Between Brexit and the general election: the political challenges confronting the uk
The Jacques Delors Centre is delighted to host an exclusive discussion with Anand Menon, Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College London, and Director of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative.
As the United Kingdom marks four years since its departure from the European Union, and with a general election on the horizon, the nation is navigating challenging times. We are honoured to host Anand Menon, Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College London, and Director of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative, as our distinguished speaker.
Join us for an insightful discussion where Professor Menon will delve into the intricate economic and political landscape of the UK since its departure from the EU. He will share valuable insights into the lessons learned from Brexit, offer perspectives on what to expect from the upcoming elections, and explore the anticipated impact on the relationship between London and Brussels. Moderated by Christine Reh, Professor of European Politics at the Hertie School.
This event is organised by the Jacques Delors Centre and is part of the European Governance Colloquium, as well as the CIVICA Europe Revisited Seminar Series.
https://www.delorscentre.eu/
https://www.civica.eu/
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So warm welcome again and uh yes so what I wanted to say is no one really can beat you in knowledge about brexit and challenges to British uh politics and economics and I’m truly delighted to be able to welcome you tonight here at the hatti school so Anan joins us from
King’s College London where he’s a professor of European politics and Foreign Affairs and before Kings you worked in Oxford and Birmingham you founded co-founded very well-known Journal called West European politics I have to say this as an academic and you’re a fellow at a chattam house I understand but most importantly tonight
Um really Anand knows brexit in and out so in 2014 10 years ago a decade ago uh you started the think tank UK in a changing Europe right which you still direct and since then Anand has really become one of the most vocal one of the most
Insightful and one of the clearest I think experts and commentators on brexit and UK politics in British and European British and European public in the media and really at the intersection of research and practice so for anyone interested in brexit I presume this is everyone sitting here tonight UK in a
Changing Europe which is still in full swing really has it all right cutting it research projects senior fellows videos reports Publications and a top ranked podcast which our students and colleagues also often like plus UK in a changing Europe really offers impartial interdisciplinary and well researched analysis on brexit not always the norm
In reporting on brexit in the UK there I say so tonight uh Anand is talking about economic and political challeng challenges in the UK in view of course of brexit and the upcoming elections we’ll hear quite a bit about public opinion political parties and issues of salience for the electorate and I’m
Really looking forward to the talk and to our follow-up discussion and I would say the floor is yours thank [Applause] you I don’t like this clapping beforehand sort of raises the bar uh so there’s lots of stuff I’m not going to talk about so just to say now
If you’re interested in Scotland or Northern Ireland or want to talk a bit more about the labor party or the economy and those sorts of things I’m very very happy to talk about those things in the questions but I’m going to try and stick quite brutally to half an
Hour and talk mainly about the inter relationship between British politics and brexit which is quite an interesting one so essentially they’re the things I’m going to talk about the dysfunctional politics and economics I really wanted to do the whole lecture on that but I told you in advance I was
Going to talk about politics so I feel I ought to stick to what I said but I’ll mention it at the end and if you want to chat about it in questions that’s fine now i’ I’ve talked through this early bit before I think the last time I was
Here in herty but it is worth just reminding ourselves that brexit did something weird to British politics by introducing a social division that hadn’t in the past structured political choice they didn’t create a social division those of you with long memories will remember that the country was divided by Enoch Powell talking about
Rivers of blood that was the brexit division but what brexit did was it crystallized the division you can see it here in graphical form the more socially conservative you are the more likely you were to vote for brexit and socially conservative means you know your views on disciplining children trans rights
Gender equality uh those sorts of issues so it’s not the typical Left Right divide that had used to structure British politics British Politics as the Oxford Professor Peter pzer put it was about class that’s how you understood it brexit isn’t about class and one of the
Things I’ll come on to and one of the things that matters in British politics now is that the two camps leave and remain divided by their World Views okay whether they were socially liberal or socially conservative were crosscutting coalitions in terms of class they brought together people with different
Economic interests and that’s one of the reasons why the current the conservative party is in the utter mess that it’s in now is that even amongst itself it can’t agree on basic economics because it brings together people with very different interests now it’s worth saying that over time this values Dimension has become
More important I suggest you’d probably find this in most countries in the west that actually values issues have become more dominant over time in political platforms in political manifestos which this is a reflection of and so on uh and so I think one thing worth saying is
That whilst I’m going to argue that brexit is less important than it was because of the economic crisis this isn’t to say that brexit will go away the brexit division in British politics is I think here to stay and can be triggered by a whole number of things
Which I’ll touch on later on but the second side of British politics is that economics was also very present when it came to brexit and I’ve got I think I shown you this last time I was here there’s a wonderful way of showing this this is the map of leave and remain in
England and back in I think it was 2018 2019 they had the last election for the mayor of London and Rory Stewart who I imagine you might have heard of uh was a candidate for mayor of London and he was interviewed halfway through the campaign
Rory is a weirdo okay let’s be under no Illusions he was asked during the campaign on LBC what’s your favorite Pub in London and he said Preta okay there’s Rory Stewart for you uh anyway that was weird it got weirder because Rory then gets absolutely murdered on social media by Corbin
Nightes accusing him being of a metropolitan liberal because he liked Pratt and I remember I said to the people our researchers in our office what the hell and they did this work and they found that that’s where the prets are in the UK and you will notice I don’t think you could
Do this with Einstein Cafe but anyway you could try it it’s a doctoral program but I think you know there is a very high correlation between where prets are in the United Kingdom and where people voted remain and if you dig below the surface of that you think about it
That’s because of what pret is it is a sort of upand cominging diverse cities people with disposable income you can put it in a more social scientific way that basically the the lower the median income in an area the more likely that area was to vote for brexit so there are
Two things going on I’m Not For a Moment saying this is only about social values but social values are introduced as a dividing line in our politics like never before and they go from the brexit referendum where they shaped leave and remain into our national politics where
They shape our politics so you can see this from the 2019 election absolutely clearly that the areas that voted leave switched in greater numbers to the Tories that this division completely reshapes the electoral map of the United Kingdom so we had to get used to saying weird things like Jeremy Corbin’s labor party
Wins Kensington or the conservative party wins Wakefield where I was from uh and I never in a million years thought Wakefield could have a labor MP but brexit meant that we got a conservative MP brexit meant that Wakefield elected a conservative MP it redrew the map it redrew the map quite fundamentally
Because what Boris Johnson did was he created a coalition of leave voters okay 78% of the people who voted conservative in 2019 had backed leave uh and actually if you look into the numbers there were more remainers in the country in 2019 than there were levers but the fact is Boris Johnson
Brought all the levers together to vote conservatives whereas the remain Camp was fatally divided between s SMP libdems and the labor party so this changed our politics it changed our politics quite fundamentally but in putting together this Coalition Boris Johnson also sowed the seeds of its destruction now let me explain this next
One to you the what we did here we did a series of surveys of MPS party activists party members and voters okay descending order it’s all labeled and what we did was we asked for their views on economic policy and on and their views on social values
And the point of this and I can share these slides if you want to look at them in more detail or if you’re sitting at the back and you’re blind like me you can’t see them uh the conservatives are relatively coherent on social values so the gap between conservative MPS and all
Voters on social values and the gap between conservative MPS and the rest of the party on social values is quite small the gap between conservatives and the median voter and indeed between the conservative and their own voters on economics is much bigger the point is the conservatives could easily talk in a
Relatively unified way about immigration about brexit about whether footballers should take the knee before football matches as a show of anti-racism which became a massive political issue in the UK a few years ago because they’re all values issues what the conservatives can’t do very easily is talk about tax
Policy or talk about you know the size of the state because the bre exit realignment meant that the conservative MPS range from your traditional Southern shatory your John Redwood to your new conservative MP in a traditionally labor area with relatively high levels of welfare dependency relatively high levels of unemployment where actually
Your economic Outlook is fundamentally different like Lee Anderson who’s been in the news a lot recently the former deputy chair of the conservative party Le Anderson’s economics have nothing common with John redwood’s economics Le Anderson doesn’t believe in a small state he believes in Greater investment
He believes in taxing the rich as and when necessary he believes in a generous welfare state because so many of his constituents are on welfare unlike John redwoods so the conservatives can talk about immigration they can’t talk about economic policy and you see the punchline coming for this lecture don’t
You the last thing you want if you’re Boris Johnson’s conservative party is to walk into the teeth of an economic crisis because that is the one thing that is guaranteed to blow apart the differences in your party now don’t get me wrong there’s quite a lot of other
Things that are responsible for the demise of the conservatives over the last few years not at least their own behavior but in sort of sethical terms it strikes me as absolutely fundamental that when you’re talking about economic competence you’ve created a coalition that is uniquely unable to display unity
And unity is one of the most treasured facets of Party politics in the United Kingdom so the first thing that happens is that the salience of brexit it crashes okay one of the reasons why rishy sunak is determined to talk about small boats even though he can’t stop
Them and won’t be able to stop them is because it’s a cultural issue that takes the focus away from Economic Policy the the the conservative Coalition wanted brexit to be quite a big issue because it’s the one thing they can talk about quite easily and it’s worth just
Reflecting on this in 2019 in January 2019 when we were having the first meaningful vote in the ipsos polling that this comes from from over 70% of people said brexit was the most important issue facing the country that number is now 6% back in January 2019 that week of the meaningful vote the
Viewing figures for BBC Parliament so not BBC News BBC Parliament exceeded those for MTV for the first and only time in that Channel’s history so brexit was box office if you wandered around the United I mean we spend a lot of time traveling around the United Kingdom you
Would hear you would literally hear people arguing about it on the train in the pub in restaurants wherever you went I mean I used to have this at home that like if we were going out for dinner with my friends my my other half would
Say for God’s sake do not bang on about Bloody brexit over dinner i’ be like fine I don’t want to talk about brexit I’m at home that’s great we would go and sit down with friends and nine times out at 10 they would start the conversation by saying so what’s happening in brexit
I mean it was a sort of a n a national plague okay so brexit has receded in the public imagination and actually one of the very very few things that link levers and remainers now in Britain is that both sides want us to talk about something else so just as a footnote I’m
Going to show you some polling in a coming up that might give you the idea that the UK is ready to vote to rejoin the European Union and indeed those people who think brexit was a bad idea now totally outnumber those people who think it was a good idea so public
Opinion has shifted but if you try and suggest a public opinion it’d be a really good idea to have another referendum they’d string you up they really are not interested they do not want to revisit the brexit debate at the moment and I suspect for the foreseeable
Future now the other thing about the conservatives and an economic crisis is that all the polling reveals that the greater the level of insecurity you feel the more likely you are to vote for the labor party this is polling from the British election study and basically basally as economic insecurity goes up
Time after time in general election after general election the evidence suggests that people are more likely to plump for the labor party than they are for the conservative party but it gets even worse for the conservative party because if you think back to the 2019 election the slogan that won Boris
Johnson the election was get brexit done right it was a brilliant slogan and it was a brilliant election campaign there’s no two ways about that but if you’re signature policy is not seen as working then you have a problem and there you’ll see that a majority of
Voters now think that being outside the European Union has impacted on the cost of living crisis has made the cost of living crisis worse now let me add something here which I think is quite important I think remain supporters in the UK miss the UK economy is in a bit of a
Hole at the moment and I’ll try and talk about that very briefly towards W the end there are all you know from the state of Public Services to the cost of living and inflation which is still a massive problem to the fact that we’ve had 15 years of stagnant median wages in
The country the UK economy is not just suffering now but has suffered for the last decade and a half and there’s a huge amount of unhappiness at the state of the economy now what people have done quite often is put two and two together
And come up with five that is to say we left the European Union prices are really high ah there we go Now flip that over and if you can imagine and it’s a stretch I know imagine a world in which the UK economy is doing quite well I mean it is really
Hard to imagine that world but let’s try Okay Close Our Eyes imagine a world in which you know we’ve got 1% growth which seems to be the best we can aspire to these days but if you get that and if people start to feel relatively comfortable again and if people start to
Think actually I can afford to go on holiday and aford to feed my kids which is a genuine issue for the British people at the moment it strikes me as fairly logical that they’ll make the same mistake the other way around and say actually brexit is now working
Because the we’ve left the European Union the economy is doing better so I wouldn’t guarantee that where people are now in terms of brexit is where they will remain I think this is very very contingent on a particular economic context but that economic context is having a real impact on the government
Because it’s not just that brexit isn’t going well it’s people blame the government for the fact that brexit isn’t going well and most importantly of all leave voters who overwhelmingly think brexit is going badly don’t think brexit is going badly because brexit was a bad idea they think brexit is going badly
Because the government hasn’t done it right uh one of the most disturbing aspects of British politics at the moment is that we are full throttle developing our own stabing the back theory of politics and it is flourishing in the heart of the conservative party you might have heard
Liz truss uh in the United States this week saying it was the Deep state that undermined her uh she bizarrely said we need to listen to the will of the British people well when I think 80% of the British people wanted her gone by the time she ended up she finished being
Prime minister so there’s an interesting sort of dishonesty about it but the but people like Jacob Rees MOG others on the conservative benches now argue that the reason brexit hasn’t worked is because we’ve not done it full-throated enough we should have immediately repealed all those EU laws and we would be now more
Prosperous than we would have been there is no basis in fact of any of these claims okay just to be utterly clear about it but it is a series of arguments that resonates with the party faithful uh and it’s one of the reasons why the conservatives are going to find
It hard to let go go of brexit because this idea that actually it could have been so good but we were let down uh is going to prove I think quite durable now what has brexit meant for the economy this is interesting uh that is a study
By a guy called John Springford who works for the center for European reform and I’ll just explain this very very quickly what John did was he took a basket of economies that historically have uh mirrored the United Kingdom so up to 2016 that basket of economy performed pretty much similarly to the
UK’s economy and extrapolated forward to try and get a sense of what the impact of brexit has been and his estimate is 5% of GDP now uh economists argue about this and actually one of the wonderful one of the best things about brexit as a social scientist is that the UK has been
Engaged I mean I wish the French were doing it rather than us but hey we’re doing it but we’ve been engaged on a series of rather fascinating natural experiments yeah I mean social scientists would kill for the opportunity to do that I mean they talk about large end studies what happens if
You introduce trade barriers to an economy we can watch it in real time what happens if you fundamentally change your immigration policy again you can watch it in real time and what we’re learning about trade barriers is the impacts aren’t as straightforward as the economic models would have suggested so
I think I mean there’s a political issue to this which is remain campaigners were so determined to have a go at brexit that they talked about a cliff Edge and so leave backers have found it very easy post brexit to say the world hasn’t ended you were all talking rubbish so I
Think exaggerated rhetoric plays a role in this but I think also it’s some really fascinating phenomena UK Services exports have held up incredibly well post brexit despite the fact that it is in Services where the trade and cooperation agreement does least trade and cooperation agreement does virtually nothing for services exporters Every Day
In the UK you’ll hear people campaigning about people musicians traveling musicians and the like so there are obviously impacts yet somehow our exports of services have held up and explanations range from the fact that we’re doing it more globally now to the fact that because of covid people more
Naturally export Services virtually than they used to I mean I’ve got a number of colleagues who rather than filling in the Belgian tax form to go to Brussels to give a lecture just do it on Zoom break the law get paid no one knows it’s perfect L harmless they say uh till they
Get caught but you know the other thing that’s curious is this Goods Imports have suffered to date worse than Goods exports that makes no sense because the EU from day one imposed the full gamut of Border controls on our Goods exports we are only now starting to introduce the checks on Goods Imports
And yet those Imports have been hit worse than exports so there’s a lot going on it is complicated it is m what we can say with a degree of confidence is there has been a significant brexit impact that brexit impact has been felt most strongly for the Moment by smaller
Firms because there is evidence of a lot of small firms pulling out of the uh Import and Export market with the European Union because the costs are simply too great and we can expect that impact to spread to larger firms depending on investment Cycles so if you’re a European car manufacturer and
You’ve invested millions in a in the United Kingdom you’re not going to shut it the day after brexit but you might think twice about doing a reinvestment in 5 years time when you move on to the new model and you have a choice of building it in Germany or the
Netherlands or Slovakia without trade barriers to 26 other economies or building it in the UK with all the paperwork that that implies so this is an ongoing impact on the UK economy albeit and this is politically crucial it’s an impact that’s very hard to identify amidst all the other things
That are going on so it is very hard to persuade brexiters about the economic impact of brexit because you can point to Ukraine you can point to all sorts of things and this is a debate that will roll on and now you’re starting to hear
People who are on the remain side of the argument saying I went to France last week and they all look a lot richer than us and this will be the sort of debate that we here playing out for ages and the question is at what point does that impact upon people’s real perceptions
And they put two and two together uh for what it’s worth that we can talk about it in questions I see absolutely no Prospect in the medium term of us having a serious conversation about membership of the single Market let alone membership of the European Union but
Again we can talk about that in questions now going back to the politics it’s been a rocky ride for the conservatives they built this Coalition it’s a crosscast class Coalition their major policy is seen as a failure and the public are obsessive about the economy which is the one issue on which
The conserves can’t really talk so what we have this is from the local elections uh last year is there is a brexit impact still so there is a still a kind of relationship between where the conservatives are doing well and where brexit did well in 2016 but it is a far
Far weaker relationship than was true in 2019 so there’s a sense of there’s a slight unraveling if you like of the brexit impact on electoral politics in the United Kingdom again this isn’t to say for a moment the brexit is gone we don’t know what happens when we we’re out of
The cost of living crisis and we’re talking about other things again but for the moment at least if you want to a number we’re probably back to 2017 in 2017 there was a kind of brexit impact on our politics so it was very different to 2015 but it was nowhere near the
Scale of 2019 and I would say at the moment the tendency is to be hovering somewhere around there leave remain still shapes the votes of some people uh those Yorkshire labor heartlands will never never go back to being the absolute safe labor seats they once were because politics has been
Changed fundamentally and there’s very strong evidence that workingclass voters simply aren’t going back to labor in the numbers that would require but it’s not 2019 over all over again you can’t win this election simply by talking about brexit in fact the conservatives are very careful not to talk about brexit
Because everyone thinks they screwed it up so that is something that they can no longer do this is just an illustration I’ll circulate this because it’s far far too small of what happened in Tamworth through the various electoral events we’ve had it is worth stressing and I
Think again this is true Across the Western World we are living in a uniquely volatile period in our politics so to take the British example between 2010 and 2017 49% of the voting public changed the party they voted for and those numbers are utterly unheard of uh and what we’re
Finding is absolute decrease in Party Loyalty the notion that I’ll vote the same way my parents or my community or whatever those days are gone the other interesting Trend to watch in UK politics actually is far less localism than in the past partly because of the death of local media uh constituencies
Act a lot more like each other than they used to so local quirks that used to shape electoral outcomes are nowhere near as important as they were 20 or 30 years ago then there’s a dog that didn’t bark they are the proportions by which reform has underperformed its
Polling in all recent elections so you have this party there that might be a threat to the conservative party and unlike 2019 can only be a threat to the conservative party because there are no labor voters who will switch to reform because that sorting happened in
2019 but one of the big questions in British politics is if if reform can narrow that gap between its polling and its electoral performance the conservatives are in for an utter battering at the next general election because even in seats they would have been Clinging On to reform can take that
5 or 10% that they’d need to win so one of the big things that another of the reasons why the Tories insist on sort of coming out with a right-wing agenda is they see the greatest threat to their electoral viability from the right rather than from the left I suspect
They’re wrong I suspect they’ll end up losing a lot of seats to the lib Dems because they’ve taxed so far to the right but they are if I can put this politely in an un enviable position where they’re challenged from both left and right and it’s not obvious which way
The party should go and then there’s the question of leadership it is absolutely staggering that starma leads sunak on everything sunak remember was brought in on the assumption that his personal brand which was a lot more positively viewed by the public than the party brand would drag the party up nope the
Party has dragged him down his ratings now are the lowest they’ve ever been and this is a crucial one if you look at Jeremy Corbin the 59% who did not think Jeremy Corbin was ready to be prime minister this is the counterargument to those people who say
Karma is boring not that I’m going to argue that Karma isn’t boring but I’m going to argue that it doesn’t matter because he’s seen as safe okay and being seen as safe is essentially all that matters in this election because you just need to be
Seen as a safer Pair of Hands than the other guy and just to understand that it’s worth just spending a second on the myth of Boris Johnson if you look at those lines okay the dotted blue line is Theresa May during the election campaign of 2017 and her popularity the solid
Blue line is Boris Johnson’s popularity during the 2019 election the dotted red line is Jeremy Corbin in 2017 the solid red line is Jeremy Corbin in 2019 Boris Johnson every single point of the 2019 election campaign was significantly less popular than Theresa May had been at the
Equivalent point of the 2017 election so the 2019 election wasn’t about a surge of popularity for Boris Johnson it was about the absolute tanking in the population in the popularity of Jeremy Corbin okay and that’s why Starman not being feared is so fundamentally important if you’re not feared people
Will consider voting for you if you’re not feared and people think the government in power has absolutely screwed the country up then you should win the election so starma in that way is in a strong position there’s one more thing I want to talk about very very
Quickly which is and this will make no sense but I can circulate it to you that is a diagram showing all the various attempts there have been to deal with regional inequality in the United Kingdom okay I chose this for a German audience because of course in Germany post
Unification you put into place a policy framework and followed it over a period of decades in a bipartisan way okay that for a Brit makes you very weird because we are simply incapable of doing long-term policymaking in the United Kingdom at the moment and at the moment
The sad the sad truth about British politics at the moment I think is it’s not just the poisonous nature of interp party competition it is the fact of the failures of public policy and one of the reasons increasingly why we have in place in the United Kingdom dysfunctional public
Policies is you cannot do anything at all for the long term in an adversarial system of politics so take one of the big things the Health Service Health Service is a massive electoral issue in the United Kingdom and there’s a paradox in the United Kingdom Health Service at the moment because under this
Parliament the government has plowed money there’s been a massive increase in medical staff in our hospital since 2019 and productivity has plummeted okay why has productivity plummeted there are two main arguments one is we are still living the as effects of David Cameron’s austerity and austerity meant we’ll continue to pay
NHS staff but we won’t invest in kit so per capita we have far fewer scanners beds any of the high-tech equipment that other European countries have more of than we have so we have a lack of capital expenditure but secondly one of the reasons productivity in our health
Services has has gone so low is because we have no functioning social care system and there are over a 100,000 hospital beds occupied by people who should not be in hospital but we have nowhere to send them and the problem is our politics won’t let us fix social
Care in 2010 labor came out with a scheme for kill for dealing with social care the Tories labeled it a death tax and they dropped it in 2017 Theresa May came out with a very very similar scheme for ficing social care and labor called it a dementia tax and overnight
The Tories dropped it there is a premium in British politics for disagreeing with what the other side says and the problem for Britain is that if you think of any of the great issues of our time the challenge of Technology the challenge of social care the challenge of an aging population
The challenge of a climate crisis they are all things that require long-term policies to be addressed and we have a political system at the moment partly because of the polarization that we’ve seen and that has got worse since the referendum of 2016 that is simply incapable of delivering those long-term
Policy Solutions so I think that intersection and this is what I really wanted to do my lecture about so next time that intersection between politics and economic policy is absolutely fundamental in the United Kingdom at the moment we are almost a case study of how to do it badly so the starma government
Matters okay because it’s been so long since we’ve had a government that respected basic standards it’s been so long since we’ve had a government that displayed basic competence it’s been a long time since we had a government that has a sufficient period of time to put in place a rational program of politics
That can make a difference the danger is that if this government ends up being a one-term government it won’t deliver because it won’t have had long enough and faith in politics which is already at a historical low level in the United Kingdom will fall even further and that
Opens the way to the radicalization or the populis ization of the conservative party that we’re seeing going on at the moment so it’s a fairly salutary end to this lecture I’m afraid but I hope at least there have been some interesting things that you want to ask questions about I’ll leave it [Applause]
There can I speak now yeah okay uh thank you very much and and I think there was a lot in there for all of us uh to think about I would propose that I start us off with perhaps two questions about the conservatives Y and one is about turnout and one is about
The Dilemma you already mentioned so if you look at the Tamworth byelection right and the turnout there the turnout during the referendum was almost twice as high as during the by-election and I wonder what that means for the Tory party whether you know whether it was the Tories who stayed
Home were perhaps not wanting uh to vote so would that make a difference for the Tory strategy going forward into the general election so that would be Tamworth by election but more generally you already mentioned right so the Tores captured the red wall right they also have to appeal to voters in the
Southwest in Scotland right so red wall brexit voting Southwest uh Scotland often remain voting what does that mean for the Tor strategy do you think they will just not talk about brexit and what does it mean more generally in terms of the Tories going into the election later
This year Well answer the one first it seems to me that the Tories have decided that the main threat they have to face is the Reform Party and the secret Terror of every conservative MP is that Nigel farage comes out and campaigns fourthly for reform and whatever you
Think of Nigel farage he’s an incredibly effective communicator and campaigner and will increase their vure can I just interrup I presume everyone in the room knows that reform is the successor of ukip yeah it’s a successor of well it’s a successor of the brexit party which
Was the successor of and it’s a very weird I it’s a really interesting party because it’s not formally a political party it’s formally a limited company so it has no members and it has three shareholders and the whole thing is very very strange but it is polling at 10 to
15% which is a real headache for the conservatives because unlike a decade ago so a decade ago we had European elections that ukip won okay and that was a thing that really kicked off the the Tory Civil War on Europe uh actually of the great paradoxes of populism in
The United Kingdom is populism was allowed to flourish because of our membership of the European Union because European elections gave ukit money and profile and actually if you talk in private to people from reform they will say now I wish we were in the European
Union it would be so much what you think but hang on you were the brexit party you can’t say that uh so but back in 2014 ukip were taking votes from labor and the conservatives uh now they’re just taking votes from the conservatives so I think they’ve the conservative for the moment
At least have decided that the major threat is from the right and that is where they will focus uh the other thing of course is it’s always been the case that the right of the conservative party in Parliament has been a lot more willing to threaten Annihilation than the
Centrists the so-called One Nation group of conservative MPS is the liberal wing of the conservative party but they are as you’d expect from traditional liberal conservatives very well behaved very polite very nice and very unwilling to make a fuss now that’s not a great way to will political influence so they’ve
They’ve punched below their weight on turnout I mean byelection turnout is always low uh it is very hard to know who hasn’t uh voted what we do know is amongst undecided vote undecided voters are disproportionately 2019 conservative voters so the people who haven’t yet made up their minds how to vote voted
For Boris Johnson in 2019 uh so the government still faces a dilemma about how to enthuse these people it’s very hard to enthuse people when you’ve been in powered for 14 years and most people think you failed uh you know which is one of the reasons why they’re so desperate to find
Reasons to scare people about K starma so I imagine our election campaign which is going to be even more gruesome than usual will be full of a lot of personal stuff about K starma because the one way the tourist think they can get those voters out is by scaring them which is
What happened in 2019 a lot of people were scared to vote for uh Jeremy Corbin but I think you know you you there is a limit to how far you can generalize from a byelection if you want to watch a really sorted byelection we’ve got the
Worst one ever coming up on Thursday in Rochdale which is just going to be an embarrassment but uh I don’t think there’s much sucker for the conservatives I mean we don’t know what turnout will be obviously and you know there are two schools of thought one is
This is a 1997 without the enthusi iasm but it is a kick the Tores out thing and there’s a lot of evidence from local elections last year that tactical voting is about as high as it’s ever been in the UK so in the seats where the lib Dems were second to the conservatives
The lib Dem vote shot up the seats where the greens were second the green vat shot up so there is a there is strong evidence of a very very strong anti-tory sentiment among the elector at the moment excellent thank you Anand I imagine there are lots of questions in
The room so I would suggest we take three and then move on so I would start with Mark with Jesse and with a gentleman with the glasses in the middle of the room test test Mark Dawson I think a a microphone is coming your way which one
Of us get okay thank you Anna this was great so Christina asked about the conservatives I’d like to ask about Labor um and how labor are going to govern in your opinion and how they’re going to tackle some of these challenges because in a way your talk was quite depressing
On that score because I mean you talked about the challenge of brexit from from my point of view labor has nothing to say on the subject and it’s related to what you said which is basically they want to avoid it but also the larger problem you pointed to which is the
Dysfunctional political system the dysfunctional as a lawyer I’d say dysfunctional kind of constitutional order again labor seem completely uninterested in as far as I can see sort of changing the political system and making constitutional reforms and you know even even in things like sort of Integrity issues there’s a kind of reluctance to
To go big on these issues so what does that mean where might labor be going in a new ter in office where does tharma want to make his Mark and maybe you could just say a few words on on that before Anand replies uh Jesse are you asking about the lip Dems then
Actually I wasn’t going to ask about the lib demms I was going to ask about generations and what you think is happening with different age groups um so many topics to cover but I think that’s been an important element and we know that one of the factors in brexit
Was essentially which year people were born in I also wanted to tag on to the end of that an observation from Richard Corbett who we all know well but was a leading labor member of the European Parliament and Richards had a line for a while that he thinks brexit was a little
Bit like Prohibition in the states in the 1920s there was a moment when it was the issue it was going to solve everything break everything families split over it you were wet or you were dry it was attached to every domestic issue and then 10 years later it sort of wasn’t
You know it become irrelevant everybody knew it had failed and it just sort of fizzled now it’s different from brexit because it could be domestically cancelled very quietly whereas rejoining the EU whole set of other challenges that leads me to the question what do you think is the next cultural cleavage
Issue because I agree with you that culture is beating economy in terms of how British politics divides these days what’s the next thing that we all latch on to and fight each other about thank you Jesse and then we have the gentleman in the middle um who is currently turning his
Hat thank you uh my question would also be on labor and um especially to what extent the loss of the 28 billion uh for green Investments uh to what extent that would kind of affect Labor’s chances I mean obviously the out outgo of the election is kind of not determined but
It’s you know there’s a certain direction we’re all heading to and um how strong is that issue with voters uh is it important to them and also what would you say would be Labor’s number one policy priority once they do get into office simply from a technical
Point of view what are what do they want to do policy-wise uh Less on a general you know right now it’s whenn the election what is the first thing that uh K will tell his chief of staff uh when he gets into number 10 and then two questions on
Labor the first about how they will govern last about green politics and then one question about generations and prohibition okay on labor this is where I lose my chance of appear uh what labor do when they get into power is panic okay you think back to
1997 Blair got in with a majority of over 100 and was like a rabbit in the headlights for four years because they didn’t dare do anything in case they lost next time and I fear that it’s going to be a little bit like this this time because there’s precious little in
The way of policy pledges I mean there’s some stuff uh so you know they’re thinking of having a statut ethics commissioner in in terms of your answer for standards in politics it’s limited but are things they’ve said they’ll do but they’ve reigned in on some of their grander Ambitions the 28 billion which
Is actually 20 billion because the Tores are already spending eight let me say a couple of things about that because it’s quite indicative of where we are even if labor were to spend that 20 plus 8 annually for the next Parliament investment would be falling in the UK because our investment performance has
Been so utterly rubbish so even if did this we’d be on a downward trajectory okay so the argument that we can’t afford this strikes me as as a weird one it is pretty cowardly and it struck me that when they introduced the policy they done something that was really
Important which was that they generated a progrowth narrative for pret zero policies so we weren’t in the world of you know the good old European People’s Party where it becomes a sorted trade-off between how much money you have and whether we worry about the climate crisis it became a positive some
Game and they did that rather well I thought uh so I found the dropping of the Pledge really depressing uh they’ve still got a promise for completely green Fuel and the deadline of 2030 how they reach that is anyone’s guess but it is very hard to see what they’ll do in substantive
Policy terms when they come in at the moment apart from being very very cautious how much do you think will voters care bilon number itself I mean that in a sense ties into the generational thing uh I think they were probably silly to put a number on it because it gave the
Conservatives a weapon uh so I think it will matter in so far as the conservatives can weaponize it rather than labor voters Beemo its passing if you see what I mean because labor I mean it does seem to me really tragic that this year of all years labor are still playing defense on
The economy that is to say we have to be ultra cautious all the Tories will weaponize it because ever there was a government that would struggle to weaponize the issue of economic competence it’s the one that had list trust amongst its numbers uh so anyway I mean that’s slightly depressing in terms
Of what labor would do I don’t think they’ll do much on the EU uh they’ll Tinker maybe an SPS agreement maybe a relatively meaningless security treaty with the European Union the problem is the only thing in terms of EU policy that would generate growth is something that politically we cannot talk about in
The United Kingdom at the moment which is the single market and I think this I think the labor government will be a government dominated by Rachel Reeves and the treasury and I think the treasury will very soon get bored of stuff that isn’t doing anything for us economically an SPS agreement will be
Great in all sorts of ways not least with the Northern Ireland border but it won’t generate meaningful aggregate grow growth for the country as a whole uh and I think it’s absolutely the case I mean we have this brown commission so Gordon Brown wrote this typically Gordon Brown
Very long word worthy report about constitutional reform uh my hunch is labor are going to ignore it and desperately try and persuade Gordon that they’re not so that he doesn’t become problematic I just cannot see in a first term a labor party that’s been out of power 14 years suddenly decides to give
Power away to the regions or to undertake significant constitutional reform because there’ll be too many other pressing priorities to be honest so I don’t see much happening there but I think starma will make a lot of the fact that he at least follows the rules that do exist as a way of
Differentiating himself from the conservatives on the the generations thing it’s really interesting I mean it’s really interesting because you know if you watch you know I was amazed to find out that Builders would have won by more if the whole Dutch electorate was under 30 which is Unthinkable in a UK
Context because actually young people do not vote for the populist right uh young people do sometimes vote green and I don’t think that’s a particular issue for the labor party now but it might be in future elections because one of the things Jeremy Corbin did was he killed
The Green Party by attracting all those young voters the one massive issue that is an issue across Western democracies and even in polling in the United States is a massive issue is the is the electoral cleavage between those with a University degree and those without uh that’s something I don’t think we spend
Enough time thinking about or worrying about because it is very very obvious in terms of uh the UK bear in mind in terms of young people as well we don’t have many of them and their turnout is low I mean we’re we’re an old country okay so actually just just
Demographically you know a friend of mine who worked for the British election study figured out that something you know 140% of under 30s would have had to vote remain for us to stay in the European Union because they’re just not that many of them compared to older
People uh so the the dice are are pretty much loaded against the those people in terms of brexit fizzling out I mean firstly a brexit won’t fizzle out it’s not prohibition why won’t it fizzle out for two reasons one because stuff will keep happening so this October the
European Union is going to introduce its esta system right which will hit Brits which means that Brits going into the euve got to be fingerprinted and whatever have a massive KnockOn effect on holiday traffic on trade and it’ll be another brexit crisis secondly the sad
Fact about brexit is well it’s not a sad fact it’s a fact the fact is if you are NE if you are the neighbor of a continental sized economy you’re going to spend an awful lot of your waking hours wondering about what that economy is doing because what
It does will shape what you do I mean the Canadians worry about the US the recent example in the UK is the carbon border adjustment mechanism that the EU is introducing and suddenly we’ve woken up to the fact bloody hell if we don’t have our own there’s a massive uh export
Duty on our steel export to the European Union and that’s nothing we’ve done that’s just the European Union changing its rule book so brexit will continue to fizzle away because we will continue to have to take note of what the EU does what the next big culture issue is I
Don’t know I’m just hoping to God it’s not Gaza which it might be thank you Anand we also have an online audience Linda and Matt do we have questions from the online audience no okay uh then online audience ah not at Hatty necessarily um so I would
Suggest the lady at the back with her curly hair and the greenish jumper uh the gentleman at the very front with the gloves uh and the gentleman in the Middle with a black hoodie this is a good tip to wear distinctive clothing we a pig to
Yeah uh I wanted to ask why you think that labor is so reluctant to properly tax the rich um it seems to me that that would be quite a popular uh topic you know that you could really get people on board and the question about young people where you
Say Obviously you say there are too few of them to make much of an impact but where we know in the the brexit referendum that a lot of them you know it was the day after I mean I don’t know if that’s a cliche but the day after
They look to see what is the EU and weren’t actually interested do you think that that has a has had an impact on them we know that a lot more people were studying politics at school after brexit hello uh I have two questions uh one of uh about the energy part I think
Wor following is that you I recently saw something about the the Prime Minister son said something very recently that uh maybe nuclear uh energy is the medicine for for is the antidote for for for this country uh without with all the the polemics involving the energy transition uh phasing out so I
Wanted to know what you think this position uh shows about the the the views of the how the the ruling class sees the country and other things that you mention in the in the beginning of how the the brexit was not about class and uh how the for a long time like
There was no prime minister being Noble for many decades so I wanted to know if you think this this kind of perennial issues in in the United Kingdom as class still exists and show some some influence in the society um hi there thank you very much for your talk uh find it really
Interesting um I’ve got a question on the Tory party so you spent a lot of your talk talking about how the biggest threat is from reform they’re really worried about that and it’s going to be a lot about kind of cultural Wars possibly wokeism um however this weekend
We just saw Lee Anderson get kicked out of the Tory party for frankly islamophobic uh comments which you would think would be pandering to the right however Russy sunak decided to him out which seems counter to everything that you were saying about the Tory party moving further to the right so I was
Hoping you could just sort of expand on on what you think about that um and yeah the the thought process behind rushi sunak thank you all right I’m going to do these in Reverse I know I always do questions in reverse order I’m going to
Do it in reverse order uh I mean there’s moving to the right and there’s being racist openly racist about an individual so you know remember Richi sunak has got a coalition to manage and part of that half of his MPS are screaming at him to get rid of Anderson once and for all
Because what he said was totally unacceptable rishy sunak responded in a rishy sunak way which was to basically irritate every constituency right so he’s irritated the right by getting rid of Lee Anderson he’s irritated the left by saying the problem was he didn’t apologize he wasn’t being racist so he’s
Irritated the left he’s man he basically irritated every section of his party and that is not atypical of this prime minister he’s just not very good at managing the politics but I don’t think there’s a contradiction between me saying they’re going to touch on some of these issues like immigration small
Boats and things like that uh but also the fact that there has to be a line I mean they have to dis I mean at the end of the day they have to distinguish themselves from reform as well uh and so they have a discre offering and they’ve got a very wide
Electorate that includes liberal Tories who find Mar of farage offensive uh one of the curious things about Britain at the moment of course is that we do have complete control over our immigration policy but we have a government that is criticizing numbers that are direct result of the policies
It has put into place which is absolutely surreal uh but that’s just where we are now uh class is still an issue class still pervades our politics but the link between class and party has weakened so for instance what the polling shows is that the working class
Are not flocking back to labor in red wall seats so class will work differently in the future but my God class is still prevalent I mean just go to a lunch in London and you can I mean you can feel it in especially if you’re British you can just you know my you
Could tap into all my insecurities by having a conversation with me about class and that I think is archetypically British in in many ways nuclear absolutely nucle we’re not like Germany we are all in favor of nuclear the problem again is goes back to what I was saying earlier about short time Horizons
And there’s a wonderful quote there’s a clip you can find it in 2010 Nick CLE was caught on camera saying uh there’s no point investing in nuclear because it will only come on stream in 2019 and of course that click went viral in 2019 Z you know uh it’s it’s very
Very hard to get our politicians to do things that are longterm in nature certainly things where you won’t feel the results during one parliamentary term uh nuclear tax uh labor also want to be the party of business and that is taking precedence over anything else in our country at the
Moment on the taxing the rich thing I would say a fundamental issue that I just again don’t think our politics is capable of getting to grips with is not income inequality but wealth inequality uh and wealth inequality particularly through property prices and house values is absolutely pernicious in
The United Kingdom at the moment I mean you see it you know in my line of work you see it very very clearly because because you know if we if we at Kings want to appoint a sort of mid-career academic at the University of Sheffield you will leave them with a
Choice of leaving their six-bedroom house with a massive Garden for a two-bedroom flat in the center of London with their three kids uh and there’s no way around that I mean the price so actually you know if I Were King for a Day I would order a binding review of council tax
Banss uh because our properties are taxed in so far as they are taxed on the basis of 1990 one values which is obviously stupid and you would give the resultant uh income to local councils to pay for services that are massively underfunded but actually just saying
That out loud it is utterly obvious that that can never happen even though it is so clearly unambiguously the right thing to do I mean you know I would go to the wall for that argument I don’t see there is any counterargument so I think we need to
Start thinking about taxing wealth and taxing wealth more effectively one of the great power I don’t know whether this is true in Germany we have strategies for growth we have strategies for dealing with the gleen transition we have never to my knowledge had a strategy for
Tax and our tax system is an absolute uh it is so complicated so contradictory marginal tax rates if you take the income if you take welfare into account for earners between 50 and 70,000 touch 100% uh it is just a dysfunctional system but actually I don’t know why I’m wasting my
Breath because nothing’s going to happen so anyway I leave that uh kids and it’s very interesting you know what happens to Future Generations I suspect that brexit becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy I don’t think you know there are a lot of kids around now beoning the fact that they can’t travel to Europe
And they can’t do arasmus I wonder whether kids in 10 years time will even be thinking about that because the world they’ve grown up in will be a world where that wasn’t on the table it’ be a world where actually why not go to Australia why why not go to the United
States because actually it’s the same Visa process it might even be cheaper uh and actually you know that sort of I just a stupid personal anecdote the first time I went into railing uh I had it was early 1980s I had an Indian passport okay and it transpired that travel going into
Railing would cost me four times more in visas than it would cost me for uh the ticket itself so I got a British passport uh and I think people’s behavior will change I think people will look elsewhere and I think actually you can’t simply assume young people are fervently
Pro-european and so young people in 10 years time will be fervently Pro European actually young people in 10 years time might just be far far less familiar with Europe than young people are now we are out of time but we started a little late so I would propose perhaps
Two more questions if that’s okay an not so the lady at the front next to uh Julia and the lady with the sort of uh dark reddish orange jumper that be this one um thank you so much um hello hello um so I just wanted to ask quickly about
The two remaining very remaining parties that supposedly still are there the lib Dems and the S SMP but the lib Dems don’t actually even seem to want to talk about brexit either after their um 2019 election result and the S SMP are in this kind of post sturgeon cycle I’m
Wondering what role you think those parties that you know are still on paper very much Pro rejoin actually um what what role they could play in a future Parliament whether they’ll wield influence in that debate well let me start with the S SMP and can I sorry we
Can I answer this one first right I’ve got a very bad memory and there’s more likelihood I’ll remember your question if I do it this way uh the S&P are going to lose seats by the look of it I what’s happening in Scotland is really interesting the support for Independence
Has remained constant okay it’s 50/50 but the number of people who think Independence is the major issue at the next election has dropped which means that there are former S&P voters who think the priority is to get the Tories out so that’s what’s changed they’ll have less influence as a results though
I cannot stress enough just how crucial the next government is in terms of the debate over Scotland because if a starma government fails to deliver for Scotland the S&P go into the next election saying this isn’t a tour issue this is an England issue in the same way they’ve
Done over the Gaza vote this is English parties not caring about Scotland so starma has to deliver and be seen to deliver for Scotland on the EU front it’s interesting because the the S&P got a lot of push back for the paper they published on the border which was
Absolute magical thinking one of there’s a book to be written on brexit paradoxes and one of the great brexit paradoxes is the SNP who opposed brexit and argued against brexit and said this is going to be awful for trade and whatever are now using the arguments the dup used during
The brexit process to say the EU will never impose a border between us and England don’t be so ridiculous we could use technology to over you know all that stuff all that nonsense is now being spouted by the S&P about the Border because actually there have been studies
That have shown that if Scotland becomes independent and joins the European Union it will have a massive impact on the Scottish economy because of the border between England and Scotland so my sense is there soft pedling a little bit on this at the moment and talking about
Other things uh but ultimately the party policy is to rejoin the European Union Scotland as an independent state inside the European Union will remain part of their uh prospectus the lib Dems it’s really interesting because here’s a little challenge if you go to this website of the lib Dems there is a
Policy paper outlining their official party policy which is joining the single Market as a first step towards rejoining the European Union and I challenge you to find it okay because it’s hidden somewhere well last time I looked it was quite hidden and that’s because they’ve decided not to talk about it I imagine
Because focus groups have said you know we will we will shoot any politician who talks about brexit during this election campaign right because people don’t want to hear about it again it’s partly because the libdems are campaigning to win a number of leave voting seats in
The Southwest you can’t go to Devon and Cornwall and be remain Central I don’t think and hope to win and actually the libdems will have a series of national of of local campaigns some of which dare I say it in apologies to Liams might be contradictory because that’s how it
Looks like they’re planning to run this campaign really big and interesting question is after the election if the lids get 20 to 30 MPS brexit is a really easy stick to beat the labor party the labor government with at that point and trying attract uh wavering voters from touris
And labor then if the economy doesn’t seem to doing very well so it might be that the lib demems come back to it but they won’t before the election I don’t think uh and whether they do after will be I mean the scale of proe activism post election is a really interesting
Question because businesses will feel unmuzzled and will talk out more than they did under the conservatives the Parliamentary labor party might become fractious about the EU because you’ve got individuals like Stella crey who’s the head of labor for Europe uh who might speak out more and
The LI Dems might speak out more so it might be that the nature of the brexit debate changes but it will only be after an election I think rather than before it sorry thank you Anand a final question of the evening perhaps a short question and a short answer thank you
Very much sorry no no no oh no no no that wasn’t um so I guess in general the picture that youve painted of politics currently in the UK is a bit as though everyone is very deep within the pathless woods um and I’m just curious
As to maybe what your outlook is for the evolution specifically with respect to how parties Define themselves um do you see more of a reversion towards or increasing reversion towards things being value based and if so how does that look for policy development or um going back to a more policy based
Identity and maybe is it differential depending on which part’s in in power the really honest but rubbish answer is I don’t know and it depends uh it depends on what happens I mean one of the Striking things about politics at the moment is it really is genuinely impossible to say who the conservative
Party is for because they’ve got this sort of unwieldy base uh and it will take contradictory policies to to appeal to different bits of it I mean I must admit one of the one of the victims of the last 10 years has been what used to be my utter enduring
Blind Faith in first P the post as an electoral system uh and you know I hate to change my mind so in so far as I’m doing it I’m doing it very very slowly and reluctantly uh but actually you know we have an electoral system that has failed
To give us in the famous phrase strong and stable governments and if it can’t even do that and if it promotes the kind of adversarialism that means we’re inherently short term we’ve got to think about it again because parties identify themselves in Contra distinction to each other fundamentally uh and whilst that works
As an electoral Tool uh you know we there was a thing in the newspapers the other day that labor are going to clamp down on even more forms of hunting right which to put it mly isn’t a national priority but is a very good way of giving red meat well
Probably that’s the wrong analogy for anti- hunt Sabers giving vegetarian meals to their base and annoying the Tories that’s the only purpose of doing it okay there’s no National interest and there is too much of that in our politics at the moment so actually it is a big question how our parties Define
Themselves the problem is you know if if you spend enough time with people in political parties they are tribal so there is absolutely zero Prospect of a labor government coming in and legislating for proportional representation because it would be the death of the labor party as well as the death of the conservative
Party o that’s a way to finish an and thank you so much I think we’ve covered a lot of ground right from uh political parties strategies and definitions British society and ended with a with a point on political institutions even thank you very much to everyone in the room and Online for
Being uh with us a special thanks to the jdc for organizing the event and to civa for supporting us and an extra special thanks to Anand I hope you enjoyed discussing brexit with a Berlin audience nightmare I didn’t enjoy discussing I know but you know 10 years on you’re still you’re still doing
Brexit and I presume over dinner you may be asked brexit is for Life Won’t fizzle out uh I guess we will talk more brexit later thank you so much Anand