Britain’s New Right: Could Reform Replace The Tories? (Dr James Orr)

25:28Where are the really sort of difficult policy areas that have to be addressed? Crime is certainly one, as Nigel was pushing very well, net zero is another, or rather, I think more this idea of energy sovereignty. You know, this idea that, you know, it is totally normal and certainly what a politics of national preference should want to seek for a country to be secure in its own, you know, in the enabling conditions of any kind of economic flourishing, namely energy independence and energy sovereignty, energy security. And so, you know, that's going to be a very important issue. I think to some extent all the DEI stuff and the kind of worries about woke and all those kind of cultural war issues.

26:10For those who aren't immersed in this world, DEI is Diversity, Equity and Evaluation. That's right. And it's kind of done as an acronym that's a sort of stand in for the cultural wars of the last few years. My sense is there's been a bit of a vibe shift there. It feels a little bit 2024, a little bit 2023. I would be surprised if we were worrying that much about Woke in 2029. But yes, I think the key thing will be the economics. I mean, this is one thing that Alex Burkhart, who's heading up Kemi Madnok's policy work, really, I think, understands that getting the economy right and getting the economics right for every single policy area is going to be vital.

26:48And so in some ways, you know, it's the first budget that's going to be more important than the first king's speech. So if the coalition government is broadly leftish on social and cultural issues and right on economic issues, and if reform is somehow the opposite, sort of more certainly right on social and cultural issues and becoming more leftish on economic issues, what does a new right, a radical right, a MAGA reformist right think is the route to kind of economic growth, if not pursuing the deregulation and low tax environment in the 1980s when Nigel Farage was a young Thatcherite metals trader.

27:27What does that economic leftish route to growth look like? This is a big question that's being asked a lot about reform. You know, are you kind of new right? Singapore on Thames. Or is it a kind of Thatcher Tribute Act? And, you know, I think the answers you seem to be getting are, look, we're still big believers that, you know, big state, aggressive intervention, heavily regulated markets is not a good thing. It's not going to be conducive to economic flourishing. And I don't think that's going to change very much. Now, whether or not, you know, and so where is growth, where is productivity going to come from?

28:03In 2029, you know, it's going to be very, very hard to get growth day one. It will always take a year, two years, three years, and means doing some very unpopular things in order to achieve it. And, you know, it is one of the great challenges of democracy. You've got a massive majority in favor of cutting taxes, massive majority in favor of increased public spending, you know, and reform has not got a magic wand. And it's going to have to really kind of get the electorate used to, I think, from day one, the difficult decisions, that phrase beloved of all politicians, in a way that I think was probably not what Keir Starmer did.

28:39I mean, he did not use his honeymoon very well last year. He could have come in straight away and said, look, we're going to have these welfare cuts and we've got to get them done right now. And he would have got away with it. I think he would have won that. And all the other sort of decisions that he could have taken and left till October to that disastrous first budget is now trying to eke out. And he's just being defeated. Even he's got one of the biggest majorities in living memory. He's been defeated on these flagship policy issues. And so I think it's going to be, you know, there's going to have to be a sort of an honesty with the electorate in the run up to 2029.

29:12And then that first year, those first hundred days, really, as we saw Trump 2.0 do, it's just everything was very, very well planned out. And it was a very, very, you know, they knew that a lot was not going to be popular. Some of it was going to be very popular, but it was it was efficient. It was done very fast. And I think in Trump's case, it's having is beginning to bear fruit. I mean, people would say the trouble is there's no evidence yet is there that Nigel Farage is prepared to be really honest with people. And of course, you know, he can answer these questions for himself. And I look forward to asking him these questions.

29:47But there's no evidence yet that he's been prepared to say those really unpopular things which are true, which is the cost of being in government rather than being a campaigner. Formidable campaigner. He's run big campaigns. But if you're going to run things, you've got to say to people things they don't like. That's true. But I think there's the old line of campaigning in poetry and governing in prose, which seems to be a sort of politician's shorthand for saying, we can lie to you on the campaign trail and do something completely different when we're in power. And to some extent, it's a problem that every politician faces.

30:20I just don't know. He is going to have to be honest. He's going to have to lay out a program that is going to say, look, there's some nasty medicine that the country is going to have to take on day one. And I'm going to be open about that. And my party is going to back me. I think one difference with what is a reformed parliamentary party in the 300s going to look like if there's going to be such a thing, almost inconceivable to think of it, but what would it look like? Will it look like the parliamentary Labour Party in terms of the kind of all the caucuses and all the kind of ancient rivalries and ideological differences?

30:51People's Front of Judea versus the Judea. Yeah, right. And my sense is, any of the Tories have kind of got that too. But my sense is actually one of the advantages of having a completely fresh new parliamentary party is that the leadership will have a great deal more power than a Keir Starmer has, even with a majority of 160. And the Kemi Patnock has over a party of 123. So I think actually, you know, in the early, there'll be a sort of honeymoon period, I think, of a kind of a year, over two years. And those first hundred days are going to be absolutely vital to force the nasty cough medicine down the country's throat.

31:28I really hope you're enjoying my conversation with James. Or if you are, then please do subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds. So you don't miss future episodes, but also crucially, you get a chance to see our back catalogue. Because there you will encounter people that you really agree with, that you really disagree with. But in each and every instance, I promise you'll learn something. They'll give you a deeper understanding of those profound global trends that are reshaping this crazy era. and hopefully leave you with some really positive ideas to take away and help you win the future. If you do subscribe, make sure you've got your push notifications turned on.

32:05That way you'll get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you'll never miss out. Right, that's enough from me, sort of. Thanks for now and back to James. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs.

32:47Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

32:58What you're trying to do in the world, as it were, the set of social and moral and political questions that you're trying to answer, if you like, the problem to which James Orr's thought and work is an attempted solution. What are you trying to do? You know, I fell in love with philosophy when I was a city lawyer and just couldn't get enough of it and decided to just walk away, head up to Cambridge, our alma mater, and just study and read books that nobody ever written in order to write books that nobody would ever read. The life of an academic. The life of an academic. Well, I'm married to one, but she won't forgive me for raising her name in that context.

33:38It was a retreat into the ivory tower, a very conscious one. It was a kind of retirement. and I didn't for a moment think that my thought or my work would turn towards the public square very much at all. I mean, academics are always talking about impact and how we can change the discourse and so on and some of them actually are very good at it, but for the most part... They're having war about footnotes and they're going completely mad and neurotic and driving each other crazy. Exactly. It's foot and note disease, they like to call it. I've never heard that. I like that. But basically most of us want to have a quiet, retiring life.

34:15And actually I was always a big believer in that, you know, writing the books that nobody would ever really hear about, those are the books that would really change the discipline. And you'd have these eccentrics knocking around these senior common rooms who would write nothing for 10 years and somebody would prod them and then they would produce a book that was just completely transformative. And I suppose that's roughly the idea I had in mind. And then I guess, you know, I want to say round about 2012, 2013, we witnessed from America, really this was an American export, the first rumblings of what you might call the cultural revolution breaking across the campuses of Britain, but particularly the elite campuses, particularly the Russell Group universities.

34:59universities. And I found myself, you know, I like to put on events, I like to put on debates, I like to invite a wide range of speakers to introduce students to. And the sort of first wave of cancellations, 2013, 2014, I was in Oxford at the time when it really started. And, you know, I think I remember helping put a debate on about abortion in late 2014. We had, I think we had Brendan O 'Neill doing the pro-choice side and we had Tim Stanley doing the pro-life side. And the college simply shut it down in response to a radical feminist group that simply didn't want this debate to happen. It's the pressure of groupthink.

35:45And I've said this before, the problem with groupthink is that wrongthink becomes evilthink. You know, where you've got a relatively balanced split on a neuralgic issue, 70-30, 80-20, then that is conducive to an intellectually flourishing ecosystem. But where you've got a position, like whether it's on climate, whether it's on Brexit, whether it's on empire, where the reality is you've got, well, maybe it's 80-20, but 15 % of the 20 are not going to say anything. There you've got the conditions for a kind of sort of intellectual sort of mechanisms of ostracism. I've gone through it a little bit to some extent, and that's what you've seen all across the West.

36:27I think the British universities have responded better on the whole. I think the British government, one of the very few things that one can, I think, congratulate the last government on is pushing this piece of legislation through the Freedom of Speech Higher Education Act, which has, I think, is going to have some mitigating effects on that problem. So that is what, as it were, radicalised me. That's what made me a suitable guest for the radical podcast. That was a cultural moment. But then there was also a political moment in 2016. We had Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. At what point did those two phenomena, and the fact that you were spending more time in America, you got to know the people around Trump, What time do they sort of coalesce to make you someone who's at the forefront of trying to forge a new, perhaps more radical, perhaps certainly original conception of what it is to be right of centre and deal with the problems we face today?

37:24In my mind in 2016, those two issues were distinct. There was Brexit and then there were the rumblings of the orange man. And I didn't actually in my mind see the phenomenon as particularly connected. I grew up in Brussels. I've been a Brexiteer pretty much since I was 13 or 14. I've been up close in the belly of the beast and I knew whereof I spoke. And in 2015, 2016, my abiding memory, I was at Christchurch, Oxford, which is, you know, but pretty as Oxford colleges, you know, probably one of the more right leaning colleges. I wouldn't say it is exactly conservative, but quite a grand, grand college.

38:04I was as far as I know, I was the only person who was out of the closet on voting for Brexit. But when I spoke to the porters and the groundsmen and the gardeners and the taxi drivers, the scouts, the bedders, I couldn't find a single one who was going to vote remain. And it was almost this perfect clean split. And I thought there's something happening here. And this is not good. This doesn't bode well. And I remember conversations with colleagues, the debates were almost always about the impact of Brexit, not on the nation as a whole, but on higher education alone. And this is what the French have this lovely phrase, deformation professionnelle.

38:45It's a sort of, you know, you could only see an issue refracted through the implications for your own tribe or your own profession. And I used to play these sort of parlour games with colleagues. I used to say, well, you know, how many universities have we got in the top 10 in the world? In 2016, it was four. How many do we have in the top 40? In 2016, it was seven. And then I'd say, how many non-UK EU universities are in the top 10 and the top 40? And the answer to both those questions in 2016 was zero. In other words, we did and do higher education better than the rest, all of the European Union combined.

39:20And so the argument that Brexit was going to have this shattering effect on us was itself just a very, very weak one. But it sounds like one of the things you found surprising and worrying amongst some of your academic colleagues was that they were thinking about this through the prism of what it would do to their industry and their sort of sliver of British culture and not the idea of the nation. And to go on. Sure. Well, I just add to that. It wasn't so much, oh, you're not thinking about Britain here. It's more that, look, we receive generous subsidies from the British taxpayer to live this wonderful, wonderfully sinecured life.

39:57And part of the kind of implicit social contract there for us is that we serve the nation by modelling civil disagreement, by helping the public and the electorate to navigate morally or technically difficult policy questions. And we're not doing that. What we're doing is we're demonising half the country. But it's interesting, within what you say there is the idea of a nation. And someone who you've been greatly influenced by, someone who I've read a huge amount of, is the late Sir Roger Scruton, probably the preeminent 20th century conservative thinker of the Western world, I'd say, together with Michael Oakeshott.

40:37In his book, Conservatism, A Political Philosophy, the first chapter, chapter two is conserving nature. Chapter one is conserving nations. And he sort of takes it as a given that the idea of the nation, a country, this kind of community of like-minded souls who share a polity, a public space, is a kind of precursor to politics. It's the idea behind politics, a home, if you like, something that Kemi Badenow's very keen on. To what he said, it's a work that you're trying to do now, a reassertion. I think it's been called National Conservatism. It's different to nationalism, which is a different thing.

41:09To what extent are you trying to reassert the idea of the nation and forge a new nation in a kind of new vision of conservatism? It's a great question. I think the metaphor of home, which Roger liked to use, and he took the Greek word for home, oikos, and then created this compound, oikophilia, love of home, and its counterpoint, its antonym, oikophobia, that is to say a kind of irrational repudiation of one's own. And that seems to me, it became clear to me after 2016 that on both sides of the Atlantic, that was the axis on which to understand Western politics. The old politics of sort of left and right ding-dongs about the free market, about state intervention, or about nation building overseas and neoconservatism and so on.

41:58All of that was over. And really the primary question was, what is our home? How do we cultivate home? How do we anchor ourselves in home? Now, the question of nation, you know, for now, I think the nation is probably the most natural structure in which oikophilia is possible. It's not necessarily always going to be a nation. Singapore, is it a nation? Yes, but it's also a kind of city state. When Aristotle talks about the importance of home, he's talking about a polis. He's talking about a fairly small community that he thinks is about the optimal sort of size for enabling mutual flourishing.

42:39And so I think the sort of insight is quite an empirical one. We love what is our own. we love other things too but we first and foremost have an affection and a loyalty to our family to our community to our neighbourhood and then as it were the outermost concentric circle of concrete affection you might say is the nation this by the way is why it's not national conservatism is not nationalism I think the mistake that nationalists make is to put that outermost concentric circle of concrete loyalty the most important one above everything else. It's actually within national conservatism, the weakest form of concrete concentric affection, but it is as it were, the absolutely indispensable enabling condition of mutual flourishing.

43:29If those cultural conditions created certain politics to which you think the answer is national conservatism, how did we get here? What is it about the 20th century and if you like the overreach of liberalism that, I think you'd call it sort of the metastasizing of liberalism that created conditions where, in your view, oikophobia is enabled as opposed to oikophilia? Well, I suppose what would mark me out as a radical conservative as opposed to a conventional conservative is that, unlike Scruton, I reject the idea that conservatism is somehow, as he called it, a hesitation within liberalism, that somehow it's downstream of liberalism, that it's liberalism driving at the speed limit.

44:12I think actually conservatism is simply the absence of liberalism and the absence of leftism. Conservatism is what everybody effectively had, that was the sort of organizing political and moral and ideological universe before roughly 1789. One of the interesting debates on the right at the moment is, is the unraveling of liberalism, and there's an emerging consensus about that on the right and to some extent on the left as well, was this always going to happen? Is it a feature? Is the unravelling a feature of liberalism or is it a bug? A lot of people would say it's a bug. Douglas Murray, for example, would say it's a bug.

44:50Can't we, we can just fix this and go back. I think it's actually a feature. I think it's actually part of the DNA of liberalism that it was always going to unravel. Because at some point, things are not enough for liberals. It's so funny because Billy Bragg, who's got different politics to you, but in some ways has a kind of, would share some of your vision, I think, of the society and the love of home that you'd like to create. We sat there not so long ago, and he was talking about how there is this kind of progressive spirit within liberalism where the arc of history, in his view, bends towards inclusion.

45:23And you get the sense that talking to him is never enough. You've always got to go further and include the next batch. You've got to extend the franchise to women, and then you make sure that minorities are included and then you consider trans people. And he would say you just sort of keep going. Sounds to me like you sort of would say, hang on a second. Yeah, I mean, I think Billy's way of thinking and the progressive way of thinking, to some extent the Marxist way of thinking, is a secularized version of the Christian doctrine of providence where the idea is that you do have an arc of history.

45:56History is not cyclical as you might see in Vedantic Indian traditions. It's heading in a particular direction towards a particular end. Obviously, within theological traditions, that end is not in this world. And you can't just sort of make political paradise here in this world. That's, as it were, it's not going to happen. It's always lying beyond. And that, in a way, is a slightly healthier, a bit more conducive to not having radical revolutions and aggressive fixes. But yes, I think you've put your finger on something. For the liberal, the aim is to attain the sunlit uplands of absolute freedom and emancipation from all unchosen obligations.

46:38And the trouble is when liberalism hits the sunlit uplands, it starts worrying about whether or not it should conserve the sunlit uplands. The liberal is not a conservative. We don't conserve the sunlit uplands. And what about the moonlit uplands anyway? What about the 0.6 % of people who might prefer the moonlit uplands instead? What about them, eh? We've got to emancipate them. And in fact, we shouldn't even be able to call the sunlit uplands, the sunlit uplands. Let's just call them the lit uplands. And so on. There's this sort of, there's this emancipatory energy that liberalism has always had.

47:13And now that's brought wonderful progress in many ways, but it's also very, very difficult for liberals to stop liberating everybody from everything. Do you think the problem with liberalism is that it's got the wrong values or that it's got no values? I think the problem with liberalism is not that it's got no values, but that it gets values in the wrong order. Conservatives and liberals care equally about freedom. They just have a different account of where it should be ranked. And I think crudely, liberals want to see freedom as upstream of everything, the organizing horizon of everything. And conservatives will say, no, that kind of freedom is a license for anarchy.

47:58What you need for the real true freedom needs to be, as Burke calls it, ordered freedom. It needs to be downstream of other things, downstream of things that connect us in certain non-negotiable ways to each other. Most classically, faith, but also family, flag, nation. That doesn't mean you can't opt out of any of those. But broadly speaking, the most propitious conditions for the only freedom worth having, that is to say, not the freedom just to do whatever we want, but the freedom to do what we ought to do, is going to be downstream of greater goods. And I think that's probably the way to understand it.

48:34It's just a question of ranking. but how you rank those different values and those different horizons is going to have enormous downstream effects. In the founding editorial of the National Review, which is a tremendous American conservative publication, William Buckley wrote that the point of conservatism, his wonderful definition of it, was to stand a thwart history yelling stop. And it seems to me that people like you, and this will get us into the sort of MAGA movement and what's happening in British politics, you're dispositionally different that you seem to want to stand a for history yelling go you kind of want to forge something new so can you just explain and we'll then apply this to american and british politics how people on the right of politics became more radical in that they demoted freedom and they changed their attitude to stopping history well great question and one straightforward answer just shooting from the hip is that reagan and thatcher's liberalism conservative liberalism was conditioned by the twilight of the Cold War.

49:38And so that is to say, the kind of animating debate was between Soviet communist tyranny and Western freedom. And so, in some ways, there was just very little difference. There was very little ideological debate between right and left before 1989. And so, freedom was just seen as something that was just non-negotiable and something that should be prized because that is what the other lot deny. So it makes us, us and them, them. Exactly. But I think even there you start to see the tremors. It's not for nothing that Thatcher and Reagan's economic policy is called neoliberalism in all the textbooks because it was an outlook that was perfectly happy with a kind of dissolution of national boundaries, free trade, free movement, free movement of capital in particular.

50:30And I think there were some very intelligent left-wing critiques that pointed out that this sort of conservatism has a sort of solvent power. It is tearing down our sense of place, our sense of home, the stability of our labor markets and our moral communities and so on. And I think what's been so interesting, and this is partly the vice president, but a lot of other thinkers too, what we're seeing with the new right is the emergence of almost a repudiation of that legacy, of what's seen as a libertarian and overly unduly liberal economic legacy. And you're seeing, you know, this is why you see a lot more convergence between the new right and the old left than one might think.

51:15So when we're talking about the new right here, this will get us into the MAGA movement, What is it that the kind of blue labor and new right traditions share, particularly when it comes to the concern for how the working class has been affected by globalization? Well, I would say the short answer to that is a primacy on home, a sense of belonging and community. And one of the most sort of powerful features, I think, of the British left is the kind of the Keir Hardie late 19th century pre-Fabian Christian socialism, which is roughly a kind of communitarianism, focuses a lot on place, on the conditions of labor and so on and so forth.

51:58And of course, you've got the Ruskins and the William Morrises and so on. And I think that is something that is entirely in tune with the new right, with this sort of conservative suspicion that free marketeers, that libertarian attitudes to culture and economics are in fact not really conservative at all. And that's not to say they're not important. It's not to say that conservatives are statists. and we can come to talk about the state maybe in a little bit. For the moment, I think my sense is in sort of intellectual circles, there's this term post-liberalism and nobody really knows what it is.

52:42It seems to be a kind of placeholder for our ignorance and basically it collects together people who think that something's gone wrong in liberalism. So I almost feel bad to ask you this because if you Google Dr James Orr, where everyone goes, ooh, he's the Vance whisperer, and all this, that, and the other. Don't believe any of it. But the fact is, you're friends with the Vice President of America. Tell me what, if you wouldn't mind, what he says to you about what he wants to do to politics, because I think one of the most important ways of understanding J.D. Vance, I mean, the founding textbook of all this stuff is an extraordinary book, strongly recommend to all of our listeners, called Hillbilly Elegy, which is about where J.D.

53:15Vance grew up and what happened when globalisation turned up. But what is J.D. Vance, who might well represent a sort of, you know, post-Trump, Trumpism. What is he trying to do in America? Well, what he's trying to do right now is to be as loyal a vice president to Trump as he possibly can be. And I think he's doing that remarkably well. And I think in exchange, I mean, Trump is giving him a remarkably, as it were, wide, wide scope. I mean, I think he's the most interesting and consequential vice president in living memory. Not just, you know, not just the Munich speech of a few months ago, But the Paris speech he delivered that same week, that speech alone would have marked him out as one of the most interesting vice presidents.

53:59Why was the Paris speech so? So the Paris speech sort of laid out an American vision, an extremely optimistic sort of America first vision of AI and technology. Of course, so it was at the AI summit. The AI summit. This is a glimpse of what right wing progressivism might be, what right wing futurism might be, what it might be to be a conservative that is open to the future, is open to the power of technology. Stand to full history yelling go. Exactly right. To go back to the Buckley, to your reversing of the Buckley line. And so there's lots of things that could be said. But I would say he is the reason he was chosen.

54:37Even though Trump was out polling him in Ohio, there was no obvious electoral benefit to selecting him as the running mate. It might have been much more straightforward to go for a Rubio or a Tim Johnson to sort of lock up some of the votes that they might be able to lock up. But Trump very consciously didn't do a Biden. He said, I'm not playing identity politics here. We're going for somebody who, you know, I think he was persuaded that he needed a Dauphin. He needed a successor. He needed somebody who could somehow embody and understand Trumpism so that there would be Trumpism beyond Trump. And I think so that I think is sort of the best way of understanding the vice president's sort of ideological horizon is to push Trumpism forward.

55:24forward. And Trumpism, I think, you know, I suppose I would say this because I'm very much involved in the movement, but I do think national conservatism is probably the best label you could give to that sort of ideological framework that is America first. It's the sort of the politics of national preference that effectively we operate, our politics should be first and foremost organized by what is conducive to the flourishing of the demos. Hasn't liberalism achieved gains for once excluded groups, but also in the economic sphere for all Americans that people like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump profited from.

56:04I mean, Donald Trump's one of the most interesting men alive, obviously. He's really in a way a creature of 1970s and 1980s New York, a period of Thatcher and Reagan, a sort of period that - He's a limousine liberal, I think is what they call him. He's a limousine liberal. So is it, well, there you go. So isn't Donald Trump someone who has created by a kind of spirit of economic, laissez-faire, Chicago school freedom, which came with the downsides for those written about in Hillbilly Elegy. And therefore, isn't there something almost inconsistent or hypocritical about Trump? It might be that he would say, well, it's overreach, we're going to go too far.

56:42But this is a property developer from Queens, New York, a limousine liberal, in your words. Isn't he created by the very circumstances he's now trying to undo? It's a great question. I think the diagnosis that the vice presidents and others have to make is not so much that, you know, there were excesses in the 80s and 90s, although I think he probably wouldn't have been on board with economic neoliberalism had he sort of been around at the time. I think the criticism really starts with the early 2000s and the rapid effects, the rapid development of globalization after China's admission to the World Trade Organization and a whole load of other things as well.

57:25And the perception there was that national interests should be subordinated to everything else, that borders should be effectively dissolved because they were economic constraints on flourishing. And I think what you see, what came so sort of quickly with that is this extraordinary wave of deindustrialization all across the Midwest, Central America, and the emergence, of course, of the flyover states. And you see this across continental Europe. You see it in Britain as well. And that's the sense of, look, economic freedom is important. Free trade is important. A sort of relatively minimal state is important.

58:04But this is not what we're getting. what we're seeing is a sense of economic dispossession and marginalization, which is directly the result of this sort of, it was just about, we could just about handle it in the 80s and 90s. There was enough to go around. But now there is a sense of deep, deep dispossession and dislocation between the haves and the have-nots. Now, I'm very, very keen not to typecast you as a spokesperson for the American government. They can speak for themselves and we'll ask them the questions where we get the chance. but do you have any concern that in some of for instance donald trump's attacks on judges and the courts and the conventions of democracy there is again this inconsistency there's this undermining of one of the things that has made america great which is this country that had a revolution pretty recently you know five minutes ago in the course of human history um built fantastically strong institutions based on the rule of law uh which the president who's acting in a somewhat kingly way is undermining?

59:03Does that concern you at all? It's a central question on the right, both in America and in Britain, for conservatives. How do we conserve institutions that seem to be hostile to us, or seem to be hostile to what we take to be the founding ideals and purposes of these institutions? And I think that's the best way, that's the best prism to understand the sort of Trump critique of the federal judiciary or of other kind of classic institutions that Reagan wouldn't have dreamed of criticizing. There is a sense that there's been a kind of wave of what you might call ideological capture of institutions all across the West.

59:44And that puts conservatives in a very difficult position because we don't like the thought that we're attacking what we're designed to conserve or our spirit is to conserve. And so I think this is going to be a key, key question uh in the policy on on the right uh not just in america but but but in britain too do we do we simply burn down these institutions do we you know do we scrap the bbc license fee do we try and start do we just privatize it all or do we try and conserve it do you think years from now 50 years from now when you and i are kind of um maybe uh doing another podcast wherever it might be there um and looking back on this moment do you think we'll sort of define it as the the era where there was a really widespread revolt against globalization.

1:00:27Yeah. That really, when you talk about the politics of national preference, when you read Hillbilly Elegy, when you talk to J.D. Vance, when you look at what Nigel Farage and the Center for a Better Britain are doing, what you're ultimately driven by is a feeling that two ideas dominated the late 20th century. One was the idea of liberalism, the idea that globalization was happening. And what we're seeing now and what you embodies are feeling that liberalism is not enough on the one hand, and secondly, the globalization did not work out. I would agree with that. There's that wonderful anecdote that was unfortunately almost certainly apocryphal of Deng Xiaoping being asked what he thought of the French Revolution, and he replies, too soon to tell.

1:01:08And whether or not he said that, it's a great insight into just the longitudinal nature of Chinese thinking. I don't think it's too soon to tell now. I think when we are aging pensioners, worrying about the triple lock having been dissolved and shattered, doing another podcast. Annoyed about the lack of triple lock. I think one way to say it is we're looking back on the long 20th century, 1914 to 2016. But I think actually it'll be more civilizational than that. I think we'll look back on it as the age of liberalism. And that what we're living through is the twilight of liberalism and the emergence of something new.

1:01:44maybe something strange, maybe something terrible. But I think actually we can be hopeful about what comes next. So I think what we're looking at is a sort of, we'll look back on it as a kind of 1789 to 2016 and that what we were worrying about in the 2020s was really the fallout of the end of that great age, that great chapter of liberalism with all the benefits that it brought, but all the kind of problems and chaos and conflict that it engendered as well. Dr. James, it's always a pleasure speaking to you. Thank you so much for coming in. Great to be with you.

1:02:19Well, you might expect me to say this, but I genuinely think that was one of the most stimulating discussions about British politics that I've had in a long time. And I really do hope you feel you understand some of the deeper currents shaping our politics and indeed American politics and global politics from listening to James Orr. That's the aim of this podcast. And I feel I do. And there's a couple of things I want to pull out. The first is he was talking as if he is someone not just at the beginning of something, but marking the end of a very long chapter in human history. And he talked towards the end of our conversation about the twilight of liberalism, this idea that really for a couple of centuries now, a liberal ideal which asserted that individual autonomy, that personal freedom is the supreme goal of politics, is something that's being eclipsed or taken over, that it's kind of peaked.

1:03:06I thought that was a powerful idea. I'm not saying I agree with it or indeed anything he said, but I thought that was a powerful way of concluding our conversation. And when I said to him, is the problem with liberalism that it has the wrong values or no values? I thought it was really interesting. He said it's not whether it's got the wrong values or no values. It's that it ranks them in the wrong order. I think that's a clever way of understanding what J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel and Donald Trump and maybe Nigel Farage are all about. And talking about that, wasn't it really interesting that the Center for a Better Britain, this new right wing think tank, which he talked about the funding of pretty openly, is basically a program for government, isn't it?

1:03:46It's a plan for government. And when he alluded to the Heritage Foundation, which, if you don't know, is an American think tank that has millions and millions and millions of dollars in funding and has helped staff the new Trump administration, it's profoundly influential. Think tanks in America play an even more active role than perhaps they do in British politics. When he made that reference, and he raised it, not me, you just got the beginning of a sense that what the Centre for a Better Britain is trying to do and what Dr James Orr is trying to do is build the kind of intellectual and personnel infrastructure that would allow reform to be not just a campaigning party, but a party of national government.

1:04:22And that's why I think he is emerging. This is my references or my sense, not something that Dr. Orr said himself. But I think he's kind of emerging as someone who is kind of a bit like Keith Joseph was to Margaret Thatcher. I kind of feel like that's what he wants to be to Nigel Farage, an intellectual flag carrier or kind of pioneer. And the moment where I really felt like I really grasped what Reformer trying to do and what Dr. James Orr is trying to do is when he made that comparison between the Conservative Party, the Tories today, and the Liberals a century ago. This idea that the Liberals a century ago were the kind of establishment left or centre-left party, obviously in a very different country, in a two-party system, as it then was, the party of Asquith and Lloyd George and William Gladstone, but they gave way, they eventually lost ground on the centre-left to the Labour Party.

1:05:16And what Orr was saying is that the Tories today, A bit like the Liberals a century ago, the Tories are kind of centre-right party that are going to give way to a more hardline, more populist, more national conservative party in reform.

1:05:33Well, you can continue to get in touch. Please do get in touch about the ideas that we've discussed on Radical and also with your great guest suggestions. We take them very seriously and you might well hear the guests that you suggest on the podcast. Here is a message from Amy. Hi Amal and team, really enjoying the podcast, thank you. I found the episode Do We Need To Have More Children very interesting for lots of reasons, but I was struck by how the conversation with Paul Morland seemed to be solely focused on the number of children born. There was nothing about the start in life that those children have and the role that they go on to play in society.

1:06:06I say this as someone with four adopted children in my immediate family. What if, instead of trying to get more people to have more babies, we invested in taking better care of the children who are already being born. Of course, in the Venn diagram of policies that support vulnerable children and policies that increase a birth rate, there's a huge overlapping segment in the middle, but those things are not the same. Let's make the children that we already have the priority and let a higher birth rate be the happy bonus, not just worry about birth rate numbers. Amy, thank you so much for that voice note.

1:06:39Massively appreciate your kind words about the podcast. And of course, I totally, totally take your point. I'm ashamed to say, perhaps because I don't spend enough time thinking about it, which is itself bad because I've not experienced it myself. I didn't think to raise the issue of adoption with Paul Morland. I should have done, actually, because there are, as you know better than most, given your experience, which is interesting to hear, there are huge numbers of kids who are still waiting for adoption and huge numbers of parents who are desperate to adopt, but for whatever reason, bureaucratic and otherwise, can't.

1:07:10So I totally, totally take your point. And perhaps I should have raised that with Dr. Moreland. Sorry, but it's it's useful to hear from you because I think a lot of people listening this week may not know we had this really, really interesting conversation with Dr. Paul Moreland, who talked about the changing demography. That's the changing shape of populations, not just here in Britain, but around the world, about declining birth rates or fertility rates and also about aging populations and how that's going to put new pressures on societies that perhaps we haven't dealt with for a very, very long time or dealt with particularly well in recent decades.

1:07:41So, Amy, thank you for alerting me and our listeners to that again. Here's another voice note. This one is from Mike, who I believe is listening to us across the seas. It's Mike here in Canada. Just wanted to thank you for the podcast this morning, Professor Robert McFarlane, talking about river pollution. Obviously, here in Canada, I'm in British Columbia. The rivers and the parks around here are just absolutely beautiful. Fantastic, clear water that's sure thundering down the mountains. And while I've been down here with my cousins as well, we're down in Souk, we came across a bear just wandering around my cousin's garden.

1:08:22and we've had pods of orcas in the Pacific Ocean. And what suddenly dawned on me, excuse me for taking it so long, is we're just visitors here in this place. We're not residents. The residents is the water and the oceans and the bears and the pods of orcas. And we should be grateful just being able to visit and we should be treating the residents with a lot more respect. So I agree with the professor. For the rivers to have a voice, yeah, I go along with that. Sounds, Mike, like you think rivers are in some meaningful way alive. I've got a couple of thoughts instinctively about what you said there, Mike.

1:08:59Thank you very much, Steve, for your voice note. And it's wonderful to know that this podcast, Radical, is reaching people in Canada. The first is I've felt for quite a long time that maybe the secret or the solution to many of our ills is for all of us, whether individually or collectively, to move to Canada. I mean, I've spent a bit of time in Canada. I went to Vancouver a few years ago, pretty convinced that Canada is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It's the second biggest country in the world by landmass. And yet it has a population that's only two thirds the size of the UK. It's around 40 or 42 million from memory.

1:09:33And there are some of the regions or states within Canada, like Ontario, which is bigger than France and Spain combined. So Canada is mostly empty and utterly beautiful. So I'm persuaded by what you say, even as you describe it. I think, what am I doing in a studio in London when I could be out there with you, Mike? But the second thing, which is this idea that we're kind of merely visitors to rivers. It's one of the central ideas of the green movement, the conservation movement, the environmental movement, if you like. The way to understand our relationship with the earth is to realize that we are just temporary custodians.

1:10:07Basically, it's a sort of starting point of the green movement that we never actually own or possess the earth. We merely inherit it and pass it on. And so your idea that we're mere visitors, I think, chimes with that. The idea that if we have a relationship with a river or with a natural environment around us, the living world, as Robert McFarlane calls it, the relationship is one of temporary relation. and the fact that we're merely connected to it for a brief amount of time, I've got to pass it on to future generations in slightly better health than we received it. How's that for a radical idea?

1:10:43And that is it for this episode. Really, really hope you enjoyed it. To make sure you don't miss future conversations, please just do us a tiny favour and subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Sounds. Remember, you can also watch episodes of Radical with Amol Rajan on iPlayer. The thing about subscribing is if you do that, it helps us get really useful information about what we're doing well, what we're doing badly. It helps us deepen the connection with you, which is ultimately what we're all about. Right. Speak to you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

1:11:17Our culture can cancel someone in the blink of an eye. Celebrities, sports stars, politicians, influencers and royalty can all find themselves in the firing line. in the age of AI generated evidence lawsuits written in legalese you need to pass the bar to decipher how are you supposed to separate the fact from the fiction that's where we come in I'm Manushka Matandadawity and this is Fame Under Fire from BBC Sounds we'll myth bust, debunk, pre-bunk, fact check and get to the truth behind the timeline there are new episodes every week so make sure you listen to Fame Under Fire and subscribe on BBC Sounds

1:11:57If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau Putin and the Apartment Bombs Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts