Reclaiming the Centre: Is the Old Political Order Dead? (Adrian Wooldridge)

23:47And these people weren't being assimilated. And since then, Sweden has had enormous problems with gang warfare, enormous problems with this Rosengard place and other places, these parallel societies.

23:59Amol Rajan:And it's a very, very high migration in recent years, which there's been a very, very big pushback against. And the Swedish people said, thanks, but no thanks. That's right. Meanwhile, San Francisco is somewhere that in the 1980s you've been to. Happy Clappy, Hippie Town back then, you know, Flower Power, all that. Yeah, in the middle of the 1980s, I was at University of California at Berkeley and living in Berkeley, but often going over to San Francisco. And I'd spent my education up until then at Oxford. And then suddenly I was in the middle of crazy California. It was like heaven. Reagan era.

24:32Yeah, it was the Reagan era, but it's not so Reaganite, I must say, in Berkeley. But I would go over to San Francisco and I did really think that I'd arrived in heaven, partly because it's such a beautiful place, but partly because at that time you had the best of bohemian culture. You had a very lively gay community, a very lively hippie bohemian community. But it was also essentially a blue collar town. San Francisco is a blue collar town with a large sort of working class presence. And you could live there as a working class person. And it was a great mixture of different cultures which somehow cohered together.

25:07And then I went back to San Francisco sometime before COVID struck. And I was absolutely devastated because what you saw was thousands of people living on the streets.

25:22Amol Rajan:Fentanyl was a huge thing. Fentanyl. You saw people wandering around like zombies. You saw people shooting up heroin, smoking crack cocaine. I mean, the whole situation of downtown California was an absolute tragedy. It is absolutely shocking, actually. It's really shocking. Even if you live in London, I've been out to Silicon Valley a lot. It is astonishing, San Francisco. By the way, the guys who run the, and they're always guys, who run the biggest tech companies, they often live not in Palo Alto or Silicon Valley. They live down the road in San Francisco. So you literally have the richest people in the world.

25:51As I was walking down the street seeing this human devastation, you see these sort of rather elegant people stepping gingerly through the morass of human detritus. And they're taking Mark Zuckerberg his lunch. Yeah, to have the world's best sushi and things like that. So you see, what you saw was a town that had a middle class, a vibrant community that sort of cohered as a city. Now you have not just detritus plus an upper class, but no coherence, no public realm that's functioning.

26:23Amol Rajan:Why do you infer from those two experiences that what we need more of is the philosophy that you fell in love with 40 odd years ago? Because a lot of people would say, they'd say what we need is closed borders, conservatism, or maybe nationalism. If you look at what a lot of other people have said on seeing San Francisco, they'd say we need socialism. We need a much better social contract. Why have you inferred from those two very different experiences that after liberalism failed in those two places, what we need is a better liberalism? Aren't you guilty of the very dogma that you accuse others of having?

26:57What I'm trying to argue is that we need to adjust liberalism to change circumstances without abandoning its most important constituents, which, as we talked, there's a scepticism about power and things like that. And that we can adjust liberalism without sacrificing its main principles. So let's say that we want to deal with the problem of San Francisco. I would say that what's gone wrong there is an over-interpretation or misinterpretation about what it means to be individualistic, what it means to base society on individual rights. Because a lot of people in San Francisco, a lot of the liberal elites in San Francisco were actually saying that, well, there may be people doing all this stuff in the streets, but that's their right.

27:39They would say that legalizing drugs is the best thing to do. So you had organized drug markets, you had interest groups who would say the homeless have a right to be in the streets and the problem of drugs is best dealt with by increasing the supply. And they give them needles and they do all those sorts of things. And what I would conclude and what I think is also in the liberal tradition is that liberal individualism is not just about giving people rights and treating them as shoppers, allowing them to consume whatever they want. that there must be an element within liberal individualism which puts an emphasis on responsibility, on good conduct and on being your best self rather than your worst self.

28:18We need to open the door within liberalism to judgmentalism, to say that's a bad thing to be doing. Smoking's bad. Shooting up heroin is bad. And if you want to be your best self, you need to stop doing that. So we need to be passing judgment on people. I think one of the things we've, liberals have retreated from the moral sphere. They've simply retreated to this notion, which was central to neoliberalism, of the consumer consuming things. If a consumer wants something, then it's automatically right. And I'm saying that is a misreading of the best liberals of the 19th century. If you read John Stuart Mill, what John Stuart Mill is, isn't saying, let's take the brakes off, let's do what we want.

29:00He said, let's take the brakes off, but also so construct our society that you're leading people to behave in a way that is better rather than worse. Well, he talked about improves their better selves.

29:11Amol Rajan:He talked about the higher pleasures. A lot of people, though, would have experienced what you experienced in Malmo, for instance, just to take that concrete example, and have said, sod this, I'm going to vote for the Swedish Democrats. And they did, by the way. And, you know, one of the first guests that we had on this podcast, because we believe, as you do, intolerance and having a heterodox approach to politics, was James Orr. And James Orr, who is undoubtedly one of the most important thinkers in Britain today. I don't say that in any way because I advocate any of his politics or take against it.

29:41Amol Rajan:And I approach this impartially. James Orr is the head of policy for reform. That is to say, Dr. James Orr, who's a Cambridge philosopher and theologian, is head of policy for potentially, potentially the next government. and I put to him, I asked him what he thought was the problem of liberalism. Was it that it had no values or it had the wrong values? And he said the following. I think the problem with liberalism, Orr said to me, is not that it's got no values, but that it gets the values in the wrong order. Conservatives and liberals care equally about freedom. They just have a different account of where it should be ranked.

30:15Amol Rajan:And I think crudely, liberals want to see freedom as upstream of everything, the organizing horizon of everything. And he went on to say, what you need for real, true freedom needs to be, as Burke, Edmund 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. What do you say to Dr. James Orr's implied charge to you, which is that you've got things in the wrong order? That he's got things in the wrong order. Very good. And now we're back at the same time next week.

30:51When you start talking about ordered freedom, you start opening the door to an established church, an established faith. And he talks about faith, flag and freedom. And that implies a certain intertwining of the flag and the faith.

31:08Amol Rajan:Isn't he just, I'm not here to defend James Hall, isn't he just being judgmental in the very way you've just invited us to be? No, no. Because I would say that once you start trying to decree that certain ultimate things are true and should have the support of the state, then you are getting into a very messy area, particularly if you have a pluralist society. What the liberals said was in a world of mobility, in a world of pluralism, you must dial down the role of religion. Religion should never have too powerful a role, so powerful a role that it becomes an orthodoxy and it starts telling people what to believe because that offends against the principles of skepticism.

31:50But it also creates these terrible things which were religious wars. So what liberals say is you have to be neutral about the details of religious faith, neutral about this intertwining of faith, flag and freedom. But what you have to have is the individual at the center of society. Now, that opens the door to something which is equally dangerous, which is that all you do is allow individuals to have a multiplicity of choices and don't rank those choices at all. What I'm trying to say is that you do need to have a notion not quite of ordered freedom but of choosing your best self rather than your worst self.

32:32It's yourself that you're choosing. You're choosing a version of yourself that has some ethical content but it's not ethical content that is dictated by a church or by the state. So I'm trying to, again, to choose a middle ground between the neoliberals who would say it's all about shopping and somebody like James Orr who would say that you have to have some sort of social institutionalization of order.

32:57Amol Rajan:you know what James Orr and actually not just James Orr who's head of policy for reform but what a conservative would say to you is that this this kind of romantic idea that Adrian Woldridge has that you can choose your best self do you know what that's really come with in the world this is what they would say is it's come with this celebration of autonomy with self-actualization all the rest of it which is also come with a tremendous cost and the cost and they'd lay this at your door and you're by the way you deal with all this in the book, they'd say that it comes with a cost which is a loss of home, a loss of community, and a downgrading of that sense of belonging and membership on which any ordered free society must exist.

33:36Amol Rajan:And it's your fault. You liberals who said, let's have open borders in Sweden or San Francisco or Scunthorpe in the UK, it's your fault that we've had this tremendous damage to our society, as they would cast it, from an excessive focus on freedom. It's because you got things in the wrong order? My problem is that I think there's a lot of truth in that. I do think the notion of a home, the notion of a community, the notion of some sort of security in a world of hyper-individualism, hyper-freedom is right. But I want to bring that back into the middle ground. So what I don't want to do, I want to reclaim it and revitalize it and emphasize that there is a liberal version of this.

34:23There's a liberal version of the home. There's a liberal version of the higher self. There's a liberal version of freedom, that freedom isn't just shopping, that freedom is achieving our higher selves. And there are liberal answers to this problem that don't rely on the flag and on faith. And if you look at the history of liberalism in the late 19th century, there were a whole bunch of people who said, look, we're losing automatic religious faith and we live in a society which is no longer ordered. It's a society which is increasingly mobile, but we don't want to go too far in this. In other words, we need to put our foot on the accelerator, but also steer in the right direction.

35:07And they said that what you need to do is have a clerisy, which is a sort of group of people, an intellectual aristocracy, who are in charge essentially of the state, but most importantly of the education system, and use the education system to preach certain virtues about beauty, truth, character, morality, which are not embedded in a particular faith, but are true for all of humanity. And Lord Reith is a classic example of this, who said that what the BBC should do is preach higher culture.

35:46Amol Rajan:Who decides what's preached? People like Adrian Woldridge and Amal Rajan? Who work for Bloomberg and the BBC? No, I think there's truth in that. And I'm willing to accept that there is a sort of libertarian argument which became very popular amongst the Thatcherites in the 1980s, said that you have no right to tell us what to believe. If people want to spend their time watching pornography, that's fine. Let them do that. Only an arrogant elitist would say that it's better to spend your time listening to Mozart than it is to spend your time listening to hip-hop or something like that. And you have no right to be preaching.

36:26What I'm trying to say is that we have to reclaim the courage to be judgmental, that unless you want to have a world which is entirely – I mean a center ground which is entirely divorced from morality, from culture, which is just a shopping mall. We want to fill the center ground with notions of right and wrong, virtue and lack of virtue, quality and lack of quality. and that is the best way to defend against the arguments of people like James Orr that you need to go back to the church. We can have culture, a certain high culture, which is capable of speaking to people of different races, different ethnicities, but also making it clear that taking drugs is bad, that listening to Mozart is good, that there is a certain...

37:12You know, it is. The clerisy is a sort of religion of public virtue of high culture. And these people said that you needed to do this precisely to avoid the dangers that we're in at the moment of having no home, of having no fixed set of values, of having no way of distinguishing between right and wrong.

37:49Amol Rajan:subscribe, please make sure you have got your push notifications turned on and that way you will get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you'll never miss out. How good is that? Right, back to Adrian Woldridge.

38:04Amol Rajan:I've put to you the James Orr critique. Let me, having spoken to him about it, let me put to you the leftish critique. They would say that Liberals failed on the other thing that we should all agree really matters, which is poverty. Inequality, sometimes they say, yeah, You know, inequality is a measure of relative difference. What matters is the absolute measure of poorness, which is poverty. And on poverty, liberals and their near cousins, neoliberals, ended up fetishizing wealth so much that they basically forgot about what's really going on. And this is, by the way, just to put cards on the table, something I think about every single day.

38:41Amol Rajan:We live in a country, which is the sixth or seventh biggest economy in the world. There are four million children in poverty in this country. About 72 % of them, according to the Child Poverty Action Group, are in families where people work. What do you say to the charge that liberals created the conditions in which a kind of market fundamentalism, neoliberalism, I'd be interested to know if you think that is a thing that actually exists, allowed us to overlook poverty and its cousin inequality? That's a very good and very difficult question. What the neoliberals would say in response to that is that they didn't.

39:16that after 1980, during the period of globalization, you had the biggest successes in the battle against poverty in the history of the world. The number of absolute people living in absolute poverty decreasing very dramatically, particularly in China, because you had the creation of a global market which allowed lots and lots of poor people, again, particularly in China, to enter the global market. And you see the number of people living in absolute poverty substantially declining right the way up to the end of the 2010s.

39:51Amol Rajan:Can I just fortify that position by saying what you're saying is statistically absolutely true. It's not just China where the big phenomenon was urbanization, people moving from the country to the city. In India, where the late Manmohan Singh, who was Prime Minister of India but was in the early 90s a finance minister, he unleashed capitalism. And it was capitalism. It was something called FDI, Foreign Direct Investment. And through capitalism, India experienced an economic miracle. It's also the case that if you look at countries like Poland or Vietnam, which are going through these extraordinary growth miracles right now.

40:21Amol Rajan:I mean, Poland is amazing what's happened in the last 25 years. It's capitalism and foreign direct investment. But what about here? Yeah, I wanted to come on to say that. So then you have a group of people who are sort of neoliberals. I mean, New Labour. And New Labour basically said that we need to marry Thatcherite methods with 1960s style social liberalism and we'll get this new synthesis, the two liberalisms brought together. And they said we need to rejoice in people getting rich. You know, Peter Mandelson said filthy rich is great. As long as they pay their taxes. So long as they pay their taxes.

40:56And there was some truth in what they did that they had an economy which was growing, certainly growing faster than it was now. They had a financial sector that was producing a lot of wealth. And their solution to the problem of poverty was essentially to give people money to get themselves out of it. So you recycle the money. You have the golden goose in London and the southeast, and you're increasing spending on the National Health Service and on the welfare state. And Gordon Brown is a very interesting example of this because he is very much to the left of Tony Blair. He's a sort of socialist, but he also believes in using neoliberal methods to achieve socialist solutions.

41:38And again, that worked to a significant extent for a long time. I think then the Tories come in and you begin to squeeze the state in a way that freezes living standards, freezes the quality of the services in the welfare state. So I think there's no ultimate incompatibility between that particular phase of neoliberalism and what Gordon Brown was trying to achieve. But I think there's something that they're leaving out, that people like Gordon Brown are leaving out. And that is the sense that people feel helpless. OK, their health services is getting better. OK, their education is getting better.

42:13But if they're trapped in a world where there aren't any jobs, because all those jobs have gone to China, in which they have no agency, no control over their lives, they're recipients of welfare, then that is not very satisfying to them. And that's why we got one of the many reasons, but a powerful reason why we got Brexit. that a lot of people voted for Brexit, not because they were getting poorer, but because they felt as though they didn't control their lives, which is why the take back control was such a powerful slogan. So partly that and partly because I think people have been seduced into making choices which in the long term are not particularly good for them.

42:49So you drop out of education early, you eat a lot of fatty foods, you sit down in front of the television for 24 hours a day watching Cash in the Attic and the rest of it. There's a richness of culture that has been degraded in communities that are dependent upon the state. There's also a sense of control, of pride, of agency. And those two things, the richness of culture, the sense of agency, were completely ignored, even by somebody who generally is as sensitive to the problems of poverty as Gordon Brown.

43:19Amol Rajan:It's so interesting. On a recent episode of this podcast, we spoke to James Kanagasurium, who is a very influential pollster, came up with the idea that Red Wall works at a group called Focal Data. And he basically argued that agency was the most important idea in our politics, that people feel they don't have control over their circumstances. I want to get some of your radical solutions because you've written, radical liberals must challenge this establishment with the same vigour with which Greens and reform challenge it, but in the name of liberal principles rather than identitarian ones. And just before I get some of your radical solutions, it's worth saying that in the book, which is a trenchant defense of centrism, but more specifically the lost genius of liberalism, you're pretty brutal about liberals overreaching.

44:02Amol Rajan:For instance, if I recall on this whole question of free speech on campus or the tendency of a kind of Brahmin class who speak only to themselves, you're pretty scathing actually about the ways in which liberals have failed. Just for those of our listeners who hate liberalism and who want to know that even you as an advocate accept that liberalism has failed more recently, how do you think it's overreached? Well, it's overreached through deregulation of the finance sector, particularly. So, you know, the beginnings of the collapse of this particular liberal synthesis, which we've been living through over many years, was the global financial crisis.

44:42And the global financial crisis was produced partly by over-deregulation partly by encouraging people to borrow more money than they could pay back. But that was an overreach. I think it overreached over immigration. It failed to listen to what regular people were saying about immigration, about the pressure on public services created by immigration. So the liberal establishment kept basically saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, immigration, we want to bring it under control, but it kept going up and up. So they weren't really responding to what people were saying. I think a number of liberal tenets about the way that universities should be run, such as, you know, quite the over-marketisation, the combination of an over-expansion and the notion that over-expansion could easily be paid for by charging students more and more.

45:31All of that has created a lot of resentment and rightful resentment. But the problem with liberals or the liberal establishment, let me say, the problem with the liberal establishment is partly, as I say, a failure to adjust their policies to changing circumstances, but also a problem of talking to themselves or talking to each other, of cocooning themselves within certain institutions. Doesn't that sound like the clerisy which you lord? The clerisy is infinitely wise and infinitely sensitive to all criticism. No, I mean, there is, of course, there is a problem here. But I think what you've tended to get within these institutions is partly talking to each other and failing to listen to what's going on outside.

46:17Partly a way of looking at people who are outside with a great deal of suspicion. So if people are raising worries about grooming gangs, the terrible attitude is to say, well, that's racist. We shouldn't try and interfere with that sort of thing. Obviously, that has led to the most remarkable problems. But also when people talk to people who are like themselves, they tend to become more extreme. So neoliberals, people who love the wonders of the market, might start off by saying, let's inject market principles into the provision of education services and things like that. But then they say, well, why stop there?

46:57Let's inject market principles into the provision of kidneys. If there's a shortage, there's a price solution to that shortage. So ideas become more and more extreme. And I think that's also true of left liberals, that left liberals who are people who are concerned with marginalized groups tended to move to ever, ever more marginalized groups and fixate on ever more marginalized groups. And my third group of liberals are sort of managerial liberals who want everything to be perfectly managed and think management is the solution to every problem, who flourish in global institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, but also in global corporations.

47:33They tend to think everything could be solved by managerialism. So I think the centre ground, rather than being a common ground, has been a sort of an alliance of different extremisms. So on the one hand, you have insulation from the problems that ordinary people, people living outside the world that we inhabit. And partly this competitive purification of views have turned liberalism into something, the liberal elite, into a bunch of people who are out of touch. But also when they talk to each other, moving to the extremes rather than to the center, the natural dynamic is to the extremes rather than the center.

48:08And a classic, extraordinary example of that, a tragic example of that, I would see, is the European Union, which has absolutely failed repeatedly to respond to very loud signals coming from society, including Brexit, and just sort of competes with itself to produce ever more sort of perfect legal fixes to problems. Is that also a problem with the clerisy which I laud? Well, I think the problem – what I'm trying to argue for a clerisy is a group of people who are focused cultural elevation, cultural enlightenment, not particularly on detailed solutions to particular problems. And the reason I'm so fixated on them is because I think if liberalism entirely abandons the middle ground, if it tries to devoid, render the public sphere devoid of moral judgment or cultural judgment, it does create this world which James Orr rightly fears where there are no values.

49:13Amol Rajan:Students, we've got a lot of students that listen to this, a lot of students who will be doing politics at the moment or political philosophy. And they'd be interested in the book that you talk about this tradition within liberalism of what you call the new liberals. And throughout its history over the last 250 years, at least, I'm sure you can trace it back and you do much longer than that. There are these figures like Graham Wallace and Hobhouse and even Winston Churchill, who came over to the Liberal Party briefly, who tried to revive liberalism. And they call themselves new liberals or you do.

49:41Amol Rajan:What would a new liberal agenda look like today? How can I put this impartially? We've got some big problems today. We've got the climate, which is a huge concern to many of our listeners and understandably so. We've got a demographic challenge, which is a very fast aging population. We've got low levels of social trust. We've got endemic poverty. And we have a completely transformed relationship with technology. We also have economic stagnation. This country's had flat living standards and real wages for basically 20 years. two things. One is, do you see a kind of intellectual firmament of new liberals?

50:15Amol Rajan:I hear a lot about post-liberals. I mean, J.D. Vance calls himself a post-liberal. And secondly, what might such an agenda, a radical agenda, look like? I think we're beginning to see a sort of a new liberal agenda forming, not associated with any particular group of intellectuals in the way that the post-liberal agenda is, and certainly not associated with any particular group of politicians yet. But what you see is all sorts of worries being communicated to the political system by groups of people. Let's say parents are worried about smartphones. Parents are worried about pornography and the ubiquity of pornography.

50:53People are worried about the amount of litter and disorder in the street. All of these things are cohering as worries. And they're beginning to communicate themselves from the bottom up to the political system. But we, you know, if anybody wants to make the case that Sir Ed Davey is a great new liberal thinker, they're welcome to make it. But I think it would be quite a hard thing to do. And also Keir Starmer is, you know, I'm sure a good man and a successful lawyer, but he's not a coherent political thinker. So we're not getting thinkers making the agenda, although I would like to present myself as a thinker who's trying to make this agenda.

51:30But I think one thing I would really put a lot of emphasis on, which we haven't talked about, is the problem of tech. Because the problem of tech, the big tech companies, is a huge challenge to liberalism in a number of ways. From the 1980s onwards, most liberals tend to say, let's be tolerant of the market or enthusiastic about the market, tolerant and enthusiastic about business. and that was almost a definition of what neoliberalism was about and what the vital centre was about under Blair, being enthusiastic about companies. And I think now we're reaching a point where that is becoming dysfunctional, that these tech companies are a huge challenge for two reasons.

52:10One is simply the size, the economic might of these companies. Which is distorting. Which is distorting the market. It's damaging the market as a whole. But the great liberal statement of Lord Acton that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is true of the private sector as well as the public sector. And you have almost absolute power in the hands of some of these people. So I would argue for breaking up these companies, for constraining the power of these companies, but also there's something more fundamental going on, which is that the essence of liberalism is the individual.

52:41And the notion at the heart of liberalism is the idea that we should have individuals who are making free choices, but they're making free choices because they're self-controlled, They're educated. They're informed about the world. They're rational, educated, responsible citizens. And what you see with the tech companies is the destruction of the individual as a rational, responsible, liberal individual. individual. You're having a fragmentation of attention. You're having the dissemination of misinformation. You're having algorithms which are designed to excite emotions rather than reason. If these organizations are allowed to do what they want to do, if they're allowed to pursue what they would naturally pursue in order to make profit, I think you will be degrading the fundamental components of individualism.

53:31So if you look at what Adam Smith is saying in the wealth of nations. The wealth of nations starts off, as much as anything, as an attack on the East India Company because it's so intertwined with power, because it's so committed to pursuing commercial ends which are out of sync with the common good that it needs to be removed from that power. And I think we're beginning to see tech companies performing the same sort of function as the East India Company, but in a slightly more dangerous way because they're degrading our individualism.

54:00Amol Rajan:I'm trying to work out how you would translate this and the agenda of new liberalism, if not through Ed Davey or indeed Nigel Farage or Zach Polanski, into an agenda for the problems facing Britain in the year 2026. To take a couple of thoughts, it was seen as being, you know, one of the bedrocks of the government. They would really be on the side of the builders, not the blockers. They'd build lots and lots of homes. And 1.5 million homes would be the target across the parliament. And so far, it looks like at the run rate they're going, it's going to be difficult. I'm not saying they won't do it, but it's going to be difficult to reach that.

54:31Amol Rajan:a lot of young people, including those listening to this podcast, would say is 1.5 million is nothing. If you want to be really radical, build 7 million. Do as many as we actually need. You hear, you know, people talk about legalization or decriminalization of cannabis. I think Sadek Khan, the mayor of London, believes in that. It's not particularly radical. Milton Friedman was advocating for it 50 odd years ago. You think about some of the other problems that we face in this country, poverty, taxation, productivity. You know, I don't see anyone getting into power. The most radical thing I can see emerging is the idea that the Conservative Party is kind of toying with dropping the triple lock after the Reform Party, which is meant to be a kind of party of the radical right, said, after all, we're going to keep the triple lock.

55:11Amol Rajan:And I'm not taking a view on the triple lock, but I would say that British politics is somewhat devoid of radical ideas at the moment. And I see in the world of podcasts, whether it's people from Bloomberg, The Economist or other podcasts, advocating ideas which seem to me outside of the mainstream, but just completely unable to penetrate Westminster and Whitehall. I don't see a radical agenda in British politics. What am I missing? What happened in the early 20th century was that when you got a new formulation, a new paradigm of liberalism, which said that the best way to empower individuals is not necessarily just to have a laissez -faire state, that you could empower individuals through more investment in education or more investment in the health service.

55:58When you have that paradigm change, which meant that people were thinking about the world in a new way, it freed them to act. And so what you had is a liberal party that was both inert and was almost reconciled to not doing very much. and because of that was old and decrepit and wasn't really attracting talent. Once you suddenly get this new blueprint for talent, suddenly you've got a lot of talent going into it. So you get Lloyd George, you get Churchill coming from the Conservative Party, you get Asquith, you get large numbers. So you have, you know, in many ways, one of the most talented administrations we've ever had.

56:42Amol Rajan:What are you saying about the calibre of modern politicians? Why don't you make explicit what's implicit, which is you're saying that perhaps we've fallen somewhat. I'm saying that the reason that the calibre is so low is that you don't have a set of ideas. What you have at the moment, basically, is the old double liberal consensus, social liberalism plus economic liberalism, is a decaying consensus. It's not generating any excitement or solutions. And because of that, it's not attracting people. Once you have a vital centre, a vital consensus, then you attract people. Once you detracted Churchill, George and the rest of it, all the things such as policies began to fall into place.

57:23And so very rapidly after the Liberals were elected in 1906, you get a series of welfare reforms. You get a series of education reforms. You get the marginalisation of the House of Lords. You get some very rapid action. So what I'm saying is that the reason that we have the crisis of quality of people at the moment and the crisis of activity at the moment is because we haven't thought up a blueprint which seems to be both galvanizing and realistic. Once you have a galvanizing, realistic blueprint, then all the other things fall into place. So all these people who say we should be paying MPs more, then you'll get talent.

58:01I think that's nonsense. I would say there are certain things that we could be doing which would not involve more spending. I mean, the big problem here is that we're under constrained circumstances for the sort of radical solutions you're talking about. I think we could have radical solutions to our education problems, which don't necessarily involve spending more. They involve having more willingness to embrace principles of excellence, competition and cultural, it's quite cultural elitism, but cultural rethianism, enthusiasm. When it comes to the alienation of younger people, the building of the seven million houses, absolutely, we have to do something about that because we have alienated, we have shortchanged a whole generation of people and generational equity should be at the heart of what we're doing.

58:52I tend to think that the sort of Roger Scruton sort of approach to this, that people are less reluctant to see new houses built, new communities built, if they're beautiful, if they blend in with the environment. You look at a lot of new houses, A, they're very ugly, and B, they have these terribly tiny little windows. There's these weird sort of obsession with health and safety rules that people will fall out of their windows or things like that. that if we could be building things that were attractive, that were in accordance with the local cultural traditions, there would be much more enthusiasm about those things.

59:23At the moment, we seem to be paralysed on a house building.

59:25Amol Rajan:Adrian, it's such a pleasure talking to you. I've read, it's a slightly strange experience talking at length with someone who you've tended to consume in sort of 800 or 900 word columns for about 20 years. But I've loved it. And I've also, I have to say, hugely, hugely, hugely enjoyed the book. It's called Centrists of the World Unite. and you're very kindly going to stick around to answer some of our listener questions. But for now, I'm going to say thank you very, very much indeed. Thank you indeed.

59:56Amol Rajan:Having read Adrian's book, a little part of me thought that he might come into the studio not with a kind of manifesto or set of policies, but with a kind of prospectus almost for some radical solutions to the future. And I thought it was interesting. You know, he had some kind of radical ideas. In a weird way, some of his radical ideas were really going back to traditional ways of doing things like education. But what he was really trying to do, I think, was to kind of lay the groundwork or create a kind of space or an area that other radicals could inhabit. He's trying to give people who are liberals and who are centrists the freedom to be judgmental about how best to live our lives and the freedom to admit that they've got lots of things wrong.

1:00:34Amol Rajan:And I was struck listening to him, particularly at the start of that conversation, with how he wanted to defend the idea of centrism. And I think that's a pretty unusual, unorthodox and even radical thing to do these days. You know, I often see centrists getting lambasted and criticised for being out of touch with public opinion. Centrism is kind of often cast as this kind of equivocation where you can't make up your mind between left and right. So you just sort of go down the middle. And he didn't think it was that at all, actually. He thought it was kind of not only something which has a particular tradition, going back to the French Revolution, but a kind of a way of being kind of assertive about the world, which says maybe we've got something to learn from both sides.

1:01:16Amol Rajan:Maybe the left are right when it comes to social justice. Maybe the right are right about not having too bureaucratic a state. So all of that was really interesting. But I thought actually the most moving bit of that was the personal stuff. I mean, the journeys that he went on to Sweden 20 odd years ago and then San Francisco much more recently made him feel this profound sense of kind of guilt and even despair that the state of the world created by liberalism and its overreach needed correcting. And if you read his book or if you listen to that conversation, I think what you hear is someone who feels that their political philosophy worked for a very long time, but is now desperately out of fashion.

1:01:55Amol Rajan:and he wants to revive it for the new age and well, whether or not you think it's worth doing that's up to you but I thought it was well worth listening to

1:02:07Amol Rajan:And that is it for this episode to make sure you don't miss future conversations and indeed the question and answer episode which Adrian has done for us that's going to be out on Monday you can subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Sounds and by the way while you're at it if you do want elsewhere to give us a little five-star review and say nice things about what we're trying to do and how we do it, that would be fine as well. We'll speak to you next week. Thank you and goodbye. Hello, I'm Johnny Diamond and I'm the presenter of the Radio 4 series, How Did We Get Here? Israel and the Palestinians.

1:02:40We explore the complicated backstory of that Middle East conflict as the region endures another wider war. Through conversations with experts with a variety of perspectives. We travel back through the centuries to examine the history of the land that's now so contested between Arabs and Israelis, and we try and understand the past that's brought us to such a present. How did we get here? Israel and the Palestinians listen on BBC Sounds.

1:03:12Amol Rajan:I'm here on the job site with Dale, who's a framing contractor. Hey, good morning. Dale traded up to Geico Commercial Auto Insurance for all his business vehicles. We're here where he needs us most. Yep, they sure are. We make it easy for him to save on all his insurance needs, all in one place, with coverage that fits his business and bottom line. Oh, I shouldn't have looked down. It's all right. We're so far up here. Look at me. Take a deep breath. No, I'm good. So good. Get a commercial auto insurance quote today at geico.com and see how much you could save. It feels good to Geico. At the BBC, we go further so you see clearer.

1:03:46With a subscription to bbc.com and the BBC app, you get unlimited articles and videos, ad-free podcasts, the BBC News Channel streaming live 24-7, plus hundreds of acclaimed documentaries. From less than a dollar a week for your first year, read, watch and listen to trusted, independent journalism and storytelling. It all starts with a subscription to bbc.com and the BBC app. Find out more at bbc.com slash unlimited.