically it. We're back. We're back, baby. If you put that on a t-shirt, you're going to make a

lot of money. Gagons are back in business. Brilliant. But I find it very interesting that all of a sudden these people who would, even by their own team, would be seen as, you know, oh God, they're all, you know, it's a bit old school. Whereas now, they're embraced, they're invited on all these programs. Do you see that as quite significant almost? Well, I think what they do well is they do tap into a sense of authenticity, which some of our politicians have lost. Like, authenticity is an incredibly powerful political drug. Like, it really connects with voters. And I think, you know, the new prime minister, if she or he were clever, they would hold their hands up immediately, because they're going to get five minutes with the country.

where they can frame who they are and what they're about, they should hold their hands and say, you know, conservatives made lots of mistakes over the last 12 years. Here's a few of them. I'm not perfect. Here are my flaws. Just be real with people. I agree.

Good afternoon. I have just accepted Her Majesty the Queen's kind invitation to form a new government. Let me pay tribute to my predecessor. Boris Johnson delivered Brexit, the COVID-Vexam. and stood up to Russian aggression. History will see him as a hugely consequential prime minister. Dump all the spin nonsense, just be completely real. And I think some of the names that you

mention, I think those guys do a good job of that. Another person, I do a lot of polling, somebody who always polls, like leagues above politicians, Martin Lewis. Now, you might not agree with everything Martin Lewis says, right, but what does he convey? Compassion, serious concern, for people, a sense that actually Westminster's not doing its job. Now, his brand in politics is very, very strong. If you were to give Martin Lewis 10 million quid and a couple of political advisors, he would probably be polling at 10 to 15%. Like, that's how volatile the system is at the moment. But it's about conveying that authenticity and that freedom to speak outside of the ideological straight jacket, right, that comes with left and right politics. And

ultimately what we are dealing with are two political parties, not just in the UK, but across the West, two political parties or two traditions that were basically forged by the Industrial Revolution and were basically forged by debates that were principally about redistribution. And we are now, I firmly believe, entering into a new era in politics, which is no longer simply about left, right economic redistribution, but is now also about liberal and traditionalist values on the nation and family and community. And the old parties are struggling to adapt to this two-dimensional space, right? So, Labor is struggling and it's kind of doubled down on social liberals, and it's said the future is left-wing economics and extreme social liberalism. It's not going to work for

lots of reasons. Geography, those voters are concentrated in the same kinds of areas. And And conservatives have also really continued to double down on free market economics, but haven't really made a bet on the value space, right? They're sort of torn between establishment liberals that kind of run the party and their new kind of cultural conservative MPs. So they've kind of struggled, I think, to really, to really adapt to that two-dimensional space. And that's kind of where we are.

So that, you know, some of these voices are leftovers from a previous era that still have a star quality. But I don't think the next movement, the next leader, the next voice that genuinely cuts through has actually appeared yet. I don't think that's happened yet. And I don't think if there is another populist wave or whatever you want to call it, it won't look anything like what we've had before. I don't think it will look like a, it won't be a UK Independence Party type movement. It will be something completely different. Why do you say that, man?

Because I think the issues and the context will demand it. Europe as an issue in British politics is basically resolved. I think it's going to be about a new generation who are coming through. It will be about the Gen X's. It will be the millennials. It won't be coming from the baby boomers. It will be something very different. But aren't the millennials all mostly quite liberal on many of these issues?

Some of them are. Some of them are, not all of them. There's a bit of evidence to suggest that even some Gen Z, Z, Zomers are actually in some respects quite conservative. I mean, I talked to my students on some of these issues. They're not as kind of, you know, quote-unquote woke as you might think, actually, on a lot of these issues, especially interesting when it comes to their personal lives. Fitness and diet and regime, incredibly conservative.

Interesting. Matt, are we going to have a winter of discontent? Yes. It's going to be very difficult. This is going to be a very, very difficult winter for everybody. And it's going to be unpleasant. and it's going to have a lot of social and political effects. Whenever we talk to people about it's going to be unpleasant,

and I know, look, no one's got a crystal ball, etc., etc. What do we actually mean by that? Well, I'll give you a stat. I'll give you, so probably the average worker in this country might be pulling about, let's say, 28, 30 grand. So it's probably taking home after tax about 15, 14,500, something like that, maybe, around that figure. if the forecaster writes somewhere between 33% and 40% of their take-home pay after tax is going to be going on bills.

Like that's huge. That's going to be a monumental, before you get to rent and mortgage, like I'm talking like energy utility. Like it's going to be massive. It's going to hit people hard, especially people further down the ladder. I can tell you, I was speaking to a finance directive for a major, major, major. company in the country that everybody would recognize. And they said to me that their forecasts suggest that of their customers, all of their customers, they already forecast that by Christmas, a third of them will not be able to pay their bills to that core service provider. And they are

already moving on to a retention model of lowering, lowering bills as quickly as possible to try and retain customers, even if it means they take massive losses. And these are, the kinds of things that are happening in boardrooms across the country because people can sense that actually what we're going into is going to be massive. I just polled actually. I asked a nationally representative sample of voters, do you agree? Would you support the calls to refuse to pay your bills until they come down, which is some of the grassroots campaigns that we've had are saying just cancel your direct debits. If you can't afford to pay your bills, just do it. It's going to be a mass protest. And I think about 200,000 people assign this petition.

for that. So I polled it. So one third of people in the country, one third of adults, say they support that action. Like if that were to happen, I mean, how many companies would go out of business? Right? Many. So there is a sense, a palpable sense that actually we may be on the cusp of something that is going to be very significant and very difficult, right, for people. And I think about my, take my students as an example. Students arriving this month in, university were born in 2004. Oh, don't say that. I know, yeah, it's crazy.

So they were too young to vote in a Brexit referendum, the 2017 election, the 2019 election, right? And they are the COVID kids, right? They are the kids that had their, all of their, the last year their GCSE and all of their A levels were in lockdown, basically, were disrupted by COVID. So this cohort, this group is a really unique group of students. But think about what they've seen, you know, in their life,

They were four when the global financial crash happened. They were six when austerity happened. They were 12 when Trump and Brexit happened. Then they had COVID when they were 16. Now they've got war in Ukraine. Now they've got the energy crisis and never mind the housing crisis and all the other stuff that we can come to. Now, yeah, of course, you can point to all generations

have had difficult times. It wasn't like this for our generation. No. I mean, I was born in 81, so I mean, for me, the 90s were like, you know, great. But in my mind, everything until 9-11 was good. And then everything just kind of like... Music was better. Yeah, it was. I mean, the 90s were...

Some has lasted longer. Free social media. I'm telling you, social media killed everything. You know, having to write letters to girls, for example. Yeah. A lost art form. And I feel really worried about them because it's going to be, for that generation, it's going to be brutal. I mean, even if you took the labour plan on energy and you said, okay, let's spend $100 billion, which the energy companies think it's going to cost long term to fix this problem, to provide loans, to keep prices low.

We're talking 30 billion more than furlough. We're talking about my daughter and her kids, if she has kids, paying this off. And your daughter's 10 months old. My daughter's 10 months old. So we're talking about massive amounts of debt being built up to deal with this problem. Again, we're not solving the problem with any of this. No, I agree. We're not solving the problem.

We're not going to get off the needle, which is just printing more money to get out of our way, to get out of the way of the consequences of our own actions. I don't really, I don't understand. Like, to me, this feels like these chickens will come home to roost a lot sooner than people think. Well, QE is beginning, I mean, it is coming to an end. We won't continue to print on the scale that we have been printing. And COVID was slightly, you know, was unique. And touch wood, we're not going to have another pandemic in our lifetime.

But I agree with you. I think we are not doing anyway near enough forward planning. We're not thinking about where the next 50 years. We're not even thinking about, I mean, how do we fix a productivity problem in this country? How do we genuinely get serious regional economic growth? I mean, it's been six years since Brexit, and in some ways it feels like six lost years. This moment could have been genuinely revolutionary for the country.

We could have had, and I think there were two things that went on, actually. We could have had a genuinely interesting moment of national renewal, but I think two things happened. One is conservatives didn't really bring big ideas to the table. You know, they did a few things, right? So, yeah, we left the EU. They were for migration, but that was kind of like about it. And then COVID hit and everything got shut down.

And then I think Labor and very intelligent liberal folks didn't really want to play the game. They didn't really want to come to the table and bring new, bold, interesting ideas for how we were going to make this moment work. And I think probably now the severity of the situation, I would hope, would now push us into a much more interesting national conversation about what we're going to do. about what's a 2050 plan? What's a 2100 plan? But this is a problem because all Labor seemed to do is just basically shut their mouths and let the Tories make an ass of it.

Well, oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. And essentially that's what's happening. I mean, you're telling me Labor on 41% of the polls because people are falling in love with Kirstama. I don't see that. In all the polling I'm doing, Kirstama is weak as he was when he came in. Like, people don't really like Stama.

But it's the incumbent seat. that is driving them from right to left. There is no compelling, you know, I would argue there's no compelling, credible, intellectually interesting, a timely alternative. There was. In the very leadership election, which is about to finish,

was that candidate not being elected. Kemi Benner? Well, on the conservative side, true, but if I was being even critical of Kemi, and I'm not, I mean, I was very on the record of saying I think Kemi would be a really interesting conservative leader. But even then, it's going to take more than the culture stuff to fix these problems. I would have loved for Kemi or Suella Bravimer or so, any others, to come out and say,

right, you know, just forget the next five years. Like, here's a 2050 plan. Like, this is what we need. It's got to be big. It's got to be bold. It's got to be ambitious. And, you know, go back to 2008 in the financial crash. Say what you want about Gordon Brown, but at least he captured the urgency of the situation,

which was we don't need to think about this domestically, we need to think about this globally. We need a much bigger, broader plan than anything that's been put forward. And I feel like this crisis isn't generating that same kind of response from our leaders. I mean, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak haven't really got into it on the leadership campaign trail in a way that they should have done. I mean, remember the US presidential election before the global financial crash, you know, I mean, Obama was sitting in meetings with Bush and the economic advisory groups actually talking about what was likely to happen and where things were going. We haven't really seen that kind of coordination and, you know, forward thinking this time around. It's been very, people have remained in their silos. I think that's worrying, given the severity of the problems that are going to come down the line.

It's a complete lack of vision on all sides, which I'm. I think just speaks to the lack of talent. Yeah, I think, well, again, I mean, I think we need to incentivise people to, better people to come into politics, because the risk, if we don't, is we're going to end up perpetuating this, you know, and maintaining the status quo as we go forward. And, you know, let's see what happens. I mean, you look across Europe at the moment, look at Italy, you know, big election this

month in Italy, of course, new parties are popping up left, right and center, look at what just happened in the French election. left and right completely imploded, almost replaced by radical left, radical right parties. Look at Germany, look at Sweden, look at Portugal, look at Spain. We're seeing levels of volatility in politics that we haven't really seen in quite a long time. We've seen high levels of fragmentation, lots of new parties coming on board. Maybe that happens in Britain. Watch the space.

Matt, one of the things that strikes me about the volution of our political system, And of course, this was always the case to some extent, but it seems to me that we, it's kind of our fault, too, because we massively disincentivized politicians from telling the truth about difficult things. And as you talk about, you know, Liz Truss, she will be elected, I'm sure, on Monday. And she needs to come out and say, well, these are the mistakes we've made. But I actually haven't heard anyone say what you've said on our show today, which is there's definitely going to be a winter of discontent. And I think it would actually be quite important for a leader. I mean, what do people think is going to happen? Well, they don't.

Right. They don't. This is my point. Because no one is saying to them, the winter will be quite difficult. You need to prepare. You need to set some money aside now. You need to do this. You need to.

Like, I appreciate a politician has, you know, the challenge of also not panicking people. But I also think the politician has a responsibility to level with the country about the nature and the scale of what's coming. and they're not doing that. Well, if you read what's coming out of sort of, you know, team trust, I think the plan seems to be the first hundred days will basically be about survival, will be about just deal with the energy crisis, get on top of it. Aspirational stuff. Just just get through the winter, right?

And then, you know, into 23, start to lay out, you know, the ideas for the big, big policy stuff. I mean, I haven't been told that, that's what I read in. I think it was the FT that did a piece on that. That seems to be the rough plan, like coming. And, you know, in all fairness, when you're polling at 29, 30%, you know, I think probably that's the only thing, really, that she's going to be really incentivized to do is just to make sure she doesn't have a rebellion

within the Conservative Party, first and foremost, because don't forget, I mean, a lot of Conservative MPs did not back trust, right? If she ends up becoming the next leader, a lot of MPs back Penny Morden, which is an interesting decision, a few others. And, you know, I think that's going to leave her in a bit of a potentially a vulnerable place. But then after Christmas, potentially she wants to get into that situation where she can look back and say, you know, we've got through it.

Now let's not ruin it. Let's stay on course, et cetera. So there's going to be that return to the David Cameron narrative of 2015. You know, don't let Labor and the SMP ruin it at the next election. Let's stay on course. Yes, things are difficult. But here's what we've done. I mean, that I imagine will be the playbook. you know, delivered, done what we could with Brexit, with signing trade deals, we're trying

to do XYZ, you know, don't put Nicola Sturgeon into number 10 with, with Kirstama. I imagine that will be the strategy. And in a sense, it will be, you know, try and mobilize England again, against the SMP and, I'm non-London England, against the SMP and Labour. And that strategy has been successful for them in the past, but it's whether they can reconnect with those groups that that I talked about, and I'm currently skeptical. Matt, you're someone who is obviously very knowledgeable about politics. You spent your life studying it. But just talking as a human being to a human being,

how worried are you about what you're seeing in our country? Because I'm a layman, and, to put it bluntly, I'm fucking terrified. Would you share those? Do you mean in terms of the economic? The economics, the culture, the social. I'm talking about the very fabric of our. country? Well, I wouldn't say I'm more of an optimist, I'm we have a remarkable, let's just play the upside for a second. We have a remarkable

resilient political system and we do. I mean, put all the liberal shrieking of the last two years to one side, right? We have never come close to having a serious meltdown in our political system, like never in recent history. And there's all Optimism point one. Optimism point two is we remain a very moderate political culture in this country. I know it doesn't feel like that sometimes, but compared to our Italian and our American and our many other neighbors and counterparts, we have a very moderate political culture.

I think that is a plus. We are not as tribal as many other people. I do genuinely think that's the case. And thirdly, we have lots of things that. still ultimately bring us together. And I think many of the things that Orwell and Blair and Johnson and many others are pointed to are valid. We have still many points of unity in this country that are not always political relating to sense of humor, our respect for certain institutions, that are not always in politics, our sense of fair play, which of course Boris Johnson

discovered what happens when you violate that, as did Dominic Cummings, you know, our sense of tolerance and fairness. These are things that I think are ingrained, actually, in our national culture. And you might say I'm being naive, but I think the British and the English culture is very resilient to many of the things that we have been talking about. And yes, it's going to be a difficult winter and it's going to be a difficult five years ahead. And lots of people are going to find it very, very difficult, you know, and it's going to find it very difficult. You know, and I'm very aware of that. We have also been through things like this before.

We've been through the three-day working week. We've had winters of discontent before. We've had major global depressions, financial crises, credit crunches, you name it. And we've not descended into mass revolt and upheaval. We've got on with it. And that's what we do in this country. We get on with it. Keep calm and carry on.

Keep calm and carry on, yeah. Well, the only positive note of the interview, And that is why we will end. Maybe we should have started. But Matt, thank you so much for coming back. It's always a pleasure to have you on. Before we let you go, we should tell everybody to read your substack and follow your work on Twitter as well.

But, of course, our last question is always the same, even though it produces a different answer every time, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about in our society that we really should be? I think we need to talk a lot more about family breakdown. I've just finished reading a great new report by the Nuffield, Angus Deaton Review, the Institute for Fiscal Studies. They've just put this report out on the scale of family breakdown in the UK and the effects that it is having on children

and the effects of this much more fluid environment that we're in. And I think in terms of policy, in terms of politics, in terms of society, we need leaders who are going to stand up and say, actually we need to now start putting family at the center of our politics and our country. And I think that would be very popular. And the return on investment is enormous. It's enormous. It's a no-brainer from a policy perspective. Strong families, stronger society, fewer problems, less addiction, less crime, less mental health issues.

You name it. It's a range of benefits. Absolutely. Matt, thank you so much for coming back. And thank you guys for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon. We're another brilliant episode like this one or a show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go,

it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. We're going to ask a couple of questions of Matt that you've already submitted for our locals. So join our locals to see those. See you there. What is the best strategy for later? to use in the next election.