← Intelligence Squared
Intelligence Squared
Rory Stewart on Trump, Nationalism and The Value of Rural Life (Part Two)
00:34:29
Loading summary
Transcript46 lines
- [00:04]
Advertiser
Right now, there are talented people out there who could take your company to the next level. Do you want to hope they see your job post before your competitors or do you want to match with them with Indeed Sponsored Jobs Hiring Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other sites. Give your job the best chance to be seen with Indeed sponsored jobs. They help you stand out and hire quality candidates who can drive the results you need. Sponsored Jobs boosts your posts for quality candidates so you can reach the exact people you want faster and it makes a big difference. According to Indeed data, sponsor jobs posted directly on indeed are 90% more likely to report a higher than non sponsored jobs because you reach a bigger pool of quality candidates. Join the 1.6 million companies that sponsored their jobs with Indeed. When we're hiring, we find being specific about what we need really matters. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, you can set detailed requirements such as experience, level, skills, industry background, and actually get candidates who meet them. Instead of sifting through applications that don't fit, we end up with people who've done the work before and can prove it. That precision is what makes the difference for us. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, you only pay for results. No monthly subscriptions, no long term contracts, just a boost whenever you need to find quality talent fast. People are finding quality hires on Indeed right now in the minute I've been talking to you. Companies like yours made 27 hires on Indeed according to Indeed Data Worldwide. Spend more time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results now with Indeed Sponsored Jobs and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com intelligencesquared just go to indeed.com intelligencesquared right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com intelligencesquared terms and conditions apply. Hiring do it the Right Way with Indeed.
- [02:33]
Kids. They grow up so fast. One day they're taking their first steps and the next they don't fit into the tiny sneakers they took them in. You blink your eyes and their princess dress is two sizes too small and their dinosaur backpack isn't cool anymore. But don't cry because they're growing up. Smile because you can profit off of it for real. There are a bunch of parents on Depop looking for the stuff your kid just grew out of. Download Depop to start selling.
- [03:02]
Producer Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. For this episode, we're rejoining for part two of our live event with co host of the Rest is Politics, Rory Stewart. Stewart joined us recently at Friends House in London to discuss the state of Britain and the world today with Caroline Lucas, the former leader of the Green Party. Drawing on his new book Dispatches from the Borders, Stewart argued that to truly create a better future for all, we we must understand the tensions that exist between rural and urban, between farming and the natural world, between the need to preserve and to grow, and between local and national politics. If you haven't heard part one, do just jump back an episode and get up to speed. Let's rejoin the conversation now live at Friends House in London.
- [03:50]
Interviewer/Host
I wanted to talk about rewilding because I was so interested in one of the reasons that you cite for concern about rewilding. And obviously you've explained that you don't just kind of, kind of dump it somewhere. It depends where it's the right place to do it. But what really interested me was that you were saying that rewilding is not a gentle return to a natural past. And the reason for that was not just because of concerns, for example, about food security, but you say because it leaves so little place for human culture. And I was genuinely, really interested in that. And it just got me thinking about the role of human beings in nature. And to the extent that we are part of nature or we're not part of nature. And there's a wonderful campaign, I don't know if you come across it, that's being fought around trying to change the Oxford English Dictionary definition of nature because the OED says nature is life except for humans. And there's this campaign that wants to try and revivify an obsolete definition, which is life, including human beings. And the reason that I'm interested in this, I will come clean, is because we were just talking about Kokmir Haven, which is near where I live. And there, there are these really famous coast guard cottages which are always part of the image. Whenever you have a picture of that area, it's those coast guard cottages and they are about to drop into the sea and there's a big fight about whether or not we should try and save them. And some people, very purists, say, no, no, let's just let it go and it's natural and that's what nature wants. And other people, myself included, say, no, those cottages are really part of the landscape. So what is your thought about and what did you mean, I guess a little bit about that sense about human culture?
- [05:31]
Rory Stewart
Well, I'm really on your side on this. I mean, one thing I think to understand is that we are a small island, we are more densely populated than India, and we have developed a form of landscape which is about the integration of farming and nature. This isn't the United States. You go to America, you look out of the window as you fly over Kansas and you just see mile after mile of these incredible rectangular industrial agriculture, or often circles, because some of the machinery operates in circles, perfect circles. Or you go to Alaska, where there are bears and wolves and no human beings. And it's a lovely, simple story. It's a very black and white story, this American story. Here is agriculture and here is nature, and now the twain shall meet. But then you go to New England, go to New Hampshire, for example, or you go to western Massachusetts and you go for a walk along the Appalachian Trail. You're walking along the woodland and you suddenly find approximately every, I suppose, 200 yards, if you get off the road, you're tripping over a row of stones in the middle of this forest, right? And of course, what you're tripping over is the field boundaries of farms. These trees have only been there in most cases for 70 or 80 years. It's a secondary growth. And buried under this growth, which goes all the way down the eastern seaboard of the United States, are thousands upon thousands of small family farms which vanished and moved west to canvas, taking with them all their memory, all their roots, all their culture. Now, in the US Case, these were farms who were established in the late 1600s, early 1700s, and vanished by about the 1860s. In Cumbria, in Borrowdale, the ash, the pollarded ash, some of it appears to have been pollarded first by the Vikings. And these stone walls in Yanworth are four and a half thousand years old. These are stone walls which were laid in the Bronze Age, early Bronze Age, Late Neolithic period. The landscape was cleared. You can tell this from the pollen samples. About 4,000 years ago, when the Romans built Hadrian's Wall, it was already an unforested landscape. You can tell from the position of the signal stations, it was necessary for them to be able to signal from one to the other that the wall were not trees across this landscape. And again, you get that from the pollen samples. And these family farms in the Bailey Valley, I was looking at a particular family called the Routledges. They are there in the written record in the 1320s. These are very modest people. These are not kind of grand aristocratic estates. So they've been operating for close to 700 years. And before that presumably in the DNA in Penrith. Did a DNA study in Penrith. 25% of the population of Penrith has Norse DNA, Viking DNA. And it's rooted into the place names, into the crosses and churchyards which have images of Loki, the. The demon God of Norse mythology, of Odin, of Baldr. All these Norse gods are on our crosses. Now, how does rewilding come into this? Well, rewilding comes in and effectively says to farmers, no, you're not going to pasture your sheep on the Lake District hills. We're no longer going to provide subsidies for agriculture and instead we're going to push to put beavers into the rivers. We're going to effectively dam the field drains, break down the walls and allow a new landscape to emerge by itself. This is not actually planting trees. This is stepping back and letting nature take its course. The result is for the valley, that these farming communities, of course, can no longer sustain themselves because they no longer have any income from producing food. So their houses either are abandoned or they become holiday homes for wealthy people from the south of England to stay in. And the whole hillside changes, the colors change. Instead of what Turner or Wordsworth are describing, which is the bright green on the lower slopes and the wild russet on the higher wild fells, the whole thing gets taken over by much longer grasses, by heathers, and a lot of other things disappear. For examp, meadowland birds disappear because there are no longer the pasture to sustain them. Many of the animals that live on the liminal edge between the cultivated and the wild also vanish because that liminal edge vanishes. And this is done by people saying that what they're doing is restoring nature. Well, what they're restoring is something that literally has not existed in this landscape for 5,000 years.
- [11:28]
Interviewer/Host
And at the risk of setting you off again, do you think that's an argument for just being a lot more selective and discriminatory about where you're doing rewilding? Or is it an argument against rewilding?
- [11:41]
Rory Stewart
No, I think more selective. Look, there's a great example near you in Sussex. NEP is great, but NEP is 4,000 acres. It's really amazing what's been achieved there. Wonderful book by Izzy Tree on rewilding in which he describes effectively taking what was a series of small dairy farms. And it now, if you go and visit, you can go glamping there. And it's like sort of some British equivalent of going on safari in a kind of African savannah. It's incredibly beautiful. There are nightingales, there are rare butterflies. Reemerging but, but, but it's relatively limited. It's a relatively rich southern soil. This is not Cumbria. We're not going to make that kind of revenue from glamping. I'm not going to, you know, criticize nep. I think it's a wonderful, wonderful project, but it's not replicable. And the problem is that the dream of the rewilders is that they want to do this at what they call a landscape scale. They imagine bison migrating, and in order to get bison migrating, they have this idea that there's this wonderful place called Cumbria where they might be able to get their hands 500,000 hectares of land where they can get their migrating bison. And, and, and then, of course, they have to control the migrating bison, so then the wolves must be released. And because that doesn't fully achieve the objectives, there need to be bears and various other things which can control the beavers as the beavers take down the trees and so forth.
- [13:24]
Interviewer/Host
It's better than nuclear waste, though, you got to admit.
- [13:26]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Although the, the. I mean, what, what. It's actually, it's not like nuclear waste. What. It's totally the same as. We did have a period in Cumbrian history when this happened. It happened, in fact, under the Norman kings. This is what William the Conqueror did and William Rufus, it was called the Forest Laws. And now they came and said, nobody in Cumbria can fell a tree, nobody can kill an animal, nobody can pasture sheep, nobody can have any crops, nobody can live here because we want our wildlife to have here. Now, in the case of the Kings, it was because they wanted to romp around killing the wildlife, but, well, only certain types of wildlife actually wanted to kill. But, yeah, they managed to achieve a situation where there were huge herds of deer migrating like those bison across Cumbria. But there was a reason why the humans got rid of the Forest Laws.
- [14:16]
Interviewer/Host
Trying to get back on track. Sorry, we slight diversion with our rewilding. We've talked quite a bit about local and regional identity and I wanted just to shift focus now to national identity and, and just maybe to provoke you a little bit about. Around your opposition to Scottish independence and to suggest that maybe it felt like some of your vision was a bit overly romantic. So what I mean by that is, for example, where you're talking about the UK and you say the idea of a UK uniting different nations is the deep grammar behind our lives, our. Our dreams and our actions. And that sounds very lovely, but isn't the reality that actually, if you look at the four nations of the UK they are deeply unequal in the sense that Westminster doesn't give much of a shit about what's happening in most of those other nations that aren't. England and Brexit demonstrated that par excellence in the sense that, you know, people in Scotland and Northern Ireland weren't really asked about what kind of Brexit they wanted. Neither was. Neither was Wales, come to that. So isn't it the case really, that the UK as we have it right now is deeply unequal and that England assumes that it is the UK most of the time, and that if the people of Scotland wanted to have a referendum on independence, they should be able to do that rather than having to come cap in hand to Whitehall to ask permission?
- [15:49]
Rory Stewart
No doubt, had the people of Scotland voted for independence, I would have accepted their vote. I would have been heartbroken. It would have seemed to me a much more profound tragedy than Britain leaving the European Union. And I was pretty heartbroken about that. But I accepted the referendum on Europe. I would accept a referendum on Scotland leaving, but I think it would make us all weaker, smaller, and more diminished as people. And actually, in a sense, one of the contradictions is that so many of my friends who were in favor of remain were also in favor of Scottish independence. I think the arguments against both are the same. Your lives do not get better by cutting yourself off from your nearest neighbors, breaking your links, your economic links, your political links, your defense and security links, by blaming someone else for your troubles, by thinking, if I just become sovereign, if I just become smaller, all these problems will go away. These problems I felt both in Brexit and with the Scottish independence reference. I know we slightly disagree on the Scottish independence reference. I can see that. But I felt it's like we can all feel like this when we're feeling unhappy and depressed, that somehow it's somebody else's fault. I don't know, it's our partner's fault, or it's our family's fault, or if it's our friend's fault. And if we can just cut them off, hunker down and be on our own, everything's going to be fine. Because we're failing to acknowledge that most of the problems in Scotland or in Britain are homegrown. Very few of them. Very few of the problems in Scotland come from England. Very few of the problems in Britain came from Europe. And consequently, of course, we discovered we didn't really fix many of our problems by leaving Europe, and Scotland wouldn't fix many of its problems by leaving Britain.
- [17:40]
Interviewer/Host
Discuss. I mean, but just on the point of principle, do you think that Scotland at least should be able to make its own decision as to whether or not it has another referendum? I mean, can you really defend that they would have to come to Westminster to get permission to have that referendum?
- [17:56]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, I suppose so, because I think.
- [17:58]
Interviewer/Host
That.
- [18:00]
Rory Stewart
We have a pretty good balance. The balance is that if there is an overwhelming demand within Scotland for referendum, we would concede it. This isn't Spain. We're not a country that sort of gets on our constitutional high horse and says, if there's an enormous number of people in Scotland want a referendum, no, you can't have it because of some. In fact, we granted a referendum when actually it turned out the majority of people in Scotland didn't want a referendum, but we granted it anyway to the snp. It was perfectly reasonable, I think, for Boris Johnson to say, you just had a referendum, you don't get to do another one seven years later because you didn't like the result.
- [18:40]
Interviewer/Host
I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? Because the next thing I just wanted to touch briefly on was the whole issue of democratic reform that we have been talking about already in terms of citizens, assemblies and so forth. But something you say is, I suspect, the answer to a national crisis in democracy is to become more local and more democratic. So couldn't you. Well, what does that look like? And at the very least, does it mean, for example, a more federal uk? Would that be a way of giving Scotland, Wales, like Northern Ireland, more powers.
- [19:10]
Rory Stewart
But within, I think more federal, but also more local in the sense that my belief is that Scotland is not going to be served by all the power being concentrated in Edinburgh any more than it's served by all the power being concentrated in London. I mean, the Western Isles, the Highlands, is very different from Lothian or the Scottish Borders. And I think the real trick, one of the real problems we struggle with industrial policy in this country is that we're so bad about devolving power down to local bodies. I mean, nothing is madder than the sight of people saying some smart person in Whitehall is going to work out what it is Manchester should be doing and what it is Newcastle should be doing and what it is Cumbria should be doing. It's much more likely to work if you devolve that industrial strategy down to the people in that place. You know, Cumbrians are much more likely to have an intuitive feel for how the Cumbrian economy works and what Cumbrian needs are than the wise man in Whitehall. And the same would be true in Edinburgh. Now, the point about democracy though, is this, that we live in a world where we assume that the reason why populism's getting going and why we have Donald Trump and Farage and everyone is that we're not delivering. And therefore the assumption is we need to be more technocratic, more efficient, we just need to get the right policy fix. And if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves just get the right thing in the budget and can just get that GDP growth up by 0.2% a year, everything will be fine. And I think this is wrong. I don't think the fundamental reason why we are unhappy and peed off and alienated from our government is that the government isn't delivering. I mean, it isn't delivering very well, I agree, but it's very difficult fixing that. Fixing government delivery is very tough. Governments are many things, but super efficient and great at delivery is not one of them. Right. But much more important, I think, is the sense that people don't feel that they have control or at stake. I think people certainly in my patch in Cumbria were not sitting there saying, you know what's driving me mad about the government is that Rachel Reeves isn't driving through more housing estates, building more wind turbines, doing all this stuff to Cumberland. No, really what they want to do largely is to be left alone and to be allowed to make their own decisions. They want more democracy, not more action. I think this model we have in our head is sort of Elon Musk model, that a government is a sort of, should be a kind of hyper efficient company that cuts through the crap and builds stuff. It's very tempting if you're a business person, but actually much of our lives isn't really about that. It's about negotiating between people with very, very different priorities, very different visions of the world. It's not like building a satellite and shooting it up into space, which is an engineering problem. The question of whether or not you put a solar panel in a much loved local field cannot be resolved just on the basis of engineering. It's a very difficult conversation about two competing types of values. Your commitment to renewable energy and climate change, on the other hand, and your commitment to your own area, your own employment, your own landscape and beauty, on the other. And that's politics, that's democracy. That's not delivery.
- [22:53]
Advertiser
If you've shopped online, chances are you've bought from a business powered by Shopify.
- [22:58]
Rory Stewart
You know that purple shop pay button.
- [22:59]
Advertiser
You see at checkout, the one that.
- [23:01]
Rory Stewart
Makes buying so incredibly easy?
- [23:03]
Advertiser
That's Shopify and there's a reason so many businesses sell with it because Shopify.
- [23:07]
Rory Stewart
Makes it incredibly easy to start and run your business. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all e commerce in the US. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today@shopify.com promo. Go to shopify.com prom.
- [23:27]
Advertiser
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies just to see if you could save some cash? Well, Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [24:03]
Rory Stewart
So you're about to make a trade based on a friend's text, but which u do you listen to? Is it we could buy a house in Tulum.
- [24:14]
Advertiser
Get optioning those options.
- [24:18]
Rory Stewart
We could lose everything.
- [24:21]
Advertiser
Or let's do a little research, get your head in the trade and make.
- [24:25]
Rory Stewart
The investment decision that's right for you. Learn more@finra.org TradeSmart.
- [24:34]
Advertiser
Ford BlueCruise Hands Free highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel, allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control. Enjoy the driver drive in blue cruise enabled vehicles like the F150 Explorer and Mustang Mach E. Available feature on equipped vehicles. Terms apply. Does not replace safe driving. See Ford.com BlueCruise for more details.
- [25:02]
Rory Stewart
This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old Number 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee.
- [25:31]
Interviewer/Host
On that note, you might remember that back in August there was a young guy called Jacob who left a voice note for the rest is politics. And in that voice note he basically said that he felt that there was just nothing he could vote for, that there was no centre ground anymore, that you know, that he couldn't vote Tory after Brexit and that he felt that Labour was pandering too much to the far right. And you replied, I am wondering increasingly whether the answer is for me to re engage with politics at a much More local level mayors, local democracy, citizens assemblies. Alistair then asked if you were dropping a big hint and you said, this is just the beginning of a thought process. So I wondered if you could tell us what your thought process is doing now. How far have you got?
- [26:21]
Rory Stewart
Well, yes, I'm perpetually worrying about this. So I have been thinking a lot. I mean, it's no secret I ran to be mayor of London and I keep thinking maybe I could run to be an independent mayor. I sometimes think about doing it in Cumbria. I love Cumbria, as you may have picked up. And my unfortunate Cumbrian constituents would then be subjected to my rants about rewilding for the next 20 years till they boot me out or fail to vote for me. But I do think there's an interesting question for all of us, which is, how do we get the relationship between the local and. And the big global? So some people, when I say to them I'm thinking of running to be mayor of Cumbria, say, well, Rory, this is the age of Trump. So this big geopolitics stuff, you're not meant to be pontificating about China and Russia and all this kind of stuff, and you're digging yourself in Cumbria. On the other hand, I think, and this is something Caroline and I were talking about in the Green Room, actually, there might be much more freedom in someone like Cumberland to reinvent democracy, to think about citizens assemblies, to think about different ways of doing things in a way that might not be true if you ran to be mayor of London.
- [27:37]
Interviewer/Host
So you heard it here, it's definitely still in a thought process. That's good. So my last question, you've mentioned Trump a couple of times and I guess we have to quickly go there and then we can move on. But I really agree with you in a sense, that if we're talking about the rise of authoritarianism and the rise of populism and the rise of people like Trump, actually it's what happens in our communities that really matters, the extent to which people kind of feel listened to and so on. And when you see what Trump is doing just now in terms of just tearing up the international order, how worried are you on a scale of 1 to 10? And do you think it could happen here?
- [28:17]
Rory Stewart
I'm very, very, very, very worried. I think I'm very worried partly because so many people aren't worried. One of the things that enables these figures is that we begin to shift our expectations and make excuses for them. I'm increasingly meeting people in Britain who are saying, well, Trump, isn't Hitler great okay, maybe Trump isn't Hitler. I mean, so now he's acceptable because he's not Hitler. And then you get. And Farage isn't Trump. Right? Oh, so now Farage is acceptable because he's not Trump. Right. So the. What is Trump? He is somebody who is a. An abhorrent. An abhorrent offense to the traditions. The United States, the traditions of democracy, the traditions of our basic respect for the dignity of other human beings. He flouts international law, domestic law. He is corrupt. He is authoritarian. He is tearing up American civil rights. And increasingly, in Britain, people are looking at him thinking, oh, I'd like a bit of that here. So it's very dangerous. It's making us realize that liberal democracy is very. Feels like a very thin veneer. Belief in the rule of law, belief in human rights, belief in. Increasing number of people now have said, well, I'm not so sure about this human rights thing. What do they mean they're not so sure about this human rights thing? What exactly do they mean? I got a tweet yesterday from a British person saying, would you agree, number one, there are too many Muslims in Britain. And number two, if you agree with number one, how many should there be? And I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, and then there were a hundred others like this. And I'm thinking, well, how does this suddenly become acceptable? I mean, imagine, substitute that with anything else. You know, there are too many Jews in Britain. There are too many black people in Britain. There are too many, I don't know, gay people in Britain. There are too many men in Britain. I mean, who knows what the thing that you wish to insert into the sentence is? This is so horrifying, because the whole point about human rights, without being pompous about it, is that we are equal. We are equal. Equal in our fundamental human dignity, worthy of equal respect. It's not a very complicated idea. And if we lose that, and that's what I fear is happening with Trump, what Trump's doing is he signals to people, don't worry, I'm not coming after you. I'm just coming after this lot. And you're fine with that, right? But once he's accepted that it's okay to treat the poor in Africa like that, it's okay to treat certain minority groups in the US like that, well, then actually, the whole argument for treating any of us with dignity and respect goes out the window.
- [31:29]
Interviewer/Host
Brilliant. Thank you so much. That was brilliant. Okay, so we now have four people with roving mics who are Roving. And we're going to take questions in groups of two. I'm going to ask you to be short or interesting or preferably both. And yes, if you could raise your hand if you had a question to answer.
- [32:03]
Rory Stewart
Thank you guys for a very interesting talk. In the 1970s, when Enoch Powell gave his famous rivers of blood speech, Sir Edward Heath immediately removed him from the party. And now we have a Conservative MP saying we need to essentially deport legal immigrants here. I would like to ask you to. How. How do you think the Overton Window has shifted so much in the past 10 years?
- [32:27]
Interviewer/Host
Brilliant. Okay, we're going to have two questions. Sorry that Rory Stewart mentioned something about.
- [32:32]
Rory Stewart
His admiration for the New Zealand system and I'm sufficiently ignorant. I don't know what it is. Could you please explain what it is?
- [32:39]
Interviewer/Host
You are about to be very grateful for your question. Thank you, Rory.
- [32:44]
Rory Stewart
So first question. So the Overton Window for people who concentrating. This is essentially the window of acceptable conversation, right? And sure enough, 10 years ago it would not be acceptable for any Conservative MP to suggest that people with legal rights of residence in the United Kingdom should be expelled in their hundreds of thousands. This is sort of unimaginable. And it's unimaginable that she wouldn't have been thrown out of the Conservative Party for saying it. So question of how this shifts is really interesting. Now we could talk about this till the cows come home. And the truth of the matter is we don't really know. We all have instincts. But there is no doubt at all that all the energy in politics, or not all, but a lot of the energy in politics now is increasingly on the farther, farther right. It's very odd. The center has died. The left, certainly the labor left is looking pretty inept and weak. And the fight is now taking place on the right. And it's the right that seems to have the energy. The right has the ideas, the right has the momentum. And they're beginning to play with ideas which are profoundly anti democratic. And it's very. There's a wonderful book by Mark Mazova which is called the Dark Continent. And it's about Europe in the 20th century. And one of the very striking things when you read about the 1920s and 1930s in Europe is that so much of what people came to believe in the 20s and 30s, which is parliamentary democracy, is failing us. Politicians are useless. They can't get anything done. The problem with elections is it stops long term planning. We're losing our Christianity, we're losing our nationhood. There's a conspiracy of liberals. All this stuff about international law is nonsense. What really matters is might, strength, community, nationhood, Christianity. This stuff is right there in Tommy Robinson. And he's dragging I mean the fact that now a figure like Tommy Robinson, who to remind people this is a man who is a convicted criminal, right? And even before he was a convicted criminal, his CV was basically as the organizer of large football hooligan mobs, right, is now seen as somebody who Elon Musk is championing all over Twitter, who gets invited on a state visit to Israel by the Israeli government and fated through the I mean this is very, very, very troubling. And and the problem is how do we make the arguments for things that 10, 15 years ago we took for granted, democracy, international law, human rights, right without sounding like we're a bunch of out of touch a feat professors who don't understand the real world. And that was the problem of course, that liberals faced in the 1920s and 30s. New Zealand New Zealand essentially went for a hybrid between a first past post constituency system and a proportional representation system. And it was wonderful. And one of the great things New Zealand is it allowed the Conservative Party to break between its right wing and its left wing and create a much more interesting, diverse and more moderate form of politics in New Zealand.
- [36:24]
Interviewer/Host
And the Greens did very well there as well.
- [36:26]
Producer Mia Sorrenti
Just thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Conor Boyle and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings. Become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and to join us at future live events, head to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full live events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [37:06]
Advertiser
The Uniswap Wallet makes crypto easier and safer to own and use. Discover new tokens, research confidently, swap instantly, and manage it all securely in one place. The UNISWAP trading protocol has powered over $3 trillion in volume and it's trusted by millions worldwide. Buy your first crypto assets in a few taps and experience the freedom of decentralized finance with uniswap. Tap the banner to get started.
- [37:33]
Rory Stewart
Quick. Choose a meal deal with McValue, the $5 McDonald, the $6 McDouble meal deal or the new $7 Daily Double meal deal, each with its own small fries, drink and Four Piece McNuggets. There's actually no rush. I'm just excited for McDonald's for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary not by alderman delivery.
- [37:49]
Advertiser
VRBO helps you swap gift wrap time. For quality time go to VRBO now and book a last minute week long stay and save over $390 this holiday season. Book your next vacation rental home on VRBO. Average savings $396.00 select homes only.