← The Peter McCormack Show
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- [00:00]
A
We have hugely overproduced people with generalist academic skills.
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B
Is AI doing for the graduate elites what globalism has done to factory workers?
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A
I kind of hope so. A huge number of people even going to university feel like second class citizens. The British economy has not been a
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B
success over the last 15 years. Can you name one thing that's got better in this country?
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A
Football. The football team.
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B
Private enterprise. Yeah, anything that the government as the state has delivered, improved.
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A
Oh, that. Well that narrows it down a lot. Yeah, yeah, that. That's probably a tougher one. This could be the end of the line for people with generalist academic skills.
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B
This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, Iron the AI Cloud for the Next Big Thing. Aaron builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure all powered by renewable energy. Now, if you need access to scalable GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out iren.com to learn more, which is Irene.com hello, how are you?
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A
I'm very well, thank you, Peter, thank
- [01:12]
B
you for coming in. Like a lot of people at the moment, I spend a lot of time thinking about AI because I think it's an interesting, fascinating subject. And I was with a girl in our local pub the other day, she's back from university. She said two really interesting things to me. The first thing she said was, I thought I was woke till I went to university. And secondly, I have no idea how I'm going to get a job when I leave. And I'm aware because of my son's generation, a lot of people struggling to get jobs. And so something I've been thinking about, I wanted to ask you about how much you've thought about this, but is AI doing for the graduate elites what globalism has done to factory workers?
- [01:52]
A
I kind of hope so, yes. I mean, we have hugely overproduced people with generalist academic skills and this could be the end of the line for people with generalist academic skills unless they're, unless they're absolutely at the kind of top sort of 5 to 1% in their particular field. I mean, I think all of you know, I think AI, the AI effect will happen much more slowly than people imagine. I think we are, obviously we tend to kind of overreact to new technologies when they come along and we think it's going to be the end of the world. And generally speaking, you know, like when the car replaced the, the horses, everybody feared that there'd be mass unemployment of all the young lads who looked after horses. And of course, you know, that, you know, the human needs are kind of insatiable and we will find new work for people. Even though clearly a lot of the kind of middling and lower level academic white collar type jobs are going to be for the chop, the kind of junior clerical legal work and the accountancy work and so on and so forth. But a lot of that is kind of already automated or semi automated. So. But yes, I think whereas much technology in the last 50 or 100 years has affected blue collar people, this is going to affect white collar and sort of upper white collar people and maybe that will make them more politically sympathetic to the people who have really lost out in our society in the last couple of years, couple of generations, which tends to be the less well educated people, people who don't go away to university, you know, people who have come from post industrial parts of the country and the political class has not been representing their interests, which is why, you know, reform and restore between them are on sort of 30, 35% in the opinion polls. So yeah, that I think one of the most, one of the kind of least empathetic speeches of any modern politician and one of the most shocking speeches in some ways was Tony Blair's famous speech in 1999 saying that 50% of all school leavers should go to university. Clearly nobody in that group of people who were helping him write that speech and I knew a few of them thought for one second that their child would be in the 50% of people who didn't go to university. No, it's fine. Obviously we need clever people, we need people to go to University. And when 10, 15, even 20% of people in your town or your school, your class go to university and you don't, that's fine. You know, you go and work in a local factory or office and life goes on. When 50% of people go, and of course many of them, we have an unusually high level of people going to residential universities in this country, which I think it's been a great source of division in some ways, then if you're not in that cohort who leave and join this sort of cast of people, the liberal graduate class, if you like, I call them the anywheres in my book about population, about populism in 2017, if you're not part of that group, you might well think of yourself as a second class citizen. And of course now as universities have expanded and expanded since, even since 1999, a huge number of people even going to university feel like second class citizens. Because they, they expected that, you know, having worked hard and passed their exams and gone to university, done what their parents and teachers asked them to do, they were expecting, you know, reasonably high status, well paid, professional job. And there, there aren't enough of them to go around and there are going to be even fewer in the AI age. So I think it could affect our politics in some ways in quite positive ways.
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B
How so? What's the positive ways? Like a new class system?
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A
Well, a greater awareness on the part of, as it were, the graduate class that they no longer have this automatic path to high status and high income and that that will make them more sympathetic to the people who lost out kind of in the last round of technological change, the blue collar workers whose jobs went to China or were abolished by technology in some way. So I think and hope it might make people a little bit more aware of that. And the other potentially positive thing is that actually more people are going to think, well, perhaps I should get a skilled trade, perhaps I should train as a plumber or an electrician or not so much a coder obviously, because AI can do coding. But there may be other areas of it where you need a degree of kind of practical intelligence and manual dexterity as well as academic brains. Because we still have a huge lack of people with technical, vocational skills, many of whom were having to. Which means that we either can't, you know, think of the building trade. I mean, you know, we have a, and we have, we have a national shortage of welders. You know, within three or four years of training as a welder you can be earning 60 or 70 grand. But because all of the, hitherto, because all of the status and the kind of financial security has been associated with higher education and getting a degree, people have been turning their noses up at these, you know, perfectly interesting and well paid jobs, but that don't have the aura of the graduate job. So. Yeah, so I mean, it may help us kind of rearrange our, the distribution of economic status might change in healthy
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B
ways and then maybe a redistribution of power.
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A
Yeah, because I think one of the problems, as I said, I wrote this book in 2017 just after the Brexit vote called the Road to Somewhere. I talked about the new education based value divides. I talked about the people from anywhere, the people who'd left their families and their friends and their homes and gone to residential universities and become sort of unrooted and, and, and, and join that mainly quite sort of liberal consensus that you tend to get in universities and they tend to you know, the anywheres, which is, we're not talking about a small elite, we're now talking about, you know, 25, 30% of the population who tend to have attitudes that, that, that go along with their own experience. So they're in favor of mobility and openness and autonomy and all of those things that, that liberal minded people tend to favor. And it means they have, they have a sense of themselves. They have so called achieved identities, identities that come from their own achievements. You know, they did well at school, they passed exams, they went to a more or less good university and have a more or less successful professional career. Which means that their sense, they have a sense of themselves derived from those achievements, which means that their identity is sort of portable so they can live in the, the edgy inner city and feel perfectly comfortable, whereas the, the other big group, and this sounds very binary, but actually if you read my book, you'll see there are many different kinds of somewheres, many different kinds of anywheres. And there's a big group I call rather unimaginatively the in between, a group who sort of share these, the somewhere and anywhere values more or less equally. But the somewheres are a big minority, if not a majority of the population, perhaps 40, 50%. People who tend to be less well educated, tend to be more rooted in place and group and indeed, whose identities are more, are based on the things that, the places they come from, the group they belong to, and often things about themselves that they can't change. You know, your white male working, working class from the Northeast or whatever. And if you're, if your identity is more based on place and group, then if place and group change, you're more likely to be discomforted. So somewheres tend to be much more discomforted by rapid social change, whereas anywheres can ride with it perfectly comfortably because they've often had that significant change in their own lives when they've left home and gone to college.
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B
Is that why. Sorry to interrupt you. Is the, the somewheres, are they more drawn to populism? Because, yeah, populism is pointing to the failures of the.
- [10:47]
A
Yeah, I mean both of, both of the world views are perfectly decent. Yes, in their mainstream form you get extreme, but you know, you can. The extreme somewhere of sort of is, you know, bigoted and xenophobic and insular. And the extreme anywhere is, you know, the people that live in kind of airport lounges and have no connection with anywhere. And both of these worldviews are perfectly decent. The problem for our politics and the thing that has created the blowback of Brexit and Trump and so on is that the N worse have been over dominant. They have absolutely run the show culturally, politically, economically. They're the people that run everything and they've run everything thinking they're running the show in the public interest if they're in politics, but often running it quite transparently in their own interest. I'm just, you know, look at a whole range of dominant policy issues in Britain in the last 20 or 30 years. You know, what has our education policy been? Send everyone to university and ignore the, the traditional technical vocational skills. I mean, actually to be fair, the Tories did quite a lot of policy work in the area of apprenticeships and the apprenticeship levy and T levels and things like that. But it's sort of still not really stuck. Look at our political economy, our political economy. We've essentially bet the house on professional, professional and financial services in London and the southeast and a few spots in Manchester and Leeds and places. And we've been completely indifferent to deindustrialization. We continue to be completely indifferent to it and it's being exacerbated by our current, you know, Miliband esque energy policy. If you look at, look at our grotesque regional inequality and it wasn't until Brexit that a political party actually placed doing something about regional inequality at the forefront of its manifesto. Boris Johnson and leveling up. I mean if not for the Brexit vote that would never have happened. And Andy Burnham places quite a lot of stress obviously on, on, on devolution and mares and so on. But you know, we've been, we've, we've, we've sent sticking plasters to the, we, we've sent welfare sticking plasters to these left behind places. And, and we've really done, you know, we, we haven't, we haven't. It hasn't been at the center of our politics in a way that it should have been, in a way that it might now become. Look at other things. Family policy. We've been completely indifferent to the fact that nearly half of children in Britain at the age of 14 are not living with both their biological parents. Our family and is. Our families are an absolute mess. We support the family less than any other comparable country in Europe. Look at our immigration policy. You know, people have voted time and time and time and time again for more restrictive immigration and we got more and more higher immigration. I mean most spectacularly with the Boris wave obviously after, after the 2019 election. So you know, the somewheres. I mean this is the reason why Brexit happened that it wasn't. I mean I think the European Union was kind of collateral damage in that vote. It's that a lot of people who are, I mean we're quite a liberal country but there's also quite a lot of people who are, as it were, kind of modern day liberal but still small c conservatives. You know, they would like change to happen more gradually. They prefer the familiar to the strange. They are not racists, but they don't want their town to suddenly be 50 or 60% people from, from different cultures to them. They, they, you know, would like support for the family, they would like it to be easier for one parent to stay at home perhaps when children preschool and their voice has just not been heard at all in politics because it's been completely dominated by the kind of anywhere liberal graduate class. And, and it's, that's kind of unbalanced the boat and you get this sort of often inco hate response to it like voting for Brexit because of the first opportunity to say the populists talk about the UNI party with some justification because both parties have been pursuing what I would call these sort of anywhere policies. There is a slightly center right version, there's a slightly center left version, but it's still essentially the same thing. And Brexit was an opportunity to just sort of give a finger to that, to that anywhere over dominance. I mean I voted Remain and although I don't think Brexit has been the, the economic disaster that it's often made out to be, I mean the point about the European Union economically is that it only really affects manufacturing goods and to some extent energy. Our economy is 8% manufacturing. We export 50% of our manufacturing goods, but only 50% of what we export goes to the European Union. So technically, I mean what, what the European Union really affects is just over 2% of national income. So it's sort of implausible that it would have a hugely either positive or negative effect on our economy. So are we just confused as to
- [16:20]
B
what we are now really as a country? Because I've just got back from America and one of the things I like about the American democracy is they really just have a binary choice. We're going to be Republican and we're going to try it for four years and if it works, we're going to try it for another four years or we're going to be going to be Democrats and we're going to try that for four years and if it doesn't, if it works, we'll carry on for another four years. And it's very, just, it's a very simple choice. And if you don't like Democrat policies, you can go and live in a Republican state and have a slightly more Republican life.
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A
Whereas here we just seem to, we
- [16:54]
B
just seem to be a, I don't know, a big mess of ideas now. And, and, and, and we are, we're fracturing in both camps. You, you don't have a fraction of Republicans which have offshoot parties which are competing with each other and fighting with each other. They fight internally.
- [17:12]
A
Yeah, I kind of slightly disagree that because I actually, I think America has been going through roughly the same process that I've described in Britain. The, the over domination of the, the anywhere. The kind of Ivy League, you know, liberal graduate class that has, that has dominated American culture and politics and economics for the last 30, 40 years. And they've, they've had a, they had a uni party there too, until Trump came along. In that instead of, you know, here or in other European countries, you get the rise of populist parties that are challenging for power. Few of them have actually taken power. I mean, Maloney initially is one example, and quite a few have been in coalitions of one kind or another. But in America, what happened was that you didn't have a new populist party coming along. You had a populist figure like Trump coming along and taking over with a popular brand. Yeah, the Republican Party. So you did, you got that, you got that huge upheaval through that. But I think, you know, I mean, like we had the Brexit moment, they had the Trump moment. I mean, they sort of, again, it was a response, I think, of a lot of ordinary, somewhere ish Americans to the fact that they felt that their country was being run too narrowly in the interests of a kind of liberal graduate anywhere class. And it was a, it was a sort of cultural revolt as much as anything else. And yeah, so I think there's, I think there are parallels here. What happened here was we had a kind of failed re. So they had a realignment there. I mean, it's obviously not going too well at the moment for Trump and the MAGA movement and the American populism. We had our moment in 2019 that should have been the moment of realignment. Brainy people like Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove, the kind of brains behind Boris. Boris was this kind of slightly kind of blustery, but kind of entertaining frontman, I think, to a political project which was not dissimilar to what was happening in America, which was to sort of peel away part of the traditionally working class or people in the bottom half of the income spectrum who felt that their interests were not represented particularly culturally, particularly on things like immigration and national sovereignty by the liberal graduate class. So had sort of shifted away from their traditional allegiance to the center left, the Democrats in America, labor in Britain and were kind of looking for a new home. Many of them had voted Brexit. The Tories got Brexit done eventually in 2019 and they were there for the taking. And indeed they did. You know, many of them did support Boris in 2019, but it was also partly on the get Brexit done and level up the country, but also represent our interests in the economy. So you know, we don't want to go back to a kind of Margaret Thatcher type sort of the, you know, the dramatic de. Industrialization that Margaret Thatcher was associated with. You know, we continue to need, you know, decent public services. We want, you know, degree of redistribution. I mean, you know, we could be in favor very much of a kind of a sort of social market economy. We, you know, we want a strong market economy. A lot of those people are often small and small run small building companies and things. They're not, they're not anti market at all. But they, they need the welfare state to be working well. They need public services to be working well much more than the, than the, than the, you know, affluent upper middle class people down south. So they, they want, you know, a degree of, you know, economic support and a well regulated economy. But they also want that, that, that, you know, the, the policies on immigration and national sovereignty and a degree of cultural conservatism that they, that they can never get from labor or the Democrats. And so they, they kind of offered their support and we had, we had our realignment moment and it failed. It failed because partly because of the character of Boris Johnson, it failed partly because of the pandemic. Obviously threw all of this aside for a couple of years at least. But they didn't achieve, they didn't do levelling up. And then they had the Boris wave because the Tories were terrified that there wouldn't be enough workers to keep the economy spinning over after Covid. And so they had a ridiculously unthought through quasi open door immigration policy policy for a couple of years and it was, and that, that, and so that those. So we ended up in, in 2024 with a labor government that was kind of out of time. I mean, you know, we should have had. We should have had the real. The realignment that they had in America should have happened here. And it sort of half happened and then the Tories blew it.
- [22:11]
B
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- [23:26]
A
Oh, massively, yeah.
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B
Yeah. And so if you're leading a movement of somewhere people, but you're really an anywhere person, do you really understand them?
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A
Yeah.
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B
And I mean, so as an example, I say of an actual somewhere person who's a leader, might be Malay. Malay and Argentina appears to be a somewhere person leading a populist movement and actually is, you know, arguably delivering. I'd even put a Bukele up there in El Salvador as a potential.
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A
Right.
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B
These people seem to. Not only they seem to understand what the mission is, why people have voted for them and what they need to deliver.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Whereas I feel like with Trump and with Boris, we have people who've made a promise and it's a fear. I have Farage with Farage as well. They've made a promise to the voters, but don't actually want to deliver it.
- [24:19]
A
Do you think Rupert Lowe is a somewhere? I mean, I don't think it matters so much, the personal biography of these people. I mean, almost by definition, if you're a political leader, you're in anywhere. I mean, sure. It doesn't. I mean, I mean, particularly if you've been to university. I don't think Nigel Farage didn't go to university. I think that's quite a Significant difference from most that he has with most anyways. But I would, I would contest this idea that we've tried populism and it hasn't worked. I mean populism, populism is essentially, I mean the, the kind of mainstream definition of populism is it is a political movement that provides simple answers to complex problems. All of politics does that. It's almost the job of politicians to provide, to distill simple answers to complex problems. It's all politics, populism. So that doesn't get us very far. I mean it's mainly a kind of boo word that liberal minded people use to describe politics they don't like. I mean describe it. I mean, I think the reality is the populist movements in Europe and America have been a blowback against the over domination of anywhere politics that I just described. And it's often quite incoherent and it's like a sort of protest movement. I mean voting for a populist party is a sort of protest vote. And you know where it has got into power it's either gone quite mainstream like Meloni in Italy or hasn't lasted very long. We haven't had it, it has not been in power in Britain. I mean unless you, I mean, I suppose you could call the 2019 realigned Tories kind of quasi populist and I. And, but, but they blew it. I mean they didn't have time to be populist. They didn't have time to try and implement leveling up or a more restrictive. Well that they blew it on immigration full stop. But they didn't have, you know, they didn't have time to make Brexit work. You know, we could have dealigned ourselves in many other ways. I mean, you know, there are benefits from being outside the European Union in sort of fintech and possibly in AI. People talk about Michael Gove you may have seen, did a kind of 10 years on. It's relatively thin pickings at the moment. But that's partly because we've moved so slowly. You know, we'd had a, if we hadn't had the pandemic and they'd stuck to their guns on leveling up and they hadn't had the Boris wave and they had actually tried harder to implement, you know, to, to enjoy the benefits of leaving the European Union then you know, we might be telling a different story. That, that, that didn't happen. So I mean I, I would say populism hasn't failed here. It's, it's not, it's not been tried but it still acts as a useful, you know, even if we never get a populist government. And I'm not sure what I would think about a kind of a Nigel Farage premiership. I mean I think like many people, even many people like me who are quite sympathetic to some of the things that populism is trying to do, some of the rebalancing that populism is, is, would feel a little bit wary about that. It's partly because he's been such a one man show and you know, and he, he had so little to say about so many areas of, of public life. We don't really know what his kind of approach to the economy is. Yes, he sort of comes from a sort of Thatcherite background but then he's responded to who he represents by, by talking about nationalizing the steel industry and so on and so forth and, and being sort of somewhat more social democratic. I don't mind that. I mean I sort of think of myself as a sort of somewhat left conservative and I think we need a kind of balance. We also in the long run we need to create a, a kind of new class of politician who can bridge the divide I think between anywheres and somewheres. We do, we need anywheres. You know, we need that kind of spirit of, of kind of, you know, openness and liberality. And you know, I'm not, I'm not anti, anywhere. I'm anti the over domination of the anywhere worldview in our, in our politics partly because it creates this, you know, often this, this sort of, you know, rather incoherent pushback against it. And that's, that's what's made a mess of our politics. We need a new generation. And at his best you can possibly see in Andy Burnham that he can speak both to the sort of Guardian reading sort of liberal graduate labor types and to you know, the voters of Makerfield, Makerfield, like I was, can never remember which one is Makefield. I don't, you know, I think he's too much in the kind of, you know, guardian reading liberal graduate camp and it's interesting that you know, he's, his appeal to the Makerfield voter has been very much sort of an economic one. He's not made a kind of cultural gesture. You know, he, so far anyway, he's not said anything. You know, I think I, I, I think if he wanted to be that bridging politician he needs to say something like I would ban the Muslim Brotherhood or I'm really going to put in the Resources and the time in that camp. Yes, but I think there aren't, you know, the Muslim population in Britain is still only 6%. Or indeed on the same subject, he should say, I'm really going to take the grooming gang's inquiry seriously. We're going to put resources and time into it. We're going to, you know, make sure that people go to prison. You know, we've got to draw a line under this blot on our story of the last 20 or 30 years or, I don't know, you know, I'm going to, I am going to stop the boats. You know, if he could, if he stops the boats, he wins the next election. I think it's as simple as that.
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B
But do you think the country is even ready for somebody to bridge that gap? It seems that we're now in some kind of. I don't say extreme, that's the wrong word. But this seems to be a quite a tough battle between the left and the right. It seems to be. You'll get the headlines on the right if you talk about millions must leave, we must solve immigration, we must stop the boats, or you appeal to people. If you say we must tax the billionaires and the billionaires are the problem. That kind of center ground reasonable, rational politics. It seems to be what we've tried maybe for the last 20 years and hasn't worked.
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A
I think that's partly a function of, of social media, isn't it? For the way that social media sort of exacerbates the, the more extreme or, you know, what it rewards. It rewards. Yeah, you know, the kind of clickbait. And I, I still think, you know, the majority of the country is moderate anywhere and moderate somewhere people. Moderate, moderate remainers, moderate leavers. I mean, I think they still have more in common. They have enough in common to actually vote for the same party. And indeed our big parties used to be coalitions of anywhere in some ways on labor and the Tory side. And that has sort of splintered partly because of the failure of the main parties. You know, I mean, the British economy has not been a success. British society has not been this. So it's certainly, I, I wander around sometimes in a, in One of those 2012 Olympic, what was it, Team GB T shirts, I, I get. People come up to me and say, God, that seems such a long time ago. We kind of felt quite united, at least that, that summer.
- [32:04]
B
Boris did a great job.
- [32:05]
A
Yeah, I mean, you know, it was only 13 years ago. I mean, we haven't changed that much in that Time.
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B
What's happened in those 13 years?
- [32:14]
A
Brexit has happened. The economies remain sluggish. Covid happened. The, the whole grooming gang scandal kind of re. Erupted. I mean, we, you know, it's been around since before then, but it became a focus. You've had a focus on sort of two tier justice and you've had a huge increase in immigration. You've had the election of sectarian Muslim politicians. Yeah, I mean, you know, we've definitely had a deterioration, but I, you know, I don't think the cause is not hopeless.
- [32:52]
B
No, I, perhaps it's more of apathy now. I mean, I haven't voted in the last three elections, but personally I just lost the will to vote because I just don't think anything will change. I don't believe any. I've lost trust in politicians.
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A
You wouldn't consider voting for Farage or Low?
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B
No, no. Low's the only one I would consider. Personally, I care first about the economy. I think we, we have to have a strong economy. We have to be productive. And if we have a strong economy and we're productive, we'll create jobs. We will need to hopefully tax less and there'll be more opportunity. I was, I was out in the States at the World cup and after one of the games, we were sat having a drink with a couple of lads who'd moved over from the UK and they said, the thing is about here is they take less of your money, so you've got more money to spend. And if you're spending more money, you're creating a more kind of bustling economy. He said, it's designed for an economy that moves. He said, I could not go back to the UK because it's designed as an economy to take. They put like bags of rocks on your shoulders. I think he said. And I thought about that a lot when I was, when he speaks to me and I came back and I said, you know, you're totally right. We just, we hold people back in this country. And I just don't believe we have anybody out there who's putting the economy first, apart from Rupert Lowe. I've spoke with Rupert Lowe three times, and each time because he understands business, he understands growth, he understands productivity, he understands the problem of too much regulation, he understands the problem of too much taxation. And so if he came out with an economic plan which was to slash the size of the state and the burden of the state and drive investment, I would support a vote for him, but I would vote for Zach Polanski. If he said that. I think if we don't. Yeah, we talk a lot about immigration, but I think you can fix the immigration problem if you don't fix the economy. People are still going to be miserable if they can't send kids to the school they want to send them to because they've got to pay VAT now, they can't have a summer holiday or both parents have to work. We're putting so much hardship on working families. I think that's what needs to be solved.
- [35:06]
A
I agree and I think there is a fair amount of consensus around that. I mean, what you describe is not a. An unusual view or an extreme view. It's not only Rupert Lowe thinks that it's pretty well all political leaders of all pretty well all parties, possibly with the exception of the Greens. I was listening to the. Was it the. The Green deputy mayor of Hackney was saying the other day that landlords. Landlords should not be able to make a profit.
- [35:37]
B
Yeah.
- [35:41]
A
So there are some nutters out there. But. And it is true, we now have the most progressive tax system in the whole of Europe. At least I think if you compare, is it the top 10% with the middle 10% that the tax take on the top 10% relative to the middle 10% is higher than even the Scandinavian countries. And we're. You have all these ridiculous cliff edges. You know, if you're earning anything between sort of 60, 70 and a kind of 150 grand, you. You have all of these points where your marginal tax rate is sort of 70 or 80%. You know, you lose your tax allowances, you lose your child benefit, etc. Etc. We got to sort that out. I mean, it's got, it's got really. I mean, I think, you know, we are losing a lot of good people to Dubai and America and places. We still have an enormous amount of entrepreneurial energy, I think, in this country. I mean, you're a kind of example of it.
- [36:37]
B
Ye. But I can give you good examples of, of why I'm not anymore. I've kind of slowed down. I sold one. I sold one of my businesses, one business I was going to open. I. I cancelled. It's very hard to make money out there. I. People listening say, Pete, stop talking about your coffee shop. But I think it's just a great example. I have a coffee shop as well and it's impossible to make money. I mean, I could, if it's the only thing I do, if I didn't do the podcast and football club and that's all I did is it In
- [37:05]
A
Bedford, your coffee shop. Right.
- [37:06]
B
And I worked on it. I could make it profitable, but I don't have the time to do it. And it used to be able to start businesses and find a good manager and.
- [37:13]
A
Yeah, and you haven't found a good manager.
- [37:15]
B
No. And that's a whole other conversation about staffing and employment. Because we, we. Because of the.
- [37:22]
A
Back to AI, though. I mean, you're going to get a lot of quite bright young graduates who are going to be absolutely looking for jobs like that if they have work ethic. I mean, there is a whole question about whether we're losing work ethic in this country.
- [37:34]
B
Well, we've turned work from a privilege to an entitlement through employment rights and minimum wage. But it's so hard to make money. You have your business rates, your energy costs, your vat, and if you take a cup of coffee, it's like this small slither at the top. You might have a chance to make a profit. So it's very hard out there to make money at the moment because. Because of the state. Because it puts so much burden in terms of regulation and cost.
- [38:04]
A
Yeah.
- [38:04]
B
And how many businesses are being crushed like that. And. And that's one of the things I really like about Rupert Lowe. He. He does understand this. I've had deep conversations here with the mics on and with the mics off. Other politicians talk about it.
- [38:15]
A
He may do. I mean, where I worry about him is that he has surrounded himself with these. These young guys who are ethno nationalists. I mean, some of them overtly. He, apparently, he was interviewed the other day and he was sort of. He played the sort of granddad. He sort of pretend he didn't really know what ethno nationalism was. I mean, come on, you know, we're not an ethno nationalist country. You know, we have this ridiculous debate about. About Englishness. Yes. I mean, Englishness is an ancestry. There is a definition of Englishness which is just ancestry. But like Britishness, it's become bigger than that. So it has a sort of civic dimension too, because you're not going to tell me the, you know, two thirds of the England football team are not English. You know, if you take a strict ancestry definition, then, you know, you would have to say two thirds of the English football team are not English. You know, they may be British. Now, it's true. Until quite recently, most ethnic minority Brits would say they were British and not English. English was reserved, as it were, for those with, you know, white English, historic white English ancestry. But we've kind of moved beyond that. It's become, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm glad to say it's become fuzzier. So lots of ethnic minorities now do identify as English and we, you know, we wave the flag of St. George and it's not seen as something sort of terrifying.
- [39:40]
B
Do you think that's because the anywheres and the somewheres experience multiculturalism in a different way?
- [39:46]
A
Very much so, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so the anyways get the benefits and, and the somewheres suffer the costs.
- [39:52]
B
Yeah. And. And in the environments they work in, the multiculturalism, it to them is the, you know, the, the food trucks.
- [39:59]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [40:01]
B
And the, you know, the, the people they work with who are equal graduate status and the people they employ. And the people they employ.
- [40:07]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [40:08]
B
Whereas the somewheres experience the change to their towns.
- [40:11]
A
Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [40:12]
B
And their communities. And essentially the anyways are, are trying to say their lived experience is the same, but it's different. It's not neutral.
- [40:21]
A
No, absolutely. And, yeah, and I think, you know, that has created quite a lot of, quite a lot of anger and resentment, particularly when the anywheres turn around and accuse of some words of being racist or bigoted, you know, when they say we really don't like it when our, when our towns and neighborhoods change so rapidly. But the vast majority of them are not racist in any meaningful sense of the word. And, you know, and they deserve to be listened to. I mean, this is what we have democracies for. And the NUS have failed very, very badly, particularly on that area of politics. And there are so many interests that, that are pushing to keep the flow coming, whether it's business interests, you know, wanting to keep a cap on wages, whether it's, you know, different arms of the state. You know, it was. One of the greatest supporters of the, the Boris wave was the Department of Health and Social Care because we don't pay social carers well enough in this country. You know, we had to suck them in from Zimbabwe or somewhere and, or that, that is, that, that is the assumption. I actually think, you know, people were. I mean, I wrote a book called the Care Dilemma that was about the
- [41:37]
B
couple of years ago.
- [41:38]
A
Right, yeah. That was partly about the, the family. The decline of the family was also about, about the undervaluing of, of care both in the domestic realm, the private realm and, and in the national economy. And people. I mean, we do have a problem in the care system. It. But people actually like. Do most people like doing that work? It Come, you know, if you look at the job satisfaction surveys, you know, people who work in, in nursing and social care often are often the people with the highest levels of job satisfaction, you know, compared to the accountants and surveyors and civil servants and people who just sit behind desks and send each other emails all day. And, but we don't, but, but people can't afford to do it. And, and that's partly for good reasons that women now have so many more opportunities than they had a couple of generations back. I've got a cousin who has quite serious Ms. She's lost the loss of one arm and two legs. She needs, she needs two carers to help her three times a day for an hour or so in the morning, at lunchtime and in the evening. And I, I went to see her and talked to one of her carers, lovely woman called Nancy who, a English woman who had said she absolutely loved the job. She'd become a good friend of my cousin actually and she says she's, she wishes she'd done the job all her life. She'd worked as a pharmacist I think for 10 or 15 years. It would, it. She, she had young children who were at secondary school. She did the early shift from 8 to 2 or 2:30 and could then pick them up from school. She was married, she had a husband who had a reasonably well paid job. Nothing flash but reasonably well paid job. So she didn't have to worry too much about the fact that, that it was a, if effectively a minimum wage job. And, but the truth is there are far fewer Nancy's today than there were 30 or 40 years ago. And that in many ways is a good thing because today lots of the Nancy have gone to university and they're doing higher professional jobs but there are still lots of people out there who would love to do this work, you know, if they could afford to, you know, and I think we just need, we need to have a, a special social care minimum wage that's you know, perhaps a pound, a pound 50 an hour higher than the, than the national minimum wage. We also need to create a, a role in, in the care system and in, I think it's sometimes referred to as enhanced care practitioner, which is kind of sort of jargony way of basically somebody who has lowish level medical skills rather than just sort of being a bog standard carer, you know, who helps people get out of bed and helps feed them and so on. Actually has some medical skills, can take, can take vital signs, can give injections, can take Blood can do, you know, and help the connection, as it were, between social care and the nhs, so that. So that the care doesn't use the NHS as much as it does now, which is very. It's very expensive and it's very damaging to the NHS having all those beds taken up by. And so you. And that would also mean that there would be a sort of. More of a sort of professional hierarchy in the care system. Not everybody would want to be an enhanced care practitioner or other people would want to just be a basic carer. But, you know, there are ways and that, you know, potentially that could save the system so much money. You'd obviously have to, you know, if you had that role in social care, you know, you. The social care, which is mainly privately provided, would have to be compensated for the fact that it was employed. You'd have to pay those people a bit more. They wouldn't necessarily have to be graduate nurses. You know, they could. They could go to the local FE college or wherever and learn those basic practical medical skills, you know, over a period of a few months or a couple of years. And that I think it would help to. The other thing that I suggested about the care system is, is you. It needs a kind of story. It needs a narrative. I mean, the care system is everywhere, you know, wherever you look. But it's invisible in the way that, you know, hospitals aren't, you know, there's this massive great thing. They're like the modern cathedrals, well, along with the football stadiums. But, you know, virtually, you know, every neighborhood will have lots of people who are getting domiciliary care in their own home. And it'll probably have a little care home somewhere. You know, you'll have, you know, you'll have 30 of them in Bedford, probably more.
- [46:32]
B
Yes.
- [46:34]
A
You know, it's a sort of major invitation, but it's sort of invisible. And I think it needs a story. And its story should be, we are the preventative service. You know, obviously we're looking after elderly people while also looking after some younger people too. That's sort of another story. I mean, not just looking at the elder care side of it. It needs a story that says, you know, you know, if somebody, an old person, falls down and is. And breaks their leg or whatever, and they. They have to go into the hospital. You know, the hospital sorts them out and sends them out the back door as quickly as possible. The role of social care is to stop them going through that front door in the first place, partly, but also by helping them with things like falls. And I mean, you know, if, if more care packages focused on exercise and you know, just, just doing sort of 20 minutes a day, it would hugely improve the balance of elderly people. And it's problems with balance that cause people to fall over. And, and people falling over cost the NHS like sort of £4 billion a year or something. Any of there are. So I think we need to, it needs to have a bigger sort of flag on it and, and it needs to be sort of celebrated more in a way and given a story. And I think its story should be, we're the National Prevention Service. You know, we're stopping this, we're stopping elderly people having to spend so much time in hospital beds. You know, we're looking after them in their own homes with the help of their families too. You've got to involve families as much as possible in this.
- [48:07]
B
Okay. I'm going to be honest, I have never really been a skincare person. Most skincare has always felt a little bit over complicated to me. All the fancy branding and the celebrities and those 10 step routines and you know what, half the time I wouldn't know what I'm buying or what it actually does. So when one skin reached out, I was a little bit skeptical, but they sent me the products. But they also did speak my language, which is science. The company was founded by longevity researchers and they've been looking at how the body ages at a cellular level. And they've developed this peptide called OS1, which is designed to target those old damaged cells. They're called senescent cells. Basically these cells stop functioning properly and contribute to skin aging over time. And they're not selling magic, they're not selling false promises. They're just trying to build property products which are rooted in actual research. And so I have been using One Skin for the last week and you know what? It's been working. I like the simplicity. My skin feels better, less dry, healthier overall and it only takes seconds. I don't have to spend ages worrying about this before bedtime. And you know what, at my age, honestly, you need to start thinking about this stuff. I can either accept I'm getting old and my body's going to fall apart slowly, or I can try and take better care of myself. So yep, I'm going to be carrying on using one Skin to. So if you want to try it out, you can get 15% off at one skin just using the code. McCormack that is OneSkin co. McCormack McCormack. Spell M C C O R M A C K. And after you've made a purchase, they're going to ask you how you heard about them. So please support the show and let them know we sent you. That's a great detail on a certain area, but I think I'm a little bit more interested in the bigger ideas of the national direction.
- [49:39]
A
Yeah.
- [49:39]
B
What do we, what do we want to be as a country? What do we stand for economically? What do we stand for culturally? What do you want to be? Because like I said, I've voted in three elections because I don't feel like anything has changed really. But I do feel like everything's got a bit worse. And I've one question I like, put into people. Yeah. Even just friends and family is over the last 15 years, can you name one thing that's got better in this country? Usually, you know, people get stuck because the roads and the potholes haven't gotten better, the NHS waiting lists haven't really got better, the policing hasn't got better, the education system. So if you look across the country, they see nothing's really got better, but things do feel like they've got worse. And the living standards feel like they've got net worth for the majority of people. And we've had different political parties who've taken us on that journey. And so how do we, how do we flip this so actually that the nation feels like it is in a good place, it is going in a good direction. Is it even possible? Does it have to get a lot worse before we could do that?
- [50:49]
A
Yeah, see, that's a good sort of party game. What's got better? Has anything got better?
- [50:53]
B
Has anything got better? Do you feel like anything's got better?
- [50:55]
A
Football to football team.
- [50:57]
B
Well, that's private enterprise.
- [51:00]
A
Yeah, well, I mean, private enterprise is still part of the country. I mean, the cricket's got more exciting.
- [51:07]
B
Anything that the government, as the state has delivered, improved.
- [51:11]
A
Oh, that. Well, that narrows it down a lot. Yeah, that's probably a tougher one. But talking more generally, I mean, a lot of these things are two edged swords. I mean, you know, one area you might say has improved a lot is the ability of ordinary people to express themselves. Themselves. Thirty years ago you wouldn't be sitting in front of that microphone, but that's running a podcast. That's a technique, that's a technical innovation that has improved the ability of people to express themselves. It has also helped to, as we were saying earlier, fragment our politics and polarize our politics in some ways. You know, I mean, who would want to now go Back, I mean, when you and I were young. Well, I'm a bit older than you. When, when I was younger, you know, we had three television channels, but we had a sense, we had a sense of a single national conversation. Now, you know, we got all the glories of Netflix and Amazon prime and all the substacks and the podcasts and levels of sort of, you know, and ordinary people can express themselves on Facebook and Twitter and sometimes in angry ways, sometimes not. And that's all good, but it's exacerbated the fragmentation and the polarization, isn't it? I mean, you know, it has, but
- [52:27]
B
actually, I kind of want to push back in one area on that because I think, I actually think you're right. It's great. But, but that is, that is technical innovation. Private enterprise allows for this, but at the same time, the ability of people to express themselves, I think we're at risk of losing that. We've been chipping away at it a little bit. I mean, Kurt sent me an article the other day where the state is going to mandate the, that YouTube ensures that mainstream channels are given more airtime on YouTube. So not just the algorithm, they have to push the BBC and Sky News. Is that correct? Yeah. And we, we see, you know, with, we've had the child safety laws on the Internet. We're now, Andy. I think Andy Burnham's talking about an ID to use the Internet to stop people using VPNs. Yeah. There's a debate over how many people actually been arrested for tweets. But we, we seem to be attacking free speech in this country as well. So that ability to express yourself, I also think, is under a threat.
- [53:24]
A
Yeah, maybe. I mean, I, I feel ambivalent about the online safety stuff. I mean, I think on the one hand, I mean, I, you know, I agree with all the Jonathan Haidt stuff. You know, the anxious generation, the kids are having their brains rewired and, you know, some degree of, of, you know, we, we launched this technology on the world without really thinking of its consequences. And I think now, you know, we had a wild west period. I think we do need to constrain it in certain ways that are not too damaging to free expression. I mean, I think that there must be a way of, of stopping the kids being sent mad without restricting free speech. But whether we're capable of getting that balance right, I don't know. But I mean, I, I, you know, I, I'm sort of basically still optimistic. I mean, I think, you know, we are a, we are a very Entrepreneurial country. You know, I accept what you say about how it's, it's been squashed in recent times under both Tories and Labor. I mean there, you know, there's an element of events, dear boy, events. You know, the, the reason why our fiscal situation is so appalling is mainly it's substantially to do not so much with the. I think the scarring, the kind of fiscal scarring from the financial crisis has turned out to be actually quite small. The real scarring was, was that was Covid and the furlough scheme.
- [54:46]
B
Yes.
- [54:47]
A
And conservative government that perhaps in retrospect should have known better. I mean there are ways of supporting people that are not perhaps so, so costly as the furlough schemes were and, but it's that sort of welfarist, safetiest ideology cocooning people that, that, that maybe a conservative government should, you know. Never has, never before or since has has Rishi Sunak been so popular when he was the, he was the Chancellor Exchequer handing out free stuff for people to stay at home.
- [55:20]
B
Well, that's the expansion of money supply problem, which is. That's what we covered on the show a lot. I was talking to you about it beforehand.
- [55:25]
A
Right. Yeah.
- [55:25]
B
But that continual expansion of the money supply.
- [55:28]
A
Right.
- [55:28]
B
It is a way. It does extract value upwards rather than downwards. Yeah, I know because I'm a beneficiary of it.
- [55:35]
A
Right.
- [55:36]
B
Just by owning assets.
- [55:37]
A
If we run an inflation, I think we definitely need. And this is something you should talk to my uncle about.
- [55:41]
B
Yes.
- [55:42]
A
Who is a grand financial economist. We got to find ways of distinguishing the productive from the unproductive rich, I think. Yeah. And, and land tax is one of the areas that I'm quite interested in. Andy Burn has mentioned this and he, he has, yeah. I mean there are very, lots of different kinds of it. But my uncle, you should definitely talk to him about that because he's, he's very, very much in favor of a land tax.
- [56:11]
B
Would it replace stamp duty?
- [56:15]
A
Definitely stamp duty would go. There's a question mark about how much of could it replace council tax. I mean it's kind of a, it's a way of trying to, trying to get a few more billion out of the Duke of Westminster without, without crushing the next sort of tech unique unicorn creator. So we don't necessarily want to increase capital gains tax. I mean the fact that we have quite low capital gains tax is an asset and, and we do now have. I mean I know one of my sons runs a, has set up with university friends set up a Small startup called Searchland. It's in this area called Prop Tech, Property Tech. It's essentially a whole bunch of websites that it's, it's mainly for the, for the property companies and developers. You can look at any house or piece of land in the country and get, you know, all the data about it. They scrape the relevant parts of the local authority planning websites every morning. So everything to do with the planning history of a piece of land or a building is, is there. And so it's, it's, it's really about how the, the kind of ease of use of the technology and, and they're the new kid on the block and they're now, I think the biggest, the biggest company in the sector and they, and they, they've got good people and they got, they got venture capital backing and they're doing very well. So, you know, you can still do things in this country and I think there are a lot of, a lot of people with a lot of good ideas. You know, we have the highest number of tech unicorns, I think anywhere outside China and America.
- [57:55]
B
Is that true?
- [57:56]
A
Well, that's what I heard Andy Haldane saying that the other day and he's pretty well informed economist. I mean, of course we end up, a lot of them sell out to Americans because we don't have the, I mean it's partly to do with market size, I think, and maybe also, although we do have quite a, quite a big, an active venture capital market these days, we don't have the degree of sort of footloose capital looking for good ideas that they clearly have in America. You know, the story of the pension, pension funds are no, you know, they, they invest like 4% in UK equities. I mean, it's ridiculous. Yeah. And I mean they've been talking about doing something, I think, you know, I agree with you, I mean with. It's just very difficult and I think it's probably true in America too. It just seems very difficult to get things done. I mean there's so much agreement, I mean like on this point about. It was Jeremy Hunt introduced a whole lot of changes to make it easier for pension funds to invest in British companies. And then Rachel Reeves introduced a new version of it and still it's 4%. I mean, I, I don't know why, but it's. And it's the same with all the, everybody agrees that we're over regulated. I mean we're, is so much of what we're living with is the failures and unintended consequences of the post 1997 Blair Cameron settlement. And, you know, this is one of the reasons why I think it's so disappointing that the 2019 realignment didn't happen, because I think they, they would have had the vision and the guts to actually challenge it in a lot of ways. But instead we ended up with a Labor government which is kind of psychologically almost incapable of undoing so much. I mean, in order to make Britain work better, we need to. There was a lot of good things about that settlement, by the way. I supported at the time. I was quite a New Labor Blair supporter. I ran a magazine called Prospect, and we, we were generally associated with the kind of New labor ascendancy. I ended up as a critic of it in many ways, but a lot of those things were right at the time. But we've overshot in so many ways. You know, regulation is the clacky, you know, the hell, you know, all the bloody bat tunnels and the fish discos and the. And. And yet we all know this is the problem. And yet we don't seem, you know, nature. England still seems to be there stopping things happening every day.
- [60:26]
B
Is it a lack of. Does our politics just lack. I don't know. It's maybe two things. One lacks the. The Whitehall lacks the ability to get things done because of. I mean, Liz Truss calls it the deep state, but this kind of blob of bureaucracies that maybe have been taken over by the graduate elites, the anywheres, but they like the ability. They want to get things done and they can't. Or do we just lack the right character of politicians these days? I look at politicians like footballers in that when I talk to my son about football, he's early 20s, we watch some of the old footage, we watch Leticia or Tony Adams or Eric Cantona, and I say, you had these big personalities and characters and they're flair and they got things done on the pitch. And now we said, you have robots, the odd character, your. Your Cole Palmer, Grealish. They seem to get pushed to the side. Now, has that been the same with politics in that we lack big characters with flair to get things done?
- [61:26]
A
I think you. You said something earlier about America, you know, if you're in a blue state and there's lots of equivalents of nature England and lots of regulation, you just bugger off to Texas.
- [61:38]
B
Yeah, well, Elon Musk did.
- [61:40]
A
Yeah, we don't have that opportunity. We're a small, highly centralized country. We're like one American state. And what the Blair Cameron consensus created, it was properly Liberal both for good and ill in the sense that one of liberalism's main ideas is dispersing power. It's very suspicious of concentrations of power that can be abused. We don't have the kind of technical separation of powers that the liberal founders of the United States created. And America has its own problems with this. But you can disperse power too far. So, so much power went from Westminster post 97, went from Westminster to Brussels to the regulators, new generation of regulators that were created for everything and of course massively to the courts, particularly with the Human Rights act and the much greater role the, that the European Court of Human Rights played directly in our, in our legal system and the, and, and we have a new generation of, you know, liberal minded university educated judges, you know, who just make it impossible to deport people and, and you know, doing the things that, that somewhere common sense would suggest should obviously happen. You know, we should obviously be able to stop people entering the country illegally on boats coming in from France.
- [63:15]
B
You sound like a racist.
- [63:18]
A
I mean incidentally, one of the most staggering, and I'm surprised this doesn't get more attention, it's one of the most staggering failures of international relations. The fact that Britain and France cannot between them stop the boats because it's massively in France's interests now too. I mean it. Quite an increasingly large proportion of the so called refugees making their way to France are now people coming to France in order to go to Calais to cause a hell of a mess and then try to get to Britain. It's massively in France's interest, cut the route off as soon as you say anyone who goes to England is immediately sent back, then the whole thing stops in one day. And it's extraordinary in many ways that they haven't been able to do it. I mean perhaps I, I was surprised, you know, when Labour got elected I assumed that was Yvette Cooper, Home Secretary. I think she was. I assumed that she would have had for months in advance because it was clearly they were going to win the election a year, year and a half out. I assumed she would have had her, you know, friends would have been quietly talking to people in Paris about, about this and what, how, how they could sugar the pill. Obviously there might be a short term political cost that a French politician might pay if they're being nice to Britain and it might look as if they're having more refugees in France because they're not going to Britain. But. So we might have had to sugar the pill, but, but nothing, nothing. I mean so many areas they were just so ill prepared, weren't they?
- [64:49]
B
But it comes back to that kind of point that the state doesn't seem to be able to get anything done.
- [64:52]
A
Yeah.
- [64:53]
B
And is the state, I mean, is the state just trying to do too much these days and it's just too much of a beast?
- [64:59]
A
Yeah, I think that that may be part of it, but, but as I say, it's partly because the state has lost the ability to do things because it sent power to non state institutions like, you know, the courts and the. We moved from. It's interesting how if you go back to the kind of 60s and 70s, it's a nut. It's another example of overshoot and it seems to be so difficult to undo things once they have been overshot.
- [65:26]
B
Yeah.
- [65:26]
A
You know, why can't we, you know, we were on the whole race thing, we overshot on the, you know, came out with the Henry Novak story. I mean, you know, a lot of the roots of that go Back to the McPherson report, you know, on the poor old. Who was the guy that.
- [65:39]
B
Steven Lawrence.
- [65:40]
A
Stephen Lawrence. Yeah. And you know, there was a sense of sort of, of guilt and you know, we had to do something about the, the experience a lot of young black kids were having in some of our inner cities. And it was highlighted by the Stephen Lawrence case. But then we get this sort of well meaning old judge comes along and says racism is in the eye of the beholder. That, you know, if somebody says something racist has happened, you have to, you have to believe them. You know, we just threw out, you know, objective judgment in so many different areas and what. But there's a sort of ratchet effect too. Once those things are done. It's so difficult for any even remotely, you know, even for Nigel Farage or even Rupert Lowe would find, find it difficult to undo some of this stuff even when it's quite obvious that it should be undone.
- [66:35]
B
So, so how that, I mean that comes back to the big question is how? And I, I want to be an optimist like you. I mean I love this country and I've had a great life and I want to go and live anywhere else, but I just look in every direction and I see a lot broken and I don't think, see things improving. And I am lost for words with the low level of talent within the political class and perhaps, perhaps the crumbling of the graduate elite, perhaps a crumbling of their power and a rise of the head and heart work people may change things.
- [67:15]
A
Yeah, well, back to the AI story. I mean that may help Change the dynamic a bit and shift status away from our over. It's another example of where we've kind of overshot. You know, there weren't enough people going to university back in. When I went to university, it was still only like sort of 8 or 9% of school leavers, you know, but yeah, we should have got up to 15 or 20%. The clever kids should go to college. But we, the, the train just kept going and kept going. You know, Douglas Murray has this image of, you know, in so many areas of, of liberal reform, you know, whether it's kind of race equality, sex equality, sexuality equality. We were just, you know, in the 90s, we were just sort of, we were getting used to being a multi ethnic multicultural society, but still the minority population was still only kind of about 10%, you know, at the end of the 90s, 1990s, and you know, we had, we had gay marriage coming in a bit later. We had, we, we were sort of feeling we, you know, we'd kind of become a pretty decent liberal society. And then this train. Douglas Murray talks about the sort of train as it were slowing down into the platform and then suddenly accelerating away. You know, suddenly we have the whole sort of trans phenomenon. We have blm, we have Permanent Secretaries taking the knee because a black man is killed in America. So we have this extraordinary sort of moral panic almost. And I think we now look back on that. I mean, I think the, the, I hope the Permanent Secretaries look back on that with, with embarrassment. But I, I still think, you know, there is a reasonably clear analysis. I mean, you know, even, even Tony Blair, without of course taking any of the blame to himself, is reflecting the, the belief that actually we do need to, you know, undo some of the unintended consequences and failures of his own project now need to be addressed if we are to move on to the next stage of British life. Well, you know, that, that, that he produced this essay, when was it? About a month ago. Did you know?
- [69:33]
B
I've not seen it.
- [69:34]
A
No.
- [69:34]
B
What did he say?
- [69:36]
A
Well, he was very critical of labor, he was very critical of Miliband and his energy policy, you know, saying, of course we should, you know, it's ridiculous not to use our own oil and gas in the North Sea. And he was talking quite, I can't remember that many of the specifics, but he was effectively saying, you know, we need to reverse. He actually said, you know, and whatever it takes to stop the boats. What? You know, whatever it takes. Does that mean leaving the echr? And I think presumably he was kind of implying that we should, if that's what it takes.
- [70:08]
B
Did he say sorry?
- [70:10]
A
No, of course not. No, no, no.
- [70:11]
B
I mean, I mean, a good starting point is if he went over to the Hague and said, yeah, challenge me on my, some of my decisions, it might be a good starting point for the rest of the nation to go, okay, Tony can do it.
- [70:26]
A
But we still got, like I said, we got the unicorns. We've got a good, you know, I, I don't want to chuck out the baby with the bath.
- [70:32]
B
We've got good ingredients.
- [70:33]
A
Well, we've got excellent universities still. You know, keep the elite universities, you know, turn many of the rest into technical colleges, keep the elite ones and the, we've got the English language still an enormous benefit. We've got an incredibly, we've got an incredibly vibrant kind of media arts creative scene, you know, all around here. We've got, you know, we've got the Premier League, we've got, we've got, you know, we've got lots of things that, that the world still looks to us for, but we need to, yeah, we need a, we need to sort out our politics and we can only sort out our politics if we sort out our economy. I think you're right about that. We just need to sort of calm down. We need to respond coherently to the legitimate somewhere complaints about the excesses of anywhere rule. You know, we've just gone too far in a liberal direction in too many areas, you know, and we need to slow that down. You know, we need an immigration pause of 10, 15, 20 years. I mean, obviously not, you know, you should still bring in a few highly skilled or, you know, people are going to build companies or whatever. But basically we should have pretty much zero immigration for 10 or 15 years. Allow the country to absorb the huge numbers of people that have come in and have a conversation about how better to integrate people, perhaps particularly the Muslim communities who are going off in a different direction politically now, which is, which is very worrying, I think. You know, all of these things are, are doable and, you know, we do have a disappointing political class. I, I agree with you. And there are some interesting people, you know, on the, you know, the people around Farage, you know, I think.
- [72:30]
B
Who do you like? Who do you rate across the spectrum?
- [72:36]
A
I do, I mean, I, I, I think Badenoch is doing a reasonable job. I think there's, I think they're, I think the, the Tories are kind of underpriced. I mean, they, I think the country needs a little bit longer before it will forgive them for some of the. One of the reasons the country rightly was very critical of them is that they were massively two parties in one. I mean they were a Conservative party and they were a Liberal party. I mean half the Tory party even to this day should really be in the Liberal Democrats.
- [73:06]
B
Y
- [73:09]
A
and whether Badenoch can manage that process. I mean, there's some really good people, I think. Neil o', Brien, Nick, Timothy, very good. I mean, you know, and Badenoch, I think she, she does need to kind of lean in a somewhat reformist direction but remain much more liberal on economics because she's, you know, her, her constituency is still much more kind of middle class. You know, she's not having to worry so much in the way that Farage is having to worry about. You know, how do you provide a kind of economic story to some relatively poor and insecure people. She doesn't have to worry about that so much. I mean, obviously, you know, any party needs to provide decent public services and welfare state and redistribute wealth. But, but perhaps not quite as, as much as we do now. Allow, allow the productive people to keep more of their wealth and therefore will, and then we'll have a more productive economy. I mean, I think she, you know, she should benefit in some ways from the fact that even though the kind of higher professional class has gone very liberal in the last generation or two, they also do worry about their, about their wallet and they're, you know, a lot of people in the higher professional class I think must be thinking, you know, why on earth are we voting labor or Green? I mean, these people don't seem to understand how to make an economy work. And I think Badenoch will be there when enough of those people, they're too liberal to ever contemplate, they're too high status to contemplate voting for Farage or low, but they could certainly vote for Bananach.
- [74:57]
B
I think I'm quite interested in, I think she's done a good job.
- [75:03]
A
The one who I like who's joined Farage is Danny Kruger.
- [75:08]
B
Danny's, Danny's the best he's got. Yeah, I think he's made some mistakes. I'm not a fan of Generic because I think with generic you get Osborne, so you get that kind of like previous Conservative. Yeah, I like Danny Kruger a lot. I think he's smart.
- [75:24]
A
Yeah, he's one of the few politicians who can talk about non economic things too. I mean we have such an economistic politics and what actually makes people happy, you Know is, is, you know, obviously, you know, having enough money in the bank and being able to go on holiday and all those things are important, but it, we just don't have any language for talking about things like the family and you know, how, how you can keep families together. Family life is incredibly stressful. You know, when you've, you're a young couple, you're both working quite hard and, and then you have, and then you have a child, you have a baby, your entire lives are changed and it creates stresses and strains and, and, and the rest of society in through the state should be there to help people at that time. And, and, and we're not nearly enough and he, Danny is able to talk about those things. I think, you know, he's a, he's an evangelical Christian himself and we're not an evangelical Christian country. He's aware of that. So he doesn't lay it on too thick. But I think his Christianity maybe sort of gives him, you know, almost a sort of slightly sort of spiritual air in the way that he talks about things that I, that I think is very impressive about the Labour Party.
- [76:37]
B
Do you like anybody in, I used
- [76:40]
A
to be in the, I was in the Labour Party for many years. I, I left in the sort of Corbyn time. I mean I, I'm sort of sympathetic in principle to the kind of Blue labor stuff. I, I, I'm not a great, I think Maurice Glassman's Blue labor have, has been a great disappointment in many ways. I mean I knew, I, I got to know Morris in the, I don't know, 2008, 2009, just before labor lost the election in 2010 and before Ed Miliband put him in the House of Lords. We were kind of comrades in arms, you know, on things like immigration. It was still very difficult to talk sensibly about immigration in the Labour Party in those days. I mean I, I remember going to kind of Blue labor meetings and it would be sort of 15 bearded men in the upstairs room of a pub in 20 2009, 2010 and 10 years later or eight years later, it was still, it was like perhaps 30 bearded men in the upstairs room of a pub. He, Morris is a very charismatic, funny guy. He's a kind of after dinner speaker. He's not a politician indeed, he's a political theorist. I mean much of what he's always going on about commodification and the what, how come, how the evils of commodification. Carl Polanyi and he, he there should have been by the 2015 election. You know, there should have been a hundred labor mps signed up to a kind of blue Labor, a more socially conservative labor program. But there are a few now. There's a guy called Hinder. There are, there are sort of five or two. I mean they, they, they got lucky. They got back in the headlines when Starmer won the election in 2000 entirely because of Morgan McSweeney. Because Morgan McSweeney was a socially conservative Irishman who kind of understood how people felt about things like mass immigration and he wanted to try and win back the reform curious voters back to Labor. I mean, I think it was too late. I mean Labour had been a liberal graduate party now for sort of 30 years. I mean it's, you know, people, people do not associate labor any longer with kind of Jim Callahan, sorry, Harold Wilson types. So I think, I mean I'm sympathetic to the, to the blue labor ideas, but I think Morris is, has not been a, A, a good vehicle for them in a way. He's not been a good champion of them. I mean he's a sort of, he's a sort of media favorite but has no real impact out in the real world. But that, you know, that, that, you know that the kind of blue labor sentiments are now represented by reform or Red Tory blue Labor, that combination of somewhat, somewhat conservative on, on cultural issues and, and sort of somewhat to the left, not anti, you know, sort of as I say, pro, you know, market friendly social democracy which I think ought to be completely compatible with slashing taxes on the productive rich. You know, let's, as I say, let's get the Duke of Westminster, you know, not the guy or gal who is, you know, setting up a new tech unicorn. You know, we, those are the people we need. So.
- [80:27]
B
Okay, but you're optimistic.
- [80:30]
A
Yeah, still. Yeah, we, we need a, we need a better a, a political class that can. Maybe not even a political class, just two or three really good politics. You know, people like Danny Krueger who can, who can, who can bridge the kind of anywhere somewhere gap. You know, I mean it, they need to be more somewhere ish than anywhere ish because the anywheres have had a damn good innings for too long in many ways. So the, the stick needs to be bent in a somewhere direction but, but not so far that you alienate you know, all of the, at least the kind of, the moderate anyways who can, you know, who can see that things have, things have gone particularly badly for you know, your kind of middle aged white man in a left behind part of Britain and, And, you know, the stick needs to be sort of bent somewhat more in that direction. So, yeah, we'll, we'll see if, if. I mean, I, I think I did. I mean, I think Restore potentially. I mean, obviously we've, we've had Nigel Farage announcing today that he's going to stand down and hope to be re. Elected in, in his constituency. That there's this sort of fragmentation on the, the populist right now. I, I did initially, when it, when Restore first emerged, I did think it could actually be quite helpful for reform in the sense that it would make them seem more moderate. I mean, I think there are a lot of, a lot of, you know, as you know, I mean, Farage is sort of a Marmite politician. Lots of people. I really don't like the way in which, you know, there are still even quite centrist labor figures who don't really grant reform legitimacy. They don't believe. Do you remember Liam Byrne, the Labor politician? He was the Chief Secretary to the treasury who left the famous note saying, sorry, there's no money left.
- [82:37]
B
Yes, I remember that.
- [82:39]
A
Yeah. I mean, I'm afraid that poor old Liam will be marked forever by that. I mean, I heard him speaking to Alistair Campbell on some branch of the rusted politics leading. Yeah, something like that. And, and they basically, they, they don't, they don't think Reform are a legitimate party. They don't really think. I mean, you know, if they were in Germany, they'd be among the people who said, you know, we've got to ban the AfD. You cannot ban these parties. You cannot. You've got to grant them legitimacy and then just, you know, take on their arguments.
- [83:09]
B
Well, the pen has just come out and the pen can now run.
- [83:11]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, with a, with a. What's it called? A sort of ankle, something on her ankle, one of those. But I, you know, if, you know, I mean, I. Restore could play that useful role, I think, in, in. I mean, I remember thinking that you remember the 2015 election when the Tories won a outright majority. Nobody had been expecting it. I actually, I put some small amount of money on them to win an overall majority. And I think it was, and it was partly because I thought that Ukip were like 12 or 14 in the polls. They got no seats or one seat or something in the 2015 election. But I thought that made it easier, particularly for a lot of ethnic minority Brits who, you know, made their parents came here in the 50s, 60s, 70s, whether they were traditionally labor, because labor was more on their side in the, in the. In the 60s and 70s and found it quite. But they found it easier to switch to the Tories because there was this slightly more sinister force to the right of the. Of the Tory Party, as they would have seen it. And, and that helped to kind of make. Make the Tories a more welcome home. And I wonder whether you could sort of get the same effect with restore, making reform mean, particularly if RESTORE do continue with all their kind of ethnonationalist stuff. Is it Harrison Pit and all those people.
- [84:48]
B
Harrison Pit, Connor Tomlinson and Charlie Downs.
- [84:52]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if they, you know, if they remain significant, you know, they're the sort of intellectual powerhouse. Rupert Lowe's this. This kind of slightly avuncular Country Squire figure at the top of this.
- [85:08]
B
Very popular.
- [85:09]
A
Yeah. Online. I mean, is he popular in there?
- [85:13]
B
Well, I, I mean, he's.
- [85:15]
A
Perhaps everyone wants a Country Squire. I mean, I just.
- [85:18]
B
I think the thing that people like about Rupert, who, Who are aware of him as a political entity, I think they just like the. The truth speaking. He's quite practical.
- [85:29]
A
Yeah.
- [85:30]
B
You know, it's quite. No nonsense. And. And also I think he's been very smart. He's just saying he doesn't care when people. I don't care. This is what, you know, he cuts through quite well. I don't think the stomach. The country has the stomach for what Restore are proposing to do, and that might be tricky, but I don't.
- [85:48]
A
Doesn't seem to be aware of it himself. I mean, he came out in this interview and said, oh, sort of, you know, I'm not an ethno nationalist, when that is sort of the distinctive characteristic as a party was that it wasn't just about putting British citizens first, it was about putting white British citizens first.
- [86:03]
B
Well, I think it's a conversation we have to have whether. Because I don't think I'm an ethno nationalist, but I think we have to be kind of aware that what happens is if you fill a country for lots of different people, that you start to marginalize people that. I mean, you know, I own a football club. Every year, the Christmas party, all the black lads will sit together at a table. There's no issue with that, but they just do. And so if you fill a country through of lots of cultures, the cultures will band together, vote together, stick together. And I've been out to Lebanon and seen what happened. I've seen the result of that in their country, which is the complete destruction of that country. And so I Think we have to have the conversation and not consider it just ethno nationalism as some kind of sinister force, but actually potentially civilizational for the country. If we, if we call this wrong, if we, if we get this wrong. And I think that's perhaps what people in Restore are thinking. It's not.
- [87:00]
A
But people in Reform, in the Tories, even in labor are thinking, you know, we, we have this constant hand wringing and talking about integration and the problems of integration. I mean, this is not, this is not unique to. What's unique to Restore is the kind of mass emigration response to it, which I think is very unpopular, actually.
- [87:16]
B
Yeah, that's what I mean, I don't think the country has the stomach for it.
- [87:19]
A
Yeah.
- [87:19]
B
And the country might accept.
- [87:21]
A
Well, let's, you know, obviously, you know, illegal immigrants should be, should go. I mean, no question about that, whatever their color. But you know, when you start sort of saying, well, you know, what about people who are, I don't know, in non white British, British citizens, you know, people who maybe weren't born here but who've become British citizens, have indefinite leave to remain but have committed a crime or are living in social housing or whatever. I mean, they need to go too. I think, I don't think 90 of the country would not support that.
- [87:58]
B
That's what I, what, what does the country, what does the country need? What are the consequences of the decisions we make and what does the country have the stomach for? Yeah, I don't think mass immigration has worked. I don't think multiculturalism has worked in the country to the extent that those who've championed it think it has. But at the same time, you know that there are things that, there are benefits of confidence. I'm the son of an immigrant. My dad's, my dad's Irish.
- [88:25]
A
Right.
- [88:25]
B
You know, he came to this country when he was nine and so like. But I just think it's a conversation we have to at least have to have and discuss and say what is the downstream consequences of a country that is maybe not majority white in at a certain point? Because there is a chart and it's changing.
- [88:45]
A
Oh, it's only a 2060. Yeah, yeah.
- [88:46]
B
So what will that mean for the country? What does it, how does that change the shape of the country? Does it change? And, and if you have Muslim only parties, what does that mean for, you know, voting blocks? What does that mean for the future of the country? I think it's a definitely think juries.
- [89:02]
A
I mean, it's starting to affect juries
- [89:04]
B
as it always will.
- [89:05]
A
I mean, but Rupert Lowe is just a splitter at the moment. I mean, you know, he is potentially, I mean, the only possible force that can, that can row back on the various overshoots, economic over regulation, immigration, too high feeling of cultural marginalization by a lot of, a lot of white English people and all of that. The only way you do that is by electing a Tory reform coalition government. I mean, it's the only way I can see in 2029.
- [89:36]
B
I am interested.
- [89:37]
A
Low is a danger to that. I mean, there is a. I mean, I remain relatively optimistic about the country, as do you. I. My optimism, I think, will. Will disappear if in 2029 we have. We have a Burnham government that can't do much better than a Starmer government. We have kind of more rioting, more Henry Novaks, et cetera, et cetera. And in 2029, despite the fact. I mean, my point is that actually sort of, you know, Brexit was an expression even before Brexit. There is a sort of. There is a majority, if not a consensus. Exactly. But, but a majority in the country who want to slow down cultural change and make the economy work again, somehow getting that combination. And it, and it could have happened in 2019, it didn't. If, if it, if it doesn't happen in 2029, and if we, you know, and, and if maybe partly thanks to restore taking 2 or 3% off either the Tories or Reform in different constituencies, if that allows in a Labor Green Lib Dem government, then I think we do have serious, potentially serious political problems in this country. So I think it's so, kind of, so at odds with what. Where the country wants to be or, you know, where a sufficiently large coalition of people in the country want to be.
- [91:08]
B
Well, there's a long way to go before then, and it's going to be quite interesting. I mean, we'll see what happens with Farage and the by election in Clacton. Now, that will be very interesting. And where the coalitions lie, that there may be a restore Conservative coalition that is a potential as well. I mean, who knows? I think the deck chairs are going to move a little bit between now and 2029. One thing I am confident of is that Burnham won't be able to bring the change that people want. And those voters who went off to Zach Polanski come back to Burnham will probably go back to Zach Polanski.
- [91:43]
A
Yeah, like I think I said earlier, I mean, Burnham, he, he sort of sells. I mean, he, he sells Manchesterism, but actually Manchester did We talk about this earlier. Manchester is essentially the kind of London of the north.
- [91:56]
B
Yes.
- [91:57]
A
You know, Manchester is 25 students, you know, all of the people from Rochdale and Berry and Bolton, you know, who are, who, you know, don't, you know, who feel their lives are not thriving. It's partly because all the clever kids in those places end up in, if not in London, in Manchester, you know that if you want to spread success, you've got to spread successful people across the country. At the moment we have far, far too many of our kind of brightest and best in London with a little subsidiary in Manchester. You know, Burnham himself is, is, is represents this story. You know, he's from working class, low middle class background, suburb of Liverpool, does well at school, goes to Cambridge and he stays in London. You know, he works briefly for a. Some sort of trade magazine and then, and then joins the political class and works as special advisor and he, you know, that's, you know, we, we do need. Yeah, I mean we got. If we can spread status, you know, back to AI where we started, we can sort of help to spread status more then people. Not everybody wants to stay. But the somewhere ideal is being able to live a productive, thriving, successful life where you come from. I mean, or at least relatively close to where you come from so you can still see your mum at the weekends or, and not everybody wants that. Some people do want to escape forever, but I think, you know, not enough people have the opportunity to do that. And Banham sort of holds out the promise of that yet while presiding over a city that is making that harder.
- [93:44]
B
Well, we'll see how our new Prime Minister fares after 23,000 votes and what he does. Fascinating. Thank you so much. Where would you like to tell people to go to find out more? Check out your books.
- [94:00]
A
Yeah, I, I've written three books since 2017. I call, rather grandly call them my Anywhere Trilogy. Sort of critique of the, of the Anywhere worldview in some ways. One was the, the. The original one was called the Road to Somewhere. I talk about the people from anywhere and the people from somewhere and how the, that, that new divide that's been sort of grafted on top of the more historic sort of social class divides in our country. And then I wrote a book called Head, Hand, Heart the Struggle for Status and Belonging. Gosh, I've gotten the subtitle something like that. Status and belonging in the 21st century which was, which sort of dug down a little bit deeper into one of the themes of the Road to Somewhere which was the, the fact that we overvalue one kind of human aptitude, the kind of exam passing. Sort of data analysis, analytical intelligence and you know, the, the, the, the, the hand and heart skills have, have been, have been sidelined in status and maybe as we were saying earlier, the AI will help to redistribute some of that status. And the, the latest one is called the care dilemma. Freedom, family, fertility, which is about the undervaluing of, of the heart in a way and the undervaluing of the care in both in the, in the home and in the, in the public economy. I've got a substack which I've been doing for a year or so which is free. It's called a good Heart is hard to find.
- [95:36]
B
There we go.
- [95:37]
A
But actually it's very easy to find. You just Google it.
- [95:39]
B
You don't charge for it on substack?
- [95:41]
A
No, no, I don't charge for it. A few people pay even though it's free donations. Yeah, yeah, which is quite, quite, quite nice. If you, if you'd like to pay me a little bit of money, I'd be, I'd be very happy to accept it. Yeah, that's my main. I work at the, I work part time at the think tank Policy Exchange. I'm actually doing a report that should come out in the next couple of months on the changing political attitudes of the higher professional class. I mean it cropped up a little bit in what we were talking about today how that the higher professional class is now really quite a big category. It's one of the reasons why they've shifted somewhat to the left economically. If you go back to the 60s and 70s, the higher professional class was only sort of 3 or 4% of the population. It's now about 12% which is one of the biggest occupational groups. Indeed, if you take the higher professionals and lower professionals, it's like 35, 40% of the entire. You know, it's the so called PMC. The professional, you know, the lanyard class is enormous, absolutely enormous. And if you go back to the 1670s, I mean, so you think of today, the higher professional class is generally speaking more liberal than the average voter, but it already was more liberal than the average voter. If you go, you know, if you think of the average sort of doctor or lawyer in the 60s or 70s, they would have been much more against capital punishment, say much less worried about law and order, partly because their own experience, you know, they lived in a relatively orderly part of town, probably more liberal on immigration. They wouldn't have been on the side of Enoch POWELL probably in 1968. So on cultural things they just stay, sort of stayed, you know, because liberal views are sort of high status, they've stayed a couple of steps ahead of the. Of the ordinary voter, which leads to the kind of Permanent Secretaries taking the knee, BLM time and all that sort of stuff. Where they shifted is actually mainly on economic stuff. They used to, you know, back in 74 election, 2/3, 70% of higher professional people voted Tory. Now it's probably 15 or something.
- [97:47]
B
Wow.
- [97:48]
A
The vast majority vote labor or Green. And that's partly because they. Their status has also declined because there are so many more of them. Unless you're absolutely the top of the legal or medical or whatever accountancy or architecture professions, you know, you, you kind of can feel almost proletarianized. Yeah. And anyway, that, that'll. That'll be out in a couple of months time, I hope. And, and I have a website of just. I think it's just DavidGoodHeart.com which has quite a few of things I've written and quite a few of the TV and radio things I've done.
- [98:31]
B
Well, we'll make sure we share it out, but thank you. I was aware of your anywhere somewhere concept a while ago and I was like, I think I'm in anywhere. Who's coming back to being a somewhere? I've got other people who are kind
- [98:45]
A
of on the cusp.
- [98:46]
B
Yeah, well, I think I wasn't anywhere. I think I was. I went to a good school, I went to university, I got a job where I traveled. I did a podcast where I traveled the world. But now I'm kind of like, I'm going back to my home life, back to Bedford, and I like it there. I like the tradition, I like going to the pub over the road and I just want everything a little bit simpler. Simpler. So I think I'm going back to being a. Maybe I'm that in betweener time. Yeah. Well, thank you.
- [99:12]
A
The people who like the book best actually were often somewheres who sort of rather reluctantly joined the anywhere class, but felt a certain sort of guilt about it almost.
- [99:22]
B
I think I'm that.
- [99:23]
A
Yeah.
- [99:24]
B
I think I'm that.
- [99:25]
A
Yeah.
- [99:25]
B
Well, thank you, David. It was amazing. Thank you. It's so good to me meet you and talk to you and we thank everyone for listening and see you all soon.
- [99:32]
A
Good to chat.
- [99:32]
B
Thank you.
- [99:33]
A
And have a good chat with my uncle.
- [99:34]
B
I will do. I look forward to that as well. Yeah. Thank you.
- [99:37]
A
Bye bye.