The decline of modern Britain — where did it all go so wrong?

ABC Listen, Podcasts, Radio. Music and

For the last decade or so, we've looked on as the United States has radically changed itself. But the UK has been changing too. The British people, famous for their aversion to radical and emotional politics, Have embarked on a course that was supposed to take them back to the comforting certainties of the past. But instead has brought them into an uncertain new world. And all of this looks deeply strange to people like me who've lived in Britain and thought they knew the place.

It began with the huge shock of Brexit, which has delivered almost none of the benefits its backers claimed it would, and led to a drop in living standard. Then there was the constant turnover of failed British prime ministers, including Liz Truss, whose tenure in office was famously outlived by a head of letters.

In twenty twenty four, British Labour won government and a massive landslide on a sliver of the vote, which raised expectations that things would settle down. But now Keir Starmer is hanging on by his fingernails. And for those looking to the monarchy for a sense of continuity and national unity, well that's not going too well either. So what on earth has happened to the land of toast and tea?

Ian Dunt is here today. Ian is a British political journalist with a reputation as an independent thinker, and he appears regularly on Radio National's late night live. Ian's also a man who understands how political dogma can lead a whole nation into a deep hole, and how the natural response of the dogmatist is to just keep digging. Ian's most recent book is called How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn't. Hello, Ian. Hello. I was in London just before Christmas.

And things always feel a bit like they're falling apart in London at any one time, but it felt really bad when I was there. There was a kind of a obvious tension, despair. Is this just business as usual in London or is the Malays in Britain more serious and more widespread than Fundamentally there is a British malaise which is a core component of our personality. And we're very suspicious of it when we see it in others.

I have to say I like that about Britain too. That's one of the things I like about it. Yeah, no, I f I find happiness and optimism quite alienating personally. And so y I don't think there's ever been a period, you know, I'm sure even like the periods that we look back on as golden ages of sort of British history, let's say like you know, triumph over the Nazis and the creation of a the NHS, you know, forty five to fifty.

I think I I imagine at the time everyone was just complaining if I know they were just complaining because when you read George Orwell or something from that period, he's not sat there going, We triumphed over the Nazis, we built the NHS He's saying, Isn't the Labour government tedious and awful? Why is everyone so miserable and why does nothing work?

But the reality of where we are politically in Britain was really set starting in two thousand and eight with the financial crash. Very few countries have the kind of systematic problems in their economy that we have. We have had a productivity crisis since two thousand and eight.

Uh that's getting close to a whole generation. That's basically actually to be honest, that's basically my whole working life. The economy has just been stagnating. Basically comatose on a table. Rarely going into recession, but never really getting out of it either. You can't grow the pie.

So everything you give to someone, let's say you need more special educational needs provision in school, means or you know to bolster your defense because you no longer have a reliable security partner in the US. Well, that has to come from somewhere else.

Either taxation or you take it out of another department. That makes politics really fraught. Things like prisons people don't really care about. At least trains they care about. At least schools and hospitals they care about. Prisons they don't. So those areas, those unguarded budgets, just start getting sliced away and cut up until prisons turn into this very chaotic space.

releasing prisoners who are more brutalized than they were when they went in, and your society starts to degrade uh in pretty significant ways. And that is where we've ended up In your most recent book you say that the conversation is in Britain at the moment is about the the problems with the education system, the health system, the transport system, the prison system. There's complex reasons why they're in trouble, as you say.

But really ultimately they all point in the same direction or the source of the problem points in the same direction to Westminster, the home of the British Parliament, the British Government. How systemic is this problem? Extremely severe. And we you know what, and this we've really had for quite a long time. This kind of image, oh the Westminster model, don't the Brits do it very well, very careful law making, it's all complete nonsense.

We write very bad law. And we write very bad law because we pick very poor people to write it and to scrutinize it. You look at the selection process for MPs in the UK. Like I I spoke to hundreds of MPs. And each time you ask them, at any point When you were selected as the candidate, did anyone ask you how you were going to scrutinize legislation? Which is after all, like we can't forget, the job of the MP. That's w their core constitutional function.

Not a single one was able to tell me that anyone had asked them that question at any time. Why? Loads of them sit in safe seats, so when they're picked as a candidate, they're basically being picked as an MP. And who are they picked by? The local party. They're picked by party activists. Basically people with very firm political views who like spending their Sundays rainy

cold Sundays cramming leaflets through mailboxes. You know, that's a very specific kind of human being. Right. And they're not really interested in scrutinizing legislation. They just want other people like them who also want to spend their Sundays doing that sort of thing. And you get these party political, really pretty ignorant, you know, highly obedient thinkers who do what the party tells them to do.

And then they sit in the commons and legislation comes out and the government's got a majority and what scrutiny is happening? Nothing. It's just rubber stamp it. Rubber stamp it. where there's more of a mixture in the parliament, it's harder to get your legislation through where you've got to convince people of your proposals. And that means that the opposition party will suddenly then go, Oh, I accept that you're trying to achieve X

I have concerns ABC, address them as part of the method of how it's done. That process of the small improvements of legislation that makes good law, that does not take place in Britain, at least in the House of Commons. Because of that we get bad law, because of that we get bad public services, because of that we get unfixed problems in the economy, because of that we get a failing political problem.

What about the expertise of ministers who may spend two, three years in the portfolio and then go into somewhere else? Honestly, the days when they used to spend two, three years in the portfolio are now a kind of halcyon dream. You know, we used to laugh we used to laugh at the degree of churn when they had two years. I mean we've had twenty five housing secretaries.

Since the year two thousand had one housing secretary every year. We've had periods where we've cycled through three to five education in the health secretaries over the course of one year because of partly the degree of just sort of chaos in the system, but partly because there's no incentive on Prime Ministers to pick people according to any kind of specialist knowledge or experience or deep domain understanding.

So instead what do they pick for? They pick in the same way that the parties pick the candidate, they pick for obedience and loyalty. Who's been loyal to me to keep me in position? And then suddenly when there's a threat to the authority, they do a reshuffle. And every time they do a reshuffle, all of the business of government freezes in all departments,'cause civil servants don't know who's going to be running the department in a couple of weeks' time.

And then people get moved around, and usually they get moved around just at the point where they've actually developed enough knowledge to understand the subject area that they're ostensibly supposed to be governing. So, you know, they've had eighteen months. Maybe they've got to grips with something about housing policy and that's the exact point that you move them and get someone in who doesn't know anything again. And then we sit back after a quarter of a century

of crisis in housing and go, My God, no one can afford housing. Young people are completely alienated from their economy. They're voting in all sorts of really dramatic ways because they're not invested in the economy, because they're still renting, even though they're now in their thirties, they're going into their forties.

How extraordinary that people are willing to vote for such vigorous, violent change and you think, yeah, because there was a policy problem that you have failed to fix because of the inbuilt incentives within the governance system. In Australia we had a major change of government in nineteen eighty-three when Labor got elected under Bob Hawke, and another big change of government in ninety-six when John Howard got elected. And on both occasions, these oppositions came into government.

After spending years in opposition using that time to develop a whole set of policies that they really cared about. And they used think tanks to do that or similar organizations or policy units within the party to develop that.

So once they came into government they had a whole suite of policies they wanted to enact. These days it doesn't happen. These days we get governments elected and the first thing the minister does is hold an inquiry. Is it the same thing in the UK? It was the same thing this election. But to be fair to Keostarmer for Labour, he'd you know Labour had lost.

A thumping, thumping defeat in 2019. It was the kind of defeat that you're out for two terms. One term to try and fix it, another term to become a vote. No one was really expecting it to change so quickly to go into government. Now you take when Tony Blair got into power, he'd had three terms out of power that had Neil Kinnock John Smith, then Tony Blair, they'd launched all of those inquiries. Social justice forums.

had years to bake it in to come up with a series of policy proposals. There's a real enthusiasm going into government then. You've got stuff you want to do, things you want to change, things you want to improve with the country. And really you have the time outside of government Once you're in government, it's just you're just being buffeted by events.

It's just remorseless firefighting of events. Once you're in government, you need the space in opposition. It really matters that opposition parties think deeply about what they want to do, because once they're in government, it's much harder to find that thinking room. In Australia we had this thing and I'm not quite sure you have the same thing in the UK, Westminster Parliament.

Well we have these questions that Australians called Dorothy Dixes. I can't quite remember where that term comes from. But essentially it means at some point that morning the whip will come around to a backbencher's office, hit them round their head and say, Right. Your job is to stand up and ask the the Minister for Cats and Dogs a question saying uh

Can the minister please explain why he's so good looking and such a genius and been so successful in his portfolio of cats and dogs and getting more uh you know and made the nation generally a a happy utopian place? And uh the the Minister for Cats and Dogs

Rises to his or her seat and says, I thank the honourable backbencher for his question. Do you get you get that sort of nonsense in this in the concert? And then if you do it enough, or as a result of having done it, you'll be made a parliamentary private secretary. And this is an extraordinary position because it's a position that means nothing, involves nothing, that you're not paid for it. But it technically

puts you as part of the government operation. You're essentially like a kind of secretarial function for ministers, including junior ministers. You're not formally a minister, you're just a sort of prefect of MPs. And that allows the government to take basically half usually about half of the parliamentary party to add like dozens and dozens more MPs and say you're not allowed to vote against the WIP.

'Cause you're technically part of the government. We're not paying you, you have no functions, you know, but you're technically part of the government. So you're n let alone i if there was any fear that any of these guys would think independently and be prepared to vote against their own government. In this case, they're no longer even allowed to do so because they've been so loyal that there's been a formalization of the relationship.

In Australia we have preferential voting. You go into the polling booth and you number your candidates in the list of preference, one, two, three, four, five, six or what have you, for the House of Reps. Similar thing, a way more complicated and much longer voting form for the Senate in Australia. But the UK has this much more simple, much more elegant system called First Past the Post. Tell me how first past the post really distorts democratic outcomes in in the parliament.

Well for a start, in the most brutal way possible, which is that it doesn't count the votes. So we ignore about two thirds of the votes in every election. We don't have to be a big thing. What do you what do you mean? First past the post, the only vote that counts is the votes for the winning candidate.

So first of all, you lose all the votes for people who just didn't vote for the winning candidate. They have no representation. We act like politics is about winning. It isn't. Voting is supposed to be about representation, okay? Not about just triumph over you know, one man triumphs over everything. But then you also lose the franchise if you vote for the winning candidate after the point that they've won. So the first vote after victory is a wasted vote.

And what you'll see, especially in urban situations. Especially for Labour historically, is just piling up of votes, thousands and thousands of extra Labour votes. Well they do no good. They are disenfranchised votes. If you'd spread those votes around the local area, around the country, those would elect more Labour MPs. But in fact you don't get MPs on that basis. So firstly we basically just ignore a huge amount of votes. The second thing it does though, I think is even more pernicious.

Which is that it's organized, its whole function, its whole purpose is to hand the government a huge majority. in the House of Commons. A strong government. That's what it's supposed to provide. And what that gives you is stupid government. Because for the reasons I outlined earlier.

Opposition parties can't really revise in the commons. Doesn't matter what they say. They can go stand up and become a modern day Cicero with their rhetoric. Makes no difference. The government's just gonna do whatever it wants to do. So what do opposition parties do instead? They can't be constructive. So they have to stand up and be like, You know what?

You're just a shower of useless bastards. That's all that they can possibly say to the government. They hope that they get a clip in the evening news, they hope that someone uses the clip on social media. But nothing constructed. The formative opposition rather than constructive opposition. And so you get poor legislation because of the election.

There's also a thing called tactical voting as a result of first past the post. I mean th I might be up by a couple of percentage points here, but off the top of my head is I recall Kiet Starmer in the last election won Two thirds of the seats in the British Parliament on what thirty three percent, thirty five percent of the vote. So he won two thirds of the seats with a third of the vote. This is a result of what's called tactical voting. How does that work in the UK?

Yeah, well it's also partly a result of the thing I was telling you about as well, which is as a political party, you're just trying to get the most effective geographical distribution of your vote. You're trying not to get too many surplus votes in any particular seat'cause it's wasted resources. Then one of the ways that happens is tactical voting. Just like you're a lefty.

You have to think, who's gonna win here? You know, my main aim is stopping the Conservative Party from winning. Do I really care whether it's the Lib Dems or Labour or the Greens? Probably not. And so you pick whichever party is most likely to do it. And in some seats

Like where I grew up, it's really obvious that that's the Liberal Democrats. In some seats it's really obvious that it's Labour. But in a lot of seats it's not obvious which party it is. And so the danger of that system you get really split progress particularly progressive votes. You know, you'll get thirty percent for Labour, thirty percent for the Greens, thirty five percent for the Conservatives, right? And even though in that constituency there is a clear majority

that are progressive voters. The minority Conservative Party can get in simply because they're monopolising one side of the vote. It's a really dangerous and very, very irrational way to organise your democracy. There's an odd joke in Australia that says

that we have a Liberal Party that's right wing, a national party that's strictly regional, a one nation party that's into division, a Green Party that's got a fair bit of red in it. And a Labour Party that hasn't worked today in its life. Um Nothing is what it says it is on the box in this

Very annoying to me. Having written a book called How to Be a Liberal, it's very frustrating to me that they've used that word for the party and that There's about nine different political identities associated with the word liberal. How do you want to uphold that idea of what it means to be a liberal? Liberalism is the belief in the freedom of the individual. And the distinction between it and most other political ideologies is that that is an instruction on how to think, but not what to think.

So for instance, if you have a right wing view, and there are right wing liberals, right? You can think, Well, what is the freedom of the individual? Freedom of the individual is that I don't get taxed, right? Like you the government doesn't get to take my money.

And a left wing view on that is, well, actually we do have to interfere in individuals' property rights because that's how for instance we create, you know, good education, good health outcomes and that means that people have the capacity to become autonomous thinking adults and that expands human freedom and individual freedom.

If people are dying of preventable diseases for lack of health care, then that seems like a really pretty draconian restriction on their personal freedom. That's the left wing view of liberalism. Those schools are just as old as each other. You can see both of them in Adam Smith. in John Locke. They both go back about four hundred years. You know, neither one of them is more legitimate than the other. And so what you see internationally is that countries just embrace different

aspects of that idea of liberalism. So if you're in the US, classically if you say I'm a liberal, they'll think that you're very left wing. If you're in France, you say I'm a liberal, they'll think you're very, very right wing. It just means you're a sort of Anglo Saxon economic model.

In Australia there's the shadowing by virtue of the party. And in the UK it exists in this material zone where it's used much more broadly and I think more accurately. But nevertheless, I mean I read like two summers ago. I read two books on trans issues, one by a very pro-trans writer and one by a very anti-trans writer, and both of them said that liberals were the enemy and the problem. So you know, even there it's a pretty mercurial messed up sort of universe.

You have an allergy to dogmatism. That comes from your own life experience. You're come two tours in your youth through different forms of strong dogmatic belief. The first one was in your teen years for a while you were you were a fundamentalist Christian, would it be fair to say that? Yeah, I think so. How did that happen to you? I had a sort of an emotional breakdown at around thirteen.

Which I think is more common than people make out us. Just this point where the brain becomes adult enough to comprehend the world. And then very quickly starts asking, well, I Wha what's the point? What's the point of all this? And it's not immediately obvious that there's an answer to that question. I certainly don't have one now. Uh but you're sort of a bit too young to handle the emotional impact of the absence of an answer.

So I was really quite ravaged by sort of by existential crisis and bleakness and just lack of point, really. And then I ended up on some summer camp, you know, archery and go karts and sort of things like that.

And they were quite good about it. They were quite sensible. I mean they they didn't do it too hard. They were not really to blame here. But you know, they take you off at one point during the thing and sort of, you know, tell you about how much Jesus loves you and there's a point to all this and there's meaning. Trem I I remember at the time it felt like a life rock.

You know, just gr grab the life rough because that makes things quite clear. There's a forward line of direction, and we can get rid of some of this crushing doubt that you're experiencing. But my interpretation of this stuff, I suppose again because you're full of these hormones

was much more vicious than the one that they put it. You know, within a six months of this stuff I was saying things which now I think back and obviously shudder, like, you know, if you don't believe you're gonna go to hell and anyone that, you know, if you're having sex before marriage it was all very it had to get very black and white and brutal and

Did you feel that self-righteousness or were you overcoming some kind of inner doubt as you said that? I remember feeling the self-righteousness. But then to be fair, I I wouldn't necessarily say that I've lost that given the way that I'm talking right now about politics.

So I mean partly this is you know the personality there's a certain extent to which the personality is. What about the attractive people that are in your your Christian youth group with you? What's going on here? Could anything make me doubt God? Yes. It was a two years of

of pretty brutal sort of stuff that I I'm surprised that so many friends and family stuck with me during that period. But I suppose at the time it was just like a necessary way of getting over that crushing sense of existential doubt. Then from there you put that completely aside. And became a Marxist. Yeah. An atheistic Marxist or a Christian. Oh no, no, God no atheistic Marxist.

And how doctrinaire were you as a as a Marxist back then? Extremely Oh really? Wow, you were one of those guys handing out socialist worker papers, that kind of thing? I spent every Saturday for about three years on Southampton High Street handing out socialist worker party newspapers. Exactly the same. I embraced that dogma as eagerly as I had religion. And you it's the things you end up doing but my memories of how I behaved when I was a Marxist or of

constant use. I wish that they were less useful in this world, but they're of constant use and I see this behavior all the time. So for instance Your primary thought is your tribal identity. I am a Marxist. I am representing Marxism. The end justifies the means. We must triumph. This is what we this is what we are. That's what my identity is. So then something new happens.

Let's say Oh Tony Blair goes to war in Kosovo. Okay. That was one of the things that happened when I was in this party in nineteen ninety nine. A really brave thing to do. And that was not American led, that was British led, getting the Americans involved. and it just sort of doesn't fit It doesn't fit your category on your assumptions. And so you're just sort of waiting for someone to give you the Marxist explanation.

You don't want the truth. You're not a truth seeking person at this stage. You're looking for ways of protecting the dogmatic shell that has encased your mind. And so you look for these answers. You look for the same, like USSR. Why did the USSR turn into this tyrannical, oppressive government? And then they'll say, Well, it's because it wasn't really communism, it was state capitalism and they'll give you a whole series of explanations that all fit

Whatever the Trotskyist analysis of of the scenario was, and you'll you'll act towards it the same way that I did when I first encountered Jesus, right? It's the life rock.

Oh, I experienced doubt for a moment. There was a quiver. But now you've given me the thing that just lets me go okay, this is all fine. At no point are you engaged in truth, at no point are you engaged in consensus or pragmatism or trying to understand where other people are coming from or trying to build solutions with others. You were just engaged in the process of erecting the sturdiest walls for your dogma. And because I see so much of that around me now.

I've become quite grateful that I have those memories and that realisation of of how it worked when I was a child. There are more than a few hardline right-wing commentators in Australia that in their youth were Marxists, Trotsky's Maoists, and anarchists. And then they have they've popped up on the right.

Seemingly having not taken much time to pause to reflect, but they're just as certain they're right now as they were back then. And it seems to me that's a s it's a really a political temperament that's into certainty.

So really nothing much has really changed. They've just got a different bunch of toys in their show bag this time, their ideological show bag. And the crucial thing of what you just said is the word certainty. And that makes it almost more of a mental type and a thought process than it does anything ideological.

They need certainty. There are two ways out of something like Marxism. Number one, well basically, you know, the house stands. So that you leave the structure in place, the foundations, but you get rid of all the sofas and the chairs and the tables and the beds and blah blah and all the content. And then you get in a whole bunch of new stuff, you go to Ikea, the ideological IKEA, and you bring in new sofas, but the house stands. The other way is you smash the house down.

And that's you get rid of a sense of certainty and the emotional need for certainty. You embrace doubt, the capacity for doubt, the importance of doubt in human affairs and in the advancement of human civilization, and in our capacity to think about things and to relate to one another. And that involves real proper demolition work and it's a much scarier prospect when you're a dogmatist than the alternative, but it gives you the potential to be a real, free, alive human being.

W how are you pulled out?'Cause you're certainly not that man now, and you say you now are good at spotting these types. You're a kind of recovering dogmatist to be like you you're a twelve stepper. Had to ring up everyone you know and apologize and do all that. So how were you drawn out of that? So I mean there are a lot of things, two of the most important. One of them was drugs. It was actually psychedelic drugs. I took a drug called five MEO Demethyltryptamine.

It's an extremely powerful psychedelic. It's a very short acting drug, it just sort of lasts for fifteen minutes. But really within thirty seconds of taking it, you just thought, Well time has no meaning at all. So the fact that this is fifteen minutes won't save me. You know, I mean I'm in real trouble here. I'd lost all sense of time and space or identity or self. Everything was lost.

And I had this profound sense of just how absurd it was to be this kind of like former bipedal ape at the bottom of a gravity well, thinking, Oh, you figured out everything there is to know about the universe and how everything works. You don't have the apparatus in your mind to have understood how everything works, even if you had the data with which to try and comprehend it.

I was humbled in the face of that drug. Like it really smacked me around. And that humility helped get me out of that sort of sense of crunching, smacking, bullying dogma that I'd had for the years leading up to it. The second thing that happened was that by incredible stroke of luck I stumbled on a T V series called The Ascent of Man by the physicist uh Jacob Brunowski. I remember that. Uh very in my dim dark childhood, nineteen seventies that went to area.

And there's an episode, it's episode thirteen I think, which is called Knowledge and Certainty or Knowledge Or Certainty. You can find the full thing on YouTube and I really hope that people do because it it's a truly profound and beautiful thing. And it's about the importance of doubt in human affairs. It's about the scientific method and why that makes it preferable to dogma, to the assertion of certainty.

Um he's Jewish and it ends with him, you know, in Auschwitz, so saying this is where many members of my family were killed and he says they were not killed by science. They were killed by ignorance that comes from certainty, by dogma. Even today there's a three minute clip of it that you can see online, but I hope people watch the full episode. It's just one of the most profoundly beautiful things and it

Shattered me completely. That that process. Knock down the house. You know, don't just replace the content. Knock down the house. I have Jacob Brunoski to thank for that.

You were talking before about how the beginning of this current state of things in the UK can be largely traced to the two thousand and eight financial crisis. Now we had a government here that rushed in pretty quickly on the device of Treasury and spent big, handed out money and encouraged people to go shopping and as we didn't even get a recession, we had a downturn. We didn't even get two quarters of negative growth in this country as a result of that.

How different was it in the UK when the market crashed in two thousand and Pretty different. Not hugely different. We still had a Labour government at that period. We had Gordon Brown, who, although he'd really signed up to the kind of Thatcherite Orthodoxy in the years leading up to that.

had still been educated in Keynesian economics. He understood what a fiscal stimulus was, which is basically what you've just described. You know, you've got a crisis of demand in the economy, people don't want enough stuff.

You've got to stimulate demand by putting money giving people jobs, building motorways, whatever they'll spend, they'll buy sandwiches on the way to work, you get economic activity just running again, the animal spirits. It's classic sort of Keynesianism. He understood all that. However

Domestic political thought started to change because of a change in the Conservative Party at that time. How so? Well up to two thousand and eight the Conservative Party had promised to match Labour's spending plan. So you had these guys, David Cameron, George Osborne. They just didn't dare state that.

That they were going to go back to the Thatcher period. People didn't really want it. They liked having public services that worked. And they liked having a degree of social cohesion and decency to the society, right? The old images we had from the Thatcher period of like miners in running battles with the police, you know, on strike and that sense of pulsating hatefulness. But when the crash came, they split from that previous position and said, No, you know what, we need to cut spending.

See that's in defiance of orthodox economics. Orthodox economics says When you have a crash, you can do it. The government's got to rush in, and the moment the economy starts to revive, when growth returns, then the government this is hard, admittedly, then the government's got to pull back and create room for the private sector to take over. Yes. Why did the Conservative Party walk away from that?

Well I think to be I mean it there there have been peri I I agree with that approach and it's the basic Keynesian approach. There are periods where it ha where it didn't it stopped working. So for instance in the late seventies. And that allowed the sort of thought basically the people around higher.

An von Mises, the old sort of laissez faire neoliberal economics that have been building since the end of the Second World War, that allowed them to put forward their proposals for Thatcherism, that made Thatcher triumphant, and that For conservatives like David Cameron and George Osborne was the conservatism that they were raised on.

It was conservatism triumphant, not just at the polls, over and over again. It was conservatism that won the Falklands War. It was conservatism that faced down, you know, the NHS and the BBC and the miners and the trade unions. And that sense of

thumping, triumphant conservatism they were born in and they never really lost it. They were prepared to say things like, Yeah, we'll match Labour spending just in the same way that Labour was prepared to say all the tax right things it needed to say to get into power.

But they didn't really believe it. So as soon as there was an opportunity, they reverted back to the old Thatcherite metaphor, which is deeply compelling to many people, which is that a nation's finances are the same as household finances. So if you're going through a rough old time you need to sit down at the kitchen table and say, you know what, we've got to cut our spending in order to make ends meet and that's how you keep the roof up.

Cut the Netflix subscription, no more takeaway food, no more Ubereats, that sort of thing. But why is that a bad analogy to household kitchen table economics thing? Uh mostly because you can't like in a household You can't borrow your way towards stimulating demand. You know, that's just not a thing that it means anything. The metaphor breaks down completely. But in a nation, you can borrow to stimulate demand. In a nation also you can borrow a very low interest rate.

at certain times and use that to build infrastructure that will allow you to encourage growth later on. Let's say to create train systems that run much, much faster, that allow for much greater connectivity between towns. And one of the problems that Britain has

is that outside of London, the transport infrastructure between towns, let alone the big cities as well, you know, is very, very poor indeed. And that makes it much harder for people to get jobs where they should be. It makes it much harder for us to put talent where it's meant to be. And that hurts you economically. Now we could have at that point borrowed on basically zero percent interest.

interest rates. That's what the market could have was basically at the door of government smashing on the door saying, I'm begging you to borrow money from us right now. It was free to hire money at that time. And yet the whole political debate just went towards austerity. forced Labour's hands in the last two years of power to adopt ever more sort of right wing positions. The whole the press was behind austerity, the Conservative Party was behind austerity.

And then when the Conservatives got to power, it led to them at the worst possible moment in the wake of the crisis just slashing budgets. And the worst thing was because they protected certain budgets Like the NHS, you can't do anything on health because people will lose their minds. It means that you cut really deep in other areas. For instance, as I mentioned before, the Ministry of Justice. Ministry of Justice had twenty five percent cut.

And I mean like they they started getting rid of prison wardens all over the place. So with prisoners, you can't move the prisoner from one bed of the prison to another bit of the prison unless they're accompanied. Obviously. They don't just have freedom to mosey around wherever they want. So when you just start cutting the prison officer numbers

What you end up doing is just keeping a prisoner in their cell for about 23 hours a day. They have the one allocated hour of exercise, but the rest of the time they're just locked in the cell. That means you can't do the class.

the university classes, the school classes, the basic literacy and numeracy classes in many of these cases, the therapy sessions, all of the provisions that might allow you to rehabilitate someone, to stop them from reoffending, to establish relationships that aren't based on conflict. And trauma.

and to embed them in a community in a working life. All the things that we know reduce reoffending were impossible because of the cuts that were done. Of course in the end you don't save any money because the person goes out and does more crimes and it's really expensive to put someone in jail for that period, let alone the money you're not getting.

as a result of the taxes that they will not pay. But in the short term, it saves you money. And so we entered into this period of unbelievable self harm from which we are yet to recover today. And that was mostly ultimately, it may have been triggered by the financial crisis. But the cause really is austerity more than it is the financial crash itself.

So David Cameron and the Tories won government in coalition with the Liberal Democrats in twenty ten. And in the subsequent election, David Cameron and the Tory Party won government in their own right. And that allowed him to go ahead to put a referendum on leaving the EU to the British people. Now he wanted the UK to stay. in the EU. You had a prime minister and an opposition leader campaigning to stay in the EU. Why have that referendum? And why have it then? Why was that why did he do that?

The same force that has defined British politics for basically my whole adult life now, which is the mainstream shifting to placate the far right. And at the time UKIP, which is the predecessor party of the Brexit party, which is the predecessor party exactly of reform. So these parties change name, but they're always Nigel Farage's party, that is what they are. Was posing a threat to the Conservative Party on its right flank.

On immigration, on Europe and all the things that he loved talking about at the time. And so David Cameron, facing local elections, which no one can even remember anymore, tried to cover his right flank by saying, you know what, fine, I'll offer I'll I'll promise a referendum on Europe. And that's the promise that he made. He probably gave it about forty five minutes thought. He was extreme you know, came from an extremely wealthy, you know, family, public school.

Absolutely no sense he'd be affected by the consequences of any of the decisions that he made. Exactly. Private schools are schools that you pay for, but they look very much like a normal school. Public schools are their own kind of internal cultural, intellectual and emotionally abusive ecosystem.

So for instance Eton will have its own games, like its own sports. It doesn't I mean it does kinda but it doesn't really play the sports that other people play. It doesn't really play rugby and football and cricket and all of that. It plays the sports that it has itself invented.

It will have, you know, its own words, its own lingo, its own slang, and its own very specific ways of brutalising the next generation of British wealthy children. So that's the background he's from, and Boris Johnson's background too. Yes. So he announces the referendum date for twenty sixteen.

He knows the opposition leader, the Labour leader at the time is is going to support r remaining in the UK. Was he going into that campaign feeling confident that he'd win and that the UK would remain in the EU? Yeah. I mean and so was I f to be fair, because generally speaking, the history of British politics is that if you say to people there's an economic risk to doing this, they won't do it.

You know, I mean that's how the Conservatives have won all the elections. You know, I mean Labour hardly ever in power. It's so rare that Labour get power. And part of the reason is it's really easy for the Conservatives with a very, very right wing press. You know, two thirds, three quarters of the press are is on the right, as it is in this country really.

To just go, don't I wouldn't do that mate. You know. Your mortgages, y think about your house, think about your pension, you know, think about economic performance. And Brits respond to that because up until then Brits had been really invested in the economy and were doing pretty well out of it.

So so why did they find Cameron's arguments so unpersuasive, the voters, when they ended up voting no? But what none of us had presumed was just the fact that people weren't that invested in the economy anymore. Huge numbers of people were actually having a really, really bad time of it since the financial crash, in many cases before then. Now, what was there to risk?

What is there to risk if you don't own any property? If you have a terrible job on insecure terms, or you're not even really told whether you're gonna have work next week or or not? if your high street looks dilapidated, if it's covered in just betting shops and vape shops. If you put someone in that scenario, then they're willing to try

to change things. And there was one message which was changed and another message which was not changed. It wasn't about the EU. It really wasn't. Overlaying all that was an argument about immigration through the medium of free movement. And until this point in British history most people had a pretty easy going sort of not easy going, but if you worked you would succeed.

You could get onto the housing ladder, you could get a decent job, your kids would probably be wealthier than you were, you know, and on we go. And that fundamental contract was starting to fray at the edges. And so we can talk about the immigration thing and that was absolutely true and populism

But the fundamental economic background to this, the thing that really changed for us was was was in that fact. What do you remember of the day of the result of the Brexit referendum? First just this sense of kind of shattered

white faced shock. And the first people you'd see responding to it looked the same. And funnily enough, they were the Brexiters. It was Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, two of the leading bre pro Brexit politicians. Yeah, they looked like the dog that caught the bus it was chasing, didn't they? Yeah, right. They looked petrified.

Absolutely afraid. I think if they could see the way it's all worked out, they'd look even more afraid than they did at the time. But they look absolutely shattered by what had happened. David Cameron. It's super cool, it's thing, just sort of popped out, you know, it was just like Oh yeah, no, we lost it. We by the way, we didn't really have any plans for what would happen if this was exhibited. I I am obviously gonna step down as Prime Minister, so I won't help plan for it either and then just

Started whistling and walked back into that just like He started whistling he just untouched. If you go you could you could see if you go back to the video of him announcing his resolution, just sort of whistles his way back into that you just sort of think just utterly unaffected. by the things he does in power. And we should remind ourselves there's no you know, there's no type of human being that should be denied power.

But you is worth asking yourself always before you give someone power, how much skin do they have in this game? You know, what are the consequences to them? Do they live in a gated community? Do their kids go to private school? Do they have private health insurance? Are they gonna be the ones in the hospital with the schools with you when this stuff goes wrong?

And the answer uh with David Cameron is no. And then a couple of people came out that were really very competent indeed, and the Brexiters would hate them for all the time. One of them was Nicholas Sturgeons, who was the first minister of Scotland.

leader of the SNP and the other one was Mark Carney, who was then the governor of the Bank of England that is now uh Prime Minister of Canada. Exactly. Right. Um and he just he was the first person to come out and just treat it like what it was, which was a fiendish and extremely dangerous economic and legal and reputational problem. None of the messianic religious oh, it's the great destiny of the nation dream works, you know, that we've been handed before.

But this is dangerous. I want to reassure the markets. You know, Sterling at this point is plummeting, you know, we put this money aside, we have the weaponry in order to deal with this, we can do it, there have plans for this. He was the exact opposite of David Cameron. Let me tell you now.

British right wingers despise Carney with a ferocity that you would not believe because he was the adult that came out that morning to treat their tawdry little project like the fiendish conundrum that it so truly was, and they never really forgave him for that.

What did the Brexit result do to the nature of the conversation about politics in the UK? It was a disaster. Just a terrible, exotic disaster. Almost instantly people started using words, phrases that we just never really heard in any kind of political context. Will of the people. You don't really hear that kind of terminology in British politics. Politics are supposed to be retail offers.

This buddy comes along and goes, you know what, I'll do this with mortgages, I'll do this with stamp duty, you know, I'll do this with schools. Do you like it?'Cause if you like it, vote for the that's rational, decent retail politics and if you don't, you know, you go for the other guys. It wasn't about like your sense of identity.

It wasn't about the people with a capital T and a capital P as one unified homogeneous whole that is spoken to by the leadership as if they can understand its spirit. All of this stuff was just ignored exotic. It just sounds like the Bolshevik Party to me as well that idea, you know, we represent the will of the working class.

What about the kind of language that was used between opponents, political opponents? I mean much more vicious because suddenly politics wasn't about a difference of ideas, it was about who you were. And that wasn't just the case of the opponents, right? That was going down to the basic level of the society.

'Cause how were people voting? You know, you were seeing discrepancies. The the best predicator was basically whether you had a university education or not. That was the most effective predicate. There was another one which was basically do you support um capital punishment? That was another very good predicator of how you would vote.

So you had authoritarian dispositions on one hand and liberal on the other. You'd have lots of really interesting psychological evaluations saying For instance, was a difference in voting by virtue of how people feel when someone walks into a room.

Let's say they're in a room talking to a few other people, someone new walks in, how do you feel? Do you feel excited about all the new possibilities of conversation that may be about to happen? Or do you feel like they're all a bit weary exactly? Who knows where this is going? Who is this guy?

Because if it's the latter you're more likely to vote Brexit, if it's the former you're more likely to vote Romaine. There's kind of like split liberal versus authoritarian, university educated versus not, living in diverse, plural, multicultural, typically urban cosmopolitan areas on the one hand, living in, you know, much more dilapidated, Uh towns, seaside towns, often former industrial sites.

Or given proper assistance since the Thatcher period, where we'd taken those industries away. The thing they'd say to me right and quite quite intensely is we're not gonna talk about Brexit at this lunch, okay? Like this too. We're not gonna talk about it, all right. Oh sure, sure dude. You know, it's your country, you know. Whatever whatever. So there was that that thing we're not gonna do this because if we do it it could be disaster.

Labour in the UK seems to have formed this kind of strange land centrism which doesn't really has got some vaguely articulated values. It's kind of weak on policy and execution. But the Tory party has become something very different.

I was going to quote to you one of the leading philosophers of conservatism from the UK, this man called Michael Oakshot. This is how he defined conservatism, and he said, quote To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried. Fact to mystery. the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenience to the perfect Present laughter to utopian bliss.

Does that sound like the Tory Party today or the or the British right today, or is it more keen on embarking on this kind of utopian project w that he's talking about here? Yeah, and that and that starts with Brexit. I mean what what are you doing? You're basically saying, look, we don't really care about existing trade flows, we don't really care about existing regulatory structures or institutions.

We are in the business of burning things down. And pretty much the entirety of the rhetoric and the conceptual content of the modern Conservative Party is about burn it down. Very few new ideas of things you want to replace things with. And it's not just Europe, right? They want to leave Strasbourg the European Convention of Human Rights with all the implications that has. By the way

The European Convention on Human Rights is not just some international document. That's baked into the Good Friday Agreement that is the peace in Northern Ireland. You know, you unravel it, you're basically unraveling the constitutional agreements that brought peace to Northern Ireland. They don't care. You start moving to the refugee convention. They want to leave the refugee convention. So ultimately it's now a burn it down kind of Sort of mouse a tongue version of of right wing thought.

Yeah. The most successful political party in British history is not in any way what it used to be. Is it fair to say that? Oh my god, yeah, of course. I mean th well it doesn't want to conserve anything at all. But more importantly, it has no sense of moderation.

But the most elegant and charming thing you could say about British conservatism that had the closest link to the things that you could most usefully say about the British personality. Just that sense of gentleness and moderation and And you know what, for left wingers and progressives, it's been really helpful, I think, occasionally just to have Conservatives as part of the conversation being like

Okay, fine. Let's let's change slowly and carefully. Will this actually work what you're talking about? Yes, exactly. What what are the pragmatic obstacles to what you're trying to achieve? Exactly. You know what? Very well defined. So without Sort of it sort of feels like the left starts spiralling into ever more sort of, you know, excited whims of fancy. As you're sort of seeing with the Green Party in Britain right now, because you're you're losing that the really healthy version of politics.

Which is about the desire for change, the desire for progress, harnessed and controlled by skepticism about what is tr trying to be achieved and the manner in which one might pursue it.

becoming quite uh not unrecognisable, but it's becoming quite a different thing, the United States. This is our main defence ally as it is For the UK as well. Our government at the moment doesn't tend to talk in public about this. I th not like Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, mind you.

The United States hasn't threatened to invade Australia like they've threatened to invade Canada. Right. Uh and nor have they threatened to invade the UK yet. I think we're about three days away from that. Three days away from that right now. Uh Keir Starmer's pretty much saying the same thing. I think probably the the strongest language they'd use about the Trump administration is that it's interesting or something like like like that.

Is Keir Starmer being nice to this nine hundred pound gorilla in the room who's you know chewing the curtains and throwing the crockery around to keep him sweet while He and the rest of Europe are trying to figure out how to defend themselves without the United States, which has suddenly become an unreliable ally.

That's exactly right. And look for I think early on they just thought I mean this nonsense, it was clear they couldn't do it, the Trump whispering stuff of being like, Oh, maybe this guy can Trump whisper, or maybe this guy can Trump whisper. And Keystone fancied himself a bit of a Trump whisperer.

And it must be clear to anyone now that no one you know, nothing's gonna work. The guy is just he's just a basically a rabid animal and he'll do you know, he's gonna i he'll be nice to you one day and he'll be very, very not nice the next and he'll threaten to invade Greenland. And none of your little quiet cups of tea are gonna stop that.

But then there's the extent of your strategic reliance. So for instance, France and Britain are very different positions when it comes to this issue. France is a completely independent nuclear deterrent. No, it's its own system. It can use it when it likes, how it likes. I said that.

It's currently sat there going, you know what, we're going to offer to extend this nuclear deterrent to all of Europe. Is that a distinctly different nuclear deterrent to Britain's, which is more interlocked with the United States? So it's technologically of its own thing then, isn't it? Yes, exactly. And it could it could be look, it could be launched from a submarine, it can be dropped from a plane. Now Britain's is submarine only, it's the trident system.

It is operationally independent. So no one yeah, Britain can launch when it wants to launch. If it wants to launch, it doesn't need to seek anyone's per permission to do that. However The maintenance so at each time you have sort of four submarines and one of them goes off, you know, and is maintained at any given moment, the maintenance is in the US. Because not the warhead, but the rockets are US and US made.

So on that basis it's not really functionally independent. Now you can create it to be functionally independent. But that costs an awful lot of money that we don't have and wouldn't want to spend anyway. And if you're not prepared to do that,

You are simply much more restrained in the manner in which you talk about the US and the manner in which you treat them. So for instance, how was it at the beginning of the conflict in Iran? Keystama comes out and goes, Well we're not gonna allow them to use our bases. for any kind of attack on on Iran because he qu he's a he's a lawyer. And almost certain he'd been given advice that goes

Well I mean I was just palpably unlawful. And then there's a phone call with Donald Trump and case someone comes out and says, Oh no, it turns out we might might let them use the base, but only for stopping the rockets being launched, which again sort of fits the you g the legal thing. So you can just basically see that there's a certain amount of impedance from the US. There's not that much.

And one of the cool things you look for in the British government, and I would really urge Australians to look for the same thing, given that I think your relations are very, very similar. is fine, you've got to say this, you've got to do it now, we get where we are now. But what is the evidence for you recognising that this is not a short term thing with Trump. This is about what's happening to a country, a country going rogue state.

You need to be able to demonstrate autonomy, strategic autonomy from this country in let's say a ten to fifteen year time horizon. So fine, say the things you gotta say, blocate if you've got to placate, but what are you doing militarily and economically?

To separate yourself from it so that you're not basically connected by a chain to a rabid dog. You were talking about that transformative moment you had as a young man when you watched that episode of The Ascent of Man and Jacob Bronofsky standing in a in a in a puddle at Auschwitz. I got the words here of what he said. I just want to quote him'cause it's quite powerful.

He says into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people, and that was not done by gas, it was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of God. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the door. between the push button order and the human act.

We have to touch people. Yeah, I d I see it that was very well read, by the way, and I say that advisedly because I've heard him say that a million times and I think he he he speaks it beautifully. I mean look, if you were to try and summarise A way of looking at the world that is humane and modest and nonviolent and non brutalizing.

And that aspires to the best elements of our personality, I still think it's really hard to come up with a better summary than that. And for all of us This period, like part of the horror of this period, is the fact that you're dragged into the worst version of yourself.

You're coming in contact with people who just say the worst things about you and people like you, who treat immigration like as if it's the same as crime, who say dreadful things about your friends if they happen not to be white, as part of a political project. You know, the brutalizing impact of populism as a functioning system in democratic countries on the mind, on the emotions. And the thing you have to aspire to is to try and keep in contact with that thought.

with your capacity for doubt, with your an aversion to dominance, to not trying to just rampage over your opponents, but trying to think like what is there that might be true in that which they say and what is there that might be rational.

In the arguments that those who I otherwise don't agree with might make. I still think it's an absolutely beautiful summary of all that's best in the human condition. It's been fascinating and illuminating speaking with you in and thank you very much. Thank you. Ann Dunt's latest book is called How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn't.

Today's conversation with Ian Dunn was made on the lands of the Gadigal people. Producer was Jennifer Leake. Executive producer is Nicola Harrison. I'm Richard Feidler. Thanks for listening. ABC Listen, podcasts, radio.