Is liberalism suffocating in the UK? | Fraser Nelson

Coming up on Liberalism in Question. This was the Queen's greatest insight. She gave her address to the United Nations, the closest she's ever came, or she ever came, to announcing her political views. And she was pointing out that in her reign, she has seen every Prime Minister from Churchill on. And yet she noticed, in decades of insightful rule, that the biggest changes came not because any of these Prime Ministers came up with the idea.

They came, in her words, because millions of people wanted them. Enjoy the show and be sure to follow and subscribe. I'm Rob Forsyth, and welcome to Liberalism in Question. I'm joined by Fraser Nelson, who's the editor of the Spectator in the United Kingdom, as well as writing daily columns in the Daily Telegraph. And I notice you're on the advisory board of a think tank called the Centre for Social Justice. Yes. That's rather suspicious. What's that?

It's funny you should say it's suspicious. I mean, social justice is something I think everybody should advocate. It basically means that you want a society that promotes social cohesion. You want to care, and not just care for, but come up with policies that benefit those at the bottom of society. I think the problem is that the word social justice has bizarrely taken on a toxic meaning, usually by social media and the internet.

And so you get this phrase social justice warrior, which is now used as a pejorative to mean some crazy left-winger. Now, at what point did liberals ever allow the phrase social justice to be taken by their opponents? Well, you tell me.

It has been taken, right? Good words have gone. Well, good words are being claimed, but I think it's up for those of us who believe in the doctrines to defend those good words. And that's why I'm a proud member of the Centre for Social Justice. And I would describe myself as a social justice advocate, maybe not a warrior. But I would like to meet somebody who in all good conscience disagrees with the notion of social justice. I ought not to be controversial.

And you are, in other words, a self-identified liberal, you tell me. Yes, I'm a liberal rather than a conservative. I believe that societies are better and stronger when governments have less power than individuals and communities have more power. Generally speaking, I think he who governs least governs best. And I think the purpose of winning power is to take it and give it away as best you can.

And I'm a sort of liberal in the Robert Menzies sense of the word, in the Gladstone sense of the word, in the Cobden, the Manchester sense of the word. But the word has been claimed now by the American left, ironically, the illiberal American left. So you enter this strange kind of Orwellian world where parties who call themselves liberal tend to be illiberal, with the exception of Australia. I think Robert Menzies did a great favor to the Australian rights when he called them liberals.

Rather than conservative. Rather than conservative, right? Because conservative, by my understanding of the English language, means that you want things to stay the same. I think conservatives should be advocates for modernizing, for improving society, and for changing a whole bunch of things that are wrong. Although in practice, conservatives tend to say, well, that is worth maintaining, not simply change nothing.

Well, you shouldn't change for change's sake, but this is why I wouldn't particularly

call myself a conservative. I'm not a social conservative, for example. I'm a social liberal. I'm quite social liberal on things like women's rights, on pro-choice. even though I'm a personally rather boring Roman Catholic, conservative, and very dull in my own life. But by and large, I think people should be free to make their own decisions as long as they're not hurting anyone.

I mean, you mentioned Gladstone. Yeah. And for him, for people like Gladstone, 19th, great 19th century prime minister. For him, liberalism wasn't just getting out of the way. He was committed to a program of improving his society, a very significant program, which in some cases succeeded, others failed. That's right. Well, basically, this comes down to my work with the Center for Social Justice.

That is very much about continuing the Gladstonean mission of looking at the state of the nation, the state of those at the bottom, to work out why so many people are excluded from our society and to work out what can be done to change them. Now, the difference between the Gladstone era of social justice and the contemporary era of social justice is that back then, there was hardly any government at all. People were being left behind. It was a devil-take-the-highmost attitude.

So you eventually got Victorian kind of poorhouse things, but they've developed into better forms of welfare. But then welfare becomes so big that it starts to beget the problem it's supposed to address. So you end up with millions of people, certainly in Britain, something like 5 million people, 13% of the workforce, are on out-of-work benefits at a time when we have a worker shortage crisis.

Now, that simply is because we have a welfare system which pretty much traps people in poverty, which creates incentives that incentivizes not industry and getting on and working. And you end up with a situation where something from a desire to help people at the bottom ends up trapping them in the wrong kind of place. So you need to therefore, and I would regard this to be a conservative mission,

welfare reform, the Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform in the US. Ian Duggan-Smith tried it for a while here. But reforming welfare, I think, is now the single biggest thing you can do to alleviate poverty. But ironically, we have created in the West some of the most expensive poverty in the world. Now, this is the paradox. Expensive poverty in the world. Exactly. If you go to places like Glasgow, where my dad's from, you can find the most expensive poverty in the world.

The amount of money being spent on people whose lives are really quite miserable. And now Scotland has got the world's, the Western world's worst drug deaths ratio, for example. So alcoholism, educational failure, drug dependency, these things are being done in council estates that are swimming with taxpayer money being spent spent by taxpayers who want to help, but instead the policies are making it worse. What happened to Thatcherism?

Thatcherism was... Because she was trying to do some of this work, wasn't she, or not? Well, then, to be honest, I think Thatcherism is commonly defined as the economic reforms. So you would move on from the kind of de registre 1970s unionized regulation to a more liberal economic model that led to an explosion of wealth. So Britain ended up going from being the sick man of Europe Europe into pretty much leading Europe with various reforms.

Now the problem is that was a success from which the Conservatives never properly recovered. So they basically kept on wanting in their heads to replay the 1980s greatest hits policy-wise, to steer every conversation back to Thatcherism. But with every era, we get different challenges.

And Conservatives can be quite slow to recognize the new challenges and to apply them to… So Britain had changed under Thatcher, but more of the same wasn't the way to go. Well, no, because times changed. I mean, when you had Tony Blair coming along, he was basically sort of Thatcherite in policy and Blairite in talk. You know, that lesson had pretty much been won. And yes, the Conservatives want to just reenact those battles.

And it was quite depressing to see. And meanwhile, you come along with really important questions that Conservatives just didn't recognise. Like what? Well, like climate change, for example. The net zero agenda was a huge issue, which Conservatives basically got on the wrong side of. They saw a bandwagon and they jumped on it. They didn't apply... They got onto it. They were pro... I mean, not pro... They believe climate change was an important

policy issue. Oh, no, no. There's no doubt that climate change is an important policy issue. But the problem is when Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, commits Britain to net zero by 2050, hugely expensive fledge, then you get Scott Morrison on the plane to Glasgow, decides to adopt it for Australia. Neither of these two so-called Conservative leaders came out with anything resembling a cost-benefit analysis.

So I think it's a great trap to think that either you're 4 net zero or you're a climate denier. There is what I call a bright green environmental agenda. I would contrast that to dark green. Now, bright green, you look at the progress we're making through technology, through capitalism, through innovation.

The way the consumer choices mean that every day, in every way, we're learning to tread less lightly on the planet. Our cars, the overall carbon intensity of the economy, It's falling all of the time. So if you can clear this trend or factor in other innovation, it's quite plausible that we hit net zero or something close to it. Is one of the mistakes setting a goal? Hmm. Rather than a process. Exactly. An idea plan rather than a process.

You've got it. So at what stage really do liberals, do conservatives think that's a kind of Lenin-style 30-year plan is really the way to achieve anything? Yes. But they figured, they were sucked into this trap of thinking it was binary. And here's a bandwagon, let's get on it because young people care about the environment, we need their votes. They didn't really apply their principles. The thought that somehow the plan would draw technology towards it.

Having this goal would mean we'd work harder at it. That was the idea. Yes, and that hasn't tended to be the path of history. You look at some of the greatest technological innovations that have transformed our planet and the way we live and the lives of millions of people. They didn't come from government edicts or from parliamentary majorities. This was the Queen's greatest insight. She gave her address to the United Nations, the closest she ever came to announcing her political views.

And she was pointing out that in her reign, She has seen every prime minister from Churchill on, and yet she noticed in decades of insightful rule that the biggest changes came not because any of these prime ministers came up with the idea. They came, in her words, because millions of people wanted them. That is a liberal agenda. That's what drives our progress. The danger is when governments don't understand that and try and intervene in the wrong way, counterproductively.

Yes, they become, as Adam Smith said, a man of part. So they start to see society like a chessboard, where they want to move people from one place to another, rather than working out that the best policy is to have the issue of courage, not in your own ingenuity, but in the courage and the character of the people you serve. So, I mean, let me now give you the history of Great Britain.

After the Second World War, the decision was not to go like after the First World War, but to really do the welfare reform that hadn't been done. That was a success to start with that overreached into the 70s that we had Thatcherism? Yes, broadly speaking. I'm thinking of a sort of momentum that happened in a society. I'm wondering. Yes, but I would say this was happening pretty much throughout the Western world.

Yeah, that's true. And we also underestimate how much at the time Soviet Russia was seen to be a success. Because at the time we thought, look at Stalin, he's basically centralizing all of this. Look at electrification, look at the transformation of the Russian economy. So maybe having a planned society Plus the war. The war, of course, the war put together all these imaginations, exactly.

And also led to a certain social cohesion as well, which people voted to maintain when they voted for Labour in 1945, much to Churchill's astonishment. So you had, of course, the idea that we need, A, that we need more social cohesion, B, that the wartime planning could be carried on into a peace.

But this, of course, works only up to a point. But you end up stifling creativity, you stop the capacity of economies to renew, and then you had the intellectual counter-revolution of a Thatcher-Reagan era, which led to a liberal interregnum now under threat.

And a threat. Yes, I think so. I think if you look at the, in Britain, for example, our tax burden is the highest it's been since that war. Yeah. It's something 77 year high that we see is pretty difficult for any economic growth to really get started under the weight of such a tax burden. But this is under a conservative government. 13 years of so-called conservative government.

And you can see why those conservatives are struggling to win the next general election, because what's their message really going to be to the voters? And you can't really say vote conservative for lower taxes because they've have given you the highest taxes on living memory, higher than any Labour government post-war ever dared to face. So where is the Liberal banner at United Kingdom? It's a very good question in the pages of Spectator magazine, I would say, for a while.

But you know, it's... It's a promotion, I can see. Well, I know, but I will have to admit that being a Liberal is a rather unpopular cause. One of the words that's really started to show up to me recently is the word Libertarian. Now, there aren't any Libertarians in Britain, but Liberals are increasingly described as Libertarians.

Because we're seen to be some sort of, I'm a liberal, I get characterized now as being libertarian, a creature of a strange American right, rather than the British tradition of Hayek and all of the various, it was the reason why the Austrian economists came to London to practice their intellectual art, and that was because we were the home of liberalism, but now we are suffering from the government, which is 50% bigger now under a Tory prime minister than it was on average in the Blair years.

Well, does this mean if liberals lost the battle, the intellectual battle,

then is that what's gone wrong? Or what? I think liberals have left the battlefield and have simply stopped fighting. When confronted with this net zero, for example, the sheer costs of this are monumental. I mean, the amount of tax it would impose, the amount of the way it would make people's lives so much more expensive.

Yet the liberals, conservatives, call them what you will, simply decided to look the other way and not even count those costs, not enter the cost-benefit analysis that any normal person would do in any normal decision. So it wasn't a weakness in liberalism, it was a weakness in liberals. It was, basically, it lost the faith. And as Robert Menzies pointed out, history is full of great movements that basically ceased to exist because they ceased to have any kind of faith to live by.

And to think that so many strategic decisions were taken by conservatives to get through one crisis to the next, to get popularity beginning onto a bandwagon, If you take one of these things, fair enough. But if you take four or five or six of them, you end up in a whole direction you never intended. Is there still an intellectual tradition in the United Kingdom of liberal intellectuals? I'm still thinking and writing this area. There is such a...

In, for example, the spectator, if I may mention. Yes. Well, there is, but I have to say, there are only a relatively small number of people of that tradition now.

Liberals seem to be basically anachronistic. We haven't had a liberal party for some while. We've got a liberal-democratic party, neither liberal nor democratic. Oh, right. Okay, yes. They're kind of your version of their left-wing party up there. Oh, yes, very much. And after the democratic vote for Brexit, they wanted the overturn, so they weren't democrats. they want to regulate the press and other illiberal things. So it's a strange Orwellian inversion of both of those words.

Fraser, it's very likely that the Labour Party will win the next election in the United Kingdom. 90% chance. That's a fairly close thing. What's going to happen to your country? Then, to be honest, right now I would say not very much. It's difficult to think of us being taxed much more than we are right now. I think the economy is being about taxed as much as people can really bear. Where Keir Starmer is positioning himself as the nothing man,

the man who would change almost nothing that you don't like. He's a real nowhere man. But that's exactly his proposition. He wants to present as few targets as possible. There are several of them. I do worry about press freedom. Now, why is this? Because if it's 90% possibility, is he afraid of losing again? Is that why?

Oh, yeah, because right now the guy is 15, 16 points ahead in the polls. He's heading for a landslide majority. majority so he's wandering around with this ming vaz of a of a pulley he doesn't want to drop it or do anything that might cause him to go straight your system not not being up being. Not having any preferential voting, it's first past the post, neither compulsory voting, can get rather large swings, can't it? That's how it tends to work.

So relatively small swings in the electorate mean a big swing in the number of swings. So right now we are heading towards a landslide Labour majority. We're heading to a Conservative party where two out of three Tory MPs will be lucky to be there after the next general election. They could be reduced to a rump. And the conversations I have now with Tory MPs aren't whether we're going to win the election is how many are going to survive.

Will it go down to 200, 150 perhaps? How many of the House of Commons? Right now, to win a majority, you need more than 300 and- There's 600 of the House of Commons? Yeah, 652. Yeah. Is this why, by the way, when I see pictures of the House of Commons, there's some in their seats, some standing behind a wall. They can't not even please for them all. The chamber isn't designed to fit them all. So it's supposed to be huddled. So on a budget day, there's no seats.

And then you can see that if you're a very grand MP and and you want to seat him, there's nowhere. And if you're of a certain size, you come and point your bottom at the non-existent space and start to make your descents. And by some miracle of physics, space always opens up. Okay,

that's just puzzling. When I watch a picture of your house, I think, they've not all got seats. How strange. Yeah, and when you see it on the plate, it looks like a set for a film. You think, this can't be the House of Commons. It's so small. But it's supposed to be noisy and robustuous. Well, you've got that. That's why we like it. Well, so we can match that. With the feet comes a chance to rethink. The chance to, not immediately, but to rethink and rebuild.

Is there hope for the general liberal cause in the United Kingdom after the defeat? Well, there is always hope. The question is how much of it. I mean, there are huge temptations facing modern conservatism. One is to go to a slightly crazy American right. Now, if we see a Trump victory, which, by the way, I think is the most probable outcome at this stage. Do you really?

Unfortunately, I do. Yeah, I don't think that does represent a real crisis because people look to America for intellectual leadership We see a vacuum in the right and we listen to the public in debates You can see if we're struggling to find the agenda let alone the candidate And again, the bookmakers say Trump has got a 75% chance of being the nominee and if I isn't a crisis I don't know what is what is it a crisis old phrase of what what's

going on lack of ideas simply I think the is an intellectual crisis.

Yes, of course I'm a great believer in the power of ideas and I think the old crisis of politics comes down to people not having confidence of an agenda you need to you need people who believe they're able to in politics I've always thought it's about making and winning arguments for that you need to say what you believe believe what you say and also not be not be penned in by opinion polls but have faith in the ability to change people's minds if you

manage to make your argument to win people to your cause now I think Australia has given the world old a great masterclass on how to do this.

With a voice referendum, I think that we've seen the opinion polls swing one way straight to another, from being two thirds against, two thirds for to two thirds against. And I think in Jacinta Price and some of the leaders of the No campaign. You found advocates able to bring politics alive, to bring the dry subject of the Constitution alive.

Yes, although, I mean, they were they were, even though Jacinta Price is a member of the Senate, yes, of course, she still came across as an un-politician, if I may put it that way. Yeah, you know, it was a phrase, is, cometh the hour cometh the man. And the problem with conservative politics is the hour come off all the time, but the man never shows up. But this time in Australia, there is- No, you may be taking too much comfort from this. The failure of the yes campaign.

And the incompetence of the proposal, though it was dressed up, I'm afraid it was, with hindsight, it was a much easier victory than it looked beforehand for those who want to vote no. Exactly. And your compulsory voting system means that people who otherwise have stayed away came up thinking, what the hell is this? You've got to vote, and therefore, yeah, yes.

There's always a danger that the British right might get as overexcited about Jacinda Price as the British left got overexcited about Jacinda Ardern. I mean, maybe this is just simply our fate to look on the other side of the world. Well, I mean, if that's what politics is about, chasing celebrities on the left or right, no wonder you've got no good ideas. Well, I think, you know, quite often liberals can be a cause with no gods and precious few heroes.

I think, you know, people are searching for a hero. People need someone to look up to. I'll come back to that in a moment. Brexit, years on, how's that working out for you? A great success. And the British public foisted this agenda upon both political parties. Yes. The Conservatives fought it, Labour fought it, both of them were overturned. As a result, Britain has now got no populists in Parliament or with any support in the opinion polls.

The only country in Europe to have vanquished the ghost of populism. Now, we did that because we had this pressure valve of our constituency system. Now, it makes us very responsive. So MPs are worried that they're going to lose their seat if this UKIP candidate gets a vote. So they came up saying to the party leader, we need to get rid of UKIP. So why don't we have a referendum?

Not because they want it, but to keep their seat. This self-preservation Forces on the national agenda something all of a sudden you can get a course correction, Reconnecting the elite to the priorities of the people. I mean, that's one of the ways in which democratic systems work It's the self-concern of the politician makes them actually listen to the people. The ones that are better tuned to, but you can get other ones For example,

with the list system that are just simply less responsive. Is there breast regret? To be honest, not very much. I mean, there are those who, if you look at the

opinion polls, there's less support for Brexit now than there was earlier on, mainly because we went into a lockdown, then difficult economic times. Things just seem worse than they were pre-2016. But when you actually, if you were to do polls saying, would you have a referendum to rejoin the EU, you'll find precious little support for that. And Scottish nationalism? is not in a very good way. Nicola Sturgeon, the patron saint of that cause, is now under police investigation, as is her husband.

And I think you can see the air coming out of that balloon pretty quickly. The point was made about possibly the voice here in Australia, that when you have a select body representing another group, they move into identity issues rather than helping their people. And Scotland was raised as an example, where under the Scottish nationalists, Scottish people have suffered under welfare. their prosperity has gone down.

In other words, the nationalists are concerned about fighting the United Kingdom rather than caring for their people. Yeah, of course. I think the SNP certainly demonstrated the salience of identity over economics. That's right. And over prosperity. Yes, exactly. Now, this can bamboozle conservatives and liberals saying, hang on, you guys, I've got a spreadsheet here.

It shows you that you're better off under option A, so surely you're going to vote for option A. Now, when we speak like that, we just speak like accountants baffled at psychology. Because you've got to speak, people are social animals, not just individuals. Making rational, self-interesting decisions. Yes, and as David Hume said, reason is a slave to passion. And you need to understand that if it's a political psychology. John and Heidt show that in his The Righteous Mind. Yes, exactly.

It turns out that Hume was right, Locke was wrong. Yeah, and so this is another reason why liberals ended up in such a bad way. They looked befuddled at the way that people were voting against their own economic self-interest in a way which made us, Because hang on, didn't Thatcher prove that everyone knows? That's not the way politics works. But he causes. But you said earlier that you need to argue the case. Mm-hmm. But you're arguing a case where the case is not entirely rational.

Well, I think the case can be rational, absolutely. The case need not always be expressed in economic cost-benefit analysis. I mean, it's important to do these things, but don't think that all political causes can be expressed on a spreadsheet. The positive case for the union was never properly made. All the unionists in Scotland were saying, ah, if you vote for independence, you're going to be worse off. People said that in Brexit as well. If you vote for Brexit, you're going to

be worse off. That's not touching the heart. That's not touching the heart. No, it sounds like an accountant's argument. It wasn't persuasive. But the unionists, by the way, they didn't lose the referendum, but they got 45% of Scots voting for a separation. A huge number. I never thought I would live to see that. So that message, the you're going to be worse off argument, backfired massively as it did in Brexit. Is United Kingdom then struggling to be a nation?

No, I wouldn't say. I'd say that the vote for Brexit was the greatest effort of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom. And I think the more people look at the prospects of tearing Scotland out of the Union, the more they think the costs would not be worth the benefits. So I think we now can see, I think the Union is probably more secure now than it's been in about 10 years. We can see that in Northern Ireland as well.

Tell me about Northern Ireland. Well, we had a pretty difficult time after Brexit because there was, as part of a difficult negotiation, the EU was basically managing to negotiate extra powers keeping Northern Ireland in the customs union. That led to very difficult discussions over the trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Now, eventually that came to a kind of rough compromise and we seem to have gone over it. You muddled through?

We muddled through, yes. But there's still, you know, if you look at trade between Northern Ireland and it's gone down massively. I'm sorry to hear that. You know Northern Ireland and? The rest of the UK. I'm sorry to hear that. it. You've said that there is a need for politicians who are persuasive and good arguers. You said that the liberal cause is the present, not in a strong state of mind. What's being done to raise up the next generation? Because it seems to me now would be the time.

To get the intellectual, to find the people, get the firepower going, because sometime the Star Montgomery is going to run out of steam. There's going to be a need to come back and provide another vision for the United Kingdom. I think two things are going to help the next generation. One is a rebellion against the identity politics of the Fed, school, and the university. There'll be a rebellion, you think? Absolutely. You can already see it.

I've got a 15-year-old son, and his generation are willfully transgressive and all of this. They always are, aren't they? and if it's there you say no exactly we always forget this whatever we tell them at school they're going to rebel against it so they're starting to laugh at this not hate it just think it's funny that's even worse by the way laughing at it yeah exactly so by the time they get into it I think we're over the peak as it were peak woke yeah I think the guys who were.

In campus now they're now in the HR departments oh yes but now we're seeing a revolution against it well you've had a referendum against it in effect so I think so you've got that generational thing I think The reaction, yes. And the second thing, I think, is we're going to find out that notions like equality, notions like freedom of speech, notions like unity. Now, these have seemed like cliches to us liberals, not politically political, but they are political now.

Because when unity is under threat by identity politics, then you get this message about no to the voice of division. Now, this, I think, is a message for conservatives and liberals worldwide. I think Australia is given the cause, it's given an argument, it's given the votes. These dots are there for liberals and conservatives to join them. So things that we didn't think needed said, let alone defended, are going to become causes that do have appeal.

Martin Luther King was right to say that people should be judged by the content of the character, not the color of their skin. You're going to get a new generation of people arguing for that cause of universality and for what binds us together over what sets us apart. heart. And this, what we would have regarded as a cliche 20 years ago, is going to become the next conservative cause, a liberal cause. What we need now are politicians able to recognize it.

Well, on that very happy note, Fraser Nelson, thank you so much for joining us here on The Great Clifton. I'm Rob Forsyth. This is another podcast in our Liberalism in Question series. Thanks for watching. If you enjoy this content, please consider joining us by becoming a member of CIS, you'll be part of Australia's growing movement towards free markets, individual liberty, cultural freedom and a limited government. Join today at cis.org. Music.