TRIGGERnometry - The State of Britain with Matt Goodwin

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

Following recent events, we will be sitting down LIVE with Matt Goodwin - Professor of Politics & author of the bestselling book - Values, Voice & Virtue, to discuss both cause and consequence of this turbulent time in British politics. Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to a very special live interview of Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today returns for the hundredth time. He's a political expert. Matt Goodwin, welcome back to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me.

We're family now. You're here, as I said, not for the first time, so you don't need much of an introduction. You are our go-to man for political analysis, particularly here in the UK, about everything that's going on. Very kind. And it has been rather an eventful couple of days, hasn't it, Matt? What have you made of everything that's happened over the last weekend and in the last two days as well? We're witnessing the disintegration of the Conservative Party.

We're witnessing a party that no longer knows what it is, what it's about, how to connect with the country. The departure of Suella Braverman, her resignation letter, which you will have seen this afternoon to Rishi Sunak, which didn't pull any punches. She's just putting it mildly. I mean, it was brutal. What this says to me, look, is, is, you know, you're just... You've got a party that was handed a unique historic opportunity in 2019. The big realignment. We talked about it on this show the day after the election.

I remember that conversation very fondly. And we said at the time, for the Conservative Party to hold this political realignment, it's got to deliver for working class voters, for older voters, for cultural conservatives. It's got to be what it says on the tin. Now, fast forward, and here we are. We have a conservative party that is basically retreating to the David Cameron, liberal Cameroon tradition, social liberalism, cultural liberalism, which doesn't really know what it is. And I think Suella Bravman's departure and David Cameron's return to frontline politics

really symbolizes this existential crisis for the Conservative Party. So what we're heading into now, for the next 12 months, what we're heading into is an ideological, philosophical, civil war for the soul of conservatism. And that is going to determine not just what kind of conservative party we have, but what kind of country we have. but what kind of country we have over the next 10, 20 years. That's a great overview of the next 12 months, and obviously it's a pivotal moment, I think, in the history of this country. I think there's no argument about that.

Can we take a moment, though, to go back over the last few days and just try and understand how we've got here? Because a lot of people, myself included, have said that Suella Braverman's positions represent a kind of silent majority in this country. And yet we also have to reconcile that with the fact that, According to some polling, 73% of the public supported her being sacked by the Prime Minister. So maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we're wrong to say that she represents a popular view in this country.

Can you tell us more about that? Suella does represent a majority of people in this country in terms of the positions that she holds and the things that she cares about. She wants to reduce mass immigration. She thinks multiculturalism as a policy is broken. She wants to deport foreign nationals who glorify terrorism, as you discuss with Douglas Murray on your recent show. She says the institutions are ideologically biased. They're skewed towards a liberal progressive causes. And she thinks that the government, our prevailing culture, is no longer prioritizing the majority,

that it's become obsessed with an identity-wake politics. Now, on all of those issues, and I've polled them, and I've written about it on Substack, I've written about it on Twitter. Those are majority positions. Not 51%, there's 60 to 75%. Why you're seeing those numbers in terms of Rishi Shingat was right to dump Suella? Well, those are all voter numbers. They're not conservative party voters.

They're not levers. If you look at the Conservative Party electorate, only a minority of them think Rishi Sineat was right to dump Suella Bravam. And while we're here, only a very small minority of them think he was right to bring back David Cameron. I mean, you've got the change. candidate bringing back the Conservative Party leader from 2005 to 2016. So the strategy is all over the place. But Suella speaks for a majority of this country who are looking at the Conservative Party, many people watching the show, looking at the Labour Party too, and realizing what we are now

living through is a restoration of an elite liberal consensus which will tolerate no dissent, no questioning of that consensus. And what worries me more than anything about what we've witnessed in recent days. It's another example of a radical alternative voice being purged from politics. Think about what we've seen. Boris Johnson, gone. Liz Truss, gone. Suella Braverman, gone. To that, we might also say Jeremy Corbyn and the radical left, gone. Radical dissenting voices, people who question the social and economic consensus in this country are being purged from politics and the public square. That makes me nervous. That makes me very worried about where we're going as a society, because I don't think we're even able to tolerate

dissent anymore. And that is why I'm almost hoping that this civil war within the Conservative Party actually leads to much longer term structural change in British politics, and we'll come back and talk about that. Matt, do you think, and there are some people who will say this, my father, in particular, who's a conservative voter, that she sowed the seeds of her own demise with some of the language and the rhetoric that she used, it was unnecessarily inflammatory, is what social conservatives and my father's ilk would say? I think that's true. And I think there's a criticism of Suella, which would say at times she wasn't necessarily behaving in a way that was what you would expect for somebody in high office. Suella in reply would say that she was there

with a specific brief, a specific mandate, and that as her resignation letter makes clear, she made a deal with Rishi Sunak that involved delivering on a number of things that were in the 2019 manifesto, lowering migration, strengthening the country's borders, dealing with the illegal migrants and the small votes and so on, and that the rest of the cabinet, including the prime minister, consistently failed to deliver on those promises. So Suella would say it was her duty to speak out in the way that she did. And it was her duty to represent those voters who went with the Conservatives in 29. And you know what? And I know I read your substack too on this. And we ended up writing similar things. I think she's right, actually. And I think Suella really

understands where the average voter is on these issues. And I think many people, as you will know on this show, are looking at the institutions, the BBC, the universities, the creative industries, are cultural institutions. And they are now seeing a consensus on the erosion of sex-based rights, support from mass migration, the imposition of woke ideology in schools, in the cultural institutions, the galleries and museums, a cynicism of who we are, of our history, of our identity. And they're just saying, you know, this is a consensus that speaks to no more than 20% of the country. No more than 20% of Britain are strongly and significantly liberal. That's it, 20%. So 80% are out there saying, what on earth is this? What is this consensus? Who wants this consensus? And of course, the answer is

the elite want this consensus. And Suella, I think, violated that. And we can see what happens when you violate that. And but also as well, there was, when she wrote that article, there were people who were saying that that was a violation. That was her stepping out of, that was her stepping out of line. That was her directly challenging the authority of the Conservative Party. Can you see why, if you put yourself in Rishi's shoes, she made her position untenable? Yeah, sure. She violated the assumption, the unwritten, well, the formal agreement that the police and the government should be independent and she waded into that. Look, that piece also made a number of good substantive points.

Why is it that COVID lockdown protesters were treated so badly relative to Black Lives Matter demonstrators? Why is it that visibly pro-Hamas supporters were given a free pass while far-right goons and thugs were rounded up and treated the way they were? There is an imbalance, or at least there is a widespread perception of an imbalance. when police officers are taking the knee to express solidarity with BLM, or as we saw last weekend, having photographs taken with children dressed up as terrorists, Islam as terrorists, the police also have a duty to remain politically impartial

as to our schools, by the way. And what I think many voters are sick of is looking at these institutions and seeing an ideological bias at work. And Soella called that out. And, you know, I understand the criticism that, you know, she had a responsibility to maintain the independence of the police and so on. But we should still be able to have a national debate about the things we are actually seeing on the streets on social media.

And that's what worries me, Matt, is that what we have now is taboo subjects when before these subjects were in the mainstream of politics. Immigration. The fact that if you come out and say, we need to stop the boats, that is then acquainted with a nascent Nazi party. by one of our most prominent sports broadcasters is risable. Well, I think the idea that the Conservative Party is a far-right party is amusing. When you consider that the Conservative Party is the most pro-immigration party we've ever had in British politics,

the Conservative Party has presided over the biggest increase in both legal and illegal immigration that Britain has ever seen. Full stop, right? Net migration was 300,000 when David Cameron came in in 2010. It's 6004,000 as we talk in November, 2023. The new figures were going to be in. will come out in the next week and it will go even higher. So the idea that the Conservative Party is far right is a joke. But your point is a very important one. What we are witnessing is the expansion of social norms. So racism, transphobia, homophobia, hate. You notice everyone had a problem with hate march but not hate crime. So the social norms get expanded. Now why does that happen? It happens because people want to silence and stigmatize views that undermine or challenge the dominant

status quo, that challenge the zeitgeist, that challenge the consensus among a more socially, culturally liberal elite. And as you made, you made this point, I think this week, Constantine, that you look at the reaction to trigonometry, I think for the first time, really in recent history, those institutions, or legacy institutions, are actually realizing that they cannot continue with that game, because voters, citizens are going to leave. They're going to explore other forums. They're going to explore other institutions, other avenues. And you can see that happening. Radio 4 Today. I have to listen to it every morning for work. It drives me crazy. Radio 4 today has lost two, two and a half million listeners since Brexit. Public trust in the BBC is collapsing.

Trust in BBC journalists telling the truth has declined sharply over the last 20 years. And I think voters are just realizing that the way in which we have these conversations, For example, the pro-Palestine protests getting sort of sidetracked into a debate about Tommy Robinson. Well, actually, the real debate there, what should have been on the front pages after the, after Remembrance Day, were people dressed up as Hamas terrorists. Yep. That should have been on the front page of every national newspaper. Tommy Robinson, relative to radical Islamism, I'm sorry, Tommy Robinson is nowhere near as much of a threat as radical pro-hamas Islam. Islamism in Western democracies. That is a major, major threat. The far right is a problem. I used to

work on the far right. It's a problem. But what we are talking about is a revolutionary, existential challenge to our way of life. Radical Islamists want to completely overthrow the institutions and our society, much like the vote left. So we're seeing the toxic combination of the two feeding off one another. And somewhere along the way, we lost our perspective and we lost our sense of what's important and what should be prioritised. And I think we saw that in recent weeks, actually. We should probably clarify, Matt, that when you say that you used to work on the far right, what you mean is when you were an academic, you were researching the far right. I think we should just clarify that. Yeah, I wasn't marching in the streets. You were not marching in the street, sadly. But you do like a good

tear up every now and again. So one of the things you touched on that, I want to come back to the Civil War and Conservative Party in the future of the country in the second. But one of the things you touch on that is the media. And I have to be honest, and this may sound radical, but over the last few days, that meme that I keep seeing online, which is no matter how much you hate the media, you don't hate them enough, that has really come to the fore because my view is, you know, what is the definition of far right? To me, the definition of far right is people who are sexist and intolerant of other ethnic

and religious groups, homophobic, think. women are second-class citizens and should be kept in the home, etc. And people who incite and use violence in the streets. And from that definition, we've had the far right on the streets of Britain for five weeks every weekend, and the police have done absolutely nothing about it. And the moment, as you say, that a few football hooligans come out and they throw some bottles, that is wrong. They shouldn't be doing that.

And anyone who breaks the law should be condemned for it and the police should deal with them. But you can see, A, the double standards in the way that they're policed. And much more, much more than that, the double standards in the way that it's covered in the media, where they say nothing about people saying death to all the Jews, Hitler knew what to do with the Jews, all of these incidents, which are as marginal as the Tommy Robinson thing is to the entire feeling in the country about it, but they don't get the attention at all. What happens instead is they just focus on that one incident

because it feeds into the narrative that they want to push. And I think the country's had enough of it. I think that's right. I wrote last week about the interplay between the rise of a very aggressive radical Islamism and the rise of the woke left and why the interaction of the two is so important. And we have lost sight of the scale of that threat. And what is it that the the vote left and radicalism is having common? Both are illiberal. They have no interest in individual rights and individual liberty. Both are revolutionary. They seek a complete overthrow of the existing system and institutions.

Both are cynical, if not hostile, towards Western ways of life. They view us fundamentally as racist, as prejudice towards minorities. Both cling to a very crude, binary view of who we are. There are believers or there are non-believers. There are the oppressed. There are the oppressors. There is no room for nuance. There is no room for pluralism.

There is no room for complexity in society. Both are very organized around rituals. Radical Islamists, it is prayer, it is Allah Wahbar, it is shouting all of these slogans for the woke, it is taking the knee, it is saying, you know, no justice, no peace, etc., etc. And so what you're seeing, I think, is as the cultural left is taking control of institutions,

is kind of pushing in this identitarian view of the world where there are oppressors and the oppressed, it's basically opening the door for radical Islamism. It's allowing radical Islamism to thrive in this model of multiculturalism, which is broken. And that's what So Wella said. Souela said, look, the issue is not multicultural societies, right? I mean, I was amazed that serious national columnists didn't understand this. Really?

She was saying there is no problem with multicultural societies per se, but there is a problem with multiculturalism. Yes. Which prioritizes group difference over commonality. And that is what's enabled radical Islamists and terrorist sympathizers to flourish in communities up and down Britain, in highly segregated communities. And Soella was absolutely right in saying, if you want to respond seriously to the challenges that we face as a country, we are going to have to dramatically reduce immigration, legal immigration. We're going to have to leave any institution or judicial convention that doesn't allow us to control our own national borders. We're going to have to have a new policy of integration, which ensures that no child, family can grow up in a highly segregated community with no interaction with wider British society.

And we're going to have to get a hell of a lot tougher when it comes to the rule of law and deporting foreign nationals who glorify terrorism. And I know you've talked about this already. I polled that, 76% of voters said, yeah, if you're on the streets of Britain and you're a foreign national and you're glorifying Hamas or you're glorifying IS, you should leave Britain. We don't want you here. You should get out of the national community. And so the era of us being tolerant of people who do not tolerate our way of life is over. And I think it should come to an end as quickly as possible. And Suella represents that, I think. You say it's over, Matt. And I certainly know that for a lot of people the last few weeks, have been eye-opening, to be sure. And I think I myself am, look, I've always, every day I'm fielding accusations, inverted commas, of being conservative. And I'm still not conservative,

but if this is the choice, I know which side I'm going to play on, irrespective of what my overall beliefs about liberalization of drugs and whatever is. You see what I'm saying? So for a lot of people, it's an eye-opening moment. However, you say that moment, that world is over, the next election is going to be a labour landslide, isn't it?

It will be a labour landslide, but what I mean is, in terms of the wider zeitgeist, in terms of the public mood, you cannot come out of the last few weeks thinking immigration and multiculturalism has been good for Britain, has been an unalloyed success story. It is now visible to everybody. We have a major problem within our communities in Britain. We have people homegrown who are out on the streets calling for the murder and the rape of Jews. Now, of course, you might say, well, we saw that after 9-11, we saw it after 7-7. I think it has become a much bigger problem now.

It's on a different scale than what it was 20 years ago. And the other thing I would just say is there is a widespread sense out there in a country. Many viewers watching this, I think, will agree. 70% of people now say, neither left nor right represent me. The space for a new radical challenger to this broken consensus is enormous. It will take money. it will take organization and it will take a charismatic leader. But the space is bigger than it was in 2013, 2014,

because voters out there are utterly fed up of this broken status quo between left and right. You can feel it. I was in a focus group last week in Stoke-on-Trent. Voters are crying in a focus group. They're saying no one's got the answers to cost of living. No one's got the answers to productivity, the lack of productivity. Nobody's seriously leveling up.

Nobody's bringing down immigration. Nobody's dealing with the small boats. They can't do anything anymore. It's almost as if our rulers are incapable of actually bringing about the changes that voters want to see. Okay, so I take on board what you're saying, but doesn't that also mean we need to get rid of first-past-the-posts then?

I personally would support electoral reform. I would support the shift of proportional representation because I think the majoritarian system no longer works for the myriad of concerns and groups that we have in British society. I would personally support that. And I think so with many people who are disgruntled with left and right. It's very difficult to upend a big party in a majoritarian system. It's not impossible.

It's happened in Canada in the early 90s. The Labour Party, of course, replaced the Liberals. It is possible. It's very, very difficult. But there's another issue here, which you guys directly tap into, which is there's fixing the politics of this, and then there's fixing the culture of this. And I think the culture,

the ecosystem that is emerging to give expression to people who no longer want to abide by this elite consensus is now much bigger than it was five years ago and is enormous compared to what it was 10 years ago. The substacks, the YouTube shows, the new media, GB News, Talk TV, whatever, the landscape is fundamentally different. So the culture is changing. And I think what makes the new elite, the kind of dominant class so nervous, is they can now sense that. They can sense they're not in control anymore. They can sense things are beginning to shift. So I... Well, yeah, that's why Private Eye are writing hit pieces about us and all of that, all of that stuff. But let's come back to this idea that the next election will be a Labor landslide,

because we all know it will be, especially after the last couple of days. I mean, there's no way of rescuing this, right? For the Conservatives. No, you're shaking your head. No, I would give Rishi Sunak a 1%, 2% chance. 2% chance. Okay. So that means the next five years, we've got a year or so until the next election, could be even January 2025, but probably not. Then you've got four years of a Labour government. And my understanding is part of Suella's move was that that defeat next year for the Conservative Party is her opportunity to be the knight in China Army. He says, well, look, I tried. Didn't listen to me.

Look, what happened. Now I'm here. Let's be real conservative now. The Conservative Party will never allow that to happen. The Conservative Parliamentary Party and the donor class will never allow the Tory Party to be reshaped. I'm increasingly of the view that Peter Hitchens was right all along. We love Peter.

If you want to save Britain, we need to basically destroy the Conservative Party. Now, the reason I say that is because look at Suella. The fact that she has attracted so much heat from her own colleagues tells you all you need to know about the state of conservatism. Here's what we need to do. We need to basically, if you care about the country, I would argue, we need to rebuild a new national conservatism,

which is very different from what we've got with the British Tories. A national conservatism would prioritize a number of things which today's Conservative Party simply do not do. do. It would prioritize dramatic reductions in legal immigration, potentially a five-year freeze so we can absorb the migration of the last 20 years. It would prioritize a robust and radical policy for integration, no more segregation, no more multiculturalism which allows communities to remain distinct from the wider British community. It would focus on cultivating a story about who we are. The economy should work for the national community, not globalized,

offshore interests. It should be fundamentally about promoting and preserving the national interest. A tough approach on law and order, including the deportation of foreign nationals who glorify terrorism or who commit crime. Revitalizing the country's manufacturing base, redistributing power, not just government departments, but power outside of London and university towns to other parts of the country, having a robust pro-family policy, which is not just about giving people tax breaks, but encouraging people to have children. I could go on. There are about 10, 12 principles that should define national conservatism, a national conservatism, which also reaches into sections of the Labour Party, which Francis, you know very well, and also reaches into

the conservatives, but also reaches into the apathetic masses, the none of the above. You say none of these parties actually represent me anymore. Now, the Republicans are beginning to understand the difference between national conservatism and what we might call Chino's, conservatives in name only, right? They're understanding that. They're understanding the potency of that. They're also understanding the need for that. If you want to stand up to China, you want to stand up to Russia, you want to stand up to, you know, woke ideas and whatever,

you need a strong nation state with strong families and a robust economy that works for, the national interest and you want power concentrated in the principle of popular sovereignty, in the people. You do not want power diluted and transferred to institutions outside of the nation state or to institutions which are not directly accountable to the people, which is what Rwanda's about. The only people making that decision should be people directly elected by ordinary citizens. So what I would argue is we need a reassertion of popular sovereignty in British politics. We need a movement for the people which transcends left and right. And whoever gets there first, whoever presses that button,

whoever speaks for the masses on those issues, will find themselves being catapulted to the very forefront of British politics. And you mentioned the need for a charismatic leader. I put it to the one person that I think could unite that coalition, because he's done it before, he's currently eating kangaroo balls in Australia, or whatever he's Nigel Farage is up to. Is that who you think is the man, Or do you think it's time for someone fresh?

I think Nigel would definitely need to be part of that movement because Nigel has consistently been the most impactful but also underestimated politician of our time. There is something interesting happening. Here's one scenario. Let's say Nigel Farage goes in the jungle and it isn't a disaster. Let's say his brand actually comes out a bit stronger. A new generation understand what he's about.

Let's say a load of 2019 conservative MPs from the Red Wall, their seats and they're milling around, they're not sure what to do. I care about the country, but I've lost my seat. I understand these red wallers, but why is David Cameron now back in the cabinet? Let's add to that, you know, the ranks of reform, the reform party, maybe the Social Democratic Party, the SDP, influential commentators and columnists from the new media, from the YouTube channels and the substacks and the Twitter sphere and, the new magazines and the online platforms, everybody who is basically united in understanding what's gone wrong

and where we need to go, that is the basis for something serious. That is the basis for something that will attract funding, people, energy, and will have an impact. And if you look at all Western democracies over the last 20 years, one of the key stories is that now is the time for renegades and radical challenges and insurgents who are willing to take on the dinosaur parties,

Emmanuel Macron, Georgia Maloney, Donald Trump, Sweden Democrats could go on and on and on. Now is the time for new people to stand up and say, we're not going to do this anymore. We're not going to give another four, five-year term to a party that is exactly the same as the other party. If Labor win the next election, Constantine, you know this. The consensus doesn't change.

High tax, big state, mass immigration, low growth, high debt. Nothing fundamentally changes. There is no radical shaking up of the status quo. Yeah, but trans people are going to have more rights, make sure good. And we'll be giving government contracts out on the basis of race and ethnicity. Of course we're all. With the racial equality act.

So what we have is a more divided, wokeified society along the lines of America and the things that make us unique as British, having a unifying story, we're proud of our history, we're proud of our identity, we're proud of our values. you know, we're proud of free enterprise. All of those things gradually get weakened and undermined. Matt, one of the things that I'm worried about, and I don't think people are talking about this enough,

is that if Labor getting with a significant majority, which I'm not sure they will, if they're honest, because every left-wing person I've ever spoken to is dubious about Stama, to put it mildly. No one seems particularly enthused by him. I'm sure they'll vote for Sunak, mate. They might not vote. They might not, but yeah.

But my point, my worry is this, it's blasphemy laws. I can see a Labour government bringing in blasphemy laws. I really can, and I find that incredibly worry. It's already happened. We've already had non-violent hate crimes. We've had, you know, you go on a London tube, you're lectured by billboard posters about, you know, hate speech and hate language. That's, by the way, another similarity between the woke left and radical Islamists.

They're both very supportive of blasphemy. And they're both very supportive. of limiting free speech and free expression in the name of their ideological mission. This is why I've always had a problem with the cultural left because the first thing to go in their project is free speech and free expression. They will sacrifice free speech

on the altar of social justice every time. They will cancel, they will silence, they will purge every time. And that's why this movement is a liberal. And when we first started talking about the woke, you remember everyone would say, this thing doesn't exist. This thing is ridiculous. Now look at the books recently, right?

Francis Fukuyama, identity, Yasha Monk, the identity trap, Susan Neiman, Woke is not left. There is now an acceptance on the centre-left that they have a major problem. It took them 10 years to get there, right? Many of us were there a lot earlier, but even the left now understand,

actually this thing that we've allowed to kind of get out the bottle is now destroying wider society. It just took them too late. And I have to say, I'm with the national conservatives on this, Because the only thing that is capable of standing up and meeting these threats from wokeism, from radical Islamism, will ultimately be national conservatism. It's the only thing that is strong enough.

Liberalism, liberal parties, centrist dads are not strong enough to deal with this threat. They don't have the unifying story. They don't have the appeals to group belonging. They don't have the kind of anchor in our history, in our identity. they're too fluid. They're not robust. They're not rigorous. And I think that's why,

if the conservatives are smart, they will reinvent around national conservative principles. If they're not smart, they will rally behind somebody like Penny Morden, and they will say the future is

David Cameron 2.0. And that will be a big problem. But we've got David Cameron 1.0 at the moment. I mean, this is the other thing, right? Vishinan presents himself as a change candidate. And then brings back David Cameron? No one thinks he's the change candidate. I just don't understand.

I don't understand the politics behind it at all. I don't think he understands the politics behind it. I don't think there is anybody left, centre, or on the right, apart from Ian Dale, who thought this was a good idea. Bless him, and we nod you in. When Ian Dale says something's good, you know it's not. And we love Ian. He's a friend, but on this one, yeah, we don't agree. But why is it that when we, I was in Manchester for the Conservative Party conference

and Rishi Sunak's speech, the three, the top three things voters want to talk about today. cost of living crisis, state of the NHS, immigration. Those are the three priorities. Rishi Sunak talked about banning smoking, reforming A-levels, and stopping a high-speed train line. I mean, they're completely different conversations, utterly different. And I think sometimes when you get people, as you know, in SW1 and politics, they're very clever people and they're bright. But sometimes they're too clever, and they overthink things to such an extent that they leave everybody else. else wondering what on earth this project is really all about. And I think, you know, I know the people

around Rishi Sunak, I've got a lot of respect for them. But I think privately, they've now concluded that they've got a year and they're just going to do what they're personally interested in doing. So they're going to do the smoking ban. They're going to do the A-level stuff. And they're not really that bothered about winning the next election. I think they're just now focusing on pet projects. Really? I think so. And I think, you know, David Cameron's appointment, jobs for the boys, put him in the House of Lords, you rub my back, I'll rub yours. I don't think this is a party. As Tim Stanley said, a journalist who I respect a lot. Former guest to the show. He said, this party is philosophically non-existent. I mean, it has no coherent ideology anymore.

It is simply about jobs for the boys, patrician liberalism, let's just keep the establishment happy and basically F everybody else. And I think that's unfortunately what we can from a Prime Minister who we should remember doesn't have a democratic mandate. I mean, Rishi Sunak does not have a mandate from voters, right? And that's why I think the defeat will be particularly bruising. But you say that, and look, I agree with you on the majority of it. But if you think about a bruising defeat,

think about Labour in 2019. They came up against Johnson. Now, we can have all the criticisms in the world about Johnson, but he was a fantastic campaigner. He was charismatic. He was funny. He had a message. When we look at the destruction of the Conservative Party, I think it was in 92. With Blair, Blair was one of the best politicians.

Permittable. Of whatever generations. Stama? No. Terrible. But he's doing what he needs to do to win the election. Opposition parties don't win elections. Governments lose elections. That's the key principle.

Boris Johnson, while we're at it, was good, but he was not a conservative. Boris Johnson was a bohemian liberal. He was not a conservative. We've not really had a serious conservative leader for a long time. Keir Stama, his net ratings are okay. He's on plus 10, Rishi Sunak's minus 15, Prince Andrews minus 60. That gives you a kind of, gives you a relative benchmark. Stama's doing what he needs to do.

Now, the question is what happens when he wins? Here are a few predictions. Number one, Labor break their manifesto pledges. They have to. Taxes are going to go up. They can't afford public services. They can't afford all the things we need to pay for without raising taxes. Here's one stat to keep in mind.

No one talks about this in front-line politics. Guess how much we are spending every month servicing our national debt on our country's credit card? Not paying off the debt, just paying the interest. Guess how much we're paying every month? I have no idea. 13 billion pounds every month on national debt, okay? Now, what could you do with 13 billion? You could do a lot, right?

So Labor's pledged to scrap non-don benefits. Great, that raises 3 billion. We're paying 13 billion a month on our national debt. So no one's talking about how to reduce national debt. So when Labor come in, they're going to have no real room for maneuver on fiscal policy on the economy. They're going to have still the worst living Sanders for 50 years.

They're going to have immigration probably at somewhere between 600 and 800,000. We're going to have a housing crisis which is going to escalate dramatically. We built 180,000 homes last year. We need to build 600,000 every year just to keep up with migration. Okay? We built 180,000. We're going to need to build 600,000 every year just to keep up with migration. Not to mention then we've got no serious growth strategy.

We've got no serious strategy for boosting productivity. We're not talking about integration and cohesion. We're going to see dramatic population shifts. And much of the migration, by the way, is low-skill migration from sub-Saharan Africa, which is a net cost to the economy. It is not adding to our economy. It is taking away from our economy before we get into private rental rates going up, before we get into school places, before we get into the NHS.

And as we know, Robert Putnam and others have shown this, highly diverse societies have lower levels of trust and lower levels of support for welfare. So if you look at where Britain is going over the next 20, 30, 40 years, with parties that seem incapable of even discussing these issues, I'm very, very skeptical of where we're going. I'm actually quite nervous about where we're going as a society because you cannot sustain this pace of change and churn without a serious political response that is going to manage it. And it doesn't seem to be any attempt to manage this on any serious level. Well, Matt, while we're on that black pill moment,

you mentioned Peter Hitchens. And Peter Hitchens, when asked on question time, I think 15 or 20 years ago, he was pressed by the host of the time David Dimbleby, I think, on what people should do about this. And his advice was emigrate, leave. And you laugh, and I have to say, I'm not laughing at all, because I speak to my Jewish friends in London. Yeah. Everyone who has the ability to leave is thinking of leaving.

And frankly, I don't blame them. I also don't blame people who are aspirational, driven, talented, who are business people, who are creative, who see a bright future for themselves. I don't blame them looking around at what you are projecting, which is no offence to you. You're very talented of what you do, but it's a statement of the bleeding obvious at this point that the country is not going in the right direction. And why should people stay? Why should people stay? Well, my daughters too, for the first time in my life, I think, I'm thinking of leaving the country.

I don't think Britain, in many respects, is a serious country anymore. I think our national conversation has sharply deteriorated the quality of our national conversation over the last 20 years, the ruling class, the inability to discuss the serious issues, the short-termism in the media, the refusal to entertain any challenge to the prevailing ideas or the orthodoxy, the stifling of free speech, the imposition of political correctness, the politicization of our institutions, the blatant bias that we can see in schools, universities, policing. And also, I think what worries me most is the general disinterest in preserving and passing on who we are. That's the thing that gets me the most. It's almost like Roger Scruton

used to talk about the politics of repudiation, the culture of repudiation. We're more interested now in repudiating than respecting our shared history, our shared identity and our culture. There were very few glimmers of hope. There are some. The campaign to defend women's sex-based rights, I think, is scoring real victories. You can see that in Labour's backtracking and Kirstarmes changes. Scotland was interesting. The gender recognition reform bill being over turned. But the victories are few and far between. Amid all of that, between all of that, is the relentless onslaught of this cultural revolution, which is what we're living in. It is a cultural revolution being imposed by the institutions on everybody else. So I am thinking of

the first time in my life leaving the country. And as I said to you earlier on, sometimes you realize that Peter Hitchens was right all along. This is an argument that will make Peter obviously very happy. Well, we talked about it. I don't think there's anything that would make Peter happy. I think that would. But I think the interesting thing perhaps to explore is we interviewed Neil Ferguson, the historian. And that episode is going out this Sunday, I think, from memory.

And we put all of this to him. And he said, well, look, the one thing that we maybe could look at for inspiration is the 1970s, when Israel had just been attacked in the Yom Kippur War, the state of the economy and the state of the country in the UK, would probably even worse than it is now. Can we look to that for inspiration, Matt, or were the circumstances different? I'm not convinced by that for a couple of reasons. The one is, how did the 70s end with the arrival of radical leaders willing to take on the consensus? We are no longer capable of tolerating leaders who challenge the consensus. Who is the next Margaret Thatcher?

Well, they'll be silenced and shut down in five minutes. It'll be very difficult. As Liz Truss and Boris Johnson showed, whatever you think of them, as their experiments showed, we cannot tolerate dissent or a change of course. Even Brexit was a sort of national trauma, a kind of a breakdown in our collective psyche. And the other thing about the 70s, just briefly,

just before you to do, the other thing about 70s is the dominant issues in the 70s were economic. And today, culture matters as much as the economy. And so the dividing lines in our society are much more complex in many regards than they were in the 70s. And that's what makes it so difficult to actually find a way through. There's someone put it, we're not one people anymore. No, and we don't have a unifying story anymore.

There is no sense of, there's not even a willingness. You know, if you go back and you read, say, Who Are We by Samuel Huntington, which is a good book on American national identity. You know, and he argues that essentially that the national unifying story in America was undermined by large-scale migration and by the rise of an elite class that no longer believed and invested in a nation.

And in many respects, we are now seeing that play out here, a sort of a tendency to look down on who we are and to expose a national community to such change at such a pace that everybody is left feeling bewildered, not really sure who they are, what they think. The counter argument I was going to put to you was the possibility of, you get a labour of landslide or certainly a labour win at least,

as you made a good point that it might not be a landslide. Things don't get better, things get worse, which they certainly will. They will. And then at that point, the public have just had enough. And there is actually the room for a thatchel, like, figure to come to come out and not be rejected by the public at least. But that's premised on the notion that our political parties would allow that to happen. And the problem we have is both left and right were products of the Industrial Revolution.

They built 100 years ago. So the two main political parties that we have were built for another era. What I think we need is the creation of new vessels, of new vehicles, and surrounding that a new, a new prevailing culture, which is much more in tune with what we're ordinary people. And I think that that is one of the things we need to do. We need to reform the institutions. We need to make them more representative of a wide array of voices, the BBC, as I say, the cultural institutions. The other thing, by the way, a national conservatism movement would do is take on institutions which are taxpayer-funded, but do not represent the interests

of the nation. Universities would be one example. The BBC would be another. We have to start drawing lines in the sand. We have to start saying these are the things that made us who we are, this is what we're going to defend and this is what we're going to promote. I mean, faith schools would be another example. I don't think personally we should have faith schools now. I think we need to even Catholic schools and Christian schools. Well, I think some face schools, I think we should be, we should be open to, but I think we need to start really assertively going, drawing some lines in the sand about what our civilization is, what our values are, and how we're going to defend those values. And conservatives have completely given up on that argument. At ARC recently, one of the

refreshing things at the ARC conference, which I think Constantine mentioned in his speech, you know, these cultural issues, which are so important to people, women's sex-based rights, the rights of children, our identity, our history, our culture, our values, all those things. What the left is now, and I would say also many people on the right, what they do now is they package all of that up and they say, well, this is culture wars. It's toxic, socially unacceptable. Don't talk about that. It's low status. And so, So conservatives have allowed the foundations of our civilization to be completely discredited, taken off the table of political debate.

So if you say, I think kids should be taught what Britain got right, not what Britain got wrong, or women's sex-based rights should be protected and enshrined in law and defended at every turn, or, you know, we should have a radically different approach to migration because over time, mass migration, uncontrolled migration dilutes who we are. all of those things should be on the table up for discussion and in a very short space of time they've been taken off the table and that I think is why so many voters feel very anxious for a group of MPs recently who will remain nameless

but they are very influential within a Conservative Party they asked me to do some polling they said what are the issues that voters feel most concerned about but not represented on the top three immigration is out of control I don't like political correctness I want to be able to preserve and promote Britain's distinctive identity from globalisation, from universal liberalism, those three things, right? Very simple things. We could do all of those things. We could do them tomorrow. We could have policies with a movement that delivered on all those things. Why isn't

a Conservative Party doing that? I put it to you, Matt, that the problem actually is the politicians, and it's because a lot of them are career politicians. They've never had a proper job. They've just gone straight. A lot of them have gone straight from university to become political advisors, assistance to MPs, blah, blah, blah, they are people of Westminster. They've never had a real job. They've never had to graft. They've never experienced a lot of the struggles of what ordinary people do. And these are the people on the left as well, not just on the right.

So what we've got is an entire strata of people who don't understand the people they're ruling or the people they've been, essentially they've been asked to govern because they've never been one of them. I agree. That the biggest single tribe in Westminster are careerists, people who have only ever spent their lives in politics. There have never been more university graduates in House of Commons as there are today. The Labour Party has more university graduates and a Conservative party on the Green Benches. So everything has become ideologically uniform. Everything has become homogenous. Some friends of mine in academia, they did a survey of MPs on the right and the left, and they found that both Conservative and Labour MPs

lean much further to the cultural left than the average voter. So when voters are looking at politics at Westminster saying, you know, why don't they just do the Rwandah scheme? Why don't they just stop the boats? Why don't they stop the woke? Why don't they do XYZ? Because our MPs don't really have any interest in doing that. They are no longer representative of the country that surrounds them.

So what do you need to do? You need to build a movement that is representative of the country that is actually speaking on behalf of a forgotten majority. And I think that is the next step. Look, we can change the culture. We can build an ecosystem. But there comes a point where you have to also translate culture into action.

You have to translate culture into political action. Otherwise, it is ultimately meaningless. If you don't have your hands on the levers of power, if you cannot influence the decisions that are affecting our daily lives, you're not in the end going to change anything. And I think that is the next phase of this. Build an ecosystem, convert it into political action. There are people, I'm sure, who are big fans of the STP.

I always vote for the SDP because they have the best policies and the ones that I believe in. People who have reform who will be going, well, what about us, Matt? We've been doing this. We've been at the forefront of this. Why can't people come to us? Well, if you look at, there's a literature on how to build a party and break through, and it suggests certain things are very important.

One is money. You need a lot of money. Secondly, you need a charismatic leader who can genuinely, cut through, really connect. Third, you need a laser-like focus on a single issue which really matters to a large majority of people. I mean, I've had these conversations with reform people and SDP people. I think they're all good people, by the way. I think they care about the country and I've got a lot of time for all of them. But I think probably given the scale of the problems facing Britain, we are, I think, rapidly approaching a point where everybody is going to have to

start to work together and going to have to start to prioritize the issues that they really care about. To be blunt, net zero tax, those sorts of issues, yes, they're important, but the real pressing issues for people are not those issues. The real pressing issues for people now is about how the fabric of our country is changing and how to slow that down and change it. And that is going to mean shifting the Overton window, dragging the Overton window into a very different place, you know, expanding it and beginning to put policies on the table which are completely different from the policies that are being offered by left and right. And Matt, is there a potential, I mean, we've obviously talked about the difficulties with

creating some sort of new movement within a two-party system like the one that we have? We have seen, while Brexit, I don't think, has delivered many of the things that people hoped it would. It nonetheless gave voice to the hidden concerns of the. of many, many people in the country. Is there room for some sort of, I don't know, referendum on illegal immigration or something along those lines where, like you said,

it's a single issue that many people feel very strongly about that can galvanize people into that. Is there a mechanism to do that? Is that something that would be advisable even? Well, if you look at Nigel Farage in the UK Independence Party, they started the Brexit journey by offering a referendum on EU membership

or calling for a referendum. That's done. And by the way, I'm not as apologetic about Brexit as you are and many people in the debate are. I actually think on balance, I still think Brexit now. I didn't campaign for Brexit, but I think now that it's happened, it's a good thing because we can exert much greater control over a wide array of issues. What's happened is a political class have chosen not to use that power in a way that was consistent with Brexit voters. So they chose to liberalize migration, not change it, etc, etc., etc. they chose to deregulate financial services, not revitalize manufacturing and heavy industry, and we can go on and on about those things. I still think Brexit was the right call. But in terms of moving forward and trying to get to a place where we can build something different, you know, fundamentally, we have to build a political economy that is no longer dependent upon importing cheap migrant workers from abroad, where the salary thresholds are as low as £20,000, $20,000, £23,000. And we have to get away from this addiction to looking outside of Britain for the

answers to our problems. And our political class, I think, is increasingly incapable of doing that. All of the interesting political ideas in the world right now are in America or Europe. I can't think of a single interesting idea that's coming out of British politics at the moment. I genuinely cannot. I mean, if you think about Blair, whatever you think about Blair, He actually had some interesting ideas about, you know, public service reform and all these sorts of things. But at the moment, I can't think of a single interesting idea that's coming out of British politics from this political class. And that, again, you know, worries me. Is there a worry, and we're going to go a little bit black pill again, you look at this and you think, well, this is fertile breeding ground for the far right, surely?

But we don't, we're not, we are not a country that would support a far right political political. party and the way in which that is used to constrain debate is increasingly, is very problematic. You know, the idea that the Conservative Party is a far right party. Oh, that's moronic. It's ridiculous. And the idea that we have generations of kids being brought up to think that Soella Braverman is somehow comparable to Joseph Goe Goebbels or like, you know, Adolf Hitler, it's ridiculous. And it's a reflection, both of the quality of education and the quality of our cultural class, right? The people who dominate the debate, like Gary Linear and Alistair Campbell. I mean,

most of those people, I would describe, to be frank, as morons. I don't think they really understand what they're talking about. Or if they do, they're just doing it through a sense of, you know, virtue signaling and moral righteousness. But that's not my point. So the far right, for the far right to prosper, what do you need? Suspicion of democracy, or at least appetite for an anti-democratic alternative. you need to have public support for a revolutionary movement, something that would tear down institutions, tear down the system, something that's openly racist that says,

you know, actually if you're black British, black Chinese, black Indian, you're not really British. You've got to be white to be British. Something that is anti-Semitic, something that probably offers a conspiratorial view of the world. And these are utterly fringe views in British society. 95% of Brits in the Ipsos-Mory data say, you do not have to be white to be British. Support for democracy is still very strong, even if voters would prefer a more direct conception

of democracy, right? Give more voice to the people, a little bit less to the elites in Westminster. There is very little appetite for revolutionary change in Britain. We have a civic culture, right? We respect moderation, we respect difference, we respect pluralism. but that's why Brits are so nervous because they can feel the woke left and the radicalism is closing that down, the civic culture.

So the British defence of this is actually utterly different from the far right. That's why the far right is nowhere. I mean, Tommy Robinson is a fringe figure. 80 people on Whitehall is not a serious national movement. It is fringe, which is good. We should celebrate that.

But that is not to say, we do not need a new political movement which campaigns on some issues like migration, like political correctness, like the collapse of our, the quality of our representative democracy. There are different things. I don't personally fear the far right in Britain, but I do fear what is going to happen if we don't actually start to change our politics. Matt, you're a busy guy, so we're not going to have time for questions from our audience. However, you guys should know that we took all the locals questions. Those of you support us on locals.

Thank you so much. We took the questions you put in there and we used them to guide the interview. Matt, before we let you go to fulfill your busy schedule, as ever, what's the one thing that we forgot to mention or haven't been talking about in the course of this conversation? What are people not saying? I would say there's a silver lining, which is the union is safe. The United Kingdom is, I think, generally safe. I think the reassertion of labour in Scotland, the collapse.

of the Conservative Party, in the aftermath of the next election, we will not be talking about the breakup of the United Kingdom. And I think that is one good thing that we can focus on. Well, there you go. The UK is going to be terrible, but it's going to stay together. Yeah, like a marriage. All right. Guys, thank you so much for watching. Thank you for supporting show. Make sure you head on over and subscribe to Matt Substack, which is very good. I read it all the time. I quoted him and my substack today, so make sure you go and check that out. Matt, thank you for being on the show. Thank you for having me, guys. And we will see you very soon, guys. Take care. Have yourselves a good

evening, afternoon or morning, wherever it is.