TRIGGERnometry - Triggernometry- Ep. 3 Liam Halligan

Episode Date: May 6, 2018

Triggernometry- Ep. 3 Liam Halligan by TRIGGERnometry Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thanks, yours too. What does RAV stand for anyway? To me, it's the remarkably advanced vehicle. Really? To me, it's the runway approved vehicle for its amazing style. What about remarkably adaptable vehicle because of its versatile cargo space? Or really admired vehicle? Oh, or really awesome vehicle. It really is the recreational activity vehicle.

The stylish 2026 Toyota RAP4 Limited. What's your Rav for? Liam Halligan. Nice to see you. Welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen.

And this is the show for you. If you were sick of people arguing on the internet about subjects they know nothing about at Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be experts. We ask the experts. We're here at the world famous Angel Comedy Club and our amazing expert guest this week is a journalist, economist, broadcaster and the author of Clean Brexit, Liam Halligan. Nice to see you. Welcome to Trigonometry.

Thank you. Liam, so before we get started, one of the thing we always, always like to ask our guests is just tell us a little bit about your background how is it that you are who you are today okay so I'm was born into a working class family in London I was the first person in my family to go to university I'm from a Irish background which wasn't always easy growing up in the 70s I'm an economist by training I was an academic for a while then I became a newspaper columnist So I've written a column in the Daily Telegraph for about almost 20 years now, a weekly column.

And I write columns elsewhere too. I spent quite a lot of time in Russia, both in the 90s as a journalist. And then more recently, I do a show three times a week on CNN, so I've got a portfolio career. I think a lot of people in British journalism don't quite know where to define me and where to categorize me. I guess that's the way I like it. And one of the things we'll be definitely talking a lot about today is Russia.

Tell us a little bit about your time, because we've talked about this before. Yes. A little bit about your time and Russia. What was that like for? So I first went to Russia in the early 90s as an academic, and I ended up working alongside a lot of other much more senior economists on the reform program that was going on. It was obviously for somebody like me interested in economics and politics, it was like a history on speed, You know, Francis Fukuyama had just written in 1989, it's the end of history.

No, Francis. History sped up. And to be in Russia during that period, it was a very difficult time for a lot of Russian people. It was under Yego Gaidar, who you remember, the Prime Minister at the time. It was an era that some people called shock therapy when the Soviet Union had collapsed just a few years before. Prices went through the roof. The planned economy didn't work anymore. You had a nascent private sector that was trying to immer.

merge. You had a lot of Russian people were very, very scared about what was going to happen. They went from sort of superpower to basket case in just a few months. But then again, you know, you had all that incredible ingenuity, skill and drive that the rest of the world knows that Russians have. So for me as a young man, it was an incredibly interesting time. It made me into a journalist. I ended up as covering Russia for the economist. And then I came back to the UK in the late 90s when I joined the Financial Times. More recently, from 2010 till 2013, I lived in Russia, but this time working in financial services. I took a few years out of journalism that I kept writing my columns from about 2008 to 2013,

working in an asset management company, and that asset management company focused on the post-communist world. so Russia, the broader CIS, Eastern Europe. And that was a great opportunity for me to really re-engage with that part of the world, which I guess was my first really serious adult research interest was the post-communist world. And I'm mainly a sort of British commentator these days, but I do try and keep a close eye on that region and travel there as often as I can. How do you see Russia's role in the world at the moment? Because you read some papers,

and they're sort of been portrayed almost as the enemy of the West. Do you buy into that narrative? Well, since the Cold War ended, we've gone through kind of peaks and troughs, haven't we? Yeah. I mean, you know, Vladimir Putin came in in the late 1990s. Nobody knew who he was, replaced Yeltsin. George Bush Jr. said, I look into his soul, I can see his eyes. There was a sort of real loving.

after 9-11 in 2001 folklore has it the first call that George Bush got was from Putin saying you guys want to use our bases in Kazakhstan you want to access Afghanistan from Russian territory that's absolutely fine and yet since then

we've had complete lows like when Russia was seen to have invaded Georgia okay Shackashvili was the darling of the West. Other people in Russia think Shackashvili was just trying to bounce NATO into letting Georgia in. Of course, Ukraine's been very, very controversial. But again, there are two sides to that story, as serious analysts of the region know. So on the one hand, I think people are completely intrigued by the Russians.

Here in London, there are Russians all over the place, and many of them have done great things and are doing great things, and are very, very impressive people. Others seem to be, with all respect, sleazy and where do they get their money from, and so on. So I think Russia is sometimes the other, sometimes it's the enemy. But on the other hand, people feel, but these are the guys, you know,

if we hadn't have had the Soviets in the Second World War, we would have lost. So there's always been this ambivalence. There's always been this air of mystique, an intrigue. I think as Western people, we see Russians as Europeans, so we judge them by higher standards

than we may judge people from elsewhere in the world, but we also see them as different to us. And I think at the moment, it pains me to say because I've spent a lot of my life in Russia and think highly of the, particularly of the Russian people, I think I wouldn't be truthful

if I didn't say, we are now at the post-Cold War low in terms of relations between the Western world, certainly the UK and America and Russia. Maybe you feel the same way. Cold War II, would you say? Are we there? No, I don't think it's Cold War too because, you know, in the Cold War, you wouldn't be sitting here, right? I couldn't get a visa and go to Moscow. You wouldn't have hundreds of thousands of Western people living in Moscow as you do, Europe's biggest city, 18 or million people. You wouldn't have BP owning a fifth of Rasmift, which of course is majority owned by the Russian state.

You wouldn't have Siemens, Liber, L'Oreal, Volkswagen, all these thoroughbred Western companies having huge factory presences in Russia. You wouldn't have tons and tons of Russian kids here at British public schools. So culturally, we are, completely enmeshed. We always were, you know, so many leading intellectuals in the West, particularly in Britain and America, are actually Russian emigres over the years. We've always been

fascinated with Russian culture. No one could say that, you know, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky aren't at the pinnacle of European cultural achievement, because of course they are, to say nothing of the great poets and novelists. Yet, of course, we are in a situation where the Western Russia are in some senses on the opposite sides of the war in the civil war in Syria. Everyone knows who takes any interest at all that Syria is strategically incredibly important for the Russians because of the warm water ports, not least at Tartas. Everybody knows that Putin thinks that we should keep Assad where he is,

where the West, having previously thought that now, thinks that we should remove Assad. Then again, on the other hand, the Western Russia are on the same side when it comes to ridding the region of ISIL. And there has been cooperation when it comes to strikes to try and keep that Islamic threat on the back foot. And many, you know, it's not necessarily an easy thing to say, but many serious analysts of the region and leading Western think tanks and universities think, well, you know, we can't really solve the Russia, the Middle East or even

stabilized the Middle East without talking to the Iranians, a emerging regional power broker, of course, historically a huge presence in the region, and the Syrians, and the only external force who can do that is Moscow.

And is that, do you think, the only reason that given the antagonism that we now see that the West is prepared to continue talking to Russia, despite what this perception that Russia is the other? Is that the reason we're still talking to Russia, basically? No, I think, look, even during the Cold War, we were talking to Russia.

We obviously talked to Russia a lot more now. You know, Russia's still supplying 40% of Western Europe's gas. You know, there's a hard pipeline now between northern Russia and Germany and another one being built. But much less true for Britain, isn't it? Britain gets a lot less of its gas. No, it does. It does. But, you know, gas is a fungible thing.

If that Russian gas wasn't there, then what would happen to the gas that's in Norway that currently comes to the UK? You can, you can, there is obviously a Western European dependence on Russian energy. Even at the height of the Cold War, there was never any question or never really any credible threat for the Soviet Union to not pump that gas. The Soviet Union at the time needed the hard currency. It needs the hard currency less now. Contrary to what we often read in the West, Russia fiscally is an incredibly strong. strong state, has very, very low sovereign debt, and it increasingly is able to export its gas east to China. Since sanctions came in, one of the big implications of sanctions, as you know

Constantine, is that Russia and China have got much closer. You've got pipelines now existing, the ESPO pipeline, the East Siberia Pacific Ocean pipeline from Russia to China, and again, another one being built. So Russia does have options. But I do. don't think, you know, when the Russian state, even though fiscally it's completely solvent, it's still getting about 40 to 45% of those state revenues from oil and gas, and a lot of that is from export. So I don't think they're going to stop those energy exports any time soon. Though what's interesting is that the Russians now, as and when they want to, they sort of sidle up to OPEC. They're not members of OPEC, but there's been a kind of Saudi Russian loving.

in recent years to try and keep oil prices relatively low in order to try and spank the US shell producers because below $50 the US shell produced, it just doesn't work, all their leverage falls to pieces. Interesting now that the Saudis have got this IPO coming up, they're selling off their huge oil company, Saudi Aramco. They want a higher oil price. And I think one of the implications of these airstrikes in Syria,

not a big oil provider, of course. But stoking up concern about the Middle East is that we could see oil prices going much higher now with both the Russians and the Saudis quite happy to see that happen. What's quite interesting is we've seen with the poisoning of the former Russian spy and we've also seen Russian collusion

or suspected Russian collusion in the American election. Why do you think Russia's being so aggressive in those instances at the moment? Is it part of a grand strategy or is it just a warning to? the west that they're still very much a global superpower? I remember sitting around in various bars

in Moscow in the early 90s and I was offered for sale, nuclear weapons, tanks, rifles. Oh, you get that in Weberspoons in Croydon as well. Nerve agents, you know, it's like going down leather lane in Hoban. No, but seriously

the fact that there's been a attack on British soil in Cathedral town of Salisbury is very, very shocking. And I think Theresa May has played her cards pretty well, actually, in terms of her response. I think the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has slightly overplayed his hand. He still thinks he's a newspaper columnist rather than a foreign secretary. Well, he is. We all know what happens to one's pros close to the deadline.

It starts getting a bit psychedelic. But clearly that was shocking, and the British government had to do something and it's been a mighty impressive so far if the wheels don't come off it's been a mighty impressive sort of rallying of diplomatic forces you know this country still got some very very smart diplomats on the other hand while it was clearly a Russian originated substance we still don't really know who implemented the substance it may still be a stretch to say this came straight from the Kremlin. So that bit, I don't think anybody can credibly say that is slam dunk definite. Is that not a case of reputationally? Because Russia does have previous on this with Litvinenko. That was investigated and the conclusions were pretty strong. And I'm not saying the Kremlin didn't do it.

All I'm saying is that there are people who would want the Kremlin to look as if they'd done it. You know, we get into incredibly complex issues here. Suffice to say for now that clearly this hasn't done the West's relationship with Russia any good at all. And clearly ahead of the World Cup, it wasn't something that is going to endear people to going to Russia, which is a sort of citizen of the world is a bit of a shame. I was thinking that getting lots of people from Western Europe and the rest of the world to sort of get through that iron curtain of the mind and actually go to this country

where it's not as it's not like it's cracked up to be in many ways the countryside is very beautiful, they're astonishing people the weather's actually really good in May and June and July I've got my worst ever sunstroke in Moscow And I think that could have changed quite a lot of people's perceptions about Russia. They'd go to Russia and they'd sort of have a good time because the Russians know how to throw a party and they generally do a pretty good job of organizing international events. But this has clearly put all that back and it'll be very interesting to see in the weeks and months

after we record this podcast the extent to which that diplomatic coalition can hold together as and when more and more evidence emerges, as it always does, about what actually happened. What do you think about their infiltration, as has been suspected, on the American democratic process? Do you think that there was really Russian collusion? And if so, to what degree? Well, anybody that cracks open a history book, it's not a conspiracy theory to say that big countries try and influence each other's elections. I mean, come on. It's completely. clear that that happens. It's completely clear that America tries to influence elections, Britain tries to influence elections, Russia tries to influence elections. Anyone that doesn't

understand that isn't watching very closely. It's different to say that this was a particularly concerted attempt in order to try and get Trump elected at the expense of Hillary Clinton. I mean, I happen to think I'm no great Trump supporter, but I think the reason Hillary Clinton didn't get elected was Hillary Clinton. And if you read her book, what happened, it's not an autobiography. It's an alibiography. She blamed everyone but herself.

I don't think there's been credible evidence that there was any particularly concerted attempt by the Russians to influence this election any more than they tried to influence any election at any time. But of course, in the current climate, there's a very willing audience for that view.

particularly among people who detest Trump. And I understand why lots of people detest Trump. His rhetoric and the way he conducts himself is sometimes pretty shocking. We'll have to wait and see what happens. What is clear is that Facebook is, and the tech giants in general now, we've gone from sort of leaning in to piss off. These t-shirted titans were seen as if they could do no wrong. do no evil, I think was

the Google thing. You can see why they needed it now. But now the scales are falling from people's eyes and it's not just that my kids constantly on social media me as a journalist, their mom

as a journalist, we kind of know that our data gets pimped and you you mention something on Facebook and suddenly there's an advert to buy it appearing on your Twitter feed and it's all a bit woo-woo. But the idea that your data is then, you know, chopped up and sold and sold and sold and sold again. I think it's starting to alarm people.

And these tech giants, they don't pay much tax, they're completely opaque when they pretend to be transparent. They have absolutely enormous market power. I think Amazon now sells 70% of all books sold in America and 50% of all retail. in America, Google's 80% of search traffic. I mean, this reminds me, guys, of, again, history. I recently made a documentary about America in the late 18, 19th century, the 1890s and the 1900s, when eventually Franklin Delaney Roosevelt,

a Republican, unlike FDR in the 30s, he was forced by journalists actually to smash up the traffic. to smash up, you know, the big oil companies, the big sugar trusts, the copper trusts, and actually inject some competition because consumers were getting absolutely shafted. And I wonder if we aren't going to face a sort of similar trust-busting moment of the tech giants in the US. That's very interesting.

And this whole sense that, you know, Facebook, whoever's got the most money can pay Facebook to Microsoft to Microsoft. target particular voters in particular constituencies to win elections and then the whole thing that were Facebook taking Russian money and have they been completely straight with the security services in the US and the UK. It's all feeding into this idea that these guys aren't the kind of goofy, oh, you know, I made a few billion and I gave it to some inoculation program. Yeah, but you've also destroyed our system of government and you don't pay any tax. Can you not lean in? Can you just pay

some tax, please? So I think people are losing their patience and the whole Russia narrative that maybe they've been facilitating enhanced sort of Russian involvement in Western elections, particularly when those elections

are leading to people taking office that the sort of liberal intelligentsia don't like. That's really gaining momentum now. Can I just say you're the first Russian I've ever met who can't actually make tea. We should put this on camera. This is actually... That is disgusting.

This is what's known in the trade, right, as Nats piss. Anyone who's going to come on this podcast, make sure you get the tea sorted out. This is the best bit of the podcast for forever now. Thanks, mate. We're a podcast, don't we? We're a podcast. That's what you're really complaining about. That's literally complaining about it.

That's your... Where's my t-shirt? That we haven't got that in for you. What I was... What are you going to say? No, I remember very well when I was going to say. He's just getting over the criticism of the tea making. I'll be honest with you.

That's the only reason we've got you here. To Constantin. It's polonium tea, man. No, that's not true. Pallonium would taste better. Right, come on. So, but you mentioned the liberal elite. You mentioned the tech giants, right?

One of the interesting things for me is that one of the big criticisms that is now being made of YouTube and Facebook is that there is a liberal bias on all these platforms. So, for example, there are people who have run channels on YouTube like Dave Rubin, we talked about him before. He's finding increasingly that when he interviews conservatives or libertarians even, those videos are being demonetized by YouTube and they're not being pushed. And he's losing people that being randomly unsubscribed from his channel and things like that are happening. So a lot of the conservative voices in these supposedly public squares,

which are actually controlled by the T-shirt wearing Titans. Titans that you mentioned. they're now saying that actually it's not a public square and is being heavily restricted. What do you make of the implications of these Tisha wearing giants for freedom of speech and for the ability to continue to have genuine conversations about politics like these ones? Well, I've knocked around in the British media most of my adult life. And, you know, it's clear the kind of people who become journalists tend to be more liberal, I want to change the world kind of people

and the people they didn't like at university tend to go off and work for Goldman Sachs or become lawyers. So there's a kind of natural artistic, lefty bias to journalism. And I'm a sort of amalgam of things. I'm fiscally conservative, but socially, I guess, fiscally social liberal.

So I do... You sound like American politics. I do recognize a lot of that. But if the sort of T-shirted Titans, t-shirted toe rags, I think we should rechristian them. If they think they can use their enormous power to, you know, piss off the GOP, piss off the British Conservative Party, they need to, I think it's as a Democrat, as in a small D Democrat, somebody who believes in democracy,

not a member of the Democrat Party in the US, as somebody who believes in democracy, I think actually it's quite important, even though I like small government, that the governments in these big power, countries now assert themselves and tell these guys, yeah, you're very clever and you've done very well and you give lots of money to charity, but you're not the government, we're the government and we are elected and that is our mandate and so we're actually going to now, and not for the sake of it, but because you do need to be reined in, we're going to rein you in. So they understand that in a democracy where there's ebb and flow between left and right,

you really don't want to upset unduly go out of your way. way to upset one side of the political spectrum because in a fair fight, they're going to win quite a lot of the time. I'm not saying that you pander to the right in any way, but, you know, conservatives are quite often in office in the US and the UK and across Western Europe,

increasingly so, actually. And I think it would then just make smart business sense to not just be even, not just see to be even handed, if you're controlling the kind of, you know, the valves and the diodes of our thought processes because basically you've got a big switch that controls the internet. You would then actually have to be even-handed because it would not make business sense to not be even-handed. I mean, for instance, look, we've got the BBC here in the UK, and I'm not the greatest fan of the BBC, but I massively admire it.

And a lot of British people feel that way, right? because it does make incredible programs, nature programs and documentaries, really astonishing, world-class, sets the standard for the world. But I think the news is really stodgy. I think there are far too many sort of posh white people on the news. There aren't enough working-class people involved with the news. There's not enough diversity of any kind, gender, race and class. But having said that, even the BBC,

which is institutionally kind of left, liberal, guardian reading, and I say that, you know, I'm talking about many of my closest friends. This is confusing to me. Even the BBC, you know, it won't take the piss, right? Most people at the BBC don't like the Tories, but when it comes to an election, they won't take the piss. They'll be even handed. When it came to the Brexit referendum,

and I speak as a Brexiteer, they were not impeccably, but for the most part, they did really well during the referendum. Well, it's interesting to me because you... And that makes sense. But you say the BBC is inherently lefty. I know lots of lefties who say it's incredibly right wing. No, but that's because you know lots of Corbyn Easter nutters. Comedians.

I know lots of comedians. You've got to realise that the reason people are ultra left wing is because they don't earn enough to pay tax. Or, or, or because they've got an old man with a trust fund in Lichtenstein and they can pretend that they don't care about money. Yeah, exactly. That is absolutely infuriating to me. But what I find interesting is going back to the, that is so true.

Should we name names? Yeah, let's name them. Name and shame. Name and shame, they go to their pos shops where they pay money in order to look like they don't have money. Have you noticed that as well?

You know, these ripped jeans, they're expensive, you know? Yeah, 200 quid for a pair of, anyway, we're sounding old now. Okay, but... We are, just because we are old, that's why. Yeah, that is true. The time is rapidly.

But just to go back to the tech, chance. I think there is a unification between left and right where we're all getting a little bit pissed off that these people aren't paying tax. Oh, big, big time, big time. And it's not just that they're not paying tax. So that is a big part of it. It's also that their monopoly power is just taking out a lot of retail variation and smaller businesses. And also, you know, so I'm an author. I write books, yeah. It is not fair that these bastards just

basically scan my book and put it on the internet and don't take it down. You don't sell many books these days unless it's a really sort of salacious current affairs book because everybody knows within three weeks they can download a PDF. So if you read, there's a wonderful book that I'd recommend to you guys

and to all viewers. It's called Move Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin. I wrote a review about it recently on a website called Unheard, Unheard. As in not part of the herd. Unheard.com where I write a sort of alternative weekly column, not my telegraph column, more of a kind of sort of a laying back column rather than a sitting at my desk column. And I wrote a review of this book, and it really is an amazing book.

So Jonathan Taplin was a music producer. He worked with some of the greats, including Bob Dylan. And he wrote a book, and it was over a year ago now, a long time before all this tech giant stuff, the discontent blew up, predicting the lot because these guys have just taken away the living of so many artists and musicians and authors. And it cannot be right that you can spend a huge amount of time producing content.

You know, we're all content providers. We're writers, we're comedians, whatever we are. All we have is our creativity and, you know, it's pathetic, I know, but this is what we do. It's not fair if somebody can just read, reproduce it and distribute it and get advertising around the distribution of your creative output and not pay you. And that's basically what's happening.

And this is another way that society is going to get really upset with these guys. Because when the creative people start getting upset and they're starting to get upset now, and Jonathan Taplin really puts his finger on that. Move fast and break things was Zuckerberg's phrase in the early days of Facebook. If we're not moving fast and breaking things, we're not moving fast enough. You know, a really laudable idea, be disruptive, innovate, create. Fantastic. But now they really are breaking things.

They're breaking the ability of artistic people to make money from their music and from their writing. And so we end up with, you know, there's so much less choice in music. The internet hasn't given us choice than when I was a kid. It's so hard to be an alternative artist now, an alternative musician, because there's just a few little songs that get picked by somebody in a room somewhere, and they're the ones that get hammered on Facebook and Google and go everywhere and go viral. And nothing else gets a look in, and nothing else can make a living, because it's just reproduced on the internet,

and the tech giants don't do anything to take down stuff when copyright's clearly being broken, left, right and centre. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, So let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being, rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers.

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These are mass-produced objects. Someone has put thought into them. I'll be honest. I'm not the person who thinks carefully about where he sleeps. My dating history will tell you that. I'm the person who's been on the same mattress for eight years and called it fine. But the older I get, the more I notice that fine isn't actually fine. Your body tells you, if you're going to invest in anything for your home,

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I write as sort of people often call them sort fire breathing and very polemical and all the rest of it but I have got the inside me there's a sort of inner nerd and this was my inner nerd coming to the fore so I was

very much against the UK joining the single currency there was a big debate about that in the late 90s in the early 2000s and I wrote a lot of the time I think the single currency were very collapsed, I don't think it'll work and of course a lot of my

very liberal right on friends said oh you horrible person why don't you want to join the single currency you must be a Nazi or something yeah we've heard that counter argument many times that was happening back then already absolutely

no no I would comply no I would retort I've just read a lot about the history of currency unions and the fact that they always split up unless there's sort of lots and lots of political Union, which was never going to happen in Europe. So I was always a sort of emu-sceptic person, not that I didn't like birds with feathers.

Emu's European Monetary Union. I was always skeptical of the project of European Monetary Union, and I always felt, and I wrote this back in the late 90s, many times, that it would lead to, you know, the European Union, which I broadly supported the idea of free trade, or broadly free trade, and doing stuff together, I thought single currency would make it incoherent. But I was always a supporter of Britain on balance, staying within the EU. But then you had the Treaty of Lisbon, you had the Treaty of Nice, these incredibly centralising treaties, and you had countries voting against them and basically being ignored

by Brussels and told to vote again. The EU, I think, in the last 10 years, started to become anti-democratic, not just done democratic but anti-democratic. And I started to get increasingly upset that Britain was trying to negotiate a new model of doing things, looser, more democratic, collaborating and cooperating without trying to subsume more and more power away from local politicians here in the UK. And the tipping point for me was when David Cameron tried to renegotiate with the European Union, you'll remember it back in early 2016. And they just basically said, you know, piss off. We're not going to change it in any way. And Cameron knew, I think, then, that he

had a fight on his hands if he was going to win this referendum. So it was at that point that I decided I would actually argue for Britain to leave the European Union. And I did a huge amount of work researching it, researching the trade deals that the European Union had done, the trade deals that it hadn't done, the trade deals that Britain was likely to be able to do outside of the European Union. And I decided in the end, as the referendum approach, there was so much nonsense being spoken on the mainstream media. I don't think people, well, most people weren't deliberately lying, but lots of things were being said that were just factually wrong about our relationship with the rest of the world, about our relationship with Europe, that I got

together with another economist, and we wrote a sort of fast-paced and accessible, but really quite detailed book with lots of footnotes about the history of the European Union and about the best way as we saw it to negotiate our exit. So you think Brexit will broadly be a positive thing for this country? I think it will be broadly a positive. I'm afraid I do. Strike me down. I do. I think it I think the single mark our membership of what we call the single market is the benefits are massively overstated. There's no single market in services and we're of course, a service superpower. I think the benefits of being inside the customs union

are massively overstated. Being in the customs union means that our consumers pay far, far more for all imports from outside the European Union. It means we can't cut trade deals with the rest of the world outside the European Union. I mean, I remember when we joined what was called the European Economic Community,

I was about five years old. Back then, it was 40% of the world. even though I only had nine countries when we joined. Now it's when we leave it will be 15% of the world economy, even though it will have 27 countries. So the growth is beyond Europe now. The world population is beyond Europe. The UK is a European country, obviously,

but it really has a lot of very, very interesting cultural and practical and logistical connections with the rest of the world. and I think it's going to be much better for our kids and our grandkids if we spend a lot more of our time, effort, diplomatic and commercial energy connecting to and trading with the rest of the world rather than the European Union. We will always trade with the European Union, but the sense has been created that if we're not in the European Union,

we won't trade with the European Union. Really? America does over $300 billion of trade a year with the European Union from outside the European Union. China does huge amounts of trade with the European Union, and that's just Japan, from outside the European Union. So I felt there were real scare tactics going on. Some of the stuff coming out of the British Treasury

and the Bank of England and other sort of international organisations like the OECD, a sort of posh western think tank in France. I mean, I knew as an economist what they were saying was utter, utter nonsense and deliberately designed to try and frighten the British people into voting to stay inside the European Union. But the European Union is basically a protectionist club. Big companies like it. That's why they pour so much money into publicity to support it. Small companies where the real growth and energy is in this country tend not to like the European Union. And then the British people in their wisdom, even though they were called thick and stupid and rome. racist and xenophobic,

they voted the way they voted. And I happen to think that was an astonishing outcome. It is difficult to go through the process of Brexit. All the complaints now are about the process of Brexit. The EU, or

Brussels in particular, a bunch of unelected not particularly clever people. Very unimpressive, a lot of these sort of life civil servants in Brussels. They're making it difficult as they possibly can. A lot of the media in the UK doesn't want it to happen,

so it's making it sound as difficult as it possibly can. And yet still, despite sort of ultra-remainers trying to reverse the biggest act of democracy in British history, the polls show that a majority of people still want to leave. I think it will be absolutely fine. I think it will be absolutely fine. And I think there will be other... My hope is not that the European Union suffers in any way.

hope is that a very big economy like the UK leaving and making a success of being outside the European Union while still trading with the European Union doesn't lead to the European Union getting weaker but it convinces people that the European Union should be looser and more democratic and less kind of dirrishist and always pushing for the sort of super state status. Now that's interesting that you're talking about scare stories because I've been reading, you know, you read the, I read the papers a lot. And you always hear in the papers, you know, whether it's from the Times, the Telegraph, or from the Guardian, you know, that these banks are going to be leaving. We are famously, that's where we generate a lot of

our tax income from. Can you see these big banks leaving the city of London? No, it was complete nonsense. Lloyd Blankfine, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, he's sort of texting, tweeting, oh, you know, I'll be spending less time in London. Why the fuck are you building your European headquarters in Farringdon, mate? And he's come out in the last couple of days. He's got almost no publicity saying, oh, yeah, well, maybe we'll stay in London. Yeah, of course your bloody stay in London.

Because it's the financial capital of the world. Certainly, it's one of the top two financial capital of the world, completely irrefutably. London isn't competing with Frankfurt or Paris. Frankfurt's barely in the top 20 financial cities in the world. Paris is barely in the top 30. London's competing with Singapore and New York. Yeah?

and the idea that the world's major banks won't want to be in London is just complete nonsense. London is even the banking capital of the Eurozone, right? And if you listen to people like Wolfgang Schaubel who's the former German finance minister, incredibly financially literate bloke, a finance minister actually knows about finance,

a rare thing. Yeah, he was saying at the time, barely reported, look, we really don't want to cut off from London because most German companies, big German companies, when they want to raise money and sell bonds, they do it in London. So it was always nonsense. And I'm afraid that was what kind of pissed me off enough to write the book because I kept listening to the television and I kept hearing on the radio stuff

that was being spurted out from all the big corporate bodies in the UK, the CBI and so on, saying that all this woe was going to happen. And I just knew common sense was that it was nonsense. I was going to say, so what? What do you think about the Brexit campaign? Because now there was a, I don't know if you saw as an article in the observer yesterday, that some of the funds weren't being used or, you know, there was slight misappropriation of funds and all the rest of it.

You know, there was a 350 million for the NHS, which turns out somewhat of a lie. The fact for... Really? We haven't left yet. Well, okay, fair enough. But this is my point, right? Oh, it's a lie. That isn't. When we leave, it is a fact that we won't pay 10 billion pounds.

a year to the EU. And okay, so what do you want to do with that 10 billion? In fact, it would have been more now because the bill's going up. So we can spend that money on the NHS if we want to. It's not a lie. We haven't left. We are still paying every year. And we will still pay every year during the transition period.

As some, you know, I was the guy who back in 2016 wrote the pamphlet that said we need a transition period because the EU funding framework is a seven-year thing that goes all the way to 2020. So in order to make the negotiation work, let's keep paying to 2020 and call it a transition period to keep everybody calm. That's ultimately what happened. We were always going to keep paying until the transition period. And when we stop paying, then we'll have money that we're not paying to Europe, because we've been the second biggest net contributor to the EU since we entered.

And then we can spend that money on other things. Well, this is an interesting point for me. As an immigrant in this country, one of the things that we've discussed with several guests already is this idea that during the campaign, the allegation was made, and you referred to, that anyone who votes for Brexit or most people who vote for Brexit do so because they're racist as infographic. How much of the conversation has become what you just picked up on, which is sloganized. Essentially, it's a fact-free conversation. And we're just talking about you're racist or you're stupid.

Indeed, there have been sort of fact-free elements on both sides, and I think maybe there's been some financial impropriety on both sides. I wasn't involved in the, I mean, I could have been involved with the leaves side if I wanted to, but I wanted to be an independent person just saying what I thought. I think it did become quite fact-free. There was sloganising, but some of us in the media in our columns and our broadcasts were trying to be. a bit more high fibre. And I've often found myself during the referendum,

people literally stopping me in the street and emailing me, hundreds of emails from people, oh, can you just explain that to me? I've been doing my research. And, you know, ordinary punters did a huge amount of work to try and understand what was going on.

And I think a lot of the British media did lapse into just punch and duty debates. But I think there were some people on both sides and people on neither side. who were trying to give the facts. I was disappointed, though, in the British government, in Cameron's government. You know, it has to be recorded because it's true and it's outrageous that the British government, two days before we have this thing called Pirder,

where the government isn't allowed to spend any more government money on a referendum or election. And two days before that, the British government used taxpayers' money, nine million pounds to distribute a completely, overwhelmingly pro-remain information leaflet. And that nine million didn't then count to the state money which the remains side got, which was meant to be even with the leaf side. So that was really, really, at best it was sly. It was deeply unfair.

But did you have people calling you racist or xenophobic? All the time. What was that like? It's obviously very, very, very distressing. I am, you know, I'm, you know, I'm somebody who grew up with a name like Liam Halligan when Britain and Ireland were basically at war and, you know, and back then the UK was a lot less tolerant than it is now. You know, my family, you know, my father's still around, grew up in the west of Ireland, speaking Gaelic. You know, he, in his heart, he's very grateful to the UK.

was able to come here and make a living that he couldn't have made in rural island back in the day. So I'm not complaining, but it isn't nice when you are absolutely of immigrant stock yourself and you've tried to make your way in a society and bring other people up behind you and grew up in an incredibly multicultural community as I did in northwest London. It's horrible. I mean, it's just a character assassination, isn't it? It's just a smear. And from people who don't know you personally, they've never seen you.

And the people who tend to accuse other people of racism in this country tend to be people who grew up in a sort of all-white environment and didn't meet a sort of black person until they went to Oxford. I mean, it's really, it's outrageous. To call someone like me that with the background that I have. But, you know, that's the way it is. When people have sensed that you know more than they do, and you've done your research, they'll try and characterize you.

to discredit you. I think part of the problem with the Brexit movement, for instance, my father, who is, he married an immigrant, my mother's Latin American, and he's very much pro-Brexit, and he will sit down with people and explain why. I think what didn't help with Brexit is a fact you have people like Katie Hopkins

coming out in support of it, and immediately you have a person like that, or, you know, Farage coming out and fronting it, and immediately that tarnishes what is potentially... No, I agree, I agree, and, you know, without UKIP, winning 13% of the vote, as they did in the 2015 election. Without UKIP having won the European elections in 2014,

there wouldn't have been a referendum. Cameron gave a referendum because he knew that UKIP were going to just wipe out a lot of, but they were going to remake the electoral map. I mean, UKIP, they didn't, they got one seat in the 2015 general election, but they came second in about 160 seats. No, no, they got something like 3 million votes. Absolutely, absolutely astonishing. They got 13% of the vote in the 2015 general election.

So, yeah, Farage rightly, yeah, has his footnote in history rightly. And you've got to give the guy credit for that. On the other hand, some of things he says I really don't approve of, you know, standing in front of a poster full of people, you know, with dark complexions, sort of breaking point. My stomach turned. That was a complete mistake. I think a lot of what Leave EU did as opposed to Vote Leave.

So Vote Leave Leave was the official campaign. Leave EU was the sort of Farage guys who were a lot more hard line. I think Leave EU, did they subtract votes? I think Farage being around a lot, subtracted votes. I think if Farage had gone on holiday three months before the referendum, then you'd have got a bigger majority in favour of Brexit. because Farage didn't convince anybody who was in two minds. No moderate is going to look at Farage and think,

oh, I agree with you. And yet Farage was always the guy put up in the debates, or nearly always, as the kind of pro-Brexit voice, which I thought was wrong. There are many, many moderate people who are pro-Brexit. And I think Gisler-Stewart, who viewers may not know, she really came to the fall. So this is a German woman, right, for the Labour Party

with a massive record on human rights who negotiated the UK's side during the EU constitution had totally signed up Europhile and she was Brexit because she thought the EU had become overbearing and when she was on the public debates and on the television representing the Brexit side

you know the polls went wild because you had a lot of middle-aged people, moderate people, particularly moderate women, saying she's amazing. Yeah. Whereas if it's always Farage is Brexit, people are thinking, well, I can see all these reasons for Brexit, and I've done my reading and all that that.

But I just think Farage is turning me off, so I'm going to stick with Remain. So I actually think Farage was a net subtraction. I completely, I know the guy. You know, I congratulate him for getting the referendum. Absolutely. And I congratulate him for saying what he believes and campaigning. He's not a racist.

You know, these guys aren't the BMP. They don't want to deport people on, you know, there are many sort of reasonable people in UKIP, people I know quite well. I'm not a UKIP supporter, because I think they go a little bit too far in many areas, and I don't think they're kind of global enough

in their outlook. But I think during the referendum, if Farage had gone on holiday, then the majority in favour of Brexit would have been more like 6040. No, I completely agree with you, because... Wow.

Because... Actually, interestingly, I'm going to say, you're completely. but no this is it I really hate this sort of mantra that Brexit equals racism it's stupid and it's wrong

and it's pure role and it's pathetic and if it had actually been more people like yourself coming on and go look this is why I vote Brexit A B C, D and F I'll be like

okay I'll go away and I'll have a think about it the fact you just get someone like Katie Hopkins wheeled out and the moment she could argue that white is you know is you know white is white

And I'd still be like, I'm not sure if why he really is white, Katie, considering we need a final solution on Muslims. Do you see what I mean? Mad. Well, in interest of full disclosure, both Francis and I voted to remain. But actually, for both, well, certainly for me, I don't want to speak for France. It was quite a wake-up moment, actually. Yeah.

Both Brexit and Trump, this realization that maybe the liberal bubble that I'd been living in didn't have everything right. But actually, I mean, you... It doesn't mean, though, that all people have voted Brexit support Trump, which is another, which is another, you know, little segue that is, I mean, look, since we've had this referendum, there has been a constant drumbeat of negativity. There are people in this country who are determined to reverse this referendum. A lot of them are sitting at taxpayers' expense, unelected, in that ermine-clad chamber of Remain, which is the House of Lords. and nothing could be more damaging for British democracy.

You had an astonishing, almost sort of democratic uprising from regions of the UK where unexpectedly they voted for Brexit. And if we try and sort of lawyer our way out of that and stitch up the result, the result so people don't get to leave the European Union and that means leaving the single market and that means leaving the customs union these are the two main legal structures of the European Union then I'm not gonna sit here and I wouldn't go on television or write in my newspaper columns that there's gonna be civil unrest you wouldn't be surprised would you I'm not I'm not gonna say I'm not gonna

predict that but what I am gonna say is that you will get millions of British people who will never a vote again and will always be upset that their vote has been erased. You know, people who shop at Liddle, yeah, their vote is just as important as people who shop at waitros. People who are plumbers and roofers, yeah, are just as important as people, you know, who got a nice degree from a sort of mid-ranking university and work at a law firm. It's one person, one vote.

It's called democracy. If you don't like it, go to North Korea. I was going to insult you by saying go to Russia All Venezuela where my mum's from Liam and I have a long running thing about Russia But I feel about Britain actually Much like you feel about Russia It's a country that I've been privileged to live in

I feel very grateful for the expense Yeah and I'm sure you go back to You go back to Russia And you hear a lot of negativity about Britain And you say well, okay, that's true But actually Yeah absolutely And I'm similar with Russia

because I know Russia, you know, personally, a lot more than most British people do, just as you clearly know Britain incredibly well now, having lived it for so long, and being sort of so culturally immersed than most people living in Russia. And, you know, you probably, you know, when you go home, you know, if you mix in certain circles, what you say about the UK could be quite unpopular. But you know it's true, right? And so you have to say it. I mean, you could wimp out and not say it.

And to a much lesser degree, but there's some similarity with me, when I hear things like, you know, I spent a lot of my life sort of over the years studying the Russian economy. That was what I really specialised in. And when I hear things like, oh, it's all oil and gas, I just have to say, well, it isn't actually 18% of GDP is oil and gas. Yeah. The service sector is twice as big as the oil and gas sector.

Because if you don't say that, then... I mean, what's the point? Well, Liam, just to finish up on Brexit, what I wanted to say, first of all, as an immigrant here, one of the things that really pissed me off about the Brexit campaign was this idea that British people are racist xenophobes. And even though I voted Remain, there was nothing that annoyed me more than that,

because I've lived in this country for a very long time. And Britain is one of the most tolerant countries. Well, you're a Russian. He's Venezuelan, and I'm a plastic paddy, and we're sitting here doing our stuff and saying what we want. Right. We've made a decent living. Our families have made decent livings,

and we love Britain, right? Yeah, absolutely. So here's the question. Britain doesn't always love us. But you've made a very solid case for why economically, Brexit is a good thing. But is not the legacy of Brexit, the social lack of cohesion and the social conflict

that we now find ourselves in, where people are after the referendum going, if you voted for Brexit, unfriend me, or I'm never speaking to you again literally families being torn apart by the vote things like that is that not also part of it depends it's all in our hands constantine it depends how we handle it I mean do we grow up and realize that people can you know it's completely reasonable to have in a close election to come down on different sides will we use the newfound freedoms that we have things we can't really do effectively inside the European Union like set our taxation the way we want to like do regional policy the way we want to, have policy towards our farms, our fishing communities, our energy markets. There's lots of ways that the EU has constrained

this country's domestic policymaking. If we respond to these new freedoms in a way that's inclusive, in a way that rebalances the UK economy, away from just London and the southeast towards the regions more, I mean a lot of my book with Gerard Lyons clean Brexit, is about what we can do once we've left.

The whole of the back half of it actually, and a big thing that we emphasise is regional policy outside the European Union. And I certainly hope that we do really rebalance this country. We have a tremendous opportunity to build, well, not just sort of try and empower alternative growth centres apart from London and the southeast. Let's link up those northern cities, those great cities known around the world

for creativity, ingenuity, Liverpool, cultural capital of popular music, Manchester, one of the main sources of the Industrial Revolution. These are incredible places, and people want to invest there, people want to be associated with them, they've got fantastic universities,

they've got a lot of human capital, they've been on their uppers, kind of in the last generation or two. But, you know, let's build international airports there. Let's bring in investment from around the world. Let's project those cities around the world. And let's try and encourage more of our young people to live in those cities rather than thinking that you have to come to London to make a success of yourself.

No, you don't. Germany's not like that. It's not like you have to go to Berlin to make a success for yourself. Well, there's Frankfurt, there's Munich. There are regional powerhouses. The UK needs to become a much more regional country, not all about London and the southeast. Isn't it fantastic to have London, you know, one of the world cities in our country? Isn't it great?

But I think too much we've overemphasized London at the expense of these other countries, at these other parts of the country. And outside the European Union, I think we've got a major chance to put that right. Liam, but you're talking at a very cerebral level. You're obviously very knowledgeable, very intelligent guy, and we're very grateful to have you here. There's a buck coming. Yeah, there is. There is a bug coming.

Well, the only part actually is nothing to do with you is that these conversations are not being had at that cerebral level. They're being had on a kind of Facebook, you're racist, you're xenophobia, you're this, you're that, don't ever speak to me again, kind of level. That is because a lot of people are still hoping that this thing can be reversed. And, you know, if you cause people racist enough,

we can have another referendum. If we discredit this process enough, then people are going to want to reverse it. If we can spread enough scare stories about how the economy is going to collapse and there's this cliff edge and, you know, Goldman Sachs are going to leave and Deutsche Bank are going to leave, then maybe people will be scared and we can have another referendum. You know, Vince Cable wants another referendum because he didn't agree with the first one. You know, this is a guy who told his own party conference in September 2016 after the referendum that I really don't think we can

insult the electorate by having another referendum. And that was on the record. It was recorded. And yet suddenly he changes his mind and thinks, oh, of course we need another referendum because he's trying to remake his party. And the Lib Dems, since they've said that, they've gone nowhere in the polls. I mean, this is a great party. I've got a real soft spot for the Lib Dems. We need the Lib Dems in British politics. But they went to the electorate in 2017 with this, we're going to reverse Brexit. And they got the lowest result in their history. The SMP went to the the electorate in Scotland with we're going to reverse Brexit. And they lost a third of their seats, you know?

I mean, come on. These cloying elites thinking that they can reverse Brexit because it kind of undermines their sensibilities. They've got to understand that people they don't, who voted against them, are just as important as they are when it comes to the ballot box. That's what democracy is about. And they have to get on with it,

and we have to make the best of it. people who voted leave and have a vision of how good it could be, and people who voted Remain and who are perhaps a little bit more, you know, need to be a little bit less enthusiastic. But the real key to this whole thing is that there is a big chunk of people who voted Remain, yeah, in good faith, many of whom I love, literally members of my closest family, and they realise okay, it's not, didn't go the way I wanted to go,

but what would it be like if every time we have some sort of democratic situation, we contest the result for years and years in the future? Well, this is it. What we have is chaos, which is essentially what is happening. Now, I mean, if you think about it, I've never voted conservative, I vote Labour, but I would never dream once Theresa May got in of demanding a recant. I just wouldn't because, frankly... Not unless there was absolute transgression.

We have had electoral fraud in this country. I mean, there was a famous case in Blackburn a few years ago. If there's electoral fraud, of course it's got to be rooted out. But of course, an election is different to a referendum in that. An election is part of a natural cycle. And Alistair Campbell often says, oh, you know, when you lose the election, you don't stop campaigning. No, Alistair, because that's an election. And this is a referendum.

And Parliament voted by six to one. for the bill to hold a referendum in early 2016 to give this vote to the British people. And to now try and reverse that. And the point about Brexit is that then once we've brexited, Parliament becomes a lot more powerful because all these laws come back to Parliament. So you have people in Parliament saying,

when you said, you know, you wanted Parliament to be powerful. Yeah, I do. After Brexit, Parliament will have a lot more power. You're now trying to exert Parliament's rights to do something, to reverse Parliament. Brexit that makes it less powerful. Well, Liam, there's only one counter argument that's not answered by that, which is would leave not be doing the same thing right now if you'd lost?

No, why would they? Well, no, you'd have to, you'd have to build up a, I mean, leave, leave waited like 40 years. You know, we joined the EU, you probably don't know this, we joined the European community without a referendum. We went in in 73 by Dictat. That was Ted Heath. Well, you don't think Nigel Farage will be out now campaigning to reverse. It was only two years after.

It was only two years after that we actually had a referendum in 1975. But my point is, you don't think Nigel Farage would be out on the streets now campaigning for a second referendum if you'd lost? No, I don't think the body politic would have given him a second referendum. I mean, look at what's happening in a lot of the Remainers who want the ultra-remainers who want the second referendum. They're not calling for a second referendum on Scottish independence, are they? because broadly they're people who want to keep the UK together. You have to be grown up about this.

You're going to get into some kind of banana republic type situation where it just becomes tribal or a Quebec-style situation where there's a never-endom. Look, Britain trades on its legal stability, right? Our comparative advantage in the world is if you come to our courts, right? It doesn't matter who you are, you're going to get a fair hearing, right? The British government isn't going to be able to rig the courts, yeah? that is what we have.

We've built that up over centuries of not always doing the right. But, you know, there is a sense now, and it's not 100% guaranteed, but you're going to get a fair hearing. We sell our debt to the rest of the world. We need a stable currency. If Britain becomes so unstable

that we're sort of, we voted to leave the European Union, and then before we vote to leave the European Union, we vote to stay in the European Union, and then what the EU going to do? Are they going to let us come back in but not be in the euro? They're going to let us have the rebate that we negotiated all those years ago. It's going to be absolute carnage.

And you know what? Our exports, our trade with the European Union, is about 10% of GDP, right? About 10% of GDP. Let's say worst case scenario, worst case scenario that our trade with the EU like collapses by 10%. Yeah, that's like 1% over GDP over many years. This is rounding error stuff. Now, of course, whether in the EU or not is important to our identity, but I would say, actually, while British people tend to love continental Europe,

we also, almost uniquely in Europe, have astonishing connections with the rest of the world. You think about something very close to my heart, because a lot of the families I grew up with were Indian families, and families had come over from the Caribbean, my best friends in the world, those people I grew up with. Yet the connections we have with the Indian subcontinent,

the connections we have with Australasia, the incredible connection we have with the United States. No one else has these connections, the English language, the fact that they're all these mad Brits or working all over the world, running companies and building companies. We aren't a normal, European country. We have

I wouldn't say bigger, broader horizons. We have more global horizons than a lot of those countries. And I think a lot of British people, whether they were highly educated or not, often even when they weren't, sense that, sense that the growth is

outside of Europe now. Europe's been the slowest growing continent in the world, apart from Antarctica. For most of the last 20, and it's close, for most of the last 20 years. I think a lot of people's sense is that it's yes we'll keep trading with Europe but not at the expense of trading more with the rest of the world. Listen we're running out of time. I think that's a perfect place

to end. Perfect. Well thank you for having me. It's been absolutely pleasure Liam. Tell us your Twitter. At Liam Halligan. Not that complicated. And also as well your book is called Clean Brexit. My book's called Clean Brexit. My podcast is called Lemme Your Ear. And what kind of stuff do you talk about in the I tend to talk to, I tend to have a sort of detailed policy discussions. So people I've recently spoke to, I spoke to David Davis, the Brexit Secretary. I spoke to an incredible economist, Nobel winning economist called a Martia Sen. I spoke to Richard Thaler, who's the guy that invented behavioural economics. He's the current Nobel laureate.

I just spoke to this incredible guy on my podcast. called Peter Platzer, who has created, he's got a huge network of satellites in space and he sells the data that they collect on things like the weather and ship movements to commercial companies. Really incredible guy. Amazing.

So, lend me your ear. Liam Halligan at Liam Halligan. I'm Constantine Kishen at Constantine Kishen. And I'm Francis Foster at Failing Human. And by the way, if you've enjoyed this great episode, So please, please, please, please follow us on Instagram and at Twitter at TriggerPod. And also, please, if you've enjoyed it, leave us a rating, five stars, please. And also leave a nice comment underneath and also subscribe and tell a friend.

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