Sir Iain Duncan Smith | Extraordinary Life Stories

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0:34I'll be with you every step of the way. One in four was a fraud-paying American. Not anymore. Save up to 40 % your first year. Visit lifelock.com slash podcast. Terms apply. Putting stupid taxes on families that stay together or one person in a family wants to stay for the first year and a half, maybe look after their kids. We have the worst tax system in the world, so we punish them for that decision. I'm instinctively anti big things, big government, big business. They forget what they were actually set up for. The real energy and drive in everything we do either comes from small businesses, small organisations, community groups, small charities.

1:13Things aren't in great shape economically. The country's kind of negative. There's a lot of negativity in the UK right now. If you took the UK out of global history, the world wouldn't look the same. we have had a tremendous influence in the key areas that matter. The whole concept of freedom, in that sense, comes from this set of small islands. You know, the concept of habeas corpus, the right to a trial, comes from the UK. The free market that the world now is supposed to embrace, that started in the UK, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The beating heart of this great country, not great because we're big or we've got large armies, but great because their dynamic has changed the world.

1:51Sir Ian Duncan Smith. I've been looking forward to this. Good. It's two of us. Tell me, who is Sir Ian Lungensmith? Well, in a potted shell, I suppose. I'm the son of a number of my family, but I'm the son of a highly decorated Second World War fighter pilot, a real hero, and a mother who was a ballet dancer. And, you know, with them I served and moved around all over Europe and into America when I was young. so we had the classic services lifestyle after the war. I went on through schooling eventually to go into, I guess to keep it reasonably tight, I went into various businesses and then into publishing.

2:37The last one I was in was publishing Jane's stuff and into parliament. I got elected in 1992. I had stood before in 87 up in Bradford and I stood in Chingford as it was then in 1992. I've been in Parliament ever since. During the course of that time, I've been a rebel. I've been a government secretary of state. I've been the leader of the Conservative Party. After the leader of the Conservative Party, when I left, I decided I wanted to commit myself to a promise that I'd made to people I'd visited. During the course of time as a leader, I visited lots of communities where they were in great difficulties and problems.

3:17I did so because I used to find that charities in each of those were solving problems which Westminster couldn't quite deal with. And they always said to me, oh, it's great to see you've got all the cameras with you and everything else, but you know, you won't come back. And that really sort of got me going because I thought when I ceased being leader, I promised to come back. And so I set up the Centre for Social Justice to look at what they were doing to see whether we could bring it up to Westminster and start to talk common sense to politicians. And so it's been a perpetual return journey to these communities.

3:52So that went on and I've raised the money for it. And we've been quite significant in some senses, but you'll probably want to ask more questions about that. So I was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions for six years, which I think is the longest time anyone sat in that job. Did huge reforms, including universal credit, but a very difficult time as well. I resigned because I didn't agree with the government. Finally, in the end, I thought there's no point in carrying on if you don't agree with people. and I've been here since then, still with Centre for Social Justice, but I've now gone into other things as well.

4:20I am campaigning heavily on the threat that China poses to us in the free world. As a result of that, I set up another organisation called the Interparliamentary Alliance on China. I said we had to be global and we had to be cross-party. So the co-chairs in each of the chapters, as it were, in different countries have to be one on the left, one on the right. Rubio was one of our co-chairs at America. He's obviously stepped down. We have 53 countries now and a growing number of them now signing up because they're worried about what China is up to, which is astonishing actually when I set this up and I consider what was going on.

4:56I'm now sanctioned by the Chinese government. You can't stand me. We discovered the genocide in Xinjiang through a couple of other sources and because of IPAC we were able to publish it literally around the world on the same day, which of course also didn't please them very much. And I've been campaigning on the Ukraine issue, been to the front a number of times to help them out as well, working with charities in the front line, getting people off combat stress. So that requires going to Ukraine as much as you can, which I do. So, and that's where I am at the moment. There's a lot there. There's a huge amount there.

5:32What I love is there's a thread of mission-led purpose there. You mentioned the CSJ, the Centre for Social Justice, which is what has connected us. But I didn't know about the more recent things that clearly meant something to you that you've looked at and thought, something needs to be done there, and I'm going to put myself forward and try and help and make a difference. Yeah, that's... I think that's what we exist for, isn't it? Well, too many don't, so credit to you. No, so purpose and I guess using that kind of mission that sort of something means something personally to you, I really admire you for that.

6:07The CSJ brought us together. The Lost Boys report, we were together last night for a gathering in Westminster. That's really touched my heart because I've got two daughters. They're both 14 and 15. And this crisis in young lads is clearly very real. and that's backed up by the report, the data, the stats, and in real time. And I just wanted to touch on that because, you know, knowing that you created and founded the CSJ and now knowing why, thank you for elaborating, because that was one of my questions, what was the why behind it? They're sort of the underrepresented, the less privileged to the people that don't have a voice is where the CSJ sits.

6:46And one of the key themes that I really appreciated from last night was actually a bit like what you said, it's all very well talking about it, it's all very well then amplifying. But then how do you make a difference? Have you got tangible kind of stories, if you like, of where the CSJ has actually made a difference? Because I imagine that's very satisfying for you. Did you know your hair ages just like your skin does? The new Chronologiste line offers luxurious youth revitalizing care for aging hair. It reverses the five key signs of hair aging. Lack of thickness and volume, dullness, dryness and frizz in just one night.

7:22Use the full range of Chronologist shampoo, mask, and overnight serum, and wake up to visibly fuller, smoother, healthier hair. Shop the new Chronologist line at kerastos.com. Well, it has. I mean, sometimes you won't be able to mark that card in a way that perhaps Westminster would understand. But we make huge difference by drawing attention to charities, small community groups. We have award ceremonies for them. We've given out directly from the result of these awards and raised money, certainly getting close to about one and a half million we've given out to charity. Now we set it up so that we have on the financial side, we also help administer different trusts because we have administration for the CSJ and we can use that separately.

8:07It's a separate charity, but it is formed by the CSJ. And of course, when people want to use their trust to get to problems, well, the CSJ can help enormously because we have this huge network now of small community groups and charities. We call it the Poverty Fighters Alliance. It's all over the United Kingdom. In every single area we have them and we're gaining more and more. We're not far short of a thousand small community groups and charity. We communicate with them regularly. We go to them when we've got an issue like Lost Boys. We went and did huge hearings as it were with all those sort of groups involved in family breakdown, debt, and also issues on failed education, looking at what the problems are.

8:49And I found all along, the reason I set it up like this is because I'm instinctively anti big things. So big government, big business, because I always think that what happens is they get too big for their boots. In other words, they forget what they were actually set up for. I'm very much a believer, the real energy and drive in everything we do either comes from small businesses, small organizations, community groups, small charities. The dynamic is there because they do not forget what they exist for, because they do it every day. And I used to say to everybody, the trouble is when you go to a place, some community, which is difficult, the people there, a lot of them won't know that around the corner there is a small charity that is working with kids that failed in education or, you know, women that have been sort of trashed, as it were, by various men.

9:39and you've seen this at the moment with these rape gangs going on. These groups are unknown to people. Why? Because they haven't got the time or the money to go publicising themselves. What they do is they just do the job. And so what I think our purpose was to go to those places, find them, find those organisations and listen to them. What they said was the problem, first of all, and then how did they see the solution coming about? The rule for me, and Andy now, the chief executive, has actually signed up to us because he came from a group like that. He ran it. He's now the chief executive. But we both agree.

10:13The thing is, we bring back to Westminster what we actually learn from the ground and then try and make it work. And we've worked, for example, with the mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, who I've known for years, used to play football with him. And a lot of what he's doing at the moment has come from the CSJ and he comes on to our committees. So we're not party pre. It's all about the problem. And we focus on that. And that's how we do it. So it's all about the small groups, the small charities, just like economics is really all about the small businesses. They're the ones that provide the jobs.

10:45They're the ones that without which we die economically. And their problems right now are part of the problem for the United Kingdom because we've overlooked the fact how important small businesses are to the health of an economy. So it's the same thing in social terms and economic terms. They run parallel. We're supporting the David Goliath scenario. There's often very few charities that get heard and seen, isn't there? and the rest are fighting for that attention. So there's... Well, you get the big charities, of course, they're heard and seen, and they spend most of their money, I'm afraid, lobbying and doing stuff in the public eye.

11:16I always argue with them that why don't you take a chunk of your money and push it down to these small groups and charities, which is a standing fight. We did a paper once called the Tescoization of Charitable Giving, when we discovered that certainly well over 80 % of charitable money ends up with less than 20 % of the charities. and because all the big ones you've heard of, the list of them, and a lot of them have money now banked in property and all sorts of stuff. Whereas you go to the charity on the ground, they're living hand to mouth, but you are inspired by what they do because their enthusiasm is unbounded.

11:50They don't see that there is a problem. They just see there is a solution. And you can't help by being with these guys and realizing just exactly how important they really are to communities. Yeah, no, I'm learning lots from you in this conversation. I knew I would. another key part of the lost boys report that struck me um key key pillars were that are affecting youngsters are sort of fatherless families social media but i wondered where politics come in you've got such a a great kind of view and and sort of perspective if you like things aren't in great shape economically the country's kind of negative there's a lot of negativity in the uk right now and i just wondered where you sit with that and and with the things you've tried to do, have done in your career, where we sit right now and whether we've got a sort of a bit more of an optimistic future to look at?

12:37We need to take a pace back, I think, to understand the UK. We are really peculiarly different. I know people argue it's not the case. It is the case. If you took the UK out of global history, the world wouldn't look the same. We've had a tremendous influence in the key areas that matter. The whole concept of freedom in that sense comes from this set of small islands. You know, the concept of habeas corpus, the right to a trial, comes from the UK. The free market that the world now is supposed to embrace, that started in the UK, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. You can go through all of these things, all the freedoms, the rights to parliament, democracy, they all came progressively bit by bit here.

13:17There has always been this divide in politics between what I call the bigwigs, the people that think that big things are important and big government. And then you have what I call the small Tories, the ones that are the small businessmen. They're the squirearchy. They're the people that were never quite as big as the others, but they did stuff. And I said, all that drives the intelligence of the country. We are, at our best, dynamic in every respect. And the great social reformers like Wilberforce and Shaftesbury and the others, you know, they got going on these things and they brought in the ragged school movement, early education.

13:53So when you look at this country, it is a dynamic force for change everywhere and at home. And we've kind of got bogged down now in worrying about, you know, who we really are, rather than rediscovering the driving dynamic that exists behind us. As I said earlier on, small businesses, brilliant ideas, small charities working like mad, getting results. Nobody's ever heard of them, but they're dynamic in that respect. So that dynamism exists down at the bottom. What's gone wrong is government has just flopped over all these things and is worried about how things look and what could they do. And we have a civil service that is more about sustainment rather than radical change.

14:35So a lot of what we do with charities just tells you quite a lot that the beating heart of this great country, not great because we're big or we've got large armies were great because their dynamic has changed the world. I mean, you know, America took the English common law system, which is the greatest legal system of the world, because it's all about the freedom of the individual. They took it to America and the Commonwealth has it. I don't know of anybody, by the way, that's ever taken European law to solve their problems anywhere else outside Europe. So you have these principles that are dynamic principles that that still sit at the heart of us.

15:09And we've just got to rediscover our faith in ourselves. You know, simple truths like, you know, families are really vital, you know, to parents as far as you possibly can. Absolutely vital in bringing up a child. The lost boy stuff uncovers that all over again. We've forgotten. We've got too sensitive about talking about it. You know, these things are vital and we shouldn't shunt them into the background and they're part of who we are. There's so much EQ coming from, you know, empathy. You know, talking to someone who's had a long political career, you are talking from the heart there. You know, the passion you got for the country and the knowledge you've got and very much Sir Ian Duncan Smith talking there as a human being.

15:48There's a danger for me that politics right now in today's world is at a distance. You know, it feels like it's all about votes. It's all about literally politics rather than doing the best for the country and all the great things that have been the legacy before. and if you look at the Lost Boys report and relating to that you named people when you said about the great things that happen role models there are role models that seem to have come up to to the top particularly for young youngsters that are the absolute opposite of what we'd really want and just just trying to understand how we sort of manage that from political when he listens you there you're inspiring it's encouraging it's positive is that missing because it feels like a lot of the messages are negative right now, specifically in politics.

16:36My view is that what we see is not always what actually happens. So there's no question social media has had a big impact on the way we live our lives, particularly younger people. And particularly, I think, the way that you can see the change between who it's really aimed at. Young girls worry about what's on social media about them. Young boys find a peculiar nature of searching for appallingly different things that changed their minds. But I know a fact. I remember there was a poll about this, and I was quite struck by it. It said when you ask young people below the age of 27 or something, all the way down to sort of 14, 15, who their real role models were, number one came up in something like 80 % of the time, my parents.

17:23My father, my mother, they're the ones that I really look at and learn from. And all right, the social media when that poll came up wasn't as big as it is now. But I'll bet if you scratch that and go and have a look at it, you'll still find that those children still look to their parents. Not all of them, there are also difficult parents and problems around. But the base building structure of social enterprise, social activity is ultimately families. And the problem is we've been apologizing and running away from it for so long that we don't understand, just like we don't with small community groups and charities, the building blocks of stable life are really importantly the family.

18:07And you then have to find ways. And that's why one of our pathways to poverty at the Centre for Social Education is dysfunctional, broken family life, because it has a massive impact on kids. And adults make decisions and make statements about what children really need. And a lot of the time they're wrong. The instinctive sense of this is we did when we were doing Breakthrough and Breakdown Britain, big reports about probably 15 years ago. We did a lot of polling on asking people. One of the groups we did was to ask those whose families had broken up when they were below the age of adulthood, as it were, and for their impressions.

18:44So we'd selected a group out which were across everything else. And then we posed questions to them about what happened, what did you feel at the time, what do you feel now? it was actually quite heartbreaking because those that as family had split, gone their way, being different problems, the first thing that always came out was the missing one in the family. So if the mother had disappeared or the father, more often the father, had gone, wasn't there, that had all broken, it still haunted many of them. The thing they missed was having that rock, that stability, that sense that, you know, they could look to their fathers or their mothers or whatever.

19:25And it's very difficult. And so, you know, later on, and then in the 30s, some of these people we polled and asked questions of. And what was really striking about it was they still felt the effect of what happened. And we seem to forget this because we think, well, you know, everything is best for the kids. But actually, it's really mostly about best for the adults, not for the kids. And I often think that's where we go wrong. We don't think actually in reality. We think about our own lives as adults. We talk about children, but quite often we don't really think, hang on, what are the consequences of my actions here?

19:57So all of these things that I guess we should really know about instinctively. I'm not saying that you shouldn't ever break up or whatever, because that happens and anything's happened. But my point is to understand the effect that that has on children is really quite dramatic. and helping people is, you know, targeting that sort of help and support to people so they can get through all of that, particularly the children. Now, we're better at it than we were before, but it's still, you know, a big problem. And it's one of the big problems on lost boys is that they're, you know, where are the role models in their life?

20:28And role models may be a peculiar way of putting it, but who do they look to if things aren't stable and difficult and they're difficult at home? Well, the next place they're going to be is either extended family, which can sometimes be difficult these days. They don't live near each other anymore. The second bit is their schooling, of course. In school, who are they going to be able to build their sense of aspiration around? And, you know, one of the biggest problems for lots of boys is the absence of men in teaching as compared to what it was before. It's fallen away. I gather there's been a bit of an improvement in it.

21:04But my point still is that if they're cleaving a role model, then they find that quite difficult if there's nobody there that's sort of like them. And you can see the difference at times. So it's not to say that teachers of old sexes can't teach boys and girls. It's not the case. I'm looking for people who act as a sort of inspirational route to the reason for education and how you use it. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C.

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22:44Inspiration is a good word. And just thinking back to how you introduced yourself, you know, your father, a flying ace, and you mentioned your mother as well. And there's an element of respect there, association, and probably particularly from the way you brought up, and I can relate, my grandfather was a wing commander in the RAF. My father's father was a brigadier in the army. So the way that both my parents brought me up was disciplined and was always accountable. Whether I liked it or not, difference is no. But my point being that there were shackles in place. There were sort of boundaries.

23:21And in today's world of social media, it feels like, and I'm, again, father to two daughters myself, you know, there are, it's very difficult to keep certain boundaries in place because they're getting so much information and knowledge that we never had access to through social media, through the internet. that. But I just wonder whether that, and I'd like to humanize this to you, actually, that you probably had quite a nomadic childhood back to the sort of moving around, which actually, if you listen to just how much you've done and are prepared to do, you're not afraid to pivot, not afraid to change, see something.

23:50I think I can do that rather than thinking, well, this is my lane, because you probably had to adapt a huge amount as a youngster. Where I'm going with it is I would associate you very much with leadership. And does that leadership, the qualities that you got passed on from boundaries, discipline, respect, from using your parents as an example and the other people you've spent time with, has that shaped that and is that a key part of what's missing for people right now where they're not really getting that discipline, the role models in their life and therefore they haven't got the boundaries and then they're effectively lost?

24:24Well, I was in the army for the regiment called the Scots Guards. I served out in Northern Ireland and eventually out in what was British in those days later on Zimbabwe. So I guess you could say those sort of elements of leadership have been through my life. Leadership really is you learn, but you have to also acquire. So understanding what real leadership is about, it's ultimately about selflessness, the honest truth of it is. You lead by making decisions, but you put yourself always last in the line of what comes from those decisions in terms of, you know, what you might take. So for example, the first lesson I learned when I was an officer in the Scots Guards was that when you know your men are out doing whatever, when the moment comes to feed, you feed last.