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The Right Will NEVER UNITE Again - Reform v Restore v Tory. Dr. Stephen Davies & Rafe Heydel-Mankoo
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- [00:00]
A
Kind of underlying tectonic plates, if you like, of politics have moved in a way, and with the first past, first electoral system, that's going to produce absolute mayhem. There's something distinctive about the British case where the under 30s are overwhelmingly supportive of the left or centre left. Eric is too pessimistic. I think that basically what we're dealing with is a phenomenon driven by a particular set of economic conditions which I don't think are going to last very much longer at all. I think that the right thing to do for RESTORE UK would be to not stand a candidate. And that's quite straightforwardly in their own self interest, because they'll be humiliated, in my view. So I think the idea that if there is a Conservative candidate, those votes are all going to go to reform in that particular seat, I think is just like for the Birds. And the two parties are basically shell organizations. They're essentially media content generators, particularly younger women, overwhelmingly more likely to be on the cosmopolitan left side. Male voters, both old and young, overwhelmingly likely to be on the right side, the nationalist side of the new divide. Some will say, well, the problem here is democracy. What we need is a strong leader who can get things done. And I think in certain places, unfortunately, that's probably going to be tried.
- [01:18]
B
Hello and welcome to the show. Now, may I first of all invite you to join us in London on Friday 5 June to Saturday 6 June for our second annual literary festival. It's one of the great free speech festivals in the country of your favorite speakers, authors and broadcasters. We've got Alison Pearson from the Telegraph, Professor David Betts, the academic, of course, who predicts civil war in this country. Lord David Frost, Brexit negotiator, Lord Nigel Bigger, Frank Faredi, the comedian Dominic Frisby. Too many to name in total. Do go to our website, newcultureforum.org.uk for tickets or click on the link below this video and hope to see you there. Now we're going to be discussing the future of the right. Does this new right we see in Britain today have a future? Is populism a temporary phenomenon or a permanent fixture on the political landscape? Can all of these new parties survive? Is the Tory party in terminal decline? Can reform secure a majority with this new fractured right? And what is Restore going to have in terms of its impact on British politics? And I'm delighted to discuss this with me today we have one of the sharpest minds in Britain when it comes to analyzing the state of modern Britain politically and how and why we got here. Dr. Stephen Davies is the Head of Education at the Institute for Economic affairs and he's also the author of an excellent new book which Ollie should have up on the screen for you now, called the Great why the New Right Is Here To Stay. Welcome, Stephen.
- [02:55]
A
Thank you very much.
- [02:56]
B
Now, let's just dive right in, I suppose, to the issues of the day. We obviously have a more fractured right than we've ever seen before. Typically the left was fractured, the were united. Now the right in Britain is fractured more than perhaps anywhere in Europe. Is that sustainable for the right if it wants to actually win power? And what is your prediction for the future of the right?
- [03:20]
A
Well, the question of whether or not it's sustainable is in a way the secondary question of, well, is it going to stay this way? And I suspect that it is. But the same is also true of the left because there's the Labour Party. Historically, the dominant party on the left is now polling at about 15, 16, 17%. The Green Party has overtaken it in quite a few polls recently. So we now have maybe three parties on the left stroke center left. So there's fracturing right across the political spectrum and I suspect that this is going to persist. There is this argument that with first past the post, there's a kind of gravitational pull towards two large parties. But actually I don't think that is true. I think that that's an unwarranted application of the peculiar circumstances of the United States to other. And so I would predict that actually this is what's just going to go on. Now, what I think we have at the moment is this. You can quite clearly see that there is a right wing block and a left wing block in British politics and there is virtually no movement backwards and forwards between the right bloc and the left bloc. They are extremely clearly defined and they are very clear about what the other that they don't want to be part of is. And so there's very few swing voters between those two blocks. Now what you do have going on though is a Ferris in a sack fight within each of those blocs inside the block to be the dominant force in the block. So in the right block you've got Reform, the Conservative Party and Restore uk, you know, tumbling around fighting like mad, trying to make sure they're the dominant force in it. Similarly, on the left, there's a, I think existential fight brewing up between the Greens and the Labour Party as to which of them is going to be the dominant force in that block. And with the Liberal Democrats as interested Bystanders, I think you might say. Now, what you also see, though, and this is a kind of still emergent phenomenon, is that there's also, you could separate out some of those forces and say there's actually a third pole starting to emerge. And this third pole consists of people, some of whom lean towards the new right, which I would say nationalist bloc on some issues, others of whom lean towards the left, cosmopolitan bloc, but who are united by their intense dislike for the dominant political style. On those two blocks, they're anti populists, if you will. These people are often labeled centrists, but I think that's a rather misleading label. Now, this raises difficulties if you talk about the future of the right. So the future of the right, the question then is, well, which of the two parties, labor, sorry, Conservative or Reform, is going to come out on top in this fight? Does restore have any prospect of making any kind of impact? The problem for the. That's a straightforward question for Reform or Restore. But for the Conservatives, the problem is that they have to appeal both to some of their voters who identify very clearly and strongly with this right bloc and who are, if you like, reform, adjacent or sympathetic. But they also have another half of their voters, roughly who. Who, while they may, you know, they don't see themselves as being in the left block, they also intensely dislike the populist style rhetoric and all the rest of it of the rest of this right bloc. And the problem is, if they move to, they're trying to ride two horses at once. This makes their position very, very difficult. The Labour Party faces a similar problem in its block, if you will.
- [07:08]
B
So do you think the Tory Party is in terminal decline? Because we see, obviously Kemi Badenoch is the most popular in British politics at the moment. She's performed. She got a lot of praise for her performances recently, not least after the state opening of Parliament and the King's speech there. But that really hasn't transferred much into the actual success of the Tory party as we saw the last local elections. You could say that she stopped their catastrophic collapse. They're stabilizing a bit. But the problem is one person doesn't make a party. And her parliamentary party does seem to be still full of wets, especially now that they've got rid of people like Suella Braverman and Robert Genrick and so forth. So is it actually accurate to show, say, that it still is a right wing party, or is it a neoliberal party, as I like to call it, and is it able to. Do you think it's going to be able to claw itself back or has essentially reformed, simply parked its tanks forever on that territory.
- [07:57]
A
Okay, several things to say there. The first is that on the. There's something called the Lindy Principle, which is a rule devised by New York theater critics, which says that the longer a show has been running, the more likely it will still be running next year. So, generally speaking, when you have an institution which has been around as long as the Conservative Party, you've got to be a very brave person to say that it's in terminal decline. That said, this doesn't mean that the party has been around for a long time, is going to be necessarily. All shows ultimately come to the end of their run. And historically, the Liberal Party, one of the two great parties in the state from, you know, at least the 1820s through to the 1920s, just basically became a minor party in the 20s and was replaced. So this could happen. And Kemi Badenoch may well find herself in the same kind of position as Lloyd George in the 1920s, widely recognized as the outstanding politician, but not transferring that to support for the party. And the case in both, the reason for that in both cases would be the same, which is that the kind of underlying tectonic plates, if you like, of politics have moved in a way which the party has not been able to keep up with in the 20s. The case was that the Liberals, for various reasons, partly the impact of the Great War, were not able to keep up with the rise of organized labor as a dominant force in certain parts of British society, and that therefore they ceded that ground to the Labour Party. Similarly, the Conservative Party, you could argue, has faced the problem that it has a challenge of responding to what we'll be going on to talk about a realignment in politics, a major shift in what many, many voters see as their primary concern, the central issue that they define their political identity by. Responding to that constructively means writing off one half of their electoral coalition. And they still haven't resolved that challenge. Really. They could have gone down the route they began to follow William Boris Johnson in 2019, which would mean moving decisively onto the kind of territory that reform now occupies, the nationalist right, if you will. However, that would mean writing off a large part of what you might call the cosmopolitan liberal right, the free market, or as you say, neoliberal right, probably to the Liberal Democrats. And on the other hand, they could decide to go decisively for that kind of position, but that would mean losing a large part of their membership and a whole bunch of voters to reform now it may well be that that die has been cast anyway, because if you look at the most recent election results, one of the striking features was the way in which places like Norfolk, for example, Essex, where Camo Bay knocked seat is, of course, and the previous year in Lincolnshire, the Conservatives were completely swept away in what would have been a rural heartland by reform. And it may well be that that part of their vote is done for, in which case, if they are going to survive, it would be as part of a kind of more center coalition, if you will, a neoliberal coalition, rather than trying to move and become the dominant party on this new nationalist right. If they are going to do that, she's going to have to, you know, know move much more decisively in that direction. I think that was what Robert Jenrick wanted to do and it was clear to him that she and the other people in the party weren't going to do that. Plus he wasn't going to become leader, which is why he quit.
- [11:27]
B
So as it stands, obviously Reform is the most popular party in the country to form. To have a chance of forming a majority government, you need to have at least 31 to 33% of the vote, depending how it's spread across the country. Reform was in that territory at one point. It no longer is, it's in, it's in the mid to high 20s. So you could argue that obviously the Tories or Reform, they need to secure votes from those voters if they're going to have a hope of forming a majority government. Otherwise they'll have to have hopefully a coalition with the Tories. But coalition also means watering down your manifesto and not being as strong as you want to. So what do you think? Do you think it's possible for reform now in this new political landscape to get a majority government?
- [12:07]
A
It's certainly possible, yes, because of the way the electoral system works. Now, at the moment they're too low and right now our electoral system is going to produce a total utter chaos at the next election because we've got five parties with pretty much the same kind of vote range Reform, slightly higher than the rest, but not by much. And with the first passive post electoral system, that's going to produce absolute mayhem. Now, let's say they do get back up to where they were originally, about 30%. That would have to be almost certainly the expense of both Restore uk, they would have to see that off completely and also of the Conservative voted party because they're not going to get any other vote, any votes from the other parties. Basically, they would be therefore they would sort of like max out at about 30%. Yes, they could win there, but it would be very close, partly because they're also both the most loyally supported but strongly disliked party. A similar problem that the Greens have. Now, what that would mean is that in many seats there would be tactical voting against them. And so I think, yes, it is possible for them to run a majority, but right now I would bet against it.
- [13:18]
B
So that leads me to what I think is one of the most critical questions for the right. Is it imperative to unite the right? The thesis I always put forward on this channel and elsewhere is that with the exception of 2015, every general election more votes have been cast for left and centre left parties than were cast for parties on the right. And the right wing vote is dying at a far faster rate. I think by 2030 you're going to have 1.4 million right wing voters die versus 400,000 left wing voters. And they're not being replenished amongst the young by anywhere near that rate. So the two elections are probably quite crucial if you want to reverse the long march with institutions, change, education and everything else. So is it possible, is it imperative and is it possible to actually unite the right?
- [13:59]
A
I don't think it is possible for the reason I said earlier that the broad category of the right now includes what you might call the right of the center, the right of the neoliberal centre and the truly nationalist right, which is what reform is now. I don't think you can actually ultimately unite them. But also I would argue that that's the wrong way of thinking it about, about it because the way you frame this is that you have kind of two elections left to save the country basically. Now the argument, the obvious kind of implied narrative there is that you win a parliamentary majority and you force through various reforms in the face of a actual popular majority that is opposed to this and a generational shift differential die off, as you put it, which is not favorable. Now I think that actually that's a recipe for crash and burn. Because I think if you do do that, what you're going to do is a provoke intense resistance, but also see a major swing to the left follow subsequent to that. And I think that what the sort of project, if you want to promote the right, however that is defined in the future, is to escape from the trap of being the politics of the boomer generation. Because one of the things that is striking about Britain in contrast to other countries in Europe, is that right wing politics of the new kind or indeed of any kind for that matter, is very much confined to the over 50s or even the over 60s. This is not the case elsewhere. So in Germany for example, the young, particularly young men are much more likely to support the AfD than any other party. In France, Marine Le Pen is the most popular and Jordan Bardea are the most popular politicians amongst the under 25s. There's something distinctive about the British case where the under 30s are overwhelmingly supportive of the left or center left. Now I'm not quite sure why that is, but that is the challenge that has to be overcome because it doesn't matter how many election victories you win in the near future and what you do with those victories. If the demography is against you to that degree, then your goose is cooked regardless of what you do.
- [16:08]
B
Oh yeah, and that's my point. I've written about this as well that you know, you can't win the war unless you win the battle for young minds. And we have the most radically left wing youth in history on a whole slew of policy issues. They have views that are out of kilter. So unless you do actually reverse the means of cultural production that are conceived by the left from the museums, galleries, the media, education, crucially primary, secondary and tertiary, I don't think you're going to have a chance. We've had Eric Kaufman on here. He thinks Britain's heading for a 20 year period of Canadian style wokery, that essentially we've got 20 years of left wing politics ahead of us and this potentially is the last gasp for a generation at least. Things could change after that.
- [16:45]
A
I actually would disagree with that and I disagree with you as well because I, I think Eric and yourself are both emphasizing the role of what you might call educational cultural institutions in producing this radicalization amongst the youth. You see, I would disagree with that and push back a bit because that doesn't appear to happen in other countries like Germany where the radicalization of those institutions is if anything even more pronounced. Similarly, it doesn't appear to be the case in the United States where it's producing a very clear and strong reaction. Geographically identifiable, but still a very strong reaction. The question is really well, why is it not producing this reaction in the UK amongst a certain part of the young. And I suspect that the reason for that is more to do with the domination of middle class life and aspiration in this country by the quest for professional qualification and certification. In other words, it's a reflection of the degree to which our economy is dominated to a very unusual degree by Professional service jobs which trading globally traded services and I think that the process of actually working in those kind of occupations but also undergoing the process of training and qualification for those is going to naturally give you a life experience and an outlook on the world that will predispose you towards the kind of radical left outlook. There are people like that in other countries, but if you look at say France, La France Insoumise, Jean Le Melachon or if you look at the radical left in the United States, people like Mamdani for example in New York, they don't command the support of anything like as large a part of the young population as is the case in the uk. And I think it's actually a reflection of the economic realities purchase the particularly acute housing problem we have in the UK and the degree to which our economy is dominated by financial and other scalable services found in the southeast of England. Now I don't think that is going to last. So I think that actually, you know, Eric is too pessimistic. I think that basically what we're dealing with is a phenomenon driven by a particular set of economic conditions which I don't think are going to last very much longer at all because they're founded upon, well, a whole set of financial and other international races which are very rapidly unraveling.
- [19:11]
B
No, I mean I agree with that too. I think it's multifaceted the issue, the issues that they're facing. There also of course is the fact that the Tory party have been focusing on their, on their core demographic for, for, for decades. Yes, they have, yes, triple up pensions, nothing for the youth. But we're not even seeing from the other parties much of an appeal to put to the youth.
- [19:27]
A
No, indeed, absolutely.
- [19:29]
B
So, well look, well look now we've got the Makerfield by election coming up where Andy Burnham is hoping to have a route but back to power. Jacob Rees Mock has called for the Tories to stand their candidate. There'd been others calling for RESTORE to stand their, their Canada down. Others would say well that's wholly anti democratic, not to allow voters the choice. What is the right thing to do for the right, would you say?
- [19:51]
A
Well, I, I think that the right thing to do for RESTORE UK would be to not send a candidate and that's quite straightforwardly in their own self interest because they'll be humiliated in my view, if they do put up a candidate. If you, if you're the Conservative Party though, though I think you can't possibly stand down your candidate unless you buy into the idea that basically the party should fold up his tent and either merge with reform or enter into an explicit alliance with them, or accept that it's only ever going to be a junior partner reform. And clearly I think they're not going to do that. And to the extent that people think there is a kind of conservative politics that is not what is put forward by the more popular style of reform, then they should not do so. It would be a violation of their principles to do so. So A, they're not going to do it obviously, but also B, I don't think should because there are certain kinds of broadly definable right wing voters who will not vote for reform. That's the point. The assumption that Jacob Reesmod is making is okay, there isn't a Conservative candidate. There's going to be a pretty much 100% transfer of potential votes from the Conservative candidate to the Reform candidate. I would strongly dispute that. I think that the Tory vote in Wigan Borough, which is where the seat is, is residual anyway. And to the extent that there is such a vote, it's made up people who basically they don't have a Conservative candidate to vote for. It's very unlikely that they might vote for the Liberal Democrats as a pinch they have done starters to a few years ago in Wigan, but they're not going to vote for anybody else. So I think the idea that if there isn't a Conservative candidate, those votes are all going to go to reform in that particular seat, I think is just like for the birds. There are other seats where that might make sense. Actually there are seats in say the east and southeast of England where I think the demography is such that yes, there would be such a transfer, but not there.
- [21:43]
B
Yes. And my own view is that I think you're going to see at the spy election and at the general election tactical voting by both sides as you've never seen before. There'll be no party loyalty as they.
- [21:53]
A
I mean, I think that's quite likely. It's worth saying, by the way, that if you're one of those kind of residual, you know, relic Tory voters in a place like say Wakefield or you know, Makerfield or Wigan or whatever it is, will you vote for Reform? Well, it depends on who the tactically vote reform. Quite likely, but it depends who the alternative is. Now if the alternative is moderate labor person or a labor person who makes culturally traditionalist noises like Lisa Nandy, for example, the MP for Wigan, the next door seat, you might not. On the other hand, if the alternative is a green or radical left Labour mp. Yes, you probably will. And I'm sure the same thing will happen on the other side of the spectrum. Like you said, I think we're going to have tactical voting like this. We've never seen it before all.
- [22:38]
B
So what's your prediction then do you think, because they say Bootle is the only labor safe seat, that you'll guarantee that Burton probably would get in, but you, you would say Burnham's got a good chance of winning.
- [22:46]
A
I think he's got a good chance of winning simply because of his very high personal popularity. But if he does get in, it will be very dangerous for him and the left to assume that this shows that he and the agenda he's putting forward, this so called Manchesterism is what has won him the seat as opposed to a personal vote. And it's going to be very tight, I mean really tight, because the majority at the last election was I think, five, seven thousand, something like that. Not what you'd call a real, you know, utterly safe seat territory. And at the most recent local elections, Reform swept every single ward in the seat by clear margins. I mean, not just by the odd vote here or there. So he's got an uphill fight. I think he's probably the only Labour candidate who would have a chance of winning that by election. But I would probably give him just about an even, slightly better than even money chance of winning simply because the personal vote is so strong. However, that does depend on what happens in the campaign. And if he has a bad campaign, then, yes, he's going to lose.
- [23:52]
B
So we'll get into your book in a moment. But one final question on the state of modern politics. Do you think, as I've felt for a while and other people are now saying it, that Britain is becoming ungovernable? We are sort of becoming falling prey to the Italian sickness. Is it just coincidence we've had a whole series of incompetent or inept or unsuitable Prime Ministers in direct succession? Or is it also the fact that because we've lost the center ground and everyone has gone over to their different extremes, there is no leader who's actually capable of commanding the support of the majority of the nation, only about a third. And when you have to make tough decisions, you're going to alienate people within your own party and that potentially we will never have a Prime Minister capable of doing what Thatcher or Blair did and getting repeated elections?
- [24:36]
A
I think that, yeah, Britain is close to being ungovernable at the moment, but I think that there are reasons sort of Structural reasons for this, if you're one of them, is the increasing debility of the British state. The fact that the British state is very large, consumes a huge amount of GDP, but can't actually do anything. Something which frustrates people of any political persuasion increasingly because of the manic obsession with procedure and rules and box ticking as opposed to output and delivery. And what this means is that any prime minister is going to, in very short order you know, find that they can't make, keep the promises they've made nothing, they, they're pulling on all these levers frantically, nothing is happening and the voters get really irate and this undermines their authority. Secondly, there's the problem, the voters, I'm afraid the voters, basically their dominant ideology is what somebody in a wonderful coinage termed cakeism. They believe passionately that they can have their cake and eat it. And so there are lots of people who think, oh, we can have, have huge, very high levels of public spending, but we don't have to raise taxes and average earnings, we can just tax the rich or print money. On the other hand you have people on the right who think oh, we don't need to make any tough choices about what to do about the rising cost of the aging population. We just need to expel, you know, 2 million migrants with current legal rights remain and this won't have any major impact on the, on the labor market. So, so the electorate across the spectrum is wedded to simplistic supposed easy solutions and does not want to confront hard trade offs. Now the third question is, well, why have politicians not come around? Why is the caliber of our political class now so low? Why do we not have politicians who can actually say look, you are going to have to face up to tough trade offs. Here's the ones I think you should make because I can imagine politicians in the past like Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, you, even Tony Benn, even would they would those politicians of that generation would indeed confront voters to trade offs and then make a case as to why they thought the case they believed in was the right choice to make. Why does that not happen now? And I think the problem is the decay of our political culture, which is that back in the 1970s and even more so before then we had two mass political parties which were major civil society institutions and our politicians typically had much more of a substantial background. The Labour Party was full of people who had worked in trade as trade union representatives in industry and commerce. The Tory party was full of people who were professionals or had worked in business. Both Parties had many people who'd done service in the armed forces during World War II or even subsequently. Now almost everyone is a pure professional politician, which means they're drawn from an incredibly small section of the population, for one thing, a rather unrepresented geeky part of the population. And the two parties are basically shell organization. They're essentially media content generators. I saw Aaron Bastani on the Navarro media equivalent of this show the other day, talking about how civil society had basically disappeared in contemporary Britain. And I think he's absolutely, completely correct about that. And what that means is that the. What you might call the politician generation and maturing process, the process by which people would learn the art of politics, learn the art of political judgment and persuasion, has gone. Instead, people just get. Get technical training on how to appear on the media and, you know, do a convincing interview, make, you know, useful sound bites and learn how to put out tweets and stir up Twitter storms. And that means that therefore, when they're actually confronted with the tough choices and the real decisions, they can't handle them.
- [28:25]
B
Well, that leads us on nicely, because that's one of the causes, I would say, of the Great Realignment, too, to a degree, is. Is your book. Now, we've been discussing the Great Realignment on this channel since we started. Our viewers are very familiar with it. However, some people may not know that you were one of the early soothsayers or early prophets of this. I first saw you discuss this in 2018, but I think you first developed this thesis 20 years ago, which, coincidentally, is when we founded the New culture forum in 2006. And we were founded deliberately to stand in opposition to the iaea, your organization, which was economically focused. And Peter Whittle, our founder, said, culture is going to be the battlefield field of the future. And nobody was actually representing that at the time I came on board. I was writing about this since 2007. And then, of course, you had David Goodhart in 2017. But what is your central thesis, then, of your book?
- [29:14]
A
The central thesis is that at any time in any political community with a reasonable degree of complexity, there are always two broad sides in politics and only two sides. And those two sides are produced by an aligning issue, which is one of the issues that people have political disagreements about, which has an unusually high degree of salience. It matters an awful lot to an awful lot of people. And that's because it typically reflects a deep social, cultural division of one kind or another, a clash of interests in society. And what that issue does is to create two broadsides which we call left and right. However. However, the aligning issue does not remain the same. Every so often, you get a realignment in which the major aligning issue changes from what it was before. Now, from about the 1900s, certainly 1920s, through until roughly the financial crisis, the dominant aligning issue in Britain and in pretty much every Western society was economics, socialism versus capitalism, if you will. Will, how much intervention should there be by the state in the economy? So if you're on the left, you favored a redistributive welfare state, and you favored a large degree of state intervention in the economy. At the extreme left, you involved total state ownership and state direction in the economy. If you're on the right, then you favored a broadly free market economy and the use of private measures, market measures to address social problems. If you're at the far right by. By that way of thinking about it, that meant you were a completely laissez faire, you know, Randy, an individualist, essentially. Now, that is no longer the case. So my thesis is that that is no longer the main dividing issue. The main dividing issue, as Tom Wyvil said, is now cultural, if you will. My argument is it's about identity. And the main dividing issue now is essentially, as I've labeled it, nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. Do you believe in a global society of which locality in which you live is a part, an interconnected part, or do you think that the primary, primary unit of human politics, society and identity, should be discrete and distinct nations and national cultures and the states that go out of those cultures? And that's the big division, I think, in the modern world.
- [31:37]
B
And so what were the underlying causes of that rupture? And, you know, and there's class, you know, class, education. These now become key distinguishing factors. As. As well.
- [31:46]
A
Yes. Well, if you look at things like, say, the vote for Brexit in 2016 or the votes for Donald Trump in the two elections he won in the United States, or indeed the one he lost, what you can see is that votes for what I have called the nationalist, or as it's often misleadingly called the populist side, have tended to correlate very strongly with certain things. One is with age, although that is actually a proxy for a much stronger identification, which is with education, which is that, generally speaking, the larger. The larger the extent of your education, the more likely it is that you're on the cosmopolitan side, the less likely it is you're on the nationalist side. Generally speaking, having a degree is one of the big, big political Dividers these days. Another one is gender, generally speaking, women particularly younger women, overwhelmingly more likely to be on the cosmopolitan left side. Male voters, both old and young, overwhelmingly likely to be on the right side. The nationalist side of the new divide. So what is the cause of this? Well, the argument I make in the book is that it actually has a transformative economic and technological cause, but it's experienced and understood through non economic categories, if you will. So I think that the thing that drives it is really twofold. One is the impact of technology, which we've already just touched on, the impact of things like social media and the like. The other, and I think the more important one is the effects of the way the form that globalization, global economic integration took following the collapse of Bretton woods and the move towards a system of investment led globalization after roughly the mid to late 1980s. Now, prior to then, the globalization we'd been seeing going on since really the 1920s, but particularly after 1948, had been traded led. But what you got with the collapse of the exchange controls being a central feature of the Bretton woods regime, was a move towards unrestricted global capital investment flows which created an investment led globalization. And what that has done is to transform the world economy. Two things. It's transformed the world economy from being made up primarily of national economies into consisting of of a couple of thousand city regions organized in hierarchically structured networks. And within those cities, the dominant growing sectors of the economy are professional service sectors, knowledge workers as people call them, people who trade in globally tradable, non tangible products. Whereas the relative importance in the developed world of manufacturing, along with other things like mining and primary goods production has declined, declined dramatically. And the areas that were formerly locked into producing that kind of activity have suffered catastrophic economic decline. But also mass migration. And the mass migration is driven primarily by the transformation of agriculture in the global south as a result of these investment flows. Which has meant that what we now have is a world with about 2 billion redundant farmers. Farmers in places like Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America. And these redundant farmers, they can no longer make a living in agriculture. So they're going to move to the city. Most of them are going to move to a city nearby. Hence the explosive growth of places like Lagos or Kinshasa, Brazzaville or Luanda or Sao Paulo. But about 10% of them, which, you know, doing the maths is several hundred million, are going to seek to migrate to a cities in the developed world, the rich countries. So that's an enormously powerful push factor for major demographic Transformation brought about by mass migration. And this has provoked a very powerful political response. And so that's what I think is the ultimate thing that's driving all this. It's a kind of combination of the cultural impact of the new technology at and the development of certain kinds of radical cultural ideas on the left which have provoked response on the right. And also the demographic and economic transformations brought about by the form that globalized economic integration has taken since the mid-1980s. But it has been experienced. The people who don't like so not understood it in economic terms. They've seen it as a threat to their identity. They their the identity of both themselves and of the locality and place in which they live and the way of life which they see as embodied in the relationships that they have with the people with whom they live.
- [36:38]
B
Yeah, that's fundamentally correct. They've seen their towns and their neighborhoods
- [36:41]
A
precisely beyond all recognition.
- [36:42]
B
They've seen statues being pulled down. Pride in Britain, as I like to say amongst British youth was 80% of British youth in 2005 were proud to be British. Today it's only 41%. So there's something clear really going on there. But then, yeah, if so if, if there is an economic core to all of this, how does that explain then that the parties of the populist right, we'll use that pejorative term, tend to be cultural nationalists, but then they're still, they're still free marketeers. And what I've always found funny was that we know that the British public as a whole lean to the right on cultural issues, but they lean slightly left on economic issues. And I've always been amazed at that. We've never had a Gaulis style party coming to fruition in this country. Seems to me the closest party to that is one people didn't even know still exists. And that's the sdp.
- [37:28]
A
Indeed. Yeah. William Clueston. People like that. Yes, absolutely. Well, that is very much where the center of gravity in the new alignment is. And I would actually push back on your assertion that most parties in most countries are of the kind you described, which I, I pejoratively, I didn't say that I've labeled it as capitalism in one country. That is indeed where parties of this kind start out. So if you look at things like the Austrian freedom Party, the AfD, the RN as it originally, the National Front as it originally was in France, the RN as it now is, they all start off in that space. They are in favor of things like protectionism and opposition to migration, opposition to economic globalization. But they also favor radical free market policies within whatever their own country is. You can see this in a lot of the policies the Trump administration has followed, for example. But what you find is that over time, those parties move to what you describe as the Gaulis position, one that combines anti globalization opposition to cultural transformation with a very active role for government, a national industrial strategy, the idea that the state should use its powers not to own industry, but to direct the flow of capital into some sectors rather than others. Increasingly, China is seen as the model of how to do this. There's a great deal of China envy out there, I think, on both left and right right now. Now, why do this? Well, I think there are two reasons. One is that's where the votes are, quite honestly, the political center of gravity is there. So you pursue the votes. But the other reason I think is that genuine intellectual conviction leads people to do this because they come to realize the politicians in that space, that a lot of the things they object to are driven not so much by their opponents on the left, in the universities and elsewhere, as by big corporations and global capitalism. And at this point they start to think, well, you know, these guys are not my friends. And they also start to realize that the kind of things they want to achieve, maintaining national ethnic homogeneity, for example, require you to do things which are incompatible with the way global capitalism is currently constructed and works. Now, you can see this most clearly in France, where Marine Le Pen, at the last election, her economic platform was, I would argue, actually to the left of Melanchol, who was the radical left candidate. She was easily the most left right wing candidates of the three or four major candidates then. And you can see a similar pattern in most countries. Now the interesting question is this hasn't yet happened in Britain, and why is that? And I think it has to do with the thing I alluded to earlier, which is the decay of the political party, which is that therefore British politics is unusually dependent upon large individual donors and, and large individual donors typically are much more concerned about economics than they are about other issues. Because if you are a very rich and private individual, then you are going to be very concerned about questions like how much tax do you pay, how much government regulation of your business have to put up with. And so the large donors who, broadly who are on what you might call, loosely speaking, the right, they will still tend to favor parties and politicians who favor that combination of nationalism on culture, but, but free market politics, and they're not going to give money to parties like the sdp.
- [41:10]
B
Yeah. And I would say, you know, big business was one of the reasons why you had mass immigration.
- [41:15]
A
Precisely. Absolutely. I mean, there are pull factors. I mean, there are two very clear pull factors because, okay, you've got these 2 billion redundant farmers, and there's a very powerful push factor on that side. What is the pull factor? Well, one is that it's to the advantage of business as well as to the migrants to have the laborers come in because it provides the business with temporarily cheaper labor. It doesn't stay cheaper, by the way. That's a misconception. But they get a benefit from that. But also, the other reason is to keep the welfare state on the road and above all, to enable to somehow stave off the evil day of confronting the bankruptcy of the state pension system.
- [41:53]
B
So long as all the migrants are contributing to the tax base, of course, as well. So, look, we've had, obviously in this country, you've mentioned France elsewhere, populism has swept along across much of the world. Is populism here to stay? And what happens when the populists fail to deliver on their promises?
- [42:09]
A
Well, this is an interesting question. Two things. There is populism here today. Categorically, yes. That's the meaning of the subtitle of my book. There are many people on the left who still think that this is a temporary, evanescent phenomenon of protest and that it's going to go away. There are others who think that, well, these people are not really upset about what they say. They're upset about things like migration, if we can. They're really upset about the fact that the National Health Service doesn't work work, or that the economic growth is not good enough, their housing is too expensive, and if we sort these out, they will go back to voting for the Labour and Conservative parties as before. And the fact is, people are upset about those things, but they are less upset about them than they are about the demographic transformations and the other cultural transformations that are going on. And so that's not going to stop them. And so there is this idea on the left still that somehow you're not dealing with a permanent transformation. And to the extent that people think it might be, they tend to blame it on malevolent external forces like Vladimir Putin. Now, I've no doubt the Russians are trying to stir things up for their own, you know, geopolitical reasons, but this is like a case of, well, you can't start a fire unless there's flammable material, and you may be able to, you know, help a fire grow, but there's got to be a fire there in the first place. And that to the extent that there is any influence, and I would hugely downplay it, I think that's what is going on there. And so yes, it is going to stay. But then the question is, well, what happens when a government gets into power and then supporters are confronted with the reality that a lot of things they promised to do or that they want to see done are not going to happen. And I think that like the kind of claims for mass expulsion of people who have legal entitlement to stay, which people like Rupert Lowe for example are advocating is going to be the classic example of this. It isn't going to happen. Quite apart from anything else, people have not practically thought through what the sheer physical logistics of that are like. If it's done in an organized way, it's almost impossible to do. You could have it done in a disorganized way, but that's not really possible for us. Where we are geographically, you could have 2 million Turks and 3 million Greeks exchanging places in the across the Aegean in 1923 because Greece and Turkey were right next door to each other. Similarly, several million Germans leaving Silesia and Pomerania and going to what is now Ethan, you know, the German Republic it after World War II, but again next door to each other. But if you want to have 2 million people leave your territory and go to somewhere which is a pretty long air flight away or a long journey away, that's practically almost impossible. So they're going to have to confront that. Now what I think will happen is this is how politics works. Hopefully what then happens is however they will do other things. They will be. They will be able to do the kind of things that Giorgio Maloney, for example, as a case in point is doing in Italy. Make immigration and acquiring of citizenship much more difficult, tie welfare benefits much more explicitly to citizenship rights as opposed to pure residential status, which is the Dubai model. Basically in Dubai anyone can go and work there. They've provided you certain minimal standards, but you have a whole bunch of rights which are only allowed to the 10% or so who actually are native born citizens of the uae. That's probably the kind of move we'll go to the left will then have to think, well, how many of these things do we reverse? And I think what will happen is as usual with politics, after to and fro over several elections, we'll end up with a modus vivendi which will be not what the purists on either side want. And I Would count myself as a purist, by the way, to put my cards on the table. But. But it's what people can put up with, if you will. And that's how politics is meant to work. So I think that is what will happen. There will be initially serious disappointment, but then I think what you will get is eventually a kind of emergence of an amended modus vivendi, which will be not the kind of situation we have now, but not what the populist right, so called wants to achieve or envision.
- [46:22]
B
But do you think there's also the risk? I mean, let's hope that the next right wing government does deliver as much as it can. But do you think there's a risk, therefore, that a large swathe of the voting public will suddenly think, well, they're all the same, and become completely disaffected with politics, if not actually cleave to a rather an undemocratic and a more radicalized type of politics?
- [46:42]
A
Well, there are, I think there is a danger that some will do the latter, that some will say, well, the problem here is democracy. What we need is a strong leader who can get things done. And I think in certain places, unfortunately, that's probably going to be tried, but I think whatever place tries it, I don't think you will do it in Britain for various historical reasons. I think the evidence will appear very, very rapidly that the so called strong leader can't get things done either, that what you're dealing with is very difficult and intractable physical realities, essentially. And at that point I think people will be seriously disgruntled, but they will realize that they'll have to settle for half a cake rather than the whole cake, basically, which is the nature of what political politics is. Now, the reason why at the moment there appear to be so many people who aren't prepared to make that kind of, you know, half a loaf better than none judgment is because of the way social media works, where it keeps people in a state of constant rage and agitation and demanding the impossible, if you will. But I think that that will, I hope anyway that that will wear off.
- [47:45]
B
And so we've discussed the difference between Tory voters and Reform voters. But what about the distinctions between Reform and Restore voters?
- [47:53]
A
I'm not sure what that distinction is myself, because I don't, I don't think we have enough of a voting sample yet or an idea about who exactly is attracted to which party to be able to gauge it. The early indications are that RESTORE is a kind of strange mixture of, of people of Rupert Lowe's generation who are very much out of the same kind of cloth as reform voters, older boomers, basically radical power lights is how I would describe them. And then much younger voters who are much more intellectually interesting, but in a rather strange way because they bought into a much more radical kind of ethno nationalist ideology, essentially. Now, as to how many of these people there are, whether this is going to grow amongst youth, which it might do, given what I suspect is going to happen in the very, very near, future to youth employment because of the impact of AI, it could well grow. But at the moment I think it's really too early to say what the differences are and we don't have enough actual elect. I mean, the latest elections, I think they only put up candidates in the area around round Rupert Lowe's own seats up over in Norfolk. Until we have more actual data points, it's not going to be very easy to say exactly what they are. Now, if Restore is like say, the two parties it most closely resembles abroad, which are La Reconquette in France, Eric Zamor's party, or the Confederacy on Party in Poland, then you would say that its support is going to to be A younger and B more affluent than the bulk of reforms voters, because that's the pattern you see in both of those cases. So Eric Zamore's party, which seems to have imploded a bit at the moment, if you look at the election results, before it imploded, it was getting support mainly from wealthy residents in the Cote d', Azur, which, sorry, is the one of the historic heartlands of the Reich in France, and also from wealthy younger people in places like Paris and other major metropolitan areas. Similarly with La Racanquette it gets. Sorry, with La Confederation it gets a lot of support in places like parts of Warsaw, parts of Krakow, again, younger, more affluent. So I would suspect that that's the demographic that RESTORE is likely to appeal to. But at the moment, as I say, we don't have enough data points to know.
- [50:29]
B
Well, it's clear that we're in uncharted territory on so many levels and that so many opportunities for disappoint as well for especially I'm sure, for us here, for our audience at home. But if there is one sort of key prediction or key lesson from your book, what would you say it is?
- [50:48]
A
I think it's that you should expect the kind of new politics we're seeing emerging now to continue and to be the way that politics is structured going forward. And that therefore, if you think about what it is that you value in politics, what it is that you want to see achieved in politics. What you should should do is look at the kind of politics I've described and think, well, okay, within that framework, what is the best course of action for me to take to achieve the goals I have?
- [51:18]
B
Well, the new book is the Great why the New Writers here to say Essential reading. If you want to understand how we got to where we are, do stay with us. If you're a member, we're going to have a few minutes of member content. But for me, for now, that's all for this week and we'll see you next week. Time.
- [51:34]
C
Hello, I'm Philip Kisley, senior fellow here at New Culture Forum and director of NCF Litfest. Yes, our literary festival is back. We had such a great time last year. Two days packed to the rafters with huge names, talks, conversations and panels and guess what? No one got cancelled. There's a novelty in this day and age. So we thought we'd do it again Friday and Saturday, 5th and 6th of June. Put those dates in your diary because we have Telegraph columnist, novelist and all round hero, Alison Pearson, one of the great champions of our culture. We have Professor David Betts. He'll be talking about his world class research publications, the State of the nations and where we're headed. You'll have the opportunity to make meet him, you can ask him questions. It's unmissable stuff. We have the wonderful Sue Cook and Professor Nigel Bigger and Dominic Frisby and Lord Frost. Returning this year, I'm delighted to say, is literary agent Matthew Hamilton. He's a fearless hero as well. So many more names, so many more surprises. But that's all you're going to get from me, at least for the moment. Click on the link below to get your tickets. Now we've got some great discounts for NCF members, so here's a tip from me. If you aren't already a member, click on the other link down there and become one before you buy. There are loads of benefits, loads of perks and you'll become one of the NCF family. That's important now more than ever. And this is an important event. It's the only jet genuinely alternative, high profile literary festival and we want you to be part of it. Join us please on the 5th and 6th of June. It's in Westminster. It's NCF LitFest 2026. See you there.