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- [00:02]
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- [01:35]
James Ball
Hello and welcome back to Unherd. We are in the midst here in the UK of. Well, the word crisis is used so often, but it certainly is true today in that there is a leadership crisis at the top of the Labour Party. The Cabinet has just met as far as we know, and this may be different by the end of our conversation today. The Prime Minister Keir Starmer is still in post, but there has been a febrile atmosphere since the local elections last week and it looks odds on that one way or the other he will go. So how do we make sense of it? There is this naval gazing, extremely excited partisan fervor at the moment. But what is the bigger lesson? Why is it that we just had a Conservative government with a big majority elected that then suicided by killing their leader and eventually their whole administration? And now we've had the same thing from the Labour side where they once again were elected with a majority and have now looks like they are in the process of taking out their own leader and almost just giving up on their chance to govern. So what is happening? Is there a bigger problem here? Is it sitting systemic? Well, we're joined today by Adrian Wooldridge who is someone we've long wanted to have a conversation with. Not only is he a long standing commentator, he's an author, he's a historian of ideas formerly at the Economist now at Bloomberg, but his new book, which I'm going to hold up here, Centrists of the World Unite, makes what is now a very unfashionable case that liberalism and actually is still the best option and that somehow we need to reinvigorate it or rescue it in order to stop all of the craziness that we're reading about every day. So we're going to start in the first half of this conversation by talking about what is happening in the Labour Party in British politics right now and what we should make of it. And we're then going to zoom out and see, looking over broader decades, how did we get here and what might we do about it? Adrian Wooldridge, welcome to Unherd.
- [03:40]
Adrian Wooldridge
Thank you for having me.
- [03:42]
James Ball
So let's start in today's events. And as I said there at the intro, I don't know where we'll be by the end of this conversation, but it looks like maybe Prime Minister Keir Starmer holds on for a while longer. Maybe he'll be forced to make a timetable for his own exit, maybe he won't. But in any case, one thing is certain, which is that a political party, a long standing and impressive and important political party, has won a majority and is now, after not much more than 18 months, somehow giving up on that chance. What do you think is going on?
- [04:16]
Adrian Wooldridge
It's repeating what the Conservative Party did not that long ago. So the centrists of the world are uniting to kill each other. And this is happening at a time when all of the intellectual and emotional energy in politics is draining away to the extremes to the Green Party or to reform. So it's not just that these parties are engaged in sort of internecine feuds, but it's also that there's a hunger for change out there that they're not dealing with. I think that the overwhelming explanation of this is that we have a crisis of leadership. Our leadership class, our leadership institutions are just not working. And people seeing both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party as two faces of a failed regime and turning against
- [05:07]
James Ball
must have been true in earlier years and earlier decades that there were substandard leaders.
- [05:12]
Adrian Wooldridge
Right.
- [05:13]
James Ball
There have definitely been people who have been as bad as Keir Starmer. I mean, would you agree with that? Can you think of any in the 20th century?
- [05:21]
Adrian Wooldridge
Not entirely. I do think that Keir Starmer is an unusually weak leader. He's an unusually weak speaker, he's an unusually weak tactician, and he does have a very unpleasant tendency to blame everybody else. But himself and to get through Cabinet Ministers, to get through Cabinet Secretaries and the head of the Foreign Office in the way that he has, I think is unprecedented. I don't know. You'll probably come up with precedents for it, but it's unusual to be so careless of the administration of the Civil Service as well as your own party. But, yes, it is easy to look back at the past and see a succession of giants. And in fact, John Major, famous for his lack of charisma, Ted Heath, famous for his lack of charisma, plus bad manners and bad behavior. There were lots of very unimpressive people in the past as well.
- [06:08]
James Ball
And dare I say, Gordon Brown, I mean, this is someone who's now been brought technically back into government for God knows how many days. But you remember when he lost the election and refused to give up, he was also clinging onto power in what seemed in a very unseemly manner. Yeah. Is that much worse than Keir Starmer?
- [06:26]
Adrian Wooldridge
What Keir Starmer has brought to this, I think, is the combination of a very large majority, which Gordon Brown didn't have, and a capacity to put the blame on the Civil Service, which I think somebody like Brown would not have done with such enthusiasm. To have such a big majority and squander it so quickly and for your failure to spread to the institutions of the state, rather than just the institutions of your party, is unusual. I think what's going on here is that we don't just have a crisis of leadership in the sense that the Prime Minister is weak, but we have a whole range of institutions which are malfunctioning at the same time. So you have the party structure, which is weaker than it traditionally has been, not so good. The Labour Party used to be rooted, as it were, in the aristocracy of the intellect. Wilson's Labour Party had some of the cleverest people in the country, plus the aristocracy of labor. You promoted people like Jim Callaghan through the trade union. Now, there's almost no roots, or the roots that you have it are in international lawyers on the one hand, and NGO people on the other hand. So there isn't a party structure that can nurture real talent in the way that's a.
- [07:39]
James Ball
Specifically Labour, that's a Labour problem.
- [07:41]
Adrian Wooldridge
But also the Conservative Party has shrunk to, I think it was, you know, a million or so members in the 1950s. It shrunk to a very small unrepresentative group of people who also can determine who the leader is. So you're having party institutions failing. You're having the Civil service not selecting the best people in the country in the way it used to, and not training them, not giving them a sense of esprit de corps in the way you used to do. So you have a whole series of institutions at the top of society malfunctioning at the same time. It seems almost at the moment, the only institution that's doing reasonably well is the monarchy, in the sense that the King did exceptionally well in his speech in the United States. But. But all these. The Civil Service doing badly, the Cabinet doing badly, the Parliamentary Labour Party doing badly. And it's not as though the Conservative Party did brilliantly in the last election. So I think a statement, yeah, people look at this ruling class and say, it's not living up to its function. It's not giving us a sense of direction. So Keir Starmer, he's the perfect emblem of a regime that is decaying because he's. He's a dutiful lawyer. He's not a person who thinks very deeply or with.
- [08:54]
James Ball
He's a proceduralist, he's a proceduralist.
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Adrian Wooldridge
And we're seeing a crisis of proceduralism because proceduralism isn't working very well. I think there are two other things going on here as well, which are really interesting. We have a crisis of leadership, but we also have a crisis of followership that people aren't willing to follow their leaders. People in politics aren't willing to follow their leaders in the way that they have been throughout most of the. The last hundred years, for reasons that are interesting. And we have, at the same time, I think, an overproduction of elites, people like you and me in our professions, commentators. There's too many commentators looking for too few stories. Too much of our talent goes into commentary in this country. So everybody, particularly since Brexit, has been running around looking for the next big story. Is that too cynical a view of our profession?
- [09:42]
James Ball
No, I don't think so. I mean, are we allowed to say whether it's a mistake or not? I mean, I feel it's almost controversial now to say that it's a mistake for Labour to get rid of their leader. What is your view on that? Do you think it will benefit if they ditch Keir Starmer or if he's forced out? Do you think it will benefit the Labour Party long term? Do you think it will benefit the country long term?
- [10:07]
Adrian Wooldridge
No to both, because I don't think. Well, long term is Keir Starmer is not a very good leader of the Labour Party. He's a proceduralist. He doesn't have vision and he has an unpleasant tendency to blame everybody but himself. But I think to justify the paroxysms that we'll have to go through to replace him with somebody else, you'd have to have a clear candidate who is better. And I don't think we have that. We have Andy Burnham. Well, I don't know about Andy Burnham. I mean, I've never been overwhelmingly impressed by him. I don't think he's so clearly the best possible candidate you can have that he justifies all of this upturning. He's been a competent mayor of Manchester, but then that position was prepared for the council before he came along. Was actually running the city rather well. A lot was prepared for him.
- [10:58]
James Ball
But he was a second tier member of Blair's.
- [11:02]
Adrian Wooldridge
Blair. And he was a Blair cabinet. Absolutely.
- [11:04]
James Ball
I think he's a failed leadership contender himself.
- [11:06]
Adrian Wooldridge
Yes. And his comments, no one really knows much about him. Yes, tell us about that. Well, his comments on the bond market, that we're in hock to the bond market. Well, you're in hock to the bond market because you've borrowed money and if we don't propose to pay that money back, then we'll be in massive, massive trouble. It's a silly populist, trite comment and he's gone from being a sort of rather shallow Blairite who echoed whatever Blair was saying to being a rather shallow sort of populist. So I don't think there's a compelling case for that. As I said, Manchester has not been badly run under under him, but I think the preparation was long standing before him.
- [11:41]
James Ball
Talking about the bond markets there just brings us back to reality, I think, because in all this excitement and so many commentators are in the can for wanting to get rid of Starmer and have something to write about and it's exciting and it makes them the center of the story. And of course the partisan actors, the politicians overwhelmingly also want him gone because the Conservatives and Reform calculate, at least in the case of Reform correctly, that they are the net beneficiaries of more crisis. His enemies within his party and then of course the Greens. So basically all the politicians are keen for crisis, which again is not a very patriotic way you could say to conduct yourself, but that's for discussion. But nobody out there is really looking at what the damage is to the country. I mean, does it not look, make us look unserious, unable to just let one prime minister have more than a year and a half in charge? We've got this bond market issue bubbling up already, I think this morning. 10 year gilts are at more than 5%, maybe nearer 6%.
- [12:45]
Adrian Wooldridge
That's correct.
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James Ball
That's very expensive. It's a real world problem. If we suddenly have an Angela Reyna candidature that looks likely over the summer, that will go much higher.
- [12:57]
Adrian Wooldridge
Absolutely.
- [12:58]
James Ball
What do you think the real world consequences of all this chaos actually are? And why is no one paying enough attention to them?
- [13:04]
Adrian Wooldridge
I think the bond markets are paying attention, the City is paying attention. And I think the one thing that keeps Starmer in play is worry about something worse. And that worry is very serious because the real world consequences, you say, in terms of your mortgage costs, in terms of the country's borrowing costs, are very, very serious. And bond yields are as high as they have been since 1990. And the market, I think, was quite forgiving of Britain because Britain had quite a good record politically until Liz Truss came across, came along and then she destroyed a lot of confidence in the country. So if we have Andy Burnham, who's dissed the bond markets, does that make them happier? I don't think so. If we have Angela Rayner, it makes them very unhappy indeed because she wants a program of big borrowing, big spending, and she doesn't have any serious economic experience in the world.
- [13:53]
James Ball
She is lined up to be Liz Truss part two, surely, if they go.
- [13:57]
Adrian Wooldridge
Absolutely she is. But Liz Truss coming into a very fragile environment, none of this is good for the country. Unfortunately, since Brexit, we've had 10 wasted years because the opportunity costs of all this political paralysis has been that we haven't fixed our institutions, we haven't paid sufficient attention to our institutions. Starmer came in with a big majority, with a massive amount of goodwill on the part of the public, with a real opportunity to start the hard work of fixing Britain's civil service, the recruitment problem into the civil service, the quality of leadership, and he proceeded to waste that in an extraordinary failure of preparation and of execution, which I can't quite explain.
- [14:42]
James Ball
It's true that he didn't seem to have any big ideas or any big plan, but not to sound like I'm defending Keir Starmer, but as perhaps the contrarian in me wants to do that, because I think at the very least he could have been worse. I mean, the foreign policy moves he's done have managed to kind of find a center ground. He's managed to stay friends enough with Donald Trump, he's managed to find a line on Israel, Palestine that sort of managed to upset people a little bit on both sides. But not egregiously. You can make the case that foreign policy wise, he's done pretty well. And then domestically, yes, so there's some legislation about renters rights and increasing minimum wage and things, all of which are gentle. I may not agree with them, but labor ish things to do. There's been no disastrous policy.
- [15:33]
Adrian Wooldridge
I think that there has been a willingness to give in to pressure groups within his party, spending pressure groups, NGO style pressure groups, and giving in over his attempt to rein back spending on, on welfare payments. That was the point where his administration went into failure. I think he could have faced those people down and he could have made it clear that the country needs to control spending that allows people not to work, to claim benefits and really to exclude themselves in the long term from the labor market. But I wanted to talk a little bit about this issue of followership because we have a leadership crisis, clearly in terms of the quality of our leaders, but we also have a followership crisis whereby people, politicians are less willing to do what their parties want. We saw this destroying the Conservative Party. Now it's undermining the Labour Party and the Labour government. And I think it's perhaps becoming something that is systemic in British politics that politicians pursue their own agendas, individual agendas, ideological agendas or interest group agendas and they're not willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the party. It's very, very hard to create party discipline. I'm wondering why that is. I mean, I think that you once had a sort of deference in politics as you had deference in wider societies. So people were willing to defer to their party bosses partly because the parties were more powerful structures, partly because we had a more deferential society, and partly because those party bosses could deliver. Now all of those things are eroding. We've moved from a sort of deference based model to a competence based model that you will be willing to defer to your leaders if they can do things for you, if they can solve problems. That worked very well under Blair, it worked under Thatcher with more ideological tinge. But since we've had the global financial crisis and since we've had a stagnation in the country's productivity and the rest of it, parties just haven't been able to deliver anything to keep their members under control. So until we can either give them a reason to act for the good of, for collective good rather than for factional or individual good, or until we can restore some sort of growth, it may be the case that we're living with this world, it feels like it
- [18:02]
James Ball
brings us to the heart of what you write about in your book, which is the crisis of liberalism, in that there is a sort of attitudinal change about the rules of the system, aren't there?
- [18:14]
Adrian Wooldridge
Yes.
- [18:15]
James Ball
Part of what you're talking about, with deference to a leader, at least giving them a chance, was a kind of genteel agreement among grown ups in politics that you would follow the rules and people would be allowed a certain period to make things work and eventually they might fail. But it was a respect for the system of a parliamentary democracy with a kind of self restraint or self governance that is really an intrinsic part of liberalism as well. So I wonder whether you think what the crisis you write about in your book, which we're coming onto, is also present in miniature in this never ending leadership speculation that somehow the rules aren't respected anymore and so there's no sense of holding back if you feel crossed.
- [19:04]
Adrian Wooldridge
I mean, one of the fundamental features of liberalism is an agreement to disagree, an agreement to play by the very elaborate rules of a parliamentary democracy, which means accepting collective responsibility, accepting the power of leaders, accepting certain sort of a deference to the system and to the conventions of the system. And that is being broken down in, in all sorts of ways, partly by the media, particularly by social media, partly by a lack of deferential culture, which we have at the moment, so sort of instant gratification culture, and partly by a sort of willingness to take a sledgehammer to the rules of systems. You have businessmen constantly talking about the power of disruption, the virtues of disruption. But disruption has a downside as well. So we have wrecking balls, as it were coming, being wielded by all sorts of people, and that's breaking down the conventions of parliamentary democracy. So I don't think that Keir Starmer is a good leader. I don't think he's got off to a good start. But we don't have better people in place. And the joy that is being expressed by the media and by a lot of people in general about the general disruption and disorder that we see around it. It's a story. Of course it's a story. But that worries me about the future of parliamentary democracy because the sort of problems that we confront, problems of low productivity, problems of institutional decay, are problems that can only be dealt with with patience, with relentless hard work. So when Starmer, in his slightly awkward way talks about sticking with the job and being a no drama prime minister and somebody who's focused on dissoc that is the right sort of attitude.
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- [23:24]
James Ball
And ironically that is what they voted for. I mean, true that it was small turnout and percentage wise it wasn't a majority. But he did Win a substantial majority to be the boring Prime Minister. That's what he was supposed to be. And he has delivered in boringness what he promised. You could argue. And now the chaos is precisely the opposite of what people thought they were getting.
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Adrian Wooldridge
There is a sort of addiction there to the chaos, both on the part of the media and on the part of the public. It's a sort of give them a chance for a few months and then give them a kicking. I was coming through Gatwick Airport a few weeks ago and an image of Keir Starmer appeared on the television and they were booed. I mean, that's an extraordinary thing to see in this.
- [24:11]
James Ball
What you're describing is really very grave. I mean, it's a systemic collapse of some kind because it means that if the underlying attitudes needed to support a well functioning parliamentary democracy have eroded, it's going to be very hard to get it back. It almost feels like we're in the scenario described in Plato's Republic, where you go from democracy quite quickly through to tyranny, because if it becomes so chaotic, people eventually just want some kind of order because they can then go about their daily lives. And it makes the strongman appeal much greater.
- [24:51]
Adrian Wooldridge
Absolutely. No, I think we're in the most serious crisis of liberalism since the 1930s. And we have very many similarities to the 1930s, unfortunately, in our political system. And what we're seeing is the agonies of democracy, the failure of democratic systems, and the way that populism is responding not just to this or that dissatisfaction, but to a sort of general zeitgeist. But be very worried about the state of liberalism, but do not ever give up on it. Because the extraordinary thing about liberalism is that it has succeeded over and over again. Just when you think it's about to die or disappear in regenerating itself, in reconstituting itself. So it is possible to do that even in culturally very difficult circumstances.
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James Ball
Okay, so make us feel better about the world we're in by giving some prior examples where it looked like the very system was about to fall over, and it didn't.
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Adrian Wooldridge
One example I focus on in my book is the 1890s, when liberalism was dying almost of self satisfaction. They thought liberals thought that they'd solved all the big problems of the world, which were problems of sort of removing restrictions on formal restrictions on opportunity, that you had to go to a certain university to get a certain job or be related to a certain person, and a sort of indifference to democracy. It was a very decadent sort of system. Everybody Was sitting around thinking, well, we've solved the problems, let's just meander on. And then a group of new liberals came along and said, look, in order to cope with the problems of a new and different world, with the rise of trade unions, with the rise of aspirations to better education, with the rise of Germany taking our markets, we need to have a more expansive notion of the role of the state. The state in liberating individuals, not in acting as a collective, but in liberating individuals from lack of opportunity. And once you have this model of a different sort of liberalism, they called it new liberalism, not very originally. You suddenly get really talented people such as Lloyd George, such as Asquith, and such as Winston Churchill, who leaves the Conservative Party for the Liberal Party. They all come into politics and they lay out a formula for improving society and they implement those things very quickly. That was a response to a situation of decadence by self satisfaction.
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James Ball
So those leaders found a way to accommodate very rapid change within a liberal agenda and move. But they were, by today's standards would be conservatives.
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Adrian Wooldridge
I suppose at the time they were considered to be extraordinarily radical. They were saying that what. What individualism means is not leaving us alone. It means interfering with the workings of the market to provide certain public services, education, scholarships to university and more and more active support for industry, but more direction for industry to prepare for the armaments problem. Then you get the 1930s where you have liberalism really being seen as the first philosophy of yesterday. The coming men were definitely Mussolini to some extent. Hitler, although people were a bit more nervous about him. And Franco. People saw the collective state, Stalin on the left, Mussolini on the right, as people who were much more modern, forward looking, linked to the times. And liberals were in a state of complete funk. And then you had Mosley here talking about organized workers, organized capitalists, companies sort of forming a collective estate. And lots of people at the time. We forget how forward thinking, a thinker Mosley was considered to be at the time. You know, he was the face of the future for many people then. So. And intellectuals, some of the great liberal intellectuals of the 1930s were almost giving up on liberalism. Then Suddenly, in the 1940s and 50s, you have not just the reconstruction domestically of the liberal order with beverage and canes and the rest of it, but also internationally with the creation of the transatlantic alliance and all of that sort of thing.
- [29:09]
James Ball
So a huge surge, you've skipped over rather an important event there, which might have been part of that, which is a huge world war. It took a world War to remind people how good liberalism can be.
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Adrian Wooldridge
It did take a world war. Far be from its quite skip over the world war. That's a big thing to skip over. But it's quite interesting the extent to which the preparation for the post world war starts in 1941, 1942, in fact, you know, the transatlantic alliance between Britain and America and the outline of that actually begins to be settled even before the United States enters the war. So there is a blueprint that is put into operation quite quickly and again with the Beveridge Report quite early on in the war, that people are preparing for this sort of thing. Then in the 1970s, which is a period in which a lot of the problems that we're seeing now with our world are repeated. You see over mighty trade unions, very poor.
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James Ball
We don't have over mighty trade unions,
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Adrian Wooldridge
we don't have those now over mighty interest groups, a bit like the NGOs today. Very incompetent businesses, very poor economic performance, A succession of endless crises in the political system. Great instability, Heath Wilson and the rest of it, prime ministers coming and going and a sense that things aren't working. A sense of a crisis right across the West. And then a group of people who are neoliberals, a form of liberalism, say what we need to do. These are the Thatcherites, the Reaganites, saying we must. The neoliberal, the free market people, they have a very clear program and they say in order to stop society being dominated by interest groups in politics, in order to get the economy moving, we need to shrink the size of the state, change the nature of the state and to expand the role of the market. And again you get a lot of movement because of that, a lot of wealth creation.
- [31:15]
James Ball
This might be an attempt to sort of age you, but I want to know, do you remember what it felt like in the 70s?
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Adrian Wooldridge
Yes, absolutely.
- [31:23]
James Ball
And did it feel as bad as it does now?
- [31:25]
Adrian Wooldridge
Yes, worse. We had a three day working week. We had electricity going off, we had, you know, I remember doing my homework by candlelight. And you had a sense of crisis in the political system. And I think there was an instability in the political system. You see all sorts of problems with the Wilson government, with secret service conspiracists to overthrow Wilson. Wilson becoming increasingly paranoid, which is even worse than we see today.
- [31:54]
James Ball
So out of that kind of sense of crisis and inertia was born Thatcherism and Reaganism and that new movement which despite its critics clearly moved the story on. In a sense then what you're saying is that we're due such a movement. Now something new needs to emerge from all this paralysis. The big question is, what is it going to be?
- [32:18]
Adrian Wooldridge
For the past 40 years, we've been governed by a sort of interesting synthesis, which was a synthesis between neoliberalism, on the one hand, belief in the market, belief in business, belief in contracting and the role of the state. And changing the role of the state from a steerer of the economy to something a bit less than that, plus social liberalism, which was basically a welcoming attitude to social change. Enthusiasm about immigration and a sort of guilt about empire and the past of the country and things like that. This sort of combination of beliefs, as I say, unstable, but it's comes to dominate the world of Blair and Clinton. They put these things together. Neoliberalism plus social liberalism, which both share a lot of liberal characteristics in the sense that they're about individual choice, they're about not being judgmental, they're about maximizing people's freedom in certain sorts of ways. And I think that combination worked quite well for a very, very long time. The neoliberal side delivered a lot of freedom, a lot of growth, and it fitted in with the technology of the mobile phone and deregulation of the telecoms industry and things like that. And social liberalism gave clear benefits in terms of creating a more welcoming country. Gay marriage, all of that worked well. But I think the people who are the products of this synthesis, and it might be called a bourgeois bohemian synthesis as well, an American commentator called David Brooks called it bobo bourgeois bohemian. That synthesis has become decadent because it is now producing a whole series of problems which can't be dealt with within its own terms. And I would say, although he doesn't look very bohemian, I would say that Keir Starmer is a classic product of that synthesis, an heir to Blair in the sense that he's a product of that synthesis. But the problem with the synthesis is that some of its key characteristics are beginning to fail. One obvious one is a sort of economic and also cultural enthusiasm about immigration, that immigration, high levels of immigration are the template by which a successful society is judged. And if you want to control it, you're doing something which is a bit
- [34:40]
James Ball
odd or wrong, that is no longer widely held.
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Adrian Wooldridge
It's disappearing. But I think it's there in the minds of many people who govern the country. It's there in the minds of the Green Party, which has got a lot of support. And we're in this bizarre sort of situation whereby we know that something has to be done, but we're Terrified that in doing something we're playing to our worst instincts. So what we need is a liberal solution to this problem. If liberals can't address this problem, then they'll bring in reform. So you have Starmer again going from really failing to address problems of assimilation on the one hand, then suddenly talking about an island of strangers. If you had, you know, one of the first things he should have done when he came into power was not just be worried about the numbers, but be worried about the patterns of assimilation in our schools, I mean, which are not working well.
- [35:34]
James Ball
Again, I'm sounding like the defender of the government here, but Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, is genuinely committed to controlling immigration. I don't know how she has been partially successful, not completely, particularly with regard to small boats, which is a very hard problem. But it seems like compared to any other alternative of a Labour government, this Labour government is relatively skeptical of immigration.
- [36:02]
Adrian Wooldridge
We're moving in that direction. I think it took a long time to move in that direction and stop. Dharma is, by background, an international law. The sort of people he has surrounded himself with are people who think. Yeah, exactly. Think that the laws regarding refugee status is a solid law. I would have had a Mahmoud policy much earlier on, but I would also have linked that with a much more emphasis in our education system to assimilation and a much more rapid and serious responsibility response to the grooming scandal crisis. Everything seems to have been reluctant. Everything seems to be done at the last moment, and everything seems to be done as a concession to the rise of reform rather than as a liberal solution to that problem. Another thing I would say is take back control. A lot of what control was about was about the condition of our streets. The fact that you have litter everywhere, the fact that you can smell marijuana wherever you walk. In London, not, of course, near here, but certainly where I live. The sense that society is not looking after itself, not cleaning itself up.
- [37:08]
James Ball
Petty crime, petty crime, all of that.
- [37:11]
Adrian Wooldridge
People going and stealing from shops without any recrimination. I think, again, a centrist government has to take that into account. In other words, take seriously the fact that people voted for taking back control.
- [37:23]
James Ball
What I think you sound like you're describing is possibly reform. I mean, why. Why be so worried about reform? Let's just work that out with our audience. Because I think you could make the argument that Nigel Farage is a philosophical liberal in the sense that he resists ethno nationalism, at least, certainly overtly. He's not in favor of re migration in any kind of forced capacity. And he is a child of the system you describe. Unlike some of the right wing populists in Europe, he seems to exist within the liberal framework.
- [38:06]
Adrian Wooldridge
I would say that we shouldn't be hysterical about Nigel Farage and that it's very notable how much he has protected his party from being taken over by the far right and that's something that certainly needs to be conceded to him. However, I think that Brexit was a big problem, that its long term consequences for Britain have been to make it poorer and less easy to govern. So I would give him a very negative mark there. I think the way he runs his party, whereby the party has no real agency, it's just an extension of himself, is in the model of a populist. I'm worried about that. I don't think he's got a tradition of sharing power with others or of running a political party in a way that indicates that he understands that power needs to be constrained rather than just gathered into the hands of one man. And I'm worried about the quality of the people around him. I agree with you that he's more like Giorgio Maloney than he is like Donald Trump in many ways. He's definitely not indulged in the sort of extreme politics that Trump has actually when it comes to pandering to, to
- [39:16]
James Ball
the very far right, because in a way, and having earlier sounded like the defender of Keir Dharma, I'm now going to sound like the advocate of Nigel Farage. But the big picture story you're telling, which is that philosophical liberalism is always evolving and every 30 or 40 or 50 years or so there is a ruction and it needs to be adapted, is actually the story that reform tell at their more intellectual end. If you talk to James Orr or even Matthew Goodwin, they will say the systems as you describe them have failed. They are no longer working and what we need is a big new restatement of how the system needs to work. And they think what they're describing is that which is to be better on borders, to strip out regulation. They're very interested in crypto and new technology and data centers and ways to make Britain more relevant in the new economy. They think they are precisely that future looking new settlement you're talking about.
- [40:14]
Adrian Wooldridge
I think that the reform and reform voters are responding to certain ways in which the centre has not delivered definitely border control. I think a certain sense of national identity and national pride. I think a certain sort of economic dynamism as well. The centre has not responded to that. But I think the solution to that problem is not to move to the James Orr Wright but to re galvanize the centre. And I think re galvanizing the centre means sticking to certain values as being absolutely fundamental to liberalism. Focus on the individual, focus on tolerance, pluralism and focus on limiting power. And I'm worried about faith, flag and family. I think it's too exclusionary. I think we need to find a way of talking about collective values that aren't quite implying a model of a single faith, let's say need to be more pluralistic than that. I'm worried about the power dynamic of reform, particularly about the strongman tendencies of Nigel Farage. But I also think that we don't just need to move to the right, we need to move to the left on media, social, certain issues. And I think that the power it used to in the neoliberal sort of bobo synthesis, we were always willing to give a free pass to business and to the market. And I think we need to be a bit more suspicious of business in the market, particularly when it comes to the tech companies and what they're doing. Not only to our culture in a sense we need to be reach out for the cultural, the regulatory system to stop them doing certain things. And again thinking about Starmer, he's been suspicious of business over completely the wrong things. You know, he says it's just businesses trying to pay minimum wages and things like that which actually increases the price of labor. But he's been very enthusiastic about business when it comes to big technology companies about moving towards screen based learning in schools is very resistant to moves to stop smartphones in schools. I think he's wrong about that. I think screen based learning is the wrong road to go down. I think having smartphones in schools is something we should be resisting. I think the tech companies need to be constrained much more. So I would argue for a bit more. I won't be arguing for green policies, but I think we need to reflect the public's very legitimate worries that tech, big tech is doing something dangerous to our culture.
- [42:49]
James Ball
Doesn't sound very left wing when you're putting it like that. Adrian. If this is your moment of saying you want some things to move to the left, to ban screens, mobile phones and crack down on big tech is frankly what J.D. vance was talking about five years ago. It's quite a common right wing refrain.
- [43:06]
Adrian Wooldridge
It's a right wing and a left wing refrain. But I think that as I say, the sort of version of liberalism that we had for the last 40 years was a, was a strange combination of social Liberalism and neoliberalism. And both of those things would have been quite liberal, I mean, quite free when it comes to allowing technology in schools. They would have seen technology as a force of progress and they would have said individual choice should govern what we're doing about smartphones.
- [43:32]
James Ball
So this is your little island of illiberalism in your program.
- [43:36]
Adrian Wooldridge
I was saying that liberals need to rethink their worry about the nanny state, actually. So it's a classic. One of the things that was central to both the neoliberals and the left liberals is a dislike of judgmentalism, a dislike of the idea that the state knows better than the people do themselves what is good for them. And I think we need a bit more nannyism in our new formula because people can be bad judges of their own long term interests. They can do certain things that harm them. Smoking cigarettes is an obvious thing. And the technology companies have latched onto this danger of short term preferences, this problem of short term preferences to get us addicted to all sorts of things from a very early age, which I think are doing long term harm to our culture. Now, I would say yes, perhaps right wing. I'm worried about the nature of our culture and I think we need to do much more as a country to preserve our high culture, high civilization from the short termism of a commercial society. Perhaps that's a right wing thing to say, but it is recognizing that business is not always on the side of the long term health of a liberal society.
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- [46:28]
James Ball
and to apply that to reform. During today's news stories, it is very interesting that Nigel Farage, normally the noisiest person in Britain, has been silent because he is sitting on the sidelines watching this bonfire at the top of the Labour Party with glee, because he is definitely the beneficiary of it. Whether the Conservatives will be, I don't know. But I think it's certain that reform is a beneficiary of what's going on today. Applying that thought to reform. One of the most interesting things, I think, is that these competing strands are not yet resolved within reform because there are figures within reform that quite liked what you were talking about that would be keen to restrict mobile phone usage, to be very skeptical about big technology. Talk about a more paternalistic restoring of good values in society. And then there is also another strain of thinking in reform which is very weak at the knees and excited about tech, about American money, about new ideas like crypto, which in a way goes in the other direction.
- [47:35]
Adrian Wooldridge
Absolutely.
- [47:36]
James Ball
And it's still not clear which of those instincts will win out. Danny Kruger, one of the most important recent imports, until very recently, was a tech skeptic.
- [47:45]
Adrian Wooldridge
Yes.
- [47:46]
James Ball
And I suppose he's now trying to get on board with reform's love of tech. Which way do you think that will play out if reform do reach power?
- [47:55]
Adrian Wooldridge
I think the libertarian instinct is quite strong, partly because Nigel Farage is a. I'd say a libertine, or he's a person who has a. Has a generous view of how you should live your life. And I also think there's a lot of money behind the libertarian strand within reform. My own instincts are very, very different from that. I mean, I sympathize with Danny Krueger about a great many things. I'm very skeptical about whether crypto is the way forward for any big political party and it does expose you to a lot of corruption or a lot of dubious figures. There's also the question of the voter base. Is the voter base sort of tech bros in London who are doing. Who wants to have more liberty to do what they want? Or is it with working class people who feel that they've been betrayed and left behind over the last few decades, the few decades of neoliberalism? I think to win elections you have to do more in the long term than just exercise revenge. You have to provide those people with a way forward. And that way forward must involve more security. The idea that, you know, the Liz Truss option of just a more libertarian way forward is, I don't think, a stable political position in the long term. And I think Nigel Farage is in the process of negotiating between these two things and he tends to indulge in Boris Johnson style cake ism. Let's have libertarianism, but let's also spend more money on poorer people.
- [49:25]
James Ball
The reform response to the Online Safety act is a nice example of this, where essentially the Online Safety act primarily is an anti porn piece of legislation. It's trying to stop young teenagers and children accessing hardcore porn, which most people in the country would support as a goal and certainly I think most people within reform. And yet, because it's been entangled with anxieties about censorship, which I share, and the experience of the last few years where somehow governments and big tech have conspired to push out right wing voices from the discourse, reform is strongly against the Online Safety Act. It's a Tory artifact and it should be resisted. Yes, it's quite an interesting sort of test that actually when push comes to shove, they go in the more libertarian direction.
- [50:12]
Adrian Wooldridge
This is one of the many reasons why I'm very nervous about reform and why I think that the future should lie in a regalvanization of the centre. Partly because they have a series of contradictions in their arguments which they have not yet resolved and perhaps can't resolve because their base is so contradictory, but partly that they don't have the wealth of experience that you need to govern a country in a very difficult set of circumstances. Now, you could say the same for Trump, but Trump has the power of the dollar as a reserve currency. He's got incredible debt, but the world economy seems to be willing to bear that. When you have a fragile country like Britain and very nervous bond markets to have a radical government of the right that isn't seasoned and that doesn't have a well worked out philosophy of action, I think that's a very dangerous thing.
- [51:04]
James Ball
Let me challenge you on some of your wording before we come to the end. Of our conversation. So your very interesting book, I'm going to put it up here again. Centrists of the World Unite uses the word centrist and the word liberalism a lot. And I put it to you that both of those words are not going to win a new election. I feel like centrist as an identity is now too intermingled with a kind of technocratic bloodlessness, which is precisely what people want to reject right now. That I don't think a new party that calls itself the centrists is going to do very well. And liberalism, unfortunately, because I understand what you mean by its merits, is also such a complicated word that is very hard to get people passionate about almost intrinsically in its design. It's against too many passions in one direction. So I think you need a new vocabulary.
- [52:02]
Adrian Wooldridge
Well, centuries of the world unite, colon, the lost genius of liberalism. It's an attempt to have a complete thought. Centrists of the world should unite. They shouldn't be divided, they shouldn't be fighting each other. What should they be united around? They should be united around the lost genius of liberalism. Not liberalism as it now is, but liberalism as it has been over many centuries in the past.
- [52:27]
James Ball
Have you got any other words you can use?
- [52:29]
Adrian Wooldridge
The trouble is that what I'm trying to say?
- [52:32]
James Ball
Is it the revenge of sanity?
- [52:34]
Adrian Wooldridge
Is it
- [52:37]
James Ball
moderate radicals?
- [52:39]
Adrian Wooldridge
One thing I'm trying to say is that liberals should be less guilty about what they've done. I think that it has become ossified as a philosophy, liberalism. But we should never forget the extraordinary richness of its last two to 300 years. You know, it's gone through a bad phase, but it has succeeded in the past by reigniting itself. We should have pride in the fact that this is an intellectual tradition that includes John Stuart Mill, Graham Wallace, Tocqueville, Hayek, Keynes. An extraordinary rich tradition. So when American post liberals say, well, liberalism is finished, what are you saying is finished? You're saying that one of the greatest intellectual traditions, I think the greatest intellectual tradition in political thought in the modern era is finished. That's a big claim, and I think a wrong claim. But secondly, I think we should be less guilty about being centrists, that being a centrist, that somebody who doesn't see the future in the extreme right doesn't see the future in the green left, sees the future in the middle way, which means listening to people, which means trying to produce moderate solutions rather than extreme solutions, which means weighing arguments together should unite together. And I think there's a sort of shift shyness about the center, a sort of guilt about the center, which I'm trying to dispel in this book. I'm saying be proud of. Be proud of yourself. Be proud of your. Your history. Admit that you've made mistakes in the past, but don't throw everything away with that. If you look in the United States at the moment, the biggest single party identification is independence, and the most rapidly growing party identification is independence. The Republicans, Democrats are about 27% each. Independents are twice that, I think. And I think in this country, a lot of people would like the centre to be dynamic problem solving. They're not against centrism. They're not really naturally extremists. They just think that the lot we have in power at the moment are not up to it.
- [54:44]
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You see the headlines every day, but do they actually tell you what's going on? We don't just look at the front pages. We look at what's moving beneath the surface. That's Undercurrents, the new daily newsletter from Unherd. It lands in your inbox every morning at 8am EST or 1pm GMT. Get the perspective that really matters. Get Undercurrents by me, James Billo in the U.S. newsroom. Sign up today@unherd.com undercurrents newsletter.
- [55:12]
James Ball
The trouble you will face with your centrist revolution or renewal.
- [55:16]
Adrian Wooldridge
Yes.
- [55:17]
James Ball
Is that it sounds quite a lot like what we hear from both the right and the left, which is two cheeks of the same ass. Yes, it is the German strategy, which is to block out, in an undemocratic way, legitimate voices of the right and left by a sort of monopoly at the center. These grand coalitions that have been popular in Europe with the aim of shutting out politically unacceptable ideas on immigration, for example, have not worked. They have just exacerbated or fanned the flames of it. And we see the AfD now doing extremely well in Germany, for example. So centrists uniting to block out populists. If you look at examples of it having been tried, it hasn't worked.
- [56:02]
Adrian Wooldridge
Is two cheeks of the same ass a quotation from Isaiah Boleyn? I don't know.
- [56:08]
James Ball
I think it's a reform quotation.
- [56:09]
Adrian Wooldridge
Oh, is that what they say? I'm not arguing to block out these positions. I think we should take on the serious worries that the reform has about immigration, and I think we should take on the serious worries that lots of people have across the political spectrum have about the degradation of our culture because of pornography and the rest of those things. These should become sort of central issues within the new, new centrist agenda. But we shouldn't at the same time abandon some of the truths of the last 40 years, that the business deregulation are in general forces for good, that openness is in general the right sort of thing that we do need to import. We need to have an immigration policy that's not just closed, we need to have one that works. So, in other words, I'm arguing for what Burke would have argued for, which is reform of a fairly radical sort in order to save quite a lot of the status quo.
- [57:13]
James Ball
Do you think this is going to happen? Do you think there is any sign of green shoots, of active and muscular liberalism?
- [57:23]
Adrian Wooldridge
I think it's beginning to emerge around the world. It's partly emerging in Canada. Mark Carney has sort of allowed, has sort of set an agenda which many people are following. I think Australia has a sort of vigour to its liberalism at the moment. I think it's certainly not happening in Britain from the top down. And indeed, I think we may actually lurch in a much more dangerous direction if we move away from Starmer, certainly with Rayna and perhaps with Burnham. But if you look at what the people, if you look at what pressure groups, groups like Momsnet are demanding, I think they're demanding, you know, pragmatic solutions to real problems which can be answered in a liberal sort of way. So I think a radical centre has a constituency. It's a constituency that's not being satisfied at the moment because of the paralysis of the politics of the centre, because so much energy is flowing to the. To the extremes.
- [58:22]
James Ball
Adrian Wooldridge, thank you so much for your time.
- [58:25]
Adrian Wooldridge
Thank you.
- [58:26]
James Ball
There you have it. Adrian Wildridge, on the very day of Keir Starmer's crisis meeting with his Cabinet. Don't even know whether he will still be Prime Minister by the end of today. Although I suspect by the time you're hearing this, he still is telling us that actually all is not lost. There is potentially a new radical centre that will come into being in the midst of all this crisis. And just as in prior centuries and decades, liberalism will reinvent itself so we can all go to sleep feeling happy that the world will once again be better tomorrow. Thanks for joining us. This was unherd.
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