Is British politics just ungovernable?

This is a Global Player Original Podcast.

Now breaking news. Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham says that he has applied to stand in the Gorton and Denton by election. A potential challenge for the Labour leadership from Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham. If Andy wants to return to uh Parliament. Uh I'll try and make time between now and the by election go knock some doors for him. The world why would Kirstarmer sign a piece of paper?

Which basically says, Dear Keir Starmer, I would like your job. Yours sincerely, Andy Burnham. Breaking news, Andy Burnham has been blocked by the Labour Party's National Executive Committee from running in the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election. Andy Burnham's doing a great job as the mayor of Manchester, but having an election for the mayor of Manchester when it's not necessary.

Would divert our resources away from the elections that we must have. It is simply untrue to say that I was told that I would be be blocked. We've just seen a week where the Labour Party leadership has almost been litigated in plain sight. There was much written about the Burnham Starmer spectacle, much florid talk about Keir Starmer's refusal to accept Burnham being a sign of strength, the flexing of prime ministerial muscle which left him stronger.

In fact, in every sense, it was a sign of profound frailty. Had Starmer felt secure in his position? Had his political project been going well, he would have been indifferent to Burnham's possible return to Parliament. He might have even been able to take a risk, dare him to bet his long standing opponent's political capital, political career,

that in any midterm by election Burnham might lose it, taking him out politically forever. He might even have felt able, had he won, to invite him into his cabinet. As it stood, Starmer was afraid, rightly afraid. Not that Burnham would lose, but that he would win. Afraid of an opponent whose political cachet, unlike his own, is real, a rare thing to say about a Labour politician right now. Afraid that so weak has Starmer's political position become that to allow Burnham into Parliament.

would be to automatically sign his own political death warrant. But there is a wider story here too. How did this come to be? How could it be that a Prime Minister elected with one of the biggest majorities in parliamentary history only 18 months ago could find himself so afraid of a man not even in parliament? How could his political position become so parlor?

There is of course a familiar roll call of reasons for that. We've covered them as they happened on the show. We could walk through all the mishaps, the mistakes, the moments he's been sinned against and sinning. But what if there is a deeper story here? A systemic Problem where Prime Ministers, including Starmer, find themselves captive in their own job, unable to flex.

with power, or rather without the thing they need to wield that power political authority, the ability to make people and systems do what they want them to do. Someone who thinks about power and what it means to wield power is Professor David Runcaman, politics professor at Cambridge and the host of the Past-Present Future podcast, a show about the history of political ideas.

I've caught up with him to ask about Starmer's rapid political decline and get at a deeper question Why do our prime ministers now seem so perpetually lost? Is it personal that they're all just bad politicians, bad at politics, or is it the politics that's the problem? Welcome to the news agents. The news agents.

Well David Runcman, Professor Runcman. I mean I think the reason for doing this, or the reason I wanted to sort of talk to you about it, is because you know, all year, certainly on news agents and the day job, we've just been talking about what feels to me basically the gravitating around the same question, which is how can it be that Keir Starmer A prime minister who comes in with such a crushing majority.

has ended up feeling as if his actual political authority has been so fragile and has just been sort of spent so quickly. And then that kind of got me thinking a little bit about the difference in politics between power and authority. And the fact that It feels to me that we haven't had Prime Minister with a sustained period of authority for a long time. Do you think that distinction between politics and auth power and authority is a useful one?

Yeah it is, I mean it's the kind of question that academics could spend a lot longer You've got arguing about. But yeah, it does. And I think K-Starmer's an interesting example of it. So this is still a representative democracy. So power and authority they derive from their traditional sources, which is winning elections and winning votes. That's

That's the currency that we deal in. But power and authority are not the same thing. So if you win an election, it puts you in power. So it means you get to be Prime Minister with all the power that comes with it, not maybe as much as it used to be, but still, you know, the reason they all want to be Prime Minister is not just vanity, right? This is still a system that really revolves around the central power of Downing Street and the Prime Minister.

So there's just a basic sense in which power derives from winning an election. But also it gives you authority, which is something different, which is like the right to be heard, taken seriously, people really

follow what you believe because they think you've claimed some kind of right. They do it not just because they have to do it, which is power. They do it because they want to do it. They feel they must do it. So if you're Prime Minister, you can hire and fire people. If you're fired, you have to leave the room.

But if you want the person in the room to think, I want to follow this man through fire, that's not power, that's authority. And what's interesting about Starmer is he won an election which on conventional measures gave him a lot of power. in that it gave him a huge parliamentary majority and there was a divided opposition. This it looks like the field is clear, but didn't give him a lot of authority because it was a weak

election win. And one of the features of it is I think it was a default win in the sense that I mean you can tell me if you think I'm wrong here, but I think almost any Labour leader would have won that election. I think Rebecca Long Bailey, you know, his rival for the leadership back in the day Rydyn ni'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio

She would be Prime Minister. Would Corbin have worked. I mean that's an interesting counterfactual. Yeah, I d so that and it that one's difficult because we sort of know what happened to Corbyn and twenty nineteen and also he wouldn't have held his party together, but a shrewd Corbynite could have won that election. And Starmer's problem, I think. is that he wants to assert his authority by pointing to the fact he won this election and the kind of basics of his power.

And it's not enough because they're at odds with each other. The power and the authority feel like they're pulling in different directions. So when he, as we're told, he sits around the cabinet table and says to his cabinet colleagues, You're only here because of me and Morgan That's asserting authority, not power. You know, you you owe it to us. You have to listen to us. You may not like us, but we're asserting who we are.

It's just not true. And I think that's the difference between authority and power. He still has the power. He could fire all of them tomorrow. He still has that power, but the authority doesn't come from that power. And for him that difference is really acute. I suppose the other thing is he doesn't have the kind of political authority, which as you say may have come with a sense that

They're there, his MPs are there because of him, which most other landslide prime ministers have, right? Like Blair could say that, Thatcher could say that Johnson could say that, right? In the after twenty nineteen. Not that it lasted that long. They could all say that. But likewise as well, he doesn't have intellectual authority, right? He doesn't have a kind of prospectus or a programme or in s sort of strong

kind of ballast of ideas that he can then draw upon and say, You're with me because you agree with me about these things. And I think so I thought this before he became Prime Minister, he and Rachel Reese both actually, as they laid out their vision. And I thought one of the questions you have to ask with this kind of vision is when it goes wrong, which it will, I mean it just will. It's a fact of politics. This is what you say when you're in opposition, but

When things are falling apart, what's the thing that you're gonna cling to in the wreckage? And I couldn't tell you what it was. I still don't think I could tell you what it was. And that's one of the think the tests of political authority. So you've got to get these people. It's really bad now for them. It's a bad time to be in government. You've got to hold these people together. So you have to have the thing that makes them want to stick with you.

And I don't know what that thing is. I know someone who It's kind of people I know this is what they do, who's just been watching video of Margaret Thatcher in nineteen eighty and eighty one when she was really in trouble, really unpopular. She didn't have a anything like a majority that Starmer had. Her party was really divided. There were people who wanted her out, no question. And in some ways the circumstances were worse. Unemployment was rampant, there were riots in inner cities.

And the person who watched these videos said the thing that sort of defined her political authority is that even in the midst of this, she was absolutely clear what the bedrock Of what she stood for was. This this is the non negotiable bit. So if you ask me what's the non negotiable bit with Starmer? The bit that he wouldn't throw out the window if he had to. I just couldn't tell you. And that's a failure of political authority.

Do you think that again, sort of Johnson's interesting kind of counterexample, isn't it? Because he was a guy who He did at least for a period of time have a great deal of authority, partly because of the circumstances in which he was governing around the pandemic, partly because of the election win that he'd

just had partly because he was associated with a clear kind of set of prospectus, even if it was one that he was a bit of a chameleon sort of around. But even he that was exhausted quite quickly. And I suppose

I mean who was the last Prime Minister to exert authority for a long period? Like it feels to me that the answer is none n none of them really have since two thousand eight, probably, since the crash. And so then that makes me wonder whether Is it just that we've had in this quite contingent way, a series of prime ministers who have been below par and not like a Thatcher or Blair or whoever it happens to be, or is there something structurally going on which makes it

harder to exert authority or just to govern for a prolonged period. So I think it's too many of them for it just to be a coincidence. We happen to have had a run of six or seven who lack authority relative to stupid or you know, they're I mean I can't say that's the thing. Prime Ministers who lack authority. So Theresa May lacked authority. She had a lot of authority for a short period. But after the twenty seventeen election because she was trying to cobble together a government with the

DUP, but Johnson quickly came to lack authority with a big majority. I think Cameron had some authority during the Coalition years. But actually I more think we look back to Blair and Thatcher and we think sort of that's how it's meant to be or how it used to be. They're the outliers. Now in British politics.

if you take a two hundred year perspective, the kind of politics we have now is more normal. It's more like it was in the first half of the twentieth century. It's more like it was in the nineteenth century. Parties are hard to hold together. The party system is quite

sort of fragile. Politics of the nineteen twenties is actually more similar to to ours in some ways than the nineteen nineties or the nineteen twenties. The nineteen thirties as well. It was more stable in some ways, but also a complete nightmare to be a government. You don't want to be Ramsay Macdonald, right? And that period, I mean, the post-Second World War period, but particularly maybe the last third of the 20th century, that looks to me like.

an outlier. And it's possible the kind of politics that we have now is more like the way this system has worked for most of its history. And we've slightly been misled by the thought that a Thatcher or a Blair is kind of how it's

meant to be. And I increasingly think that sort of golden period for the kind of democracy that we have was much briefer than we realized. And it coincided with all sorts of things. That worked in the age of Thatcher and Blair. This is the age of mass circulation newspapers and broadcast technology, relative even you know during the Thatcher period, relative economic stability, a certain kind of international authority on the world stage, a a Cold War or post Cold War scenario in which

the issues were clear. It's incredibly rare. And like you say, the nineteen twenties More chaotic world environment, more chaotic media environment, more chaotic party system, more different kinds of people in politics. The other thing about the the Thatcher Blair years

That was the sweet spot of the professionalization of this system. Like the people in your party in parliament, you could pretty much rely on them to think of this as a career and something in which they wanted advancement and you could control them in those ways. The problem that Starmer has, one of the many problems he has, is he's got a parliamentary majority made up of people who are nothing like him, many of whom know they're not.

in politics for a career, many of whom know they're gonna lose at the next election anyway, many of whom have come into politics from another world, the sort of NGO charity world, they see it more as a kind of certain kind of performance than a career thing. They're on a hundred different WhatsApp groups. I mean someone you you're gonna know this better than me, but the WhatsApp application of parliamentary government. It's more like the 19th century. In the 19th century,

They were all in different clubs, you know, like around London. They were all gossiping in different clubs. And neither the Prime Minister nor the whips nor anyone else kind of knew what they were up to. And also you have In a way that does remind me a lot of the modern media environment, the fragmented media environment. You know, you have newspapers specifically, not just for your part of them, you know, for your

tribe of the party and you know you have and particularly in the US, I mean that was even more profoundly so and it was vicious as well, profoundly. And appearing two or three times a day, all of that. It was so that Almost think of it as sort of Bernard Ingham period where Thatcher's press secretary. Yeah, a Graf Yorkshireman could kind of browbeat certain people. Even Alistair Campbell could browbeat certain people, had access to the levers of communication.

That period is really rare. So I don't think we should just think we've had a succession of fairly useless prime ministers who weren't up to it like the ones who were up to it when I was young. Actually we've had a succession of Prime Ministers who found this system as hard to manage as People found it to manage in the nineteen twenties or the eighteen nineties.

or the eighteen seventies or God v you know, the eighteen forties. You just try. It's impossible. I mean, that's I I think the the idea of the return to kind of normality or normalcy, as Americans would say. Feels to me i like one of the most kind of misleading concepts in contemporary politics, right? Because and and it is one that I and I sort of understand it. People

kind of yearn for because we we imagine I think mainly they're thinking of the nineteen nineties rather than the nineteen eighties,'cause the nineteen eighties was obviously just so much more divisive. But the nineteen nineties and the sort of early two thousands you know, in the run up to the twenty twenty four election

So many people would sort of say to me, particularly if you're talking at things or whatever, this is gonna be it, isn't it? This is gonna be the moment we can almost have a kind of breath and return to something. And it feels to me in a way when we're talking about Starmer However unimpressive he might be in different ways, it was that expectation in some ways that I think weighed most.

Problematically. And it is one that he slightly fed into as well because he talked about a politics which would intrude less or tread less late. It's probably something he could never pr actually deliver. I mean he'd lived through the Brexit years, right? He knows.

what what this politics is like. It's not going to get any lighter. But I think he and th those around him almost also bought into that analysis as well that basically you know the the the fundamental problem with British politics was that the Tory party was

you know, riven and feckless and useless. And if you just take them out, then it's a sufficient condition to to basically improve the whole system. And something that they're realizing is that that's not true. And that that is a fallacy. So if he believed that, that was just a mistake. I think it's a mistake for any politician to think The problem with our politics is that the people on the other side are not serious people.

And we are serious people. I think he profoundly believed that. So if he did believe that, the people around him should have disabused him of that unless they believed it too. And part of the problem that he finds himself in now is if he does believe it, he's got to unbelieve it. pretty quickly and he's struggling. I mean you can almost see him physically struggling to unbelieve it because he comes across in many ways more and more serious. It sounds flat, empty, dead.

Because it actually what he's done is sort of hollow it out. I suppose the the other way as well of sort of thinking about the bigger problems without democratic politics, right, is that I suppose you could also argue that this maybe collapse authority is too strong a word, but the sort of la lack of ability to wield authority in a significant way.

is it's not confined to Britain, right? I mean if you look at most other w you know, Western European democracies, whether it's Macron or, you know, Schultz had it and so on, even you know, Biden, even Trump, I mean Trump like file hegemonic at the start of this year. He was wielding both power, absolute power,

And complete authority. And yet now at the end of the year, even that started to collapse. So gravity of politics seems to be exerting itself on on him. So is it more systemic? Is there something else going on? So it's quicker for sure. Political time is sped up. Political time is sped up.

It's much quicker. It is systemic. It's not universal. There are I think Maloney in Italy still has power and authority. These politicians who've been hollowed out in this way can cling on for a long time. But yeah, it is. And yet you look at Trump and you feel like Trump so there are s there are sort of fundamentals which aren't new to our time. If there's a cost of living crisis, inflation is the

is the great killer of political authority. In the nineteen seventies, every democratically elected government around the world fell during the period of the highest inflation in the early seventies. So it didn't matter whether you were charismatic, technocratic, big majority, small majority. It's kind of kryptonite.

And Trump's problems at the moment, his promise that he shouldn't have made was that he would bring down the cost of living. So it's not like, you know, it's systemic, but we shouldn't think it's systemic in the sense that it's this sort of new media environment and there's a kind of you know culture that is eating.

political. It's almost reassuring that in a way. I mean I find it in a sense that like when Trump's going on about the price of eggs, which again is something that he you know, he highlighted it's that is the price of eggs. The price of eggs has been an issue in politics for a long, long, long time. But if you compare, say, Starmer to Trump, with Trump, I don't think he knows how to sort out Medicare, Medicaid, rising health costs. the price of eggs, and so that could do for him.

But the way he communicates the language he has, his ability to use anti political language as a politician gives him a kind of out in this environment. What do you mean by that? So in You know, one of the biggest problems that Starmer has is he tries to assert his authority, his seriousness. the grown ups are back. He's sensible by sounding like a politician. And this is so one of the differences is this is a very anti political age. So the reason it has sped up in part

People's patience is shorter. They are willing to give politicians far less time than they used to give them. There are many more outlets for their anger. And I think if you're Starmer and Starmer's particular problem, I think, is that he's chosen to a fix himself and says he can't get rid of her to another politician, Rachel Reeves, who has exactly the same problem. So they both sound like when things get tough,

our way out of it is to sound more and more like politicians. And they share, like Tanya, but something I thought about quite a lot as well is it's precisely that, which is they were actually, even in historical terms, a relatively unusual Prime Minister Chancellor partnership in that they

Quite often not always, but quite often, the Chancellor, Prime Minister, i they complement each other in some way or they balance each other out. You know, Blair and Brown are obviously most famously, Cameron Osborn did it as well. Whereas actually They're both almost versions of each other. And they're both the straight man, they're both the stooge. It's like a double act in which the thing that would give the double act life, which is the other one, is is missing.

Whereas Trump, you feel I was sort of thinking about this, the the Rob Reiner was murdered, and Trump comes out and he of a man who's just been murdered, it turns out, it seems like by his son, says he had it coming. You know, Trump derangement syndrome explains why no one should mourn for this guy. And then when there's outrage, he doubles down on it and he says this guy is bad for the country and you know there's a little part of me always that thinks, Oh my god, he's finally gone too far.

But he's done the thing that he does, which is he hasn't just changed the the narrative. I mean he's totally happy and Johnson had some of this too. He's totally happy to provoke that response. He really doesn't sound like a politician when he said that. He sounds like a lunatic and he sounds like a cruel man. I mean a really cruel malicious. Malicious. There's something chilling about that.

but he does not sound like a politician. And it's not just that that sort of cuts through, but it's like a sort of breaking out of this thing that Starmer and Reeves are trapped in, which is the the circumstances are really hard for governing. It is systemic and their default is to kind of get deeper into the system and it's sort of like Trump is he's sort of brushing it off. He's he's disdaining it. I don't think it's gonna save him, but

It's different. I mean I don't know if you saw Starmer was at the liaison committee. And I thought it was a very, very revealing moment where he talked about how difficult it was to in act change and he said, you know, I pull on these levers and I pull on this other lever and then different arm's length bodies and different regulatory bodies come back and they say, You can't do that, Prime Minister, you can't do that And I just thought, God, this really is

profoundly problematic for him in a sense that, you know, if you're a technocrat, if you come in as a technocrat and you you ground your politics and your authority in basically making the system work. And then you basically sit there and you sort of put your hands up and you go, God, I can't make the system work then you really have nothing.

And I just thought that sort of embodied his problems in so many ways. And even the w that way of describing it sounds like a technocrat a technocratic politician slightly moaning about his lot? And that's also, I think, fatal for this kind of politics. This kind of politics needs something that Sounds like it comes from another space and Starmer hasn't got it. He he's shrinking all the time because the space he occupies feels like it's getting narrower. Does he does does he remind you of

Anyone historically. Because again, something that I thought about. Like in terms of other leaders he's'cause he's unusual. He's unusual in the la within the Labour Party tradition. I mean there haven't been that many Labour Prime Ministers, so it's hard to sort of compare. But is he

Are there any sort of parallels? Does he mean you make it a little bit more than a little bit? So no in some ways sort of bits of him remind me of lots of people. Some of his tone deafness is actually a little bit like Theresa Gray, I think. When he came in, my wife It annoys her when I remind her of this. But when people were really excited that the grown-ups were back in the room, people who'd voted Labour. And I said his first week.

Reminded me to a T of Gordon Brown's first week. If you remember, people were thrilled. Even after Blair, they thought the grown ups were back in the room, the government the government of all the talents. Brown gave that speech on the steps of Downing Street, this sort of dignified speech. You're staking your colours to wear the grown ups, mask. doesn't work the second you do something a bit childish, which in Brown's case was not called an election.

And in Starmer's case there's been a whole series of U turns and turnarounds and sort of flailings about. So he's a bit of all of these things, he's not the first lawyer to be Prime Minister. Blair was a lawyer. But to me the odd thing about Starmer is that mismatch between he's got sort of little bits of the faults of all of them. And I may be wrong about this. I don't know him at all. But it seems to me like He lacks self knowledge, or at least a sense of his own

sort of unusual vulnerabilities. So the mis the really big m mismatch actually feels to me a bit like vanity. There's a kind of Funny I don't think Gordon Brown had it. I don't think Tere Theresa May had it. I don't think even weirdly Boris Johnson had it. I don't think Boris Johnson thought he was amazing. And my fear with Starmer is he kind of did believe that thing. I think when he says to his cabinet, You're only here because of me. He does believe it.

And that mismatch I think is fatal for him. I can't think of another politician where I felt the sort of gap. Well, I tell you there's a very big gap. There's a very good big gap in I think and he's unusual in that when he is completely uninterested in and indifferent to his own sort of place

Historically and his own? Yeah, well no, I don't mean I don't mean in terms of I'm sure he wants to be a successful Prime Minister. I meant more in terms of his place in the lineage of politics and within the Labour Party.

So you know if you ask him and I've interviewed him and I asked him sometimes particularly early on, you're trying to get a sense of the guy and you'll say, you know, well which do you have any political heroes or d which Labour prime ministers or leaders do you most identify with? And the sheer kind most political leaders and you know, Labour pri Labour Prime Ministers in particular.

can talk to you about that all day long and they'd love to talk about it and they'll love and they'll start before you know where you are, you're talking about George Brown or something, you know. But he he rolls his eyes at I don't want to talk about that. boring I'm ironically he says in quite boring way. If he actually turned around and said that in a kind of quite fun way, it would be quite a moment. But he can't I think he's very unusually indifferent. I don't think he has much

in a historical life, I suppose is that. So what's interesting about that, because you can think of a way that that would come across as a kind of modesty. Yes. And yet I think it's not. I think actually the politician who thinks So the modest version of it is just, you know, I'm I'm not comparing myself to these people and I just want to do a good job. But the other way I think, but he sort of thinks he transcends it.

I mean he thinks he almost thinks he's above it. Because you know, once you place yourself in that lineage, you are beholden to a whole set of ideas and traditions and people. And he wants to be someone who defines himself and defines his own politics. And that

It's so hard to pinpoint it'cause you've so you've interviewed him, I haven't. I haven't sat across from him, you have. So maybe he doesn't come across like this. But to me, there's just that whiff in the things that you read about him and the way he reacts. Where he just seems to think that he's slightly above it. And maybe the public pick up on that. I think the question about British politics, I think, is.

Not why is he unpopular, they're all unpopular at the moment. But why is he so quickly the most unpopular by far? You know, almost by a factor of something. Partly'cause he and Reeves are dragging each other down. There's no question that's part of it. But I think the absence of political authority, like we talked about, people do pick up on it. Even before Johnson was about to be turfed out, he still had some of that. Even Theresa May had some of that.

It's like he's he's got none of it left. So what are people picking up on? Because they haven't sat across from him either. And they y you and I are interested in this stuff. We listen to the interviews that he gives, we read about him, we watch him. Most people aren't. But they're picking up on something. And I think so my feeling is it they sense there's something fraudulent about the mismatch between his sense of his own authority, command of this situation

And the complete absence of it in reality. And yet someone like Farage, for example, who again is unpopular, we can overdo it. Yeah. But he's someone again who I mean maybe it's more charismatic authority with him, it probably is, but nonetheless he's someone who

is an arrogant man. I mean he is. He's a deeply thin skin again, someone I I s across from you know, very unlike Stam, he's extremely aware of his own place in what he wants history to be and all of those sorts of things. He thinks about those things, I think, quite deeply. But he's not as unpopular as Starmer, obviously Starmer's Prime Minister, but he's he's the public don't seem to mind that arrogance.

No, and it's partly because it's slightly more self-aware. Maybe it's just maybe I'm not saying anything more complicated than that people pick up on the fact that people who are lack who are really lacking in self-awareness are very off putting and that he has that. Farage is pretty self aware. I think Trump is pretty

Self aware. Do you? Some people would be surprised by that. Yeah, I think he I think he has a much clearer sense of what he's doing. I mean, I think he's unhinged. I think you can be unhinged and self aware. I mean it's not it's not it's not even that hard. You just have to know that you're a bit unhinged, and let yourself. Officer Leith Johnson was more self-aware. There's something tone deaf about

Starmer, but it is also it's it's some of the basic stuff. Like you say, it is charisma and language and the ability to communicate. Even when Farage is sounding arrogant. He sounds so Like himself and what is the himself that Starmer is sounding like, except as you said, the

frustrated technocrats. And sometimes as you say, you know, politics people like you may spend all the so much time thinking about these things. And but sometimes politics can be as simple as that, right? And people do pick up or at least At least it's maybe a it's not quite as simple as that in its entirety, but it certainly is an maybe an underrated component of kind of why particular politicians fail. It's that It's those small things about them that the public think about or intuit.

In a way that maybe we don't think much um attach much importance to Yeah, and it's so it's not like Starmer is the most boring, spectacularly boring, uncharismatic politician that anyone has ever seen, right? He's not and people really liked him, the people who are on his side in the Brexit.

arguments really like him. They actually they thought he was the grown up. I mean, I'm not sure he was, but they thought he was and he came across as authentic and he sa often sounded quite passionate about it. So it's not as if There's something about him that puts him off the chart. But it's he does not know how to compensate for his weaknesses. He somehow doesn't know how if you are this kind of politician,

Like we said, you need around you different kinds of politicians. You need to connect yourself with people who can tell a different kind of story. And it's it's as though he pulls it back to him. With a ward. UK under rank. Here in Edinburgh. Simon Marks, my American Week is next. Reporting from the heart of Cardinal. your life listen on our Yeah.

Leading Britain's conversation. The news agents. We're talking about how much sort of importance to attach in a way individual politicians' failings and the sort of systemic problems, which clearly are there. And as you say, in some ways these aren't new problems, but in some ways they do feel new. And certainly obviously the tech environment is I mean you wrote.

And you wrote your book about how democracies might end or die and that was what sort of ten ten you know, twenty eighteen, so eight years ago or so on and that was, you know, partly anchored and centered around the role that tech would have and whether democracy as we've known it is compatible with the way that big tech and social media operate.

How do you feel about that book now? I mean do you feel vindicated? Do you feel that you were right or do is it different? I wrote which had in it the line, Donald Trump is not how democracy ends. And come twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, I thought, well, at least that bit is right. I'm not so sure now'cause I didn't think he would come back. But it was also trying to argue against the view that democracy is going to end with a bang, that it's going to end with a whimper.

And it's gonna hollow out. It's not going to end with revolutions and coups and the traditional way democracies do end, which is you wake up one morning and the generals are on T V and they're telling you not to leave your house if you don't want to be shot. That's not gonna happen.

And it's gonna take decades. So I do I feel vindicated? I mean, I feel we're still on that. It may be happening slightly quicker. But I also the thing that I increasingly feel is that sense that this version of democracy that we have, with these kinds of political parties communicating in these kinds of ways, traditional ways.

uncomfortable most of them with this new media and a new media environment that does empower citizens. This is a more democratic world for sure. Even though tech companies are hoarding power, they are also distributing it to people too.

moan, complain, form networks, organise themselves. So one the irony is is that we talk all the time about and get very concerned that democracy is on its last legs and yet in so many ways if you compare it go back to the nineteen eighties or the nineteen nineties, that what we can now consider a kind of halcyon period.

our political discourse is so much more democratic. Yeah. So it is simultaneously the thing that people wanted to be is either the one thing or the other. It is simultaneously our world getting more democratic and less democratic every day. And the thing that's being squeezed by that is traditional representative parliamentary democracy.

You know, it's called the meeting the people used to say the state's too big for the small problems and too small for the big problems. And in some ways the politics we have is too democratic for the undemocratic stuff where you have to be quick and nimble and compete with the Chinese and compete with the tech companies.

But it's too undemocratic for the democratic stuff where people want answers today and they want to be heard and they have a voice and they have a platform. They feel empowered. And it's squeezed between those two things. And that's happening quite quickly. But it is a kind of squeezing and I think one of the ways I think it's hollowing out

is not because the authority of these politicians is completely disappearing or their power is disappearing, but more and more stuff is just bypassing them. Or maybe that the institution's authority of themselves Declining. The sort of traditional Yeah, but that's that so yes, and that's probably been true for a while. So people when did we lose traditional deference for our politicians? I mean that might have happened.

was more powerful. Well actually at the moment it is quite powerful because Labour have got a bunch of MPs that they can't manage. But then people don't feel, Oh, look, Parliament has asserted itself. They just think, Well, that's not working either. So it's the institutions. That was w one of the funny things, wasn't it? I I always thought about the the Brexit process, which is that everybody kept saying

This is an institution which isn't working. And yet in so many ways it was working exactly perfectly, right? I mean yet it couldn't come to it it's was struggling to come to a conclusion, but given the arithmetic of the MPs that the public themselves had sent to Parliament, And Parliament was engaged in this you know scrutiny function and and trying to sort of hammer out a compromise. It was kind of working exactly right. And yet, despite that,

its own authority and its own respect among the country was declining every day. And likewise the people who were in favour of Brexit wanted a Brexit so that Britain's Parliament would be fully sovereign again. But seeing how a parliament works They didn't, they wanted to bypass it. So too much of the politics kinda goes round these institutions and round

these politicians. But I think this could go on for a long, long time. I mean the thing that really strikes me about our politics we're so disillusioned. Polling shows that trust or confidence in these institutions is as low as it's ever been. We have the most unpopular Prime Minister and Chancellor in recorded history, I think. People are unhappy and often despairing of the future. And we spend all of our time wondering who's gonna win the next election.

I mean everything signals it doesn't matter. And you could keep going like that for a long, long time. Partly that feeling that the next one will somehow resolve this. You know, that feeling is real. Like you say, people keep saying, Is this the moment where we go back to this thing working? Or the people who are really frustrated with it, is this the moment where we finally kind of break free from the shackles? And Nigel who's got to be a good thing.

than ever because we have more access, there are more outlets, there are more ways in which you can And the outcomes are less predictable. The outcomes are less predictable. There's there's more churn and chaos around it. The horse race is is more dramatic. People are falling off.

And so that's another and so that's another example of how, in a sense, democracy has become more successful or more appealing because more people are interested in the horse race, which is a sort of centre of democracy. But it's but but it's not yielding anything. Yeah, it's a very thin definition of success.

Turnout, turnout up, turnout down doesn't prove much. Turnout was very high in the Weimar Republic. That was not a successful democracy. High turnout is often a sign that people are scared. All of these things pull in different directions. So you can have a democracy that is dynamic. and has a lot of engagement. Although the engagement we also have to be clear is patchy in the sense some people are hyper engaged.

And some people aren't engaged at all. So even that can give you a misleading impression. you could find places in the country where it would feel like politics was treading very lightly on people's lives because no one gives a monkeys. So all of this is going on at the same time and we want it to be one thing or the other thing. But the long term trends, no question,

the long term trends are away from and around this version of politics. So the Power of the tech companies. the rising power of China, the ways in which the world that we live in is probably going to face wars or other huge events coming up, which will make us feel small. And that makes our democracy feel inadequate. And at the same time, the kind of bubbling chaos of the underlying democratizing forces that are at work. The starmer version of politics, it just looks really thin and squeezed.

And like not much can pass through it. If you sort of think of it, representative democracy is meant to be a sort of bridge or a filter. It it takes public opinion, anger, hopes, fears. And it passes through something. And out of that you get politics and policy and outcomes and decisions. And it just feels like the thing it has to pass through is so thin and strained and old.

relative to all of the stuff that's going on around it, that's s eventually it's just gonna be thinned away. But I don't think it's gonna snap in the sense, I don't think it's gonna It's hard to imagine what that would even be. Yeah, collapse in s America is not on the brink of a civil war. Britain is not on the brink of becoming ungovernable. London is not

a sort of wild west wasteland. These are the binary visions of politics. If it's not working, again we we go back to our traditional visions of what the failure of democracy looks like. So the nineteen twenties led to the thirties and the thirties led we know where.

That's a hundred years ago. That is not our world at all. Our version of politics. It's got a lot of you know, there's this phrase a nation has a lot of ruin in it. Our politics has got a lot of ruin in it. It can keep going for a long time. But it is It's shrinking before our eyes. And maybe the problem with Starmore is he is, unfortunately for him, almost like a physical embodiment of that, of the incredible shrinking man.

Do you think if someone who's thought about the nature of democracy itself a lot and the history of democracy and again sometimes in our very kind of short term political discourse, we s forget how young democracy still is, right? And it's not surprising that in its contemporary form, you know, we've only had everybody has only had the vote on an equal basis since night not even a century, yeah, right? So it's still really, really young.

Do you think I mean you say it's got a lot of road left to go. I mean do you think that it can be saved from itself? Because it seems to me that a lot of the things that you're describing are kind of consequences of the democratisation of society itself. It feels as if that a lot of these things are almost inexorable. Do you think that a group of politicians genuinely could reform the system if they were so minded to save it from itself?

So I really don't know the answer to that question in the sense that History teaches you that political systems get stuck a lot in the way that our one probably is. And it needs something from the outside to come and kind of jolt them out of it. The br British democracy usually British democracy was really in trouble nineteen twelve, nineteen thirteen. It was really in trouble

In the twenties and thirties, really in trouble of you know American democracy was really in trouble with the in the eighteen fifties, it was really in trouble in the nineteen thirties. So it's usually a war. It could be also a real financial shock to the system. The nineteen seventies probably had that. function. Although we had that in OA and it feels as if everything that has flowed from that has been

negative or it it feels as if the system has not in any fundamental way managed to refashion itself, either economically or politically. So that the the crisis in two thousand and eight, nine, at the time there was a thought and we've had COVID as well, we shouldn't we shouldn't forget. And in Britain, we've had Brexit, which is a constitutional crisis for the system. And with each of those, at the time there was a thought, including with COVID.

This shows what we're capable of. This is a galvanizing event. Doom and gloom about climate change. No more. Because look what we can do when the the chips are really down. And it just fades away very quickly. And it's partly because all of those three events in a way, even Brexit, which came close to making Britain ungovernable, but in the end didn't. We just had an election and we sorted it out and we went on our merry way. All of them were not quite bad enough.

to make the system fail to work, what is the not worst but worst case scenario in two thousand and eight, nine, which would have actually required a change in the way that we do politics fundamentally. Obama couldn't have just patched it up. Gordon Brown couldn't have just patched it up. The thing that would have been worse feels like it might not have been manageable at all. What's the version of COVID that would have made us think we just can't carry on?

this way. Well it was it wasn't great, you know, it was pretty bad. And so it is quite hard under the conditions we live in to think of the thing, but it probably will come. There are crises to come in the next ten, twenty years Probably, possibly including real military threat. Maybe even wars.

Technological failures. I think the thing that hasn't happened yet, the dog that hasn't barked, is the technology hasn't failed yet. So at some point this technology will fail in a way that impacts on all of our lives. the network will out in some way. And so

banking will cease to work or airplanes will fall out of the sky or hospitals will s will stop functioning and it may only last for twenty four hours. But we haven't had that yet. You know, when WhatsApp goes down for three hours, people behave like That's the thing. But just when the we'll know it when the thing h nothing

just carries on serenely without that crisis in the same way the global financial system had its moment. So the the think of the tech equivalent of 2008-9, the crisis for the companies, the ways in which we suddenly realize they're putting our lives at risk. That could do it. A war could do it. But there's a fatalism about our politics because it's like we're waiting for the external thing. So you ask me could a group of politicians come along?

and decide to make this way of doing politics better suited to an age in which some things are more democratic and some things are less democratic and the challenges and the cycles are getting quicker. In the absence of that event, It's not going to be an election. The thing that it will not be is an election. The election of Nigel Farage or whoever it is.

It's conceivable in Britain the next general election will produce a parliament that can't govern. But we will guarantee we will not convene a constitutional convention and come up with a radical set of reforms for a new deliberative, more consultative. We'll just have another election. We will just have another election and then Farage will win that one because he'll say, I told you they were trying to stop me.

So it's not that. I did think briefly that if Scotland had voted for independence unlike Brexit actually, Brexit didn't force a constitutional reckoning because Brexit was We want our traditional constitution. So it was a restoration as much as anything. It was a restoration. Scottish independence would have been a revolution.

And the system just wouldn't have made sense at that point. Almost nothing about it would be for the five years. Elites would have been forced to reckon with the constant because you're basically creating a new state. I can't think of anything else And who knows? Right. You you just don't know. But that one came close, I think. Is there an equivalent to that coming up? I'm not sure that there is. So it feels passive our politics as well. It's part of the problem.

There's a kind of waiting for God or whoever it is element to it. So what we really need is a new war. No, we don't need a new war. Professor David Runsman, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. The news agents. Right, I will admit that I'm a big fan of Runcimmans and his thinking. So if you enjoyed that, I can guarantee that you will love.

His podcast, Past Present Thinking, as I say. If you are interested in the history and philosophy of political ideas, I'll guarantee you will love it too. That is it from all of us for this week. One other thing we've covered on the show before what is in my view anyway one of the biggest policy scandals of our time, the student loans system or lack of system. But since then, in fact, just this week, The Chancellor said this to my LBC colleague, Natasha Clark.

yw'r pwysig yw'r pwysig yw'r pwysig yw'r pwysig yw'r pwysig yw'r pwysig yw'r pwysig yw'r pwysig yw'r pwysig yw'r pwysig yw'r pwysig. And you only pay it back if you afford if you can afford t to do so. And obviously after a period of time uh that gets written off uh entirely.

So uh if you are able to get a job that pays a good wage, you'll pay that money back quicker. But if you're never uh able to repay, that loan will eventually be written off. I think that is the fair uh system. Around half of people go to university today, but half don't. I'm not so sure. So we're planning a special episode on the issue. We know so many of our listeners and viewers have had their own experiences of the system, so do us a favour.

Send us your name, your age, the course you did, how much debt you left university with, how much debt you now have, and whether you think you got value for money. Send those voice notes. To NewsAgents at Global.com. Thanks as ever to our production team on the News Agents Shane Fennelly, Michaela Walters, Natalie Inn, Jarvin Badawal, Anna Georgievich. Jess Williamson, Mikey Bags. and Lizzie Ward. Our executive producer is Louis Dagenhart, our editor,

is Tom Hughes. It's presented by Emily Maitless, John Sopel, when he happens to be in the right hemisphere, which is pretty rare, and me, Lewis Goodall. We'll see you on Monday. Have a lovely weekend. This has been a Global Player Original Production.