Tom Tugendhat on Modernizing the UK and Political Reform

0:04Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatis .org. For full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit ConversationsWithT Tyler .com. Today, I am chatting with Tom Tugentot. Tom has served as a member of Parliament for Tonbridge since 2015. He has served as Security Minister. He has also stood up to the UK's enemies and been sanctioned by Russia, China and Iran for that privilege. As a back -benture, Tom was elected by MPs to serve as the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

0:47before being elected as an MP, Tom served in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's worked for the foreign office, helped to set up the National Security Council of Afghanistan, and on returning to the UK, Tom served as military assistant to the chief of the defense staff, the professional head of the UK Armed Forces. Tom, welcome. Thank you, Tyler. It's lovely to see you. Forgive me. I've just been interrupted by a child. My boy Adam. My boy Adam. Hi Adam. good to see you again. You probably don't remember me. You remember Tyler? You met Tyler? I don't remember. You did meet Tyler.

1:25Yes. I don't remember. Oh, I'm sorry. He's his memory isn't as good as yours. Okay, Pooza, can you look at me alone? How old was I? A few years ago. Gone two years ago. Two years ago. Exactly. Can you close it all please? Sorry, I apologize for that. Don't worry. No problem. You know the famous Korean clip. Yes. By CNN. Yes, one of the greatest TV episodes of all time and it's fully natural. Okay, first question. What is your favourite walk around London? And what does it show about the city that outsiders might not understand? Oh, my favourite walk is down the river and you know a lot of people walk down the river, but one of the best things about walking down the river in London is, first of all, it shows two things.

2:08One that London is actually incredibly private place. You can be completely on your own in the centre of one of the biggest cities in the world Within seconds just by walking down the river there's very often even in the middle of the day There's nobody there and you walk past things that are just extraordinary you walk past a customs house Okay, it's not used anymore But it was the customs house for three four five hundred years you walk past obviously the Tower of London You will pass Tower Bridge you will pass many things like that But actually you're walking past a lot of modern London as well and you see the reality of London, which is actually the truth is London isn't a single city.

2:43It's many, many different villages, all coupled together in various different ways. And so I think outsiders miss the fact that there's a real intimacy to London that you miss if you're all you're doing is you're going on the tube or if you're going on the bus. If you walk down that river, you see a very, very different kind of London. You see these real communities and real small, smaller communities. As a question of governance, how does London becoming so large, so wealthy, so successful, mesh with the relatively weak federalism of the UK? One might think if you have a city that critical, you need a lot of federalism to build up the intermediary bodies governing it.

3:20Is something in there need to be changed or is it optimal as is? I think it does need to be changed, but the reality is the UK is a very, very centralized state. I mean, although there is a mayor of London, of course, there's a mayor of London, the reality is the mayor have very, very limited powers. They control transport for London. They are joint heads of the City Police Force, the Metropolitan Police, the Home Secretary, so our Interior Minister and the Mayor of London both have the ability to fire the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and the Mayor has certain rights or rather powers on planning, but that's actually mixed with the burrows as well.

3:54So it's a much more diffuse system, a few compared to the United States. It's nowhere near as powerful as the Mayor of New York, for example, or a regional governor or something like that, or a state governor, sorry, forgive me. So how should we change that to make London better governed? Well, I think the big thing for London, actually, is to make sure that it's transport connections to the region are stronger. I mean, the real hold up for the whole of the United Kingdom is the lack of infrastructure investment over whatever it is, 30, 40 years. You know, we've just seen Crossrail built and already it looks like it's going to be a break even point in the next five or six years Which is a remarkable speed of return and the reason for the speed of the returns frankly that so little other infrastructure has been built So it's it's almost in a it's not quite a monopoly provider status But you know what I mean?

4:40It's got such a dominant ability to provide for the community that it's it's making a huge difference And the biggest thing that London could do is to get the investment going but it's not just true of London, that's true of Manchester Birmingham, all of our cities and all of our towns as well. We need a massive injection of infrastructure investment in the United Kingdom and we need the leadership to provide it because if you look at the pattern of growth in the United Kingdom, we were growing at a very healthy percentage, you know, 2 to 3 % up until 2007, 8, and the fall -off since then has left us effectively, I mean, depending on who you ask, anywhere between 18 and 25 % poorer.

5:15Why do you think England in particular is so unbalanced economically compared to the Netherlands or Germany? What is it in the history? Or is it really just the infrastructure links? So the infrastructure is hugely important. If you're not willing to connect Britain, guess what? You get concentrations. You get real concentrations. And then the challenges you get, the concentrations you don't get the housing. So if you don't have the housing, you don't have the ability to invest. and one of the striking things actually is the mayor of London who's been in place now for eight and a bit years has been a complete failure in building houses.

5:50He's been really resistant on building houses and he talks about rent control, which as you know, the moment you start talking about rent control, nobody wants to rent a house and nobody wants to build a house because it, I mean, you don't need me to tell you this, Tyler, but is one of the single greatest threats to the ability to house people is to introduce rent controls as complete disaster policy that's been tried a hundred times and failed a hundred times. And that's what he's talking about. But that's Labour's controlling attitude rather than the ability to build. So I think there is a strong argument for having greater devolved interest in infrastructure development.

6:22But we're a smaller country than the United States. So infrastructure can't be all local, can't be all done at a state level, if you see what I mean. But nor can it be all national, as we're so much bigger than say Belgium or or the Netherlands. So we need that relationship, we need a better relationship between our devolved powers and our national power, and that's something we haven't achieved yet. What's your most controversial opinion about London architecture? Oh, that the recent architecture actually can be absolutely fantastic. There's some really beautiful recent architecture, there's some beautiful town squares, or you know, the sort of urban squares built recently.

6:57And the condemnation of modern architecture, I think, is wrong. I'm a fan of what some architects call pastiche. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time. If there's a good design, if there's a good form of architecture that works that people like, I don't see what's wrong with repeating it just because you've changed the, changed the plumbing or the wiring, you know, behind the facade. But even though we're much wealthier and better educated, it seems that we, and I don't just mean the UK here, we can't build anything like, say, bath or York. And why is that? Where have we gone wrong?

7:31Well, we can actually. The King has built Poundbury. I've seen some fantastic designs for communities in Yafavisham. I've seen some really nice designs for communities in other parts of Kent. And there are people who are willing to do it. But the challenge you've got is you've got to have long -term interest. And actually, the great irony is that what we've swapped is we've swapped the ability to plan for the long -term with the ability to plan only for the short. And once you do that, then you put huge financial constraints on. And once you restrict the ability of people to access the land, and so you put all of the costs on the land rather than on the building, you end up massively distorting the amount that people are willing to spend on the architecture and on the quality.

8:10Because, of course, people aren't doing this for charity, they need to make a profit out of it. Profit is a perfectly noble motivation. And we need to make sure that people are able to do that. But if we constrain their ability to spend on beautiful architecture by restricting the supply of land, so they have to plan and inflate it price for that. Then you end up with less quality, design and less quality housing. If I think back to the 1970s, and I suppose even the 60s in Britain, my impression is a lot of very good buildings were knocked down, probably by mistake. Is that why Yimbi has a bad name and a lot of Britain today?

8:46Yeah. How is it we ensure we get Yimbi, but don't repeat the mistakes of the 1970s? We're saying, Christopher Rentscher is destroyed. Look, I think that's exactly right. And when you don't need me to tell you this, but you see the same in New York, the destruction of Pennsylvania Street Station was appalling. And you see it in the attempt to destroy, thank God, that was resisted by Benjamin, but the attempt to destroy St. Pancras Station was something that was done, the destruction of Houston Station. You know, we've seen some really appalling acts of vandalism. And in fact, the king was one of the people, the first people to criticize it in various speeches in 1980s and at the time he was constantly referred to as a young foggy and now he seems to have been rather more present and I think people recognize at the time.

9:30One of the things that we've got to do is we've got to make sure that we're building beautiful. There's a really interesting piece of work being done by a guy called Nicholas Boy Smith on Create Streets as his project and it's about building beautiful and it's amazing when you set out beautiful design codes, when you set out buildings that really add to the environment. People don't object so much. You know, it's hardly surprising that if you're going to build some modernist monstrosity next to my house, I might object. If you're going to build some sort of George and Villars that add to the feeling of the area, then I may feel that you're increasing the value of my house, not diminishing it.

10:03What makes Kent, which is where you're based, special in the history of England, as you see it? Oh, Kent is remarkable, actually, and very different from the rest of England. It's very underappreciated, but I'm a proud citizen of the sovereign and independent kingdom of Kent. Something okay, I admit that we haven't been for about a thousand years, but we still claim it. So Kent was actually colonized if that's the right word to use by the jutes, not by the angles and sacks and so by a different Viking tribe, a different Viking people. And instead of having pre -mogentia, so the inheritance availed the sun, they had the Frankish inheritance, which was the inheritance shared between the male, as of the father.

10:42Now, it's still sexist, but it meant that you ended up with a very different system. So you ended up with much smaller parcels of land. You end up with much smaller land holdings. And that had several effects, actually. One of the effects it had was it saw the greatest rise of industry. Because of course, you can't effectively just farm the rents of your peasants by owning a lot of land. Then you actually have to do something about it. So you see, for example, the rise of industry in Kent earlier than in other places. You see the arrows that were made for the Battle of Crescy and were all made in Kent.

11:12They were made by Kentish ironworks and they were made because they were small holdings and they were small holdings because people only had enough land to farm for themselves. They didn't have enough to profit off the wealth of others. You then see, of course, the fact that Kent is on the crossroads of Europe, of course, and you know, don't forget, seaways were the highways of the medieval world. so being on the coast, and particularly on the coast between England and France and the low countries and Germany, meant that you were right on the front line of commerce and ideas. So you get ideas coming into Kent, I mean, obviously right at the beginning, it was the Romans who landed in Kent and came up and fought the Kentish men at the Battle of Snotland in just before the turn of the year 0.

11:54And you then see the reintroduction of Christianity in about 600 when St. Augustine comes along and meets with the first Christian queen of Kent, Queen Bertha. So you get these ideas and later on you get the Protestantism that comes through and you get revolution of course because the peasants revolt comes from Kent. And that's so when what Tyler manages to get the men of Kent to rise against the king, but you get various ideas and various uprisings out of Kent. So Kent is a land of revolution and ideas. And how does that shape the politics in Kent today, that history? It's challenging. It's still challenging.

12:29It's an area where you get political innovation. You get political ideas coming out. In recent years, we've certainly seen some different politics coming out of the coastal areas of Kent, out of the centre. We've seen different areas of challenge. But some of it's eroded away. But you still have small, land holdings. You still have much more of a feeling of equality in Kent and you're doing many other parts of the United Kingdom. Now your town of Tonbridge has a very famous private school. Does that system need general reform in the UK or is it just fine as is? No, look, I think it has reformed an awful lot.

13:05I mean, the impressions about what a school does in a community, I think, are very often mistaken. I mean, Tonbridge School not only gives out large numbers of bursary, so a lot of the kids who go there don't pay full fees, various descriptions, fair few who don't pay anything at all. But also the school has a really important role in the community. So it sports track and it's, you know, and it sports facilities are used by the whole town at various different points. And very often for either low or free, a lot of the other schools use the theatre and use their facilities like that. And they run something in, which is relatively common in the ITC, called a combined kidette force.

13:40And various other kids are involved in elements of that as well. So it's not a standalone, you know, 40, 50 years ago, it would have been a very standalone institution. but the fees would have been relatively lower. Now the institution is much more integrated in many ways into the town. It's true that the fees are higher. They are very high. But what it offers the rest of the community is also a huge amount. Putting aside present company, who was the great unselected Prime Minister in British history? So I would say it was Dennis, And as healy, Michael Hezzlteen, Roy Jenkins, others, who's your pick?

14:16Should be the prime minister. Okay, I think all of those people are really interesting. I think Ken Clark would have been very interesting as well. I mean, actually, I think most recently, the one who would have been prime minister had he stayed in Parliament is George Osborne. I think when Theresa May came back after the 2017 election with not only a reduced majority, but actually a slight minority administration, I think George Osborne would have been Prime Minister within weeks had he stayed in Parliament, but he stood down. And so I think it was a, you know, that's one of those moments where, you know, sliding doors and the history is slightly different.

14:51Can the British system of government, in its current parliamentary form, how well can that work without broadly liberal individualistic foundations in public opinion? I think it works extremely well at ensuring that truly liberal foundations are maintained. I mean, that not in the American sense. I mean, in a genuine in the old liberal tradition that emerges from the UK in the 1718 hundreds, where freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, the right to own property, and all those principles that then became embedded in various different constitutions around the world, including your own. You know, I think it does very well at doing that because it forces you, our system forces you into partnership.

15:31You know, there are 650 people who you have to work with in some way in Parliament over the next four, five years. And there's four of us currently going for a leadership at the Conservative Party. And there's one reason why, despite the fact that we're competing almost in a US primary system, the way in which we are dealing with each other is very different, is because we're all going to have to work together for the next four years. Whoever wins is going to have to work with the other three. And the idea that you can simply ignore each other isn't true. There's only 121 of us conservative MPs in Parliament.

16:05and what this system forces on us is the need to deal with each other in a way that you have to deal with somebody if you're going to deal with them tomorrow. And I think that's one of the reasons why the British political system has endured because it forces you to remember that there's a long -term interest, not an immediate one, not just a short -term one. Putting aside particular hypotheses about specific elections, but why do you think for a while now, party outcomes in the UK have become quite uneven relative to say the continent. That is one party will win by quite a bit, right? Well, it's partly down to the system, right?

16:41I mean, it's a very small number of votes in a certain number of seats, can swing certain seats quite a lot. So if you look at the results of the last election, for example, in 24, on the 4th July this year, the Labour Party won with a majority of 179 off 33 and a bit 34 % of the vote. Now, normally, an opposition party will get 34 % of the vote and the governing party will get 38 % of the vote. But what labor have achieved is they've managed to get a lot of very narrow wins. So they've got a lot of wins by 500 or a thousand votes across the country. In fact, it would only require, I know it doesn't sound it's quite a big only, but it would only require 175 ,000 votes to switch for it to be reduced from a majority to a minority.

17:26Now, admittedly, that's a lot of votes, right? But the truth is when you look at an electorate of 40 million, that's not that much to switch from a, effectively, a two -thirds victory in the commons, you know, to a 50 -50. Putting aside any party loyalties, but does the thinness of those mandates make you more optimistic about liberalism broadly conscured in the UK? Yes, it does. It makes me much more optimistic about it. And the reason is, the only way you get these mandates is by appealing to a wide enough section of your own voting block and by convincing those who are against you either to support you or to stay away.

18:05And they stay away when they're not interested in supporting their own side or they're not too fearful of you. So you'll look at, for example, the 2019 election, the turnout was very, very high and it was very high because a lot of people either were extremely angry at one of the party leaders or they were absolutely determined that their own party leaders should win and the combination of the two meant to generate very high turnouts on both sides. And it also meant that the major political parties, the two major political parties, got the bulk of the vote, whereas in 2019, there's a lot of people who were angry at us for conservatives after 14 years in office.

18:42But there was no real enthusiasm for Keir Starmer, nor was there any great fear of Keir Starmer. And that meant that you got first of all a very low turnout, but you also get a very low margin of victory in percentage terms, although you end up with a very large majority in electoral terms. And that means that these things can change quickly. And I think the important thing in a democracy is to be ready for change and to make sure that ideas, good ideas, can cut through. And that's why I'm extremely optimistic for the next election, for example, because I think that the kind of economic reforms that we need to see, the conservative revolution that we need to see, the back -to -service, back -to -leadership, and back -to -action that we need to see, is something that can generate a real swing and a real momentum behind it, relatively quickly and certainly within four years.

19:27It's a common view without ciders that the mechanisms through which Brexit evolved and was achieved show there was some kind of defect in the UK system of government that somehow how you got stuck at a certain point, and there weren't enough moving parts in the system to budge you from either to getting the deal done or reversing it. So independent of whatever one thinks of Brexit, do you accept that criticism that somehow the system can get stuck due to the extreme sovereignty of parliament? So I accept the criticism at the time, and the reason I accept it at the time is because we had something that was introduced called the Fix Terms Parliament Act, which meant that the government in theory could not dissolve parliament.

20:09Now, you can have two systems, right? You can either have a system of government where the government sits outside the parliament and they both have fixed terms, in which case you have a mandate that endures like that, but then you get your obstacles between the two. Or you can have the government in our system where the government by definition can command a majority in the commons. That is the definition of a government in our system. It's anybody who can command a majority in the Commons is by definition the Prime Minister. Now, we got to a position because of the Fick Terms Parliament Act, which was introduced during the coalition years, where there was somebody in the Commons who was sitting in the seat of the Prime Minister, but could not command a majority.

20:47Well, that led to complete inertia until the Lib Dems made a credenously stupid mistake and thought that they were about to win an anti -Brexit vote and leave themselves to victory. And they forced an election, actually had they hung on and tolerated the inability of Parliament to get things done. I think the situation may have been very different. But I think what the lesson was from that was that you need to remember what the system is and why it works. Our system means that the Prime Minister either has the ability to command a majority in Parliament or the Parliament collapses. And that forces a level of truth and honesty into a debate that means that members of Parliament have to think very hard before they vote against the government, before they vote down their own side, because they may be voting themselves out of office.

21:33Should the House of Lords be abolished or phased out? No, it shouldn't. The extraordinary thing about the House of Lords is, look, it's not something that anybody would invent, but it works. Well, you're right. You're the kind of economist who might. But, you know, the weird thing about the hereditary peers, and there's plenty of changes you can make to the hereditary peers, but the weird thing about it is it's a system of randomness that injects lottery into government. Now, you know, I can certainly see an argument for turning that from a family lottery into a jury system where it's a temporary lottery.

22:08But the other thing that the House of Laws does, which is very, very difficult in the democracy, is it forces you to think longer over time. And what the House of Laws used to do through its hereditary principle, was force you to think lonely, long time over time for yourself, so 20, 30 years, but actually think generationally. If you want to guard the stability of your country so that your children, your grandchildren, and her at your wealth, then you need to be thinking over 50 or 100 years. One of the problems that democracies have is short -term thinking. Balancing long -term and short -term thinking is something that every democracy should be trying to do.

22:45I'm not going to tell you that the fact that most of the red repairs. In fact, I think they're all male and maybe wrong about that, but they're maybe a woman amongst them. But I think they're all male is clearly an issue. And the fact that they come from a very narrow demographic of our society is clearly an issue. But the fact that they introduce long -term thinking, but they don't actually have the ability to block anything. And that they force effectively a power based beyond the day -to -day will of the Prime Minister. I think it's a benefit. And I think it's been good to have as a revising chamber.

23:20I don't think you should ever have pre -eminence and I think the elected chamber should always have the ability to overrule it, which we do. But I think having that long term thinking is really important. Why has the global fascination with the British monarchy so persisted? Now surely some of that is the legacy of empire, but it seems to a far outlived that is the only explanation. The monarchies of the Netherlands, Norway, no one much talks about them say in the US, but yours, my goodness, you're like the global reserve currency. What's the PR genius behind the hat or how did that happen? What's special?

23:54There's various things. You know King Farouk said when he was an exile after having left Cairo for the last time. He said, one day there'll only be five kings left. The King of Hearts, the King of Spades, the King of Plubbs, the King of Diamonds and the King of England. I think he's partly right and the reason he's partly right is because it was the Queen's genius. actually. I mean, we've never been better governed and better ruled than when our reigning monarch is a woman. We've always had very, very good women monarchs, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, and then Queen Elizabeth again. It's been a remarkable success that she's been able to be a guiding presence without having, without her voice becoming in any way strident or separatist.

24:32She's never divided. And that was a remarkable gift. Now, it's also, I think, the benefit that, you know, the English language really helps. And I think the fact that most people in England, well, certainly in England, Wales and Scotland, numbers are slightly different, but most people are Northern Ireland, of course, different again. But most people in the United Kingdom take the monarchy seriously and respectfully, but know that it's not relevant in a day -to -day sense. And I think divorcing the splendid from the sordid, if you like, is rather a healthy way of having a government. We don't like our Prime Minister to be bathed in gold and glory, and we certainly look at your presidential system sometimes with a little surprise.