What is Radical Politics?

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1:02David McWilliams: To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast.

1:15David McWilliams: How you doing there? It is time for the podcast. Podcast today is going to be all about the intersection of economics, politics, culture, and maybe not to... Sociology, John. Oh, yeah, throw in a bit of that. But the question in this podcast is, what is radical politics? Is radical politics politics that is far removed from where the people are? And if that is radical politics, so if you are taking a radical position, you are radically far away from the vast majority of people, in which case you're either wrong or you're trying to drag them in a certain area. If you look at this, this podcast is going to be very revelatory, John, because what it's going to tell you...

2:04David McWilliams: And radical. And radical. What it's going to tell you is Fianna Fáil, Fianna Gael here, the centre. Democrats in America, the centre. Labour Party in the UK, the centre. If we go into France, you'll have Macron's En Marche, the centre. Christian Democrats, Social Democrats in Germany, the centre. All these parties call themselves centrists. And therefore you think that they and their ideas would match the center, i.e. they would be much more representative of the average dude on the street than radical politics. What we're going to show you in this podcast is that centrist parties in Europe and America are actually very radical.

2:49David McWilliams: And radical parties are actually very centrist. So our use of language is completely intemperate and inaccurate because what we're going to show you is there is a gap between where the people are on culture issues. Not economics issues, but culture issues and where mainstream centrist parties are. And as a result of that, mainstream centrist parties all around Europe, including Ireland, are actually very radical in comparison to where the population are and ultimately where the population want them to be. So this is a relatively new development. It is a relatively new development. It is, not only is it relatively new, but it's unbelievably important in trying to explain the rise of the so-called radical right.

3:38and populism.

3:40David McWilliams: And populism, because the data we're about to show you with the help of John Byrne Murdoch from the FT, it's going to show us that the parties of the radical right, so we say, or the far right, are actually the parties of the centre. Yeah. And the parties of the centre and the traditional mainstream are actually very radical. Because we're measuring radicalism in terms of the distance away from the average person you are. Yeah. If the political parties are miles away on crucial issues from the average person, then they are radical. And if the, in this case, far right, that we're calling far right, are closer to the average person, well, they are centrist.

4:21David McWilliams: And we've got our language all mixed up. So to help us decipher language, policies of radicalism and all that good stuff, let's go to John Byrne Murdoch of the FT, who wrote a wonderful piece a couple of days ago on precisely this topic. John, how are you? Great to see you. I am very well, thanks. Not at all. Now, John, explain to me the premise of the article and then we can talk to the listeners about it. Sure. So I should say that I'm very much standing on the shoulders of one particular giant on this one, which is a political economist by the name of Lawrence Gunther at the Toulouse School of Economics.

5:05So he's done this whole body of work about what he calls representation gaps. So this is the idea that the public, the voters and politicians each have views, policy preferences, values, and that there is a gap between the public and the politicians on cultural issues. So if you ask people, whether they're members of parliament or members of pubs, shall we say, you ask them for their views about their preferences on what should be done about the economy, taxing, spending, public services, that kind of thing, you'll get fairly similar answers, similar preferences, depending on whether you're in the pub or in parliament.

5:43David McWilliams: Okay. So give me an example. So if you were to say like, what do you think of capitalism, right or do you think capitalism is a good idea so politicians would say there'd be a certain amount say strongly agree strongly disagree something like that exactly that so questions about capitalism questions about whether the state should intervene in in running things questions about whether more income and wealth should be redistributed from the rich to the poor so you'd get a range of responses but they would look pretty similar whether it was public or politicians okay so so again i'll put that so the average bloke in the pub would let's say 49 % of the average people in the pub would say, you know, where do you feel on capitalism?

6:20David McWilliams: Say, well, I'm a very liberal person. And that would broadly concur with politicians, or I'm a very illiberal person. So the percentages of what people think in the pub, and the percentages of what people think in Parliament or the Dáil are broadly similar on those old ideas. Exactly that. So So one way of thinking about it is that wherever someone stands, wherever most people stand on those economic questions, they can look at TV, open the newspaper, read the politics section, and they'll see their views represented there. There'll be parties of the centre-left, parties of the centre-right. Whoever's been in government the last couple of decades, one of those big old-school parties will have represented their views.

7:05David McWilliams: Okay. On issues of what we would call traditional economics, left versus right, redistribution versus taxation, high taxation versus low taxation. So those big issues. Exactly that. But then, of course, we've got this other set of issues. We think about politics as taking place on these two axes. You've got the economic left-right, sort of socialist and then more free market. You've also got this socio-cultural left and right from the progressives to the very conservative, nationalistic tendencies. and on that latter axis the cultural social axis this is where we see this misalignment okay so if you look at the views of the public on things like what should happen to illegal immigration or cross-border flows in general one of the classic questions is people are asked should immigrants to this country have to adapt to the local customs take a question like that and the public are generally in agreement with that statement.

8:05They think, yep, if you've come over to this country, you should assimilate into the way we do things here. Whereas you ask politicians, these people in the mainstream parties, centre-left, centre-right, they are much more liberal on those questions. So they're much more likely to say, you know what, it's fine if some people have their own custom, their own cultures, and that's okay. Or you take a question, a classic question about whether we should be tougher on criminals. there should be longer sentences, that kind of thing. Again, the public, by and large, or about two thirds will say, yeah, we do need to be tougher on crime.

8:40Politicians, it's almost the other way around. The majority will often say, you know what, sentencing has been too harsh, we need to think of other ways of addressing these issues. So on those social cultural issues, the person in the pub, the person down the street, is looking at the political class and thinking, you folks are actually just not thinking about this in the same way as me. You don't see a problem here, maybe. So that's where there's this big disconnect. And it's analyzing loads of survey data from loads of countries that Laurence Gunther has done to show that this is how things are.

9:11David McWilliams: So explain to me, so the what is, before we talk about the why, so the what is, and you have kindly, and I do this every time John publishes a piece in the FT, I always text him and I say, John, give us the Irish data. Because you look at UK, Denmark, Portugal, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden in the article. And given a nudge from me, you've actually given me the Irish data as well, which I really appreciate and so too to our listeners. So give me the case, let's say in the UK and let's say Netherlands and take Portugal, those three countries, and then we'll take Ireland and see what the difference is.

9:49David McWilliams: So in the UK, what is the gap between the public and politicians and what does it look like and how big is it? And does that explain Farage? Right. So in the UK, if we take the question about, I'll read out the actual question wording, which is people are given the statement, immigrants should be required to adapt to the customs of this country. And you can agree, disagree, strongly or weakly. And what you see from the public is about 87 % of people. So sort of about six in seven people say, yeah, people who come to this country should adapt to the customs of the country, of the UK. And they strongly agree?

10:29Well, it's about 50 % who strongly agree, about 35 % who agree more weakly. Okay, so in total? Yeah, in total. Whereas among politicians, fewer than half of politicians say that immigrants should be required to adapt. So you can think of this as it's almost like politicians are, the majority of politicians are endorsing this very multicultural approach, this idea that we should be a culture not only of multiple ethnicities, but of distinct cultures. Whereas the public are generally saying multiple ethnicities, that's fine, people can come from all over the place, but everyone should be moving in the direction of the existing culture in the country.

11:10So whether that's language, values, religion, that kind of thing. There's that. The politicians are saying, we'll take all sorts, and people can very much protect their own ways of life. The public say people should adapt.

11:24David McWilliams: Okay, so that's the case in the UK. So basically what they're basically saying is that we're not that fussed about who comes in as long as within a short amount of time they become quote-unquote British. Exactly that. For whatever description of what British culture is. Yeah. But they're not basically walking around visually, intellectually, socially as a distinct group. Exactly that. And that's consistent with other surveys where people are asked about their views of different types of immigrants, for example. And a large majority of people in most countries, certainly in the UK, are very welcoming of people who are coming over to work, coming over to study, that kind of thing.

12:06but people who are coming over claiming asylum, people who don't improve their language skills, people who are thought to be coming over to not work, to claim benefits, that's where people have that unease. So it's this acceptance of immigration in general but an unease with the idea of these distinct groups who are not integrating and that's the view that is broadly held by the public whereas the politicians seem to take a more liberal stance.

12:36David McWilliams: And in the case of, let's say, a couple of like Germany before we get to Ireland? Yeah, so Germany is similar. About three quarters of the public say that, yeah, they would expect immigrants to the country to make efforts to adapt to German culture and life, whereas it's only about a third of politicians who take that view. And again, Portugal, because different countries, southern European. Portugal is another one similar to the UK. You get a very wide divide there with the politicians taking very liberal views on immigration, the public being much more adamant that people should adapt to a Portuguese way of life.

13:06So we see similar patterns in the majority of countries.

13:10David McWilliams: So let's now have a look at, you've done up the Irish ones for me, they're not published, but let's have a look. What are the Irish data saying? So similar broad picture, but a narrower gap. So here it's about two in three of the public argue that immigrants should adapt to Irish culture and life. And it's just over half of politicians who take the same view. So 70 % of the public, 56 % of politicians. So not as wide a gap as in countries like the UK, Germany, Portugal, but still a gap in the same direction. So what we're saying is that the political class is out of step on cultural issues with the average person.

13:47David McWilliams: And therefore, this could explain the emergence of, into that gap, come people who are much more reflective of the average person's idea. And in the case of the UK, that could be Farage. In the United States, that could be Trump. Before we go into that, the country that stands out here is Denmark. What's going on in Denmark? So Denmark's a really interesting one, where this is data from around 2015, 16. And what we see is even back then, the public and the politicians were almost completely aligned on questions around immigration and integration and that kind of thing. And that's particularly interesting because Denmark is one of the few countries in the West where we've not seen this sustained upward march of the populist right in vote share.

14:36So there was a period around 2015, around the time of the European Mediterranean migrant crisis, when Denmark's own populist right wing party was making significant headway. But then ahead of the 2019 election, the Social Democrats, the center left in Denmark, came out with a very tough line on immigration, both in terms of the number of asylum seekers they pledged to take in future and on efforts to make sure that people arriving in the country integrated into Danish culture. So we saw this happen in those shifts ahead of the 2019 election. but what this is telling us that that came from a an authentic place that this was not a series of politicians who felt like they had to do something despite what they believed it's telling us that the the political mainstream in Denmark actually were aligned with the public at the time and I think that matters because we often see other parties towards the center now talking a tough game on immigration.

15:41But that is often perceived as being disingenuous. It's perceived as just being people trying to talk their way out of the problem instead of acting. Whereas I think in the case of Denmark, there was a sense that the political class were with the public, cared deeply about this and wanted to solve it.

15:57David McWilliams: And was the Danish the Social Democrats? Because the Danish Social Democrats would have been historically very liberal. They would have been left both in terms of economics, but also left in terms of culture. Do you think that they kind of made, they concluded intellectually and economically that the Danish welfare state, very generous, has always been, cannot be consistent with very high levels of immigration? Do we know why they made these decisions? I think that there are various ways that this has been looked at and people have said subtly different things over the years. But I think two things that come out, One is that there was just this real sense that integration was not working as intended.

16:42You were getting these sort of pockets with very high unemployment rates and that Cher speaking the Danish language was not progressing at the rates people would have hoped for. But to your point about the welfare state, I think it's not necessarily that there was a feeling that that was incompatible with immigration. It was more a sense that if parties of the centre-left, if parties that believed in the welfare state and had those more socialist tendencies, if they didn't take these concerns seriously, the party that was taking them seriously on the populist right would have sought to dismantle some of those socialist, more centre-left, more pro-worker tendencies.

17:20David McWilliams: Okay, so let's stand back and think about the UK. In the last few days, the United Kingdom has introduced an ID card, which for many people observing the UK would have been, that was an anathema to the UK because the UK would all say, we don't need ID cards, that'll be big brother, they'll know what's doing. This is a big shift in the UK. And do you think this is the Labour Party trying to get on the right side of the culture wars because they're being completely devoured on that side by Farage? I think it very clearly is. And you can see in the language that Labour is using to release this, they're very much framing it as being about illegal immigration and about attempting to address the problem of people coming into the country, slipping through the system, and then working in the shadow economy.

18:08Now, I think there are questions to be asked about whether it will solve that. I mean, people who apply for jobs in the UK at the moment are generally presuming everyone is doing things on the up and up, people's identity is checked. There are many ways that well-intentioned employers and employees can already do this. So I think there is a question of will this solve problems or is it maybe just being framed rhetorically as a solution to those problems? And I think whatever the answer is, that distinction is really, really important here because the evidence is fairly consistent that politicians who talk a tough game on these cultural issues without actually solving them, not only are they not helping themselves, but they often end up helping the populace, right?

18:55Because what they are effectively doing there is saying, yes, you are right to be concerned about crime, or you're right to be concerned about immigration, but we're not going to solve them. And therefore, you know, dot, dot, dot, implication, you should actually vote for the people who will, who are on the radical right. So I think the key is that politicians and parties that are trying to close off this gap, as it were, close off this opening to the populist right, need to actually be doing things. And that is obviously far easier said than done, especially in the case of the UK at the moment where we've got the small boats issue, which several governments have now been trying very hard to solve without getting there yet.

19:36But I think it just underscores that it is action here that will close the gap, not just saying nasty things about immigrants and illegal immigration.

19:46David McWilliams: So if we can broaden it up, because Ireland, as you know, John, you're a regular visitor, we're in a very strange, slightly limbo position, because all the survey data suggests, as the data here, that the people are more conservative, more nationalist, socialist more worried, let's say, about immigration and sentencing, it seems, the harshness or not of sentencing than the political class is. We have yet to have a messiah from the right wing emerge, as you have had, but we don't have a Le Pen figure. We don't have a Wilders figure. We don't have an AFD movement. We don't have Maloney figure. We don't have a Trump figure as of yet.

20:34David McWilliams: But what you're saying is the data is suggesting that, broadly speaking, the gap between the Irish political class and the Irish punters is not quite the same as Europe, but moving in that direction. So it means that the fuel for this movement is there. Now, for many, many years, there was a party called Fianna Fáil, which is in power in Ireland, and Fine Gael, right? The two main parties. And their basic idea was we kind of know where the people are, and we will more or less follow where the people are. So as a result of that, we have had for nearly 100 odd years, very much stable politics, right?

21:18David McWilliams: Why do you think parties like this, I'm just, I'm asking your conjecture in Ireland, and then I want to ask your experience in England. And I'm taking the Labour Party to be, again, an example, and the Conservatives, why do you think those parties that used to kind of be on the pulse of the nation are not anymore? Yeah, it's a great question. And I mean, one of the theories here is that this is partly to do with the education mismatch between politicians and the general public. So I think people are used to this idea that, well, most people go to university now, so surely the public can't look that different to politicians in that regard.

21:55but I think there are two things there. First of all, in most countries, it's not most, it's sort of maybe 40 % or so, but also that is 40 % of 18, 19-year-olds today. So in the population as a whole, the political class is still far more well-educated than the public. And so, you know, I'm not someone who uses terms like sort of indoctrination and this idea that the universities are just sort of engines of woke, as it were. But there is clearly some sense in which there is a way of thinking about the world and certainly about these cultural issues, I think, which becomes completely natural for most people who've gone through the university system and is much less natural to those who haven't.

22:40And, you know, again, there are subtle differences here. This is not a case of everyone who's been to uni this, everyone who hasn't that. But I think it's that sort of values, intellectual values system, I think, is a big part of this, that people are just thinking about this in very different ways.

22:57David McWilliams: So you think that, you know, if you go across, I mean, I know in the case of Ireland, we have a very, very huge success rate in university now, but it's changed very rapidly. And if you look in the Doyle, there's very few young TDs. There's a lot of old TDs. Number one, those old TDs are probably better educated than their peers. And their views are kind of formed in sociological departments or sociology departments of various universities. And so that might explain it because it does seem like a basic error on the part of the politicians, unless you think they're trying to lead the countries down a certain way and they have a view that multiculturalism and etc.

23:43David McWilliams: are objectives of policy. But I'm not sure that's the case. Yeah, the leading question is really interesting because I think someone could read all of this research and look at all this data we've been talking about and could still, I think, quite legitimately conclude, well, there are two ways to close this gap. The politicians could move towards the public or the politicians could make the case that the public should move towards that. And I think certainly a fair number of people on the left in the UK have been making that argument that the problem with someone like Keir Starmer is not that he's not been sufficiently believably right-wing on immigration, as it were.

24:21The problem is that he's not made the multicultural, progressive, modern argument that voters should actually be okay with the levels and types of immigration the UK has been having. And as I say, I think the theory there is perfectly sound, but what I would question from the closer look I've been taking at the data is that, again, there's an assumption there that it's essentially ignoring the fact that there are legitimately some problems with integration in a country like the UK. So the share of people in the UK who don't speak English to a decent standard rose between 2011 and 2021. And that, by pretty much any reasonable person standard, is not the direction that we should be going in.

25:10And there are other more precise examples we can point to. And then there's the simple fact that large numbers of people turning up on the coast without having previously had permission to arrive. That is fundamentally disorganized and chaotic, and people don't like that, regardless of who those people are, where they've come from, etc. So I think this is the issue. It's not here, there is not a suggestion that the public are sort of rabidly right-wing on immigration. It's more that there are concerns about exactly how this is playing out. and therefore the most obvious way to close that gap is for the politicians to speak to and address those concerns rather than the politicians somehow just, oh, they've just not come out with exactly the right way of framing this yet, which will suddenly bring the public along with it.

25:59David McWilliams: Yeah, no, I mean, it's interesting. So you might, over the last year or two in Ireland, one of the big issues has been asylum seekers arriving, in, the processing procedure being very, very slow, probably because we didn't have that problem before. So you've got to employ all these new professionals to deal with this. But also then the way in which the state has dealt with at the same time as having a housing crisis, they've decided, OK, well, let's just deposit these asylum seekers in various places around the country, which has completely inflamed public opinion down in those places. and rather than say actually we're listening to you, many people feel the politician's reaction has been we're just going to lecture you on how morally wrong you are and how morally right we are and we're going to shame you into accepting this status quo has changed and as a result of that, that's creating this not only gap but it's also creating this yearning from something new politically and that something new politically is addressing specifically the cultural issues and nothing else.

27:11Yeah, I think there's certainly a sense that that's part of what's happening here. I think it's also worth talking about, again, the role of the state in all of this. And I don't even mean necessarily immigration here, but you talked about the piling up of asylum cases. And that's certainly an issue we've had in the UK as well. The processing times have gone out of hand. The reason that there have been very large numbers of asylum seekers in temporary accommodation in some of these former hotels in the UK, for example. Same here. Same here. Same kind of thing. Exactly. Yeah. That's more or as much, if not more, to do with backlogs in the administration side as with the actual numbers of people arriving.

27:49And we could extend this to crime as well, where the UK has a mad backlog of court cases and cuts to policing have also contributed to why There's been a big rise in theft in the UK because people feel that there's going to be no consequences. And so it's not just about the gap in values. It's the fact that the way the state has been handling these issues has made them rise in salience. It's made them more clearly signs of things going wrong in the voters' eyes. And that then, of course, is also why in the UK a year ago, just over a year ago now, despite most of the things we've been talking about being true at that point, Labour were still the ones who won the election because at that point, they were still seen as a set of people who could come in and fix things.

28:40But a year and a bit on, they've come in, they're perceived as not having fixed things at all. Or if anything, some things haven't gone slightly backwards. and that's why you now have the situation where a party as radical as Reform UK can be polling on around 30%. So it's the confluence of all these things. It's the values gap, which to your point, that's the fuel or the dry tinder. And then that is the match for that is either a sudden rise in asylum cases or in the case of the UK, it's all of that on top of repeated failures by governments to really get a grip of the situation.

29:16David McWilliams: Yeah, I mean, just one other issue, because I do want to ask you at the end about reform and the possibility of a reformed government next time out. Another issue, and you've written about it a couple of weeks ago, was this idea of the contrast between actual violent crime and what I would describe as in-your-face crime. So you did the data in the UK and I was looking at the data in Ireland. So violent crime, the chances of being murdered in Ireland have collapsed dramatically. In fact, Ireland has a lower murder rate now than it had in the late, in the early noughties, 2008, 2009. But the chances of getting your phone robbed or the chances of getting your bike robbed or the chances of getting your shop robbed if you're a shopkeeper have gone through the roof.

30:05David McWilliams: So what we've done is we've had a situation in Ireland, I think it's the same in the UK, so where violent, violent crimes have fallen. But kind of in-your-face, petty crimes have risen. But the problem is because when it comes to murder, murders tend typically to be disguised. They tend typically to affect a very small part of the population. If the murder rate drops, not that many people feel it because by definition, murders are secret. Whereas if petty crime rises, everyone feels it because it's in your face. and as a result of that the perception is that crime is rising it's out of hand it's part of this immigrant problem and consequently the whole thing's thrown together yeah that's exactly right so that that shows up really clearly in the data like the a lot of people who are subject to violent crime as well it's it's part of a pattern that there it's not necessarily the first time that that's happened to someone whereas of course with phone snatching shoplifting that kind of thing it's much more random and of course in the case of shoplifting you don't just have to be the victim of a shoplifting you see the impacts of it all the time right in terms of different products an ever expanding range of products being put behind lock and key that kind of thing more security staff in shops that kind of thing so so yeah i think there's that growing sense of of disorder and yeah to the tie up with immigration between that disorder and immigration i think something interesting in london in particular i need to spend more time in Dublin to know if there's a supply there as well.

31:39But the role of e-bikes in this stuff. So you've suddenly got people whizzing around all over the place, which gives people enough sense already of a sense of things not being right, things being a bit messy. But those are often actually asylum seekers who've come over and have not been allowed to work, as is the case in the UK, and are therefore sort of operating in a shadowy economy. So you have this confluence of things, again, with the state having a hand in exactly what's playing out which means that people are seeing a lot more people who are visibly people who've come in from a different country and are then often involved in this low-level disorder and even if there's actually no correlation between someone's immigrant status and and whether they're doing things like that it's just much more in your face as you were saying and so suddenly people have this sense that something's not right something needs to be addressed and then they look at the political, the mainstream political class at the moment, and they feel like they're, those people just don't think about this in the same way.

32:38David McWilliams: Yeah. And the final aspect of that in terms of sharing and amplifying is, of course, the smartphone. In the old days, if you were robbing a shop, chances of you being caught on camera were zero. Now, for example, there's sort of bravado of fellas actually videoing themselves doing the crime or other people doing, then that's shared online, then it's up on socials. And then suddenly half a million people see an act of what we used to call petty crime. But the problem with petty crime, it's not petty if it's you. It's petty if it's somebody else. There's nothing petty about being robbed because that changes.

33:14David McWilliams: So let's get to the end of this, John, because I've always found, and you know, like I'm a big fan of your work, I've always found your ability to identify certain issues that others are talking about, others are feeling, and actually writing about this, where does this take us politically? Where does all this take us? The crime, the immigration, the amplification, the fact the state doesn't look as if it's in control, the general sense of disorder, like in a society like Ireland, which is actually very orderly. If you look at the hard data, there's a perception of disorder. And the same from the UK.

33:50Yeah, I mean, we can each look to our West, I guess, a bit of a further look from where I am than you. But yeah, there's a solid argument to be made that this dynamic is part of what led to Trump being elected. So obviously, no election is one on a single issue. Inflation was the most important issue in the last US election. But immigration ranked very high as well. And the numbers of people crossing the southern border in the US were extraordinarily high in 2023-24. So there's a real sense that that played into it. And then, you know, the whole media environment that we're in as well, obviously, elevates those stories.

34:27So I think there's a pretty solid argument here that if the mainstream, sensible politicians with often fairly mainstream and sensible policies, if they aren't taking seriously the public's discontent on these sort of disorder issues, and I think disorder is a nice way of encapsulating it, because that captures both the sort of asylum cases and the crime, then it does just open this opportunity for more authoritarian people on the right to come in. Now, the caveat, again, is that this will always play out differently in different countries. So proportional representation systems, this will play out differently to first-past-the-post systems, as one example.

35:08It might be the case that you have exactly the same dynamics in the UK and Germany, but you end up with reform winning in the UK because it's first-past-the-post, but the AFD still sort of locked out of a coalition in Germany. So it's not the case that everyone is now destined to have radical right heads of state in the next decade. But the general trend of rising public appetite for someone who will just take these issues seriously and try to do something about them, I think is something that we're going to see continuing until and unless the centre-left and the centre-right are seen to really be taking action on.

35:45David McWilliams: John Byrne Murdoch as always a pleasure to talk to you fascinating stuff John and I will come back and have a discussion about this afterwards but brilliant stuff John thank you so much my pleasure

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38:03Fascinating piece of research, and it really gets you thinking, actually.

38:06David McWilliams: Yes, that the radical are centrist and the centrists are radicals. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It reminds me of when he was talking there, it reminds me of that great De Valera quote. I don't know if it's a great quote, but it's a De Valera quote. It's from Dev, it's got to be great, man. When he said, if I want to know what the Irish people think, I look into my own heart. And that actually sums it up, really. But there's a beauty in that quote. There's a beauty, there's a pomposity and an innocence at the same time. But is that kind of, that kind of sums up what many of the radical centrists, as they are now to be known, are they kind of thinking that, look, I know best?

38:49David McWilliams: Absolutely. So I think what John has elucidated there is something that is escaping many, many analysts, journalists, commentators, political freakers, all that sort of stuff. and I think it's because the language is wrong. So the language that we have used is, and again, I come back to, as I said, the very top, that the center position is the broad, median aggregate of where most people are. But if you find on these cultural issues that the political class is far away from the broad, average dude, What it means is the political parties are radical. And if those political parties are absolutely centrist in their economics, their tax, their spend, but are very, very radical on their social agenda, then they are the radicals.

39:53David McWilliams: whereas the far right that we're calling far right that seem to be much much closer to the average person on issues of integration of immigration of crime not only are they not radical they're actually in the center yeah now that then is the eureka moment that explains why so many people in the center are voting for reform in the uk president trump in the united states meloni le pen etc it's because those politicians that the mainstream are calling radical the actual broad sway of the population agree with yeah and the people who agree with the radical position are only the extreme educated sociologically educated and people who have an agenda that they want to spread see i actually thought that was a really interesting point when he when he spoke about the gap in education that most of all of politicians the uk i know he's talking a lot about the uk but it goes same for here and france and germany and denmark and america and America that the politicians are well-educated.

41:14And there is this element as well that, you know, in trying to, I know you always go on about the woke mind virus.

41:22David McWilliams: I don't always go on about the woke mind virus. I have just, I have just, I just say it to piss you off because John rarely, rarely gets angry. He's a very, very placid fella. He's even more placid than I've brought him some jellies back from New York. You should see the head in him. Anyway. They're good jellies. They are. But this is what gets them, because I just say you're suffering from the woke mind virus. The Trump derangement syndrome. But this idea, I'm not using the word woke, but the idea of kind of being liberal and trying to... Or progressive or whatever you want to use. Yeah, yeah.

42:01But the politicians, certainly in this country, trying to be all things to all men. and as JFK says, you know, you can't please all the people all the time. But by doing that, they end up doing nothing. And they don't take those, you know, hard decisions that they talk about.

42:20David McWilliams: Well, it's interesting. It's not that they're, they think they're pleasing everybody. Yes, sorry, that's more correct. They're actually leaving the bloke and the bloquette, man and woman in the pub behind. and they're increasingly alienating themselves from the people, the normal people, and they are allowing themselves being driven by what is quite a rather radical idea on the issue of immigration and law and order, as we spoke about. So I think what we have, John, is a mangling of the language. And in a way it's quite unusual because normally language leads. It doesn't actually lag. Language and slang tend to lead because language is so unbelievably malleable and changeable and all that.

43:08David McWilliams: Of course, I think right now what we have is the language is behind. The idea, as you say, that certainly in our generation, the political class is more traditionally educated than the average voter makes sense because in the traditional education, if you go through third level, you're much more likely to be influenced by liberal ideas, much more likely to be influenced by ideas that would be regarded as democratic, maybe inoffensive is another word, that you don't want to offend people, because you think that offending people is an actual primitive urge, and a much more sophisticated urge is not to offend people but what you end up with is policies that the average person doesn't not only agree with but doesn't even recognize yeah and this i think explains a lot of what's happening in society where does the correction come there's always a correction at some stage yeah where does that come trump is the correction trump is the evidence it's not a great correction no but it's trump or whatever this is but it's not a great correction but if you regarded donald trump as evidence something is badly wrong within the consensus political establishment something is badly wrong within the elite what you have and i've i keep coming back to it is the fascinating thing is it's who's right and who's wrong here and i don't mean right and wrong morally but who's on the right wave and who's in the wrong wave.

44:47David McWilliams: All the so-called radical right have been voted in democratically by normal people. So Farage are at least in the polls. Trump, Le Pen, all the votes these guys are getting, the AFD, Wilders, Meloni, Orban. You can go as far as Vucic and Serbia, you can go wherever you'd like. The new president of Poland, whose name escapes me. They've all been voted in by normal people going about their normal business, voting in a normal, functioning, transparent democracy. And at every stage, what the normal people are saying is we reject the radicalism of the mainstream parties. And the mainstream parties react to that by pointing the finger at the people who voted for the right wing people saying you are radical you are wrong you are somewhere uncivilized you're unsophisticated and frankly you are the past yeah but in fact they're the future apart from denmark apart from denmark so what did the danes do and this will end here this is the fascinating thing so the danish social democrats decided you know what we're going to position ourselves with the people yeah not with the university professors They sold the thunder of the right.

46:11David McWilliams: Yeah, because they saw, hold on a second, if we don't do this, if we stay with the university professors, okay, says the university professor, if we stay with the university professor and the sociology department and the minorities, et cetera, we're going to lose. Yeah. And also we're turning our back on our real constituency, which are lower income, working class Danes. So what do they want? And what the lower-income working-class Danes want is they want law and order on the streets. They want the streets to be safe for themselves and their kids. They want their kids to be able to afford houses and not have to compete with new immigrants coming in.

46:56They want the new immigrants to come in to work, but not to swanye around when a Danish cartoonist burns a picture.

47:06David McWilliams: Allah, they insisted that Danish cartoonist is Danish and he can live in Denmark because Denmark is a free society and it's not an Islamic society or whatever it happens to be. And the Social Democrats said, we're with them. We're with the average canut. But they're just representing the people as politicians should be. That's their role. And by and large, most people are decent, are democratic, are in the middle. they don't mind immigrants at all in fact they like their immigrants they're right to change but they want people to assimilate properly they don't want people to say well I'm in this country now but I'm going to take my culture with me and be rejectionist of the local culture so all these things are going on but I think we can conclude which is fascinating and I think it opens up a whole new area of discussion that what was radical or what is perceived as radical is actually mainstream.

48:07David McWilliams: And what is politically marketing itself as mainstream is actually radical. And that, I think, is a... A radical thought. It's a radical thought. So take it with you and we'll see you Tuesday. But actually, John, before we go on Tuesday, we have a fascinating discussion with Edge of U2, who is going to be talking to us about Endeavour. It's a good one. Endeavour, which is a movement or an organisation that he's chair of, which is all about creating networks, backups advice mentoring for entrepreneurs it's a fascinating discussion the crux of the discussion is how you build world-class companies in ireland and how you keep them in ireland which is precisely what we've been talking about for months and months on the podcast so that's all and there's a few good stories in there too there's great yarns that's the podcast and edge talking about Endeavour and the new economy.

49:03David McWilliams: That's all next week. Talk to you later.

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50:07Your phone, utilities, rent, and insurance. I wish dating kind of worked like that. Connect your bank account, add those on-time payments to your Experian credit file, and your FICO score updates right away. You could instantly raise your FICO score by an average of 14 points with Experian Boost. Download the Experian app for free today. Results will vary. Users who received a boost improved their FICO score 8 from Experian by an average of 14 points. See App Store or Experian.com for details. Results will vary. Not all payments are boost eligible. Users who received a boost improved their FICO score 8 from Experian by an average of 14 points.

50:43Some may not see improved scores or approval odds. Not all lenders use Experian credit files. And not all lenders use scores impacted by Experian boost. See Experian.com for details.