7 prime ministers in 10 years

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0:39Tom McTague, welcome to The Exchange. It's great to have you here, to be blessed by the presence of our editor-in-chief. We're talking on the 22nd of June. We'd had this in the calendar for a while. Plan to discuss the 10-year Brexit anniversary, which falls tomorrow, 23rd. But in keeping with the rollercoaster that is British politics, our plans have been slightly upended by yet another resignation. A few hours ago, Keir Starmer announced he would be standing down. He said, I know the question being asked now is not who was best placed to change the Labour Party to take us into power and to begin the vital work of improving lives for millions of people.

1:13Those questions have been answered. The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the general election. I've heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question and I accept that answer with good grace. That means we're headed for our seventh prime minister in 10 years. Events, well, I guess maybe, I'm going to say they're clearly linked. I think the nature of our conversation over the next hour or so, we can test the thesis to the extent to which Brexit has a hand to play in that increasingly, you know, lack of stability in British politics. But just to kick us off, Tom, you woke up this morning, Starmer's resigning.

1:45What was your first thought? I thought, that four and a half thousand word piece I wrote on Brexit. Is anyone going to read it now. All that work I've done. Go and see Monet's grandson. Yeah. Yeah. That was my, that was my first selfish thought. And do you know, do I need to change it? Do I need to rip up the magazine? And actually, you know, luckily we sort of prepared for this eventuality. So much of the, you know, the coverage of the magazine, the structure of what we'd planned remained in place. And that in itself is quite sort of revealing of this period of time that we've gone through, right?

2:26You know, that we were ready for the prime minister to go on Monday morning. You know, we knew that he was thinking about it over the weekend, you know, Alva, our political editor reported about this. And yet, so we were sort of ready to go. And we'd been here before, like all of us in the newsroom, you know, all of us, You and I have covered prime ministers leaving. You know, it's so reminiscent now of these kind of moments, this sort of rhythm of our national life now where a prime minister comes out into Downing Street and speaks at the lectern and Steve Bray blasts horrible music in the background and tries to, you know, turn it into a joke and all of that.

3:12We've seen it with David Cameron and with Boris and with Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak and now with Keir Starmer. You know, it's this repetitive story. And I think that is revealing of something. You know, 10 years, seven prime ministers. That is an extraordinary period of time in British politics. Yeah, I should say to listeners as well, you'll be able to read the essay Tom just mentioned on our website. When you are listening to this, it will be live there and it's in the magazine, obviously, this week. that resignation it just had this I think British politics in microcosm on the one hand and then also I think representative of this really strange and I will almost say unreality this strange nature to our national life and I'll explain what I mean but just as microcosm I felt like it was on the one hand the failure of the British state right in that Bray is there spraying his music across a moment of national significance.

4:17And whilst I will admit I did chuckle when he used to do the Benny Hill music whenever Boris Johnson was giving a speech, when the Prime Minister resigns, and perhaps maybe in times gone by, it really was totemic because it might happen every 5, 10, 15 years, maybe. Who knows how long the period of time is. It's happening now with such frequency that actually the kind of gravitas that's associated with it is in decline. Why isn't the police stopping Bray doing that? And then that running in tandem alongside Starmer giving that speech. And Tom, I've been a long time critic of Keir Starmer. But during that speech was one of the few times I've really felt for him.

4:53And it was as he started to crack up at the end of his speech. And there were glimpses of the man that I think a lot of us suspected was under there that you identified in that profile you did of him when you started as editor. He had this authentic quality. And I was looking at that as a commentator, political journalist, thinking that was it. Only now, as you say goodbye, have you touched on the first time emotional resonance in me, the authentic, the credible, the man underneath the suit and the put upon voice and the loyally nature. And in this world of our new politics, where if you don't have a theory of the attention economy, I don't think you're going to get very far.

5:39That would have been the thing that he could have built a political legacy on or a successful political career on. And I just thought it was such a shame to see it happening then, because where was that authenticity in the two years he spent as prime minister beforehand? Yeah, there was a pathos to that, which was sort of unavoidable, that sense of sadness. and in his voice, in his eyes, in his demeanor. In fact, if you're looking at the cover there, there is a kind of pathos to just the way he stands and everyone can see it. And in fact, comparing that position there, Starmer's position, which looks very much like Starmer, obviously it's a kind of pastiche, compared to the Burnham next to him.

6:23There's a real difference. And I think with Starmer, you know what he was never able to do is to relax into the job in a sense in that in the in the communicative way just to sort of talk normally and i think that's something talk about the attention economy i think that's something when i look back over this sort of 10 year brexit period as michael goff put it on the cover of the spectator last week you know the Brexit decade, the Brexit age. That's perhaps how we need to think about it, this 10 years. We haven't had a prime minister in a sense who feels modern, who feels that they understand this hyper-aggressive social media age in which we live.

7:12We had the resignation 10 years ago of David Cameron. And the same kind of crack of the voice, the emotion, the sense of a you know, of a family man who was cracking up when he was talking about his family. And, you know, had failed, could understand that he had failed in the job. And he was then giving way to this period of chaos, this period of chaos that we've had now. And we've cycled through these leaders, none of whom seem to have been capable of kind of gripping the enormity of the challenge in this post-Brexit world, either to have taken us out or to have made it Brexit work in the years afterwards, in a way that they were able to maintain their dignity, maintain a sense of purpose throughout their premiership and to be able to communicate it.

8:13And you had figures like Theresa May. But also, I think Boris Johnson feels quite an old-fashioned figure now in how he communicates and kia starmer ultimately you know going on to tiktok and and watching the videos of people that are employed in number 10 trying to make him cool and he's never going to be cool that was not his appeal but he can sit and talk in a normal way about normal things and he has a sense of duty. That's what he feels. And I think he never really communicated that. And I think the question that I guess that you and I are talking about is, is that because of Brexit? Is this because of this chaos that we're in?

9:00Is that ultimately because of Brexit? Or is it ultimately because of the attention economy, social media, everything else? What is it that's causing this chaos? And I do think essentially, while Brexit cannot be the answer, it is absolutely a fundamental contributing factor, perhaps the contributing factor to the chaos. I don't think it's possible to look at 10 year period after a momentous constitutional change, revolution in effect, and say seven prime ministers and not say the single starting point is that moment that Cameron resigned after the referendum. Yeah, I think about leadership and, you know, I have been thinking about it because we are about to see a change happening at the top of the country.

9:52Keep component parts of what that job entails. And I think on the one hand, to really prove he's slightly oversimplistic, one part of it is having a political economy, right? An idea about on whose behalf are you going to govern when that red box comes in front of you and you're presented with option A and option B, the following people will lose out when you choose A, the following people will choose out when you lose B. You must choose who loses out. Having that ideology that underpins how you think about those problems is central. But probably, maybe not more so, but if not as important, your job as the leader is to communicate it at the end of the day politics is about storytelling and it is about emotion and if you can't win an argument on that most fundamental level that is i think the role of that that figurehead now if we accept that framing there have been two colossal ruptures to both of those things in the last 10 years as you find the brexit vote won and its impact for the british constitution and our two-party system and then the other is the social media age, which has completely upended our information ecosystem.

10:57And I think there are people who have been able to adapt to it. It's interesting you're talking about Johnson. I think about him as a product of British television. Have I got news for you and the rest? And the newspaper, print media. Yeah, absolutely. And then you draw a parallel to Trump, right, who again is a man made by American television. The difference though, I think is that Trump has evolved as a communicator in a way that I'm not sure Johnson has. But Mamdani does it, Farage does it, he understands it quite well. And I really do think one of the fundamental tests for Burnham is going to be whether or not he is able to adapt and change his politics to that world.

11:37I think, you know, you look at Manchester and him doing that weekly BBC radio phone-in show, and I think that is a fantastic example of how a regional politician can and should communicate to their constituency. But like you've said, the online world is frothy. There are things that are real there. There are things that aren't. There's a lot of misinformation, brutal, biting satire, and how most likely Andy Burnham adapts to that, I think is really significant part in the making or breaking of him as a prime minister. Yeah, I mean, Boris Johnson, I always thought it was interesting to note that he wasn't very good on social media.

12:16So for a prime minister that had, you know, many of the kind of attributes of a Donald Trump, you know, a populist leader who, you know, was controversial, divisive, all of those things, you know, larger than life. He was actually terrible on social media. He never really had a big Twitter account that was really punching in the way that Donald Trump's did in the run up to 2016. He's never been big on TikTok or Instagram or any of these things. He doesn't really work in that environment. And so he does now feel increasingly old-fashioned, you know, a sort of a politician from a bygone era. And yet I don't think we've had that sort of really modern prime ministerial candidate or prime minister in this post-Brexit world.

13:07We're just, it's kind of, it's almost, it's that cliche of like we're sort of in between eras. And I think a lot of the things that you're talking about, about sort of that inability to communicate in the modern world, the ability to communicate a program, a story, a narrative, or an analysis of what has gone wrong, is obviously was Andy Burt, sorry, Keir Starmer's, one of his major flaws. And I talked about that, but I think it has been a problem going all the way back to 2016 and before into 2008, even perhaps this sense of what is it that we are trying to achieve as a country? You know, in a post-Brexit world and a post-economic crash world, how are we supposed to become prosperous or maintain our prosperity, what we've got left of it?

14:07How are we supposed to lift those areas of the country out of what is, in effect, poverty compared to, you know, the average European level of wealth? We often don't remark on it, but just this sort of compare GDP per capita in Birmingham or Leeds or Newcastle or Glasgow with GDP per capita in Amsterdam or Hamburg or Munich or Milan. Lyon. Lyon. Any of these, Madrid, Barcelona, any of these places, we're just poorer, right? So we've got into a position where we're just poorer. And I think there is a reasonable body of evidence that would say that post-Brexit, we are now poorer than we would have been.

15:04Now, I don't think that that is necessarily a reason for not voting against Brexit. That's perfectly reasonable for people to make other priorities. But I think it's something to look at head on. It's a contributing factor to the fiscal squeeze that we're in today. So a lack of money, which makes the other thing that you talked about even more acute, which is the sense of if you are a political leader making a choice between different people, if your economy is not growing, it makes all of those choices much, much harder. You have to take something away from somebody. And David Cameron talked about this in his autobiography about his time as prime minister.

15:48There is a premiership in which the economy is not growing, a premiership in which it is growing. And the difference is absolutely remarkable because when an economy is growing and you can essentially make those choices without somebody losing out because the pie is growing, You're just taking prospective gains away from them rather than actual money. And that is a different order. And you look at what Keir Starmer has had to do so far and why he's unpopular. It's some of those moments where he's just taken something from somebody like Winter Fuel or tried to with welfare or has taken the money away from the MOD, what they were expecting anyway.

16:28And so I think you have to go back to a sense of fiscal crisis, economic failure, and beyond that, a sense of how are we going to get out of this? How are we supposed to get wealthy again? And I don't think almost any post-Brexit leader has had a credible and persuasive argument about how we're supposed to do this. Yeah, and almost is in denial or not prepared publicly to acknowledge what you have just acknowledged. We were talking earlier today before we came down and recorded this about Starmer as a politician, specifically a political figure and his connection to Brexit, right? shadow Brexit secretary in the Corbyn government, bounces the leader of the opposition's office into a second referendum with remain on the ballot position in the build-up 2018, I think, party conference it was.

17:24It might be out by a year or two, but it was around then. You know, second referendum campaign kicks off. It essentially is the reason for the collapse of the Corbyn party in that 2019 election versus Boris Johnson's get Brexit done. He assumes the leadership of the party. He then becomes prime minister and really, I think, doesn't seek to make, certainly not reopen those arguments, right? As you identified, the position of the Labour Party was, we'll make Brexit work. And as his future has looked more at risk, he started to talk more about that reset with the European Union because of the political reality that exists within the Labour Party, the Parliamentary Labour Party, which is that, broadly speaking, most of the MPs I speak to, people with varying levels of seniority, they all think it was a mistake, and that there is this really elephant in the room when it comes to talking about economic performance, potential growth, that there is this thing that they think was to the detriment of our country, but they can't talk about it, they can't reopen the argument, because electorally it's just a nightmare, and it is toxic.

18:30And to link it back to when we first started talking about this, It's that kind of unreality, the nature to the political discourse, which is there is this, I think, really quite big problem. And indeed, one that Keir Starmer appears to have identified. But as a government, they really didn't want to start talking about it. They wanted to start on that foot making those Brexit arguments. And particularly when you apply it to recent elections, by-elections in Gorton and Denton, Caffilli, Makerfield. I think you can make the argument that we have these two kind of competing blocks. and they appear to be coalescing around on terms of the progressive side.

19:05It might be Plaid Cymru in Kefili. It might be the Greens in Gorton and Denson. It might be the Labour Party in Makerfield. But essentially that progressive remainery block, it appears to be the kind of the central fault line of our politics now. I don't know how you think about Brexit. Do you think about Brexit in those terms? Yeah, I think it's a really important point because there are so many different strands that you've just sort of picked up on. One is the sense of Keir Starmer having these sort of wavering positions. And for, you know, defensible reasons, he, in the run up to the 2019 election, as you say, he eventually maneuvered the Labour Party into a position of a second referendum in which there would be remain on the ballot, you know, and that was the position that Tony Blair was pushing.

19:48And it was an attempt, obviously, to stop Brexit. And they lost. They lost to Boris Johnson in 2019. Tony Blair waved the white flag and said, right, we've lost. And so did Keir Starmer. And Keir Starmer said, we accept it. And, you know, and that leads us into this position where, yeah, there is an inherent sort of unreality, as you put it, to a Labour Party, which clearly in its heart and its soul, a majority of the Labour Party takes it for granted that Brexit was a great mistake. And if it could, it would reverse it. And yet it's in power. It has power in a massive majority and it is not doing so.

20:31But that, I think, goes back to this sort of the deeper sort of fundamental point here, the structural point from 2016 is that 2016 shattered the electoral coalitions that had existed up until then. Now, they were under pressure way before 2016. You know, I think we should always think about, and maybe we can talk about this sort of towards the latter half of this podcast, but, you know, the sense to which Brexit is a symptom rather than a cause of a lot of our problems. But Brexit did fundamentally shatter the coalitions on both sides. And for a while, it looked like it shattered them and remade them in bigger blocks that almost were more stable than what had existed up until 2016.

21:19You know, when you had this constant pressure on the right of British politics from Farage and the Eurosceptics to force the Conservative Party into a more Eurosceptic position. And you had a similar weakening on the left, you know, where you had a rise of the Lib Dems and others and the Labour Party's vote share falling year on year. And then suddenly you have Brexit and you have this explosion of energy and they coalesce in two big blocks in 2017 and then 2019 where you get the both major parties performing at much higher levels. So still people will say correctly that Jeremy Corbyn won more votes than Keir Starmer.

22:06There is that sort of fundamental reality that you had the Tory party back up above 40%. I think Jeremy Corbyn got the Labour Party above 40 % in 2017. Obviously, it changed in 2019. But still, it looked for a while that those old fissures on right and left are gone. And we were back into a new world. And actually, Brexit had settled things down. But obviously, it has had an effect, a destabilizing, a fundamentally destabilizing effect where British politics and electoral coalitions is much more fragile than it was. And people who have changed positions are much more willing to then just abandon the party and do what you say.

22:46They can go from the Labour Party to the Greens, to the SNP, to Plaid, whoever it is, to the Lib Dems, whoever it is that will stop the right. And equally on the right, we've now seen this remarkable reality that in Makerfield, the Conservative Party, I think, got 2 % or something, didn't even keep its deposit. And the split on the right was between two parties that did not exist at the time of the 2016 referendum. That in itself is remarkable and does go back to this fundamental point that Brexit was not just a significant fork in the road for Britain in terms of in or out of the EU, but it was a fork in the road pointing us towards this period of time, this decade, which has been structurally chaotic.

23:42I'm interested to hear what you think, assumptions you had at that time that have since been proven to be true or false. Because you're talking about now, I remember in the wake of the vote and several years afterwards, talking about it as if it was a kind of populism pressure release valve. That as we'd seen, we were still seeing then Front National, AFD, other parties in Europe and the rising tide of populism. and it seemed and i think i was naive to think this at the time but it really with a degree of certainty back then it seemed like oh no we won't have this won't be a problem for us now we voted to leave the european union that the you know the electorate has found expression of its dissatisfaction in that way or that sentiment has been expressed in this thing we're going to radically change the constitution of the country and therefore we're not going to see a similar thing and it just seems with hindsight now i look back at that and and it's just complete rubbish Which clearly we haven't got one, we've got two.

24:38And Farage has had multiple parties, all of which have varying degrees of success now really seems to be onto one now. But we shouldn't be then, you know, too certain about anything. That is one of the things that I think, you know, having sort of spent four years writing a book about Brexit. But my overall take is that ideas of inevitability should be junked immediately. We should be immediately sceptical of them. So, you know, I think the strongest argument for Brexit or the strongest argument that the Brexiteers have, like I was, I went and did my duty and appeared on the Spectator podcast last week, making the case for the New Statesman over at our rivals.

25:23And we were talking about Michael Gove's cover story in his magazine that week. And it was the defense of Brexit. And it was interesting that their cover had a butterfly, the Brexit butterfly, which they had used 10 years ago to say Britain had been set free. And that butterfly was battered and bruised and had holes shot through its wings. And, you know, it was a there was a humility in that cover, you know, that they were saying, OK, we it's it's not as if we have like flown off in this glorious future. We accept it at some implicit level that Brexit has been fairly challenging. But his his his defense, I said to him or said on the podcast was unconvincing on the whole.

26:13You know, the small benefits that he was talking about, which, you know, he's perfectly entitled to say we couldn't have done it inside the EU. But the one paragraph that I think he fundamentally believes in and is what will be tested over the next 10 years or the next 10 years of Brexit age is the argument that you can have a quicker feedback loop between anger at a public level and action at a governmental level. We'll see if that's going to play out because ultimately, yes, that whole point, you had those bits of analysis. I remember Cummings saying something along these lines that the salience of immigration had just collapsed after the Brexit vote because people thought finally, like, well, okay, I've got some control over this.

27:04And it turns out we then used that control to open the border, not close it, which I think was probably a surprise to some people. and obviously that is a a part of the story that we are uh going through now is that we are there is a uh you know an anti-immigration sentiment on the populist right expressed in various degrees of you know anger and uh and sort of violent rhetoric um depending on you know on the scale um and it's also the other question of course which is separate to this which is but linked, the asylum story. Now, I guess the go of defense of Brexit is that ultimately the government will then react to this and will then be able to see off the populist, the anti-establishment right.

28:01I mean, I think that is a pretty open question right now, whether that's going to happen. But that is, I think, fundamentally what he believes. And that is what we're going to be testing. It's interesting. Dominic Cummings, I think, wrote over the weekend as well about the sort of the missed opportunities or what Brexit could have enabled the British state to do, but it hasn't done. And when you talk about restore and reform in that way, I'm reminded of Tangil's cover story from several months ago, talking about the age of deportation and just how much national politics has changed. You know, the fact that the dividing line might be the difference between hundreds of thousands of people being deported and possibly millions in the vision of Rupert Lowe and the coarsening of the discourse.

28:48In the wake of the Henry Novak killing, Farage said in one of his videos that he put out, he didn't say white lives matter, but he used it in a sentence. And I thought it was really representative of the way that the idea, If you could imagine a mainstream politician saying that even one or two years ago, I don't think I could. Things have really dramatically changed. Let's pause there for a second, Tom. Stay with us. We are going to take a quick break. But join us after when we will be discussing the Britain that produced Brexit.

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30:24Still here with Tom McTague. Hello, Tom. Tom, take us back to the atmosphere, not the campaign, but the country. What was the Britain of 2015, 2016? What was it feeling? Tell me about the atmosphere and the memory of that place. Well, I think sometimes in British politics, you'd be forgiven for thinking that life was wonderful and British politics was easy in 2015 before Brexit. Or indeed, before the 2008 financial crisis, if you read Tony Blair's essay in which, you know, that was the pivotal moment in which we just took a wrong turn. And if we could just go back to that moment and govern ourselves sensibly, all would be well.

31:10No, I think if you go back to 2015, you have to look at why we'll be in a position where David Cameron was bound into calling or holding a referendum. And there are fundamental reasons for that. There are structural reasons for that. He had called a referendum. He started to think about a referendum as early as 2011 at the height of the Eurozone crisis. You know, this is only a year after he's become prime minister and he has tried to veto a European treaty. He tried to veto a European treaty because they didn't give us what he wanted. And they were trying to save themselves. They had an existential crisis in their currency.

31:56And they were trying to create institutional protections for their currency. And to them, what David Cameron was trying to do, he was trying to extract concessions for Britain on the city of London, in particular financial services. And to them, they were saying, hang on, we're drowning and you've got the you're threatening to stop the life boy being thrown into the water unless you get certain gifts as a result. and the ones that you want are to do with the City of London Financial Services three years after the great financial crisis, which is the cause of the problem that we're going through as they saw it.

32:41Now, that is obviously a partial telling of their position. The Eurosceptic response to that is, no, the cause of your problems are the way you constructed the euro, and that's on you, and now we're having to pay a price. But the fundamental challenge, as far as David Cameron and those around him was concerned, was that we were inside the EU, but outside the single currency. So in the single market and outside the single currency. And the problem with that is that there was this great fear that had been there from the moment that the single currency was conceived and was beginning to get into motion right back in the late 80s and early 90s, is that if the members of the single currency come together as a caucus to set the rules of the single market, Britain will not have the influence over that.

33:40because they had existential interests that bound them together and we didn't. And so we'd got ourselves into this position. We were a free-floating currency within the single market with Europe's offshore financial center that was a clearinghouse for their currency. And they were trying to wrestle back control over that. That is the structural tension with David Cameron. That's what caused the referendum, The fact that he tried to veto a treaty to get protections for the city of London, and they bypassed him and ignored him. And it was like the worst nightmare of the British establishment is coming to pass.

34:23Now, obviously, when we look back at it now, we think primarily about immigration and the sense that since 2004 and Tony Blair's decision to not impose restrictions on Eastern European migration into Britain, that we'd had this sort of building pressure underneath. And of course, that's true. But go back and read the original speech from David Cameron about the holding referendum. him, he doesn't say the word immigration once. Now, he acknowledges later that this was a mistake on his part, a political mistake, but it is revealing. And so what you had in 2015 was you had this position where Britain's structural weakness within the EU had been exposed by the Eurozone crisis.

35:10David Cameron had tried to deal with that and the political pressure that he had from the right, from Nigel Farage and his own backbenches and immigration and all of the rest. He tried to deal with it in one fell swoop, call a referendum. And the way he thought he could win it, the only way he could win it was in or out. And he made the promise. He held the Tory party together. And then to his surprise, to everybody's surprise around him, remember, he won a majority. That is not what they expected. You know, they expected a lot of them thought that Ed Miliband was going to win to become prime minister, or they would have to have a coalition with the Lib Dems.

35:48But anyway, they win and then they put the referendum in place. But I just think it's so important to go back to that structural challenge because it is ignored often now in the debate. And you gave that speech at Bloomberg, didn't you, as well? I mean, it's probably not the place you would go to sort of deliver a kind of frothy immigration-based argument, right? So it's a financial one. And yeah, there are so much from that time, but you just, because we were talking about it and given the first half of the conversation about Burnham and so many of the ideas around him, people are making this argument about the productive state.

36:22Are we going to borrow to invest to build infrastructure? Does the state have capacity to do this thing? And as much aside as anything else, but I also think about that period and I think about that period of cheap money and, you know, virtually zero interest rates. The possibility that now if, you know, I have no doubt if Burnham intends to borrow some money to build, I don't know, let's say get HS2 to Manchester or to twin a dual carriageway or to build a bypass somewhere and all the rest of it. And it's going to cost a lot more now than it would have costed back then. And I admit, obviously, we've had the pandemic since.

36:55But when I think about that period, whether it is indeed in context of Europe and the Constitution or if it's in terms of the fiscal picture and indeed the infrastructure that's downstream of that, I really do feel that this kind of sense of missed opportunity or, I don't know, it just feels like a different political time. It was. It's a long time ago than it was now. But I feel like there were so many missed opportunities around then for Cameron and others to govern in a different way that maybe wouldn't have put Britain on the path that it's arrived at now in 2026. Yeah, I think one of the key questions in British politics is where do you start your story about our decline or about our problems or about the political crisis that we're going through?

37:43You know, what is your genesis? And for a lot of people, of course, it is 2016. It's stupid David Cameron makes stupid promise. And as a result, we get chaos. Now, as we went through at the start of this conversation, there is truth in that. There is truth in the story that Brexit did something to British politics that sort of destabilized it in some fundamentally important way. And as I say, I think there is truth to that account. I think it's kind of insufficient as an account because it doesn't deal with the fact that why did we call the referendum? Why was there a structural fragility about Britain's membership of the European Union?

38:35What was that about? And it doesn't reckon with the financial crisis and the Eurozone crisis that followed. You know, both of those moments being absolutely pivotal in British politics. You know, it's why we had cheap money. You know, it's because we were, you know, we had to lower interest rates because we were in such economic difficulties. It's, you know, it's the cause ultimately or the precipitating cause of the Eurozone crisis, which exposed the single currency's weaknesses. But, you know, my own take is that I think the story has to go back further. I think it has to go back further than 2008.

39:14In a sense, or why, I guess, is the question. To me, it's because the problems were evident before 2008. You know, the rise of immigration as a topic in British politics, the rising numbers of the net numbers began in the mid 90s. the economic difficulties, the stagnant median wages began before 2008. And fundamentally, I come back to this point in my own head, at least, which is 2008 didn't come from nowhere. It's not like we had a perfect system and just some freak tsunami washed it away, of which we have no responsibility for that event. We created a system which blew apart, obviously because of events beyond our control in the United States and elsewhere, but it blew apart.

40:14It was fragile because of things that we did, whether it was the regulatory regime or the fact that we were completely imbalanced and reliant on the city of London, so we can't take a crisis, a financial crisis in the world, that the whole economy blows apart as a result. I think these are fundamentally important points. The North, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, they were not wealthy parts of Europe before 2008. I don't see a long-term economic model in the early 2000s for how to make Manchester and Newcastle and Leeds wealthy places. So I think one of the things we have to deal with is the fact that There was a consensus that was established in the early 1990s about Britain's place in Europe, about Britain's political economy, post-Thatcher political economy, that blew apart in successive crises in 2008 and 2016.

41:17And we haven't found a model since then. And that to me is something that few politicians are talking about. And the right has their own genesis argument, which is it's all Tony Blair's fault. And it's the constitutional vandalism that has got us into this mess. And that at the moment is the argument that is winning on their side. It is their version of Margaret Thatcher's, you know, it's all because of the post-war consensus. We need to blow it up. But the left, I think, has not found its argument since 2008, 2016. Yeah, well, I'd agree with you. Thinking about that moment of genesis, you know, okay, if it's not the Bloomberg speech, maybe it's 2008.

42:06And why does 2008 happen about this Big Bang deregulation? Maybe you have to go back, if you want to explain that, you have to go back to the post-war consensus. And before you know it, you're in Algeria in 1945, which is an in-joke for people that have read Tom's book. Let's talk about power, Tom, and the extent to which we can understand Brexit and the intervening period as a revolt against power, against, I think in America, you see this really clear strain of anti-institutional politics that to me says that there is something bigger and deeper happening at a population level than just Euroscepticism.

42:41But, you know, I'd invite your how you frame and think about what happened and what happened since. Is it as kind of elite struggle competition between different elite groups, possibly even at the up just in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party or perhaps something more popular and perhaps populist happening? Because we have these accusations, don't we, of both manipulation. So, you know, on the Remainer side, people invoking Russia and Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. And it cuts both ways as well. You know, the Leave is very keen to dress what happened as, you know, a populist, a popular uprising against wealthy elites, Remainery, liberal, metropolitan types.

43:27How do you think about power in relation to what happened? How do you frame the last 10 years in terms of power? It's a good question. I have this vivid memory of when I was a journalist at Politico and I would go between Britain and Brussels quite often. and in fact it's probably that's the the genesis of my of my book really is that is sort of getting into the weeds of brexit and understanding different perspectives and really being exposed to completely different worlds and how those two different worlds saw things through completely different uh lenses and and that being you know important for me and sort of understanding how how history plays out you know how people people's sort of stories of who they are and what is happening can completely shape um people's understandings of events um you know and going to brussels and hearing you know just just assumptions that were not heard in in britain and sort of if i was to say something in brussels about how it was being perceived in number 10 say they would sort of look at me with sort of confusion like you know as if i was sort of speaking a foreign language you know in a sense and then i would you know the same would i'd say the same back in london they'd look at me like i sort of crazed you know romayna because i'd sort of repeated back what i'd heard in the you know the commission and i and sort of that was important to me but i remember this moment where we were at a a party a politico party and sort of the great and the good were there and there was a um uh let's just call them a kind of eurocrat or you know sort of uh you know a powerful member of a kind of the brussels establishment and the kind that only the european union can produce and that person had um properties in london and And it came onto this conversation about Wales.

45:40And I can't remember why it was about Wales. But this person was sort of lambasting the Welsh for voting to leave. Do they not understand how stupid this is for them, that they've sort of voted to make themselves poorer? Like they get all this funding from Europe. And my reaction was like, you know, maybe this reveals something about me. but it's like my back just got up and I was just like but you so you expect them to just keep voting for a status quo in which they are poor so poor in fact that they require you know transfers of money from Brussels like it's not if you think about it in a different way it's not necessarily irrational to say I'm fairly sick of this system which which keeps us poor or means that we are poor and so I think there is clearly something to me about that you know the sense of yes there were fiscal transfers from Brussels to poorer parts of Britain.

46:41There was also, on the whole, a fiscal transfer from Britain to Europe. Both of those things are completely defensible positions. But the sense that there was a part of the country, or large parts of the country, which felt that it wasn't their project and they weren't listened to, they had no control over it, was clearly an important part of that story. And that question of power and where it belongs is absolutely central to this story. Tom, thank you for talking through that helicopter that appears to be hovering over our studio as we have this conversation. Hopefully it's not too unpleasant for those of you who are listening to us now.

47:28So in that same way, then, if we frame it as power, who do you think has won and lost from this period of time? Both, I guess, in terms of electorally, but more broadly. You know, we've come out of Europe. We've had a decade since. Who's benefited? Who's won from that vote? Well, right now, essentially no one. So that's another core problem in British politics today. And I think something that the Brexiteers on one side are having to sort of process and something we're sort of essentially we're all having to process. And it came out in the focus group that we did for the New Statesman in Makerfield ahead of the by-election.

48:19This feeling among voters that, yeah, of course, Brexit hasn't worked. It was like a sort of, you know, a given among so many of them. But it came with other, you know, other follow-ons from that. It was like, yeah, of course, Brexit hasn't worked. But that's because the political establishment hasn't, you know, hasn't has made a hash of it, either because they don't believe in it or that they're useless. And so we don't have to I don't want to revisit any of that again. Yes, it wasn't like, oh, we made a mistake. We must go back and correct it. It was, you know, yeah, that didn't work, but nothing works anymore anyway.

48:57So, you know, who's who's to, you know, why would we think anything would work? They mess everything up. Nothing works in this in this country. And I think that is at the root of this. It's the sense that they understand, the voters perfectly well, that Brexit hasn't really delivered much for them, in that they are clearly not richer as a result. Immigration hasn't come down. The asylum crisis, as many people would see it, has not been solved. You know, so the issues on which they care about haven't got better. And so I think until there is a sense in which Britain is outperforming its European peers at a significant and visible level, then I think a lot of people will not conclude that Brexit works.

49:53And I think that relative point is important. You know, there is a book by David Edgerton that I think you and I have been talking about off air into the sort of the period of 1945 up until essentially the second half of the 20th century, in which he talks about, you know, the 70s actually produced higher living standards, you know, growth in living standards, success of every growth in living standards, much better than what we've got today. and if you take it over the entire Thatcher period, it's completely comparable. All of this kind of revisionist telling of history. But it was important because it's saying that there wasn't some great momentum shift either going into the European economic community in 1973.

50:43This didn't signals a major boost to our economic performance. And, you know, in effect, leaving hasn't done an enormous change in our economic, this is a sort of broadly flattening economic performance over the entire period. But what is important in these different periods is relative economic performance. British people in the post-war era could see that Europe was outperforming them. And it mattered because you saw it with your own eyes. And I think that's something that's going on today in which people return from Europe or return from Australia or Canada or something and go, oh, it's noticeably better there.

51:26And things are getting noticeably worse here. So I think that is a fundamental thing. I think there's a really important insight in there too, which is that people may assume or expect, Okay, so if there is this broad swathe of sentiment in the population that goes, Brexit was a mistake, it hasn't been to our benefit, you may assume or conclude from that. It's like, oh, well, presumably the larger than life, last standing character from that period in our politics who advocated for that course of action would be politically damaged by it. You might go, oh, well, Nigel Farage surely then is going to be out on his ass and is going to stand a hope in hell at this next election because of that sentiment.

52:04is I actually know I think it's probably easier for people who supported Brexit in the first place, particularly if they feel that way that it was a mistake. What's the more likely sort of course of human psychology? Is it to say, well, I made a mistake in doing that? Or is it to say, well, no, the person that was in charge of seeing that through on the other side of it made a mess of it so it hasn't worked out. And therefore, Farage is yet to have been in government. And so actually it's kind of insulated from that criticism, right, which is that he advocated for it. They agreed with that decision, tick.

52:37And then he isn't discredited by having been a part of the conservative governments that tried to implement it and the ensuing constitutional crises that followed. Again, tick. So it's a slightly counterintuitive outcome whereby even though people regret might not be the right word, but it's sort of having this frustration and anger about the way it's been followed through, then turning and electing one of the key people who advocated for it, which I think is probably an outcome or a line of thought and inquiry that I think a lot of people who were more on the remain side of things would initially perhaps struggle to comprehend.

53:12This goes back to the problem of thinking things are inevitable, imposing reason onto these things and thinking, oh, well, if in my mind this will inevitably result in X, Y, and Z. There's a great essay or there's a great book on the 1975 European referendum, which is the first referendum that kept us in the European economic community as it was then. And it was this sort of resounding victory for Remain. It wasn't called Remain then, but it was essentially the Remain in the common market campaign. And that was two years after we'd gone in. So it was almost like a kind of rubber stamping of that campaign.

54:04And afterwards, there was a whole series of essays that were published. You know, obviously, these great analysis of what went on. You had people like Neil Kinnick, who was at the time a fierce Eurosceptic going, OK, hands up. We've lost. You know, we're in the EC for life now. That's it. You know, we're finished. Jack Straw, who was a Eurosceptic, whose son, Will Straw, went on to run the Remain campaign in 2016. You had all of these Eurosceptics who effectively said, you know, fair enough, we've lost. That's no longer a part of our national discussion. And you had academics who, I forget the name of, who wrote this one I'm thinking of in particular.

54:51But there is this essay that was seen as sort of defining at the time. And it said, imagine the scenario in which the other side had won, that the Leave side had won, No to Europe had won. And this was the side fronted by Michael Foote and Tony Benn and Enoch Powell and Barbara Castle. And all these sort of big figures, some of whom are sort of great heroes on the left or great heroes on the radical right today. And they said, imagine what would have happened. We would have had the Labour Party split. It would have gone off to the left. It would have elected the Eurosceptic left. It would have cleared the way for a new third party to emerge from nowhere, a pro-European centrist party.

55:38It would have allowed the Tories back into power and horrible Eurosceptics to come back into power. And of course, the Remain side, the yes to Europe side won, and all of those things came to pass. So the Labour Party changes leader shortly afterwards. Callaghan comes in. Margaret Thatcher is elected in 79. The Labour Party splits effectively in the 80s. The left take charge under Michael Foote. They have a policy platform of leaving the EU or the common market as it was then. You have the emergence of the SDP, the pro-European centrists who guarantee Margaret Thatcher's victory in 83 on the landslide and the revolution in British politics happens.

56:30And it's Margaret Thatcher who becomes the martyr for the Eurosceptic cause in the 1990s. So I think, again, to foreign observers who say, hang on, so in the years since Brexit, it has become deeply unpopular in this country and a majority, clear majority keep saying that they think it was a mistake. And the favourite to become prime minister after the next election is the man who caused Brexit, who gave you Brexit, who championed it from the beginning. How do those two things marry up? And you say, because politics doesn't work like you think it works. You know, Nigel Farage is not blamed for the Boris wave of migration that came after Brexit.

57:19Boris Johnson and the Tories are blamed for that. He is not blamed, not by, he is blamed by a significant portion of the country for the economic problems we're in, but not by his supporters who don't believe that he is the cause of this or that Brexit is the cause of this. So, you know, politics doesn't work in these kind of clean, predictable ways that people keep assuming it does. It's kind of chaotic and contingent. And you and I will make predictions and they will be entirely wrong. Absolutely. Long may it continue. I had a wry smile on my face, as you were saying that, Tom, both obviously knowing what it was that came to pass afterwards, but also just the closeness, actually, to what it, if you flipped it on its head and you swapped leave for remain, you applied it to our modern times, how much of it came to pass again several decades later.

58:11And I think that point you've just made there about the nature of politics, and I think it's so pertinent, particularly in the context of our first half of this conversation, where we're talking about Keir Starmer and Andrew Marr actually making a very similar point in his obituary for Starmer on our website today. That's what we've got time for. Tom, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on The Exchange. You will come back in future, no doubt. If you'll have me. Absolutely, we will. You've been listening to The Exchange with me, Olly Dugmore, and our editor-in-chief, Tom McTague. If you've enjoyed this conversation, please like and subscribe wherever you've been listening.

58:45And Tom's paperback version of his book about Brexit, Between the Waves, is out this month.

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