Is Britain a liberal country?

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0:32The New Statesman

0:37Most people would say that Britain is, by and large, a liberal country. Individuals have their freedom to express their individual beliefs. Others are expected to accept this difference in opinion with a certain level of tolerance. Our government is decided by free and fair elections. We have a high level of personal freedom and protected rights. But Adrian Waldridge, author and Bloomberg columnist, thinks we're getting it completely wrong in how we think about liberalism. Forget market choice. Forget the idea that liberalism just means being nice to people. Waldridge argues the real foundations are individualism, scepticism and a deep suspicion of concentrated power.

1:18And by that definition, our current system is failing badly. We're drowning in stuff, he says, but starved of the things that actually matter. Cheap fashion, endless scroll, information nobody has time to trust or distrust. Global IQ scores, he points out, were rising for a century. Then the smartphone arrived and they started to fall. Meanwhile, the ideas driving real energy in politics right now, they aren't coming from the centre at all. They're coming from the populist right and the populist left. From MAGA's post-liberal intellectuals in Washington and from a reform party built, in his words, entirely around one man.

1:59So, is liberalism dead? Or has it just forgotten what it's for? I'm Olly Dougmore and you're listening to The Exchange from the New Statesman. I was joined by Adrian Waldridge to discuss all this shortly before discontent from both the left and right ousted Keir Starmer from office. Enjoy the conversation. Adrian Waldridge, hello. Hello. How are you? I'm very well, thanks. How are you? I'm good, thank you. We were wittering before we started recording. There are two strands that I think are probably going to follow the course of our conversation over the next hour or so. And for me, they are when thinking about liberalism, the two trend tracks are one, what it morphed into and what it became and how much we should distinguish neoliberalism from liberalism.

2:50from liberalism. And the second is to the greater or lesser extent to which if the sort of the products of our liberal democracy, our liberal system in Britain, but elsewhere, if they are this, the things that you've outlined, whether it's this sort of the ugliness, if you like, of our built environment or, you know, sclerotic institutions or, you know, stagnation, stagflation and a lack of growth in real terms wages, at which point you say, no, no, these things are actually downstream of the political and economic settlement that we have. They are a consequence of it. And therefore, we should think about liberal democracy as being defined by these things rather than it not being properly implemented.

3:39How do you think about that challenge? Well, let me start off by trying to say a little bit about what liberalism is, because It's a sort of a torturously difficult question. And there are sort of two very common views at the moment of what liberalism is. One is the right wing view, the conservative view, which says that liberalism is basically about expanding the role of the market in allocating resources and reducing the role of the state. The second is the left liberal point of view, which says liberalism is essentially about a regime based on kindness, a regime based on being nice to people or being considerate about people.

4:22And I think both of these views are not quite right. The market versus state view, I think you can have big government liberals and small government liberals. I think Hayek was definitely a liberal. He believed in small government, but Keynes was a liberal. He believed that the government played a very important role in regulating the economy. He could be described as a big government liberal. And I think the notion of kindness or consideration, I think it's a moral virtue, but I'm not sure it's a political doctrine for governing a political system. system. So I would say that the essence of liberalism lies elsewhere.

5:03I would say the essence of liberalism lies in three things, but they're three quite complicated things. One is individualism. A liberal society starts with the individual and the individual's rights, hopes and aspirations. It starts with the presumption of skepticism that we can't know certain fundamental metaphysical truths. So we have to rely on debates and have a regime of toleration as a result of that. And it starts with a position of worry about power and the concentration of power. Those are the three fundamental things which I think define a liberal system. So you constrain power, you have constitutional rights, and you have political rights based on the individual rather than the collective to constrain the role of power.

5:57Now, let me just say just a little bit about why those things are relevant. I think individualism, I would like to qualify by saying the individualism of neoliberalism was something that was about, let's say, consumer choice or shopping. And I think that's a very impoverished view of what individualism means. I think individualism must be much more a matter of self-development, self-improvement, moral control over your own desires and thoughts. So it's not just a matter of saying, let the individual choose. It's a matter of saying, let the individual make an informed, intelligent and considered choice.

6:44and that involves educating preferences. And this is something that John Stuart Mill is very, very interesting about. John Stuart Mill is often regarded as a sort of Hayekian sort of libertarian. I don't think he's that at all. I think on liberty is much more about self-development than it is about just letting freedom reign in the sort of crude libertarian sense. The other two things I'd like to just talk about would be toleration in the sense of lack of certainty about metaphysical things. Liberalism comes along almost first as a doctrine that says we shouldn't have enforced religious certainty.

7:24We should have religious choice. That's something that was immensely important in the 17th and 18th centuries. And secondly, political power. Liberalism comes along saying the king should not be a tyrant, should not have absolute power. We should constrain these things. We should constrain power because, you know, as Lord Axson says, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. And both of these things, toleration and scepticism about concentration of power, they might sound a bit abstract or wishy-washy when people are trying to put bread on the table or food on the table. But in fact, they're absolutely vital at the moment.

8:01They're central to our politics at the moment, and more important, really, in many ways than they have been before. So I would, in my definition of liberalism, downgrade the idea that liberalism is about market choice and moral choice, the sort of bobo, bourgeois, bohemian consensus that we had in the, you know, the 1990s, really, and say it's much more open to state intervention. It's much more open to state intervention when it comes to moral issues as well as economic issues. But it's much more focused on these other things, worries about power, worries about intolerance and worries about self-development, I would say, the sort of choices that people are making.

8:49I understand all of those terms. But I think they, particularly as relates to the individual, I think it relies on an assumption. And that assumption is rationality on behalf of the autonomous individual. And I think our politics nowadays is increasingly driven by emotions, values, attention. And I wonder how you reconcile, I mean, you're nodding along here. So how do you reconcile that with liberalism's view of human nature? Do you think those two things are incongruous? I would say that if you assume that individuals are naturally and always rational and are not subject to emotions and are not subject to social influences, then you are making a foolish assumption.

9:42And if liberalism is based on that assumption, then it falls apart. I don't think that's what the classical liberals believed. And I think that they had a whole series of arguments which are just as relevant to now, today than they were before. The central to Mill's argument, for example, on liberty is not just the idea that our liberty begins where, you know, my liberty begins where your fist ends, as it were. that it's just a matter of constraining physical constraints on your freedom. He talks massively about self-development. And what self-development means is moral development, the capacity to regulate your desires and instincts and control them, as Freud was later to talk about.

10:37But it also is about educating preferences, choosing you know his mentor bentham said there's no difference between you know video games essentially of that time and poetry and mill says no that's not true there are higher preferences there are there are things that matter there are preferences that matter that that have a deeper significance for human beings i think all of that is true and i think now in particular it's important to emphasize those things and to craft a world in which individuals can be as rational as possible, as autonomous as possible, and as capable of self-development as possible.

11:19And in order to do that, you have to put constraints on the power of information technology, on the power of these distraction machines, which we see at the heart of our culture,

11:33on the power of distorting sort of media operations to undermine our nature as individuals. So the individual isn't just a natural thing that comes into the world and is autonomous. The individual is something that's created and needs to be protected from certain malign influences. If I were to become a fentanyl addict, I would be a person who would act in, you know, appalling, like around stealing and doing all of those sorts of things. I'd start acting in appalling ways because I would no longer be a rational agent. I think we're doing that to our culture through the sort of digital technology that we have.

12:12Our attention spans are declining. We're having an information environment which has been polluted, deliberately polluted in some ways by lies and misinformation. And all of those things, those cultural forces unleashed by this very powerful technology we have is undermining the central elements in a liberal culture, which is a rational individual. I've seen you, I've read you making this argument as relates to specifically the abundance agenda. And let's pause here and talk about that in a little bit greater detail. So obviously Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, write this book, Abundance. and, you know, being very reductive about their argument.

12:59Essentially, liberals, progressives have lost sight of achieving their goals and have become slaves to following processes. They've constricted themselves and they've forgotten that to govern is to do and that there needs to be this explosion in infrastructure, building housing, building reservoirs, building public transport, whatever it is. And I think it was a Bloomberg column that I was reading And you said yes, but I think was your argument. And you said we do also have an abundance of the things you were just speaking about there. I don't know what the right word for it is. Stuff, I think, is actually possibly the right word to be rude.

13:41You could say shit. You know, there is just this cheap tat, both in terms of information and products. You know, fast fashion, the informational slop that is beamed into our consciences by the smartphone devices that we all carry on us. And I just, I'd love to hear more about your thinking on this because I sort of, it really, it quite depresses me to be honest with you that all of us have this device in our pockets. You know, at our thumbtips, all of us have at our disposal the sum total of human knowledge. Yeah, sure. Do we use them for that purpose? Generally, no. Sure. No, we don't. Well, I think that with the abundance agenda, let me be clear, as the politicians say.

14:27Let me answer that head on. Head on, exactly. It's quite important to recognize that there are certain shortages of things that really matter to people. Yes. That are really grinding down the quality of our lives and of our culture. Houses being a primary example of that, just places to live, basic places to live, but of good infrastructure and all of those things. And so the abundance of people saying that we've forgotten how to build these things, how to create these things, and we've got bogged down in infrastructure, bogged down in procedure. There's a lot of truth in that. I think there are other reasons why there are housing problems.

15:09We talked about earlier the agglomeration problem. And, you know, a lot of people in the certain knowledge industries all want to live in the same place. But definitely we need to address those shortages. But if what they're saying is essentially what we need to do is to go back to the Blair-Clinton agenda of centrism, which simply meant freeing up markets, reducing regulations, getting things on the move. I don't think that's enough because there's another problem there. We have too little of the good stuff, but too much of the bad stuff. And we're producing lots and lots of tat, obviously, and it's easier now than ever to produce tat.

15:51Manufacturing is incredibly efficient and it's incredibly good at producing copies and cheap stuff and fast fashion and all of those things, which add very minimally to the quality of life. But we're also overproducing information and we're not distinguishing between good and bad information. So the information environment is massively overcrowded. And if you look at, I don't know, if you look at pop music or if you look at the world of TikTok videos or all of these things, things last a very short period of time. One thing is followed by another, the sampling. There's just a massive overabundance of stuff which doesn't stick.

16:27You know, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, all of those things lasted a long time. Today's groups and fashions disappear with extraordinary repetitive, or at least I think they do. I may be wrong about that. But particularly with the social media and the media feeds, the information feeds that we get, there's not enough discrimination as to news, whether it's true or false. In fact, there's a lot of evidence to show that false news travels faster and has a bigger impression than true news, particularly if it chimes in with our prejudices. And there's a lot of evidence to show that our attention span, that our capacity to appreciate things is declining.

17:11You know, there's this thing called the Flynn effect on IQ. Global IQ has been going up, went up relentlessly really from 1900 to 2000. And at 2000, it started to go down. So test scores in mathematics, test scores in verbal reasoning, IQ scores, they're all starting to go down at roughly the time when this social media phone revolution takes over. So it's damaging our capacity to concentrate and damaging our capacity to persevere in the long term to get desirable ends. Now, I think there are various ways of dealing with this. One obvious way of dealing with it is to regulate the flow of information.

17:54And I applaud all these attempts to stop children having phones in their schools and things like that. But I think another very important aspect of this and something I lay a lot of emphasis on this book is the notion of liberal education. That is that we should have an education in the liberal arts that puts enormous emphasis on developing our power to appreciate literature, to appreciate music, to appreciate art, and to appreciate things by studying them in a sort of enduring, sustained way. And I think the more frenzied our culture becomes, the more important it is that we should learn poetry or really read books, classic books, in a sustained way, study them very, very carefully and in an enduring way, Almost that we go back to certain central texts and learn them and digest them and treat them as a sort of lifelong resource against noise infusion.

19:01We had Dominic Sandbrook on with our culture editor, Tangil Rashid, on the New Society podcast. And he was sort of he was saying that Keir Starmer should go to bed with a trollop. He did. The sort of I can't remember which prime minister he was referencing. It was one of the Harold's. Harold Macmillan, I think, was a great Trollope fan. And would, you know, if some minister was enraptured in scandal, some sort of housing crisis, he would sort of prescribe and say, oh, you should go home and read some Pliny or something. It's not that bad. But I do think there is a huge amount of value and truth in that statement, which is that I think all of us are poorer for the empathetic process of actually reading, reading specifically fiction, inhabiting a different person, a different character and their worldview and thinking in that way.

19:56let's pull back to liberalism and let's say for a minute if we just if we accept your your, the view you've outlined so far and say okay perfect, agree, tick tick tick this is the world view we should pursue, what good is it if we inhabit a world where the big players are illiberal powers and you come up against the Chinese Communist Party, you come up against Vladimir Putin in Russia, people who are more powerful than us, but do not subscribe to those same values. How do you think about that problem on the world stage in particular? Well, I think that liberalism at the moment, the liberal world order broadly conceived is under greater threat than it has been at any time since the 1930s.

20:49And in some ways, I'm not saying it's worse than the 1930s, because that might be a slightly visible statement. But there are ways in which we have worries now, which we didn't have in the 1930s, that in the 1930s, both Britain and the United States, then the most powerful countries in the world globally, were both essentially liberal. And at the moment, I think the United States, it's difficult to call it fully liberal. I mean, you have the most illiberal president in charge of the country, either ever or, you know, I don't know, Andrew Jackson, I'd be more of a list if, you know, it's debatable.

21:28But the United States is, you know, in the strongman camp. You also have the world's biggest democracy, i.e. India, run by Modi, who is in the strongman camp. And of course, the world's biggest, along with the United States economy, China, in the strongman's camp. So we are shifting in an illiberal direction extremely rapidly. When I wrote this book, I started off, I think I started writing the book about four years ago. And everything that happened as I was writing it was bad. I thought I must write this book to try and make a case for liberalism because things are going badly and everything got worse.

22:07And then just as I'm about to publish the book, we then have the Middle East exploding into chaos. So it's just everything is really shifting in the wrong direction very quickly. So what can we do about that, particularly given that we're a small country and that the United States is so powerful, India is so populous, China is so powerful and the rest of it? I do think, however, that books, ideas, ways of doing things can actually have an influence. If you ask why is it that we have an uninspiring prime minister, which we clearly do, is it just because Keir Starmer personally is so dull? Well, we've had a succession of uninspiring prime ministers.

22:55If you ask why do we have a Whitehall that's just sort of a lethargic blob, is it just because they've got lazier and more lethargic than they were 20 years ago? I don't think that's the case. I think it's because we don't have a political blueprint that seems to chime both with our values and with our problems. And so I think if we can do that, if we can find a political blueprint that chimes with those two things, that addresses the real problems that we have now, but in a way that is liberal and in a way that prevents a shift either to the far right or the far left, I think that you will get a lot of dynamism in the system.

23:33And I think if we get dynamism in Britain, well, it's a small country, but it matters to us. And I think if you could get the similar sort of thing going on in Europe, then it would matter. The United States is more difficult because the level of polarization is so huge. But I think that nevertheless, a few good ideas that really resonate will attract people. and a few people who are really good at what they do will create dynamism. And I would say, you know, I remember it did look as though the political system was pretty desperate for the Democrats before Bill Clinton came along with people talking about the seven dwarfs and things like that.

24:14And then Bill Clinton, whatever his faults, you know, reanimated it. The same a bit with Tony Blair on the left. So things can change. So is Starmer not a liberal? Were his predecessors not liberals? Absolutely. I mean, what I'm trying to argue is that liberalism has to reconfigure itself. It has to take its basic elements and rejig them to deal with new problems. And what we have at the moment is a liberal consensus that was forged in the 1980s, 1990s with the sort of Thatcherite revolution followed by the Blairite revolution, which, as I said earlier, is a sort of Bobo, bourgeois, bohemian consensus, which basically says we should be pretty laissez-faire about morals, pretty laissez-faire about the economy.

25:17and pretty tolerant about whatever business does, business is good. And that consensus was very dynamic in the 1990s. It began to slow down partly because it became the establishment. And so everybody who was in the establishment believed that consensus and establishments become decadent. This particular establishment has become, in my view, very decadent. And the people who espouse those values, when those values cease to apply very well to the sort of society that you have, begin to make exceptions without fundamentally rethinking what they're doing. So they're saying, I believe these things, but I'm going to make this concession.

25:56So if you look at what one of the biggest problems confronting the country at the moment, and one of the things which is driving a lot of polarization is obviously immigration. And what you had was basically a bunch of people in Whitehall, just as much as Westminster, who said essentially that immigration is good economically. Immigration is good culturally because it leads to diversity and it doesn't really bring any problems. So you increased the flow of people, you reduced emphasis on assimilation and the rest of it. And that has created a set of problems which that liberal elite who had all of those assumptions have failed to deal with.

26:41And as they now try to deal with it because it's causing them problems on various directions, they can't deal with it without a sort of panic. So I think that, say, a number of chickens are coming home to roost, that a number of failures of that regime are coming home to roost. So you have two things going on. One is an establishment that is entrenched, antiquated and increasingly self-dealing. And secondly, there's a bunch of problems which they failed to predict, which they actually actively dismissed and which are biting them in the behind. And so they look like an establishment that doesn't work.

27:25And if you look at the recent by-election, there's a perfect example of that. You have, you know, the centre basically collapses and you have people moving to the Green Party or people moving to the Reform Party, I think very largely over the question of immigration, whether you should celebrate it or whether you should revile it, things like that. And the centre, because it hadn't dealt with that problem, because it dismissed it as a problem, just being lost by that. Do you understand that result as a departure point from the two-party system that we've had in this country? The two-party system in this country has lasted for a very long time.

28:02And it has a sort of internal logic because of the nature of Parliament, the nature of the first-past-the-post system. But it is extraordinary that you should have the Labour Party with a seat that it had since, I don't know, 1931 or something collapsing. and the Conservative Party losing its deposit. And two parties, which didn't exist really, the Green Party may have existed, but not in its current form, getting such a big swathe of votes. So I think that we probably will end up with a two-party government, but what we have essentially is six parties competing within this system designed to create two-party rule.

28:43And it's not clear which of those parties will come out on top of that. It's a sort of roulette-like system. But I think it's all of the emotional energy in this country is on the left and the right. I might call them populist. I don't know what you want to call them, but sort of populist parties. And all of the intellectual energy is on those left and right. Not enough of it, I think, but it's moving those sorts of directions. And the centre is failing to address those problems within its own liberal terms. I think you can call them populists. I think on both sides, I think they would call themselves populists as well.

29:26I know Polanski definitely does. You can call populism as far as the Greens are concerned. Yeah, I've interviewed Rory Stewart in the past and he's spoken about the centre kind of being the third point, the tension on the bowstring, if you like. Like if you think of either end of the bow as the left and right extremes and it's up to the centre to kind of draw energy and its power from both extremes and find a space in between, I guess. It comes back to the challenge or question I posed to you slightly earlier about whether or not the anti-liberal, illiberal aspects of that by-election result, but certainly perhaps Britain's national politics more generally, are a product of how liberalism has manifested in recent years and the connection between those two things.

30:16I don't know how you think. Maybe I think probably you would look at reform quite explicitly and say that's a rejection of a liberal norm. You've mentioned already as regards immigration, but I would say probably free speech issues, cosmopolitanism as well. I don't know. Would you categorise the Greens in the same way? Would you think it is a rejection of those kind of liberal norms as they've been established in this country? Well, first of all, let me say that I really like your phrase as how liberalism has manifested itself in recent years, because I think liberalism does manifest itself in lots of different ways.

30:49Which is not meaning that it can be anything you want it to be. As I say, there are certain fundamental values that it must embrace, but it does change over the years very significantly. I would say that I would add to your list of ways in which reform is illiberal the party structure, because it's a party structure entirely built around one man. It's not a real membership party. The party has no power. I think it's a private company. It's a strongman, personality-focused party. I think that the Greens are more of a party, although Polanski has obviously galvanized them in a very important way.

31:38They do share a sort of populism in that they think the elites are terrible and we need to have very radical solutions. But I think they're more within the framework of what I would understand to be a party than reform is. and they're cuddlier than reform. We're going to take a quick break now. We'll be back after this.

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33:33I wonder, Adrian, if we could turn our attention maybe to Trump and to MAGA a little bit, just because you mentioned you lived in L.A. You know Steve Bannon. I think you were saying that just before we started recording. and I just I would like to hear how you're thinking about the sort of the formulation of MAGA thinking and MAGA government right now because it draws on a few of the themes we've been speaking about i.e you know the the nationalist populace national nationalist economics the likes of Bannon and I think there are multiple polls in the coalition but a crucial one are the tech bros and they're slightly more libertarian thinking, particularly if you're thinking about the likes of Peter Thiel, a few of the AI guys as well.

34:25I mean, who do you think of as sort of the influential ideologues, if you like, in the MAGA court? Who is it that we should be looking at and seeking to understand if we want to understand how Trump's imperial court is thinking about the way it governs? Well, let me say a little bit about energy to start off with. If you go back to the last election, the last disastrous election, it wasn't just that Joe Biden was not really composmentous, but a lot of the other leading Democrats, such as Nancy Pelosi, were, you know, very elderly. They'd been around for a long time. and there's a sort of the sort of late Soviet sort of feel here that you had a bunch of people who were just preserved in aspic and whose arguments were also preserved in aspic that they were just repeating the same cliched phrases that they'd been repeating for the last 20 or 30 years.

35:27Now, I'm trying to figure out who's Andropov, who's Chinenko. I can't quite put it together. Exactly. I think, you know, the Americans have better dental work. They have better plastic surgery. But, you know, institutionally, it's the same mechanism. If you look at the mayor's election in New York, you know, the Democrats are presenting people, pushing forward people who really are, you know, as I say, preserved in aspic or formaldehyde or something, something of that nature. And Trump obviously is old, but he seems much younger. He seems much fresher because and he has a very different sort of political style, which is a showman style.

36:12But he doesn't speak in weird formulaic phrases or in weird sort of road tested cliches. He says odd things, but striking things. It's hard, you know, when he talked about, you know, they're eating the pets and they're eating the cats and the dogs and the pets. You know, it's something that is very striking. It may be a lie, but it's an, you know, it's a statement that sticks in your mind. Arresting. It's arresting. Exactly so. And so you have a sort and when he came to power the second time around, not the first time around, the second time around, he did an enormous amount very, very quickly.

36:48And so you have that sort of political and emotional energy and that sort of ability to connect with the public. But you also have something else in America and much more in America than reform over here. You have intellectual energy. You have a bunch of very interesting post-liberal thinkers. They would call themselves post-liberal thinkers who have striking answers to a lot of questions that are troubling people. You know, where should power be in a modern democracy? What should national identity be in modern democracy? What should national interest be? How should we pursue national interest?

37:30and what should we do about values, what values should hold society together. And they have answers to all of these questions. And what struck me is both the vigor of these answers and also the extremism of these answers. So you have a Harvard law professor who, Adrian, the Adrian should stick together, but not in this case, Vermeule, who argues for a very extreme notion of unitary executive and a very extreme notion of the imposition of values on the population. Or you have this guy called Kevin Robbins, editor, who runs the Heritage Foundation, who has this very extreme notion of opposition to public companies, being in favour of family companies, particularly family companies rooted in Christian traditions.

38:25much more extreme critique of capitalism than anything that's coming out of the Democratic Party. And you have notions of theocracy or at least religiously infused values coming. J.D. Vance, for example, endorsing all of these sorts of things. Aristopopulism. And indeed, I wrote an article, well, he calls it, I mean, sorry, Michael Anton calls it, Michael Deneen calls it aristopopulism. And it's really a fusion of populism with very, very intellectual ideas about what sort of society we want to create. So you have this rich intellectual current. And you can't fight something with nothing. You can't fight post-liberalism by just saying, these people are mad.

39:19And you can't fight it by just saying, well, let's have Blair and Clinton. You have to have a critique of their arguments. And you have to have a defense of liberalism, of the liberal values that are being critiqued and undermined, which I've tried to do in my book, but never in my life have I seen fundamental liberal values that go back right to the founding of the republic in the United States, back to the 19th century, under more serious sustained attack. And a lot of these people, Patrick Deneen wrote, I thought, a good book on the failure of liberalism, basically thinks the American founding was a mistake because it's too liberal and wants to go back to older, you know, feudal values.

40:04Yeah. It's a very well-written book, it has to be said. It's some of the ideas now really quite confronting. I guess, yeah, if I was – and then if I – okay, to do the corollary, right, who am I thinking about? Who on the British right, who's doing the equivalent thinking? And for reform, it's largely, well, it's Danny Kruger, it's James Orr, but I don't think it's not quite on that same level. This is probably our final question, Adrian, before we have to draw things to a close. If you were designing the British Constitution from scratch, how much power would you give to ordinary voters? I think power is so important in a democracy that it needs to be constrained in various ways.

40:53So I would constrain the power of voters by having a representative system, which we have, and by having certain rights, which are encoded in a constitution, and by having a separation of powers. We have what we have in this country is very peculiar because we have a separation of powers. We've always, you know, since 1688, we've had a separation of powers, which pretends not to be a separation of powers. So we have certain constraints on the power of the executive. I'm in favor of having a Supreme Court that adds firmness to that constraint. So I would, as it were, I would give power to voters in a way that is indirect and constrained.

41:39But another thing worries me, and that is this is something that the populists actually argue. And I have a lot of sympathy with them. Populists of both the left and the right. They say whoever you vote for, you get the same result. And I think that there is a sense in which the establishment, not just in Westminster, but also in Whitehall, is subject to group thinking. And that group thinking often doesn't reflect the preferences of large numbers of people in the country. And it's group thinking which is encouraged by the fact that they all live together in the same milieu. But it's also encouraged by the fact that they live in this London world, which is very separate from the provincial world that lots and lots of people live in.

42:26And Brexit was created partly because people felt that democracy didn't work because they kept getting the same result, because their personal concerns were not reflected in what happened. It was as much against the Westminster establishment as it was against the Brussels establishment. and that was particularly I think driven by by immigration more more than anything else and I think that that group thing needs to be broken up in various ways I try and argue in this book that we need much more social mobility in this country so we're not drawing from the same narrow group of of people with the same background but also I think we need in some way to disperse power no country in the in the in the world with the possible exception of South Korea just concentrates so much of its activity in one huge, huge city.

43:23So people feel unrepresented, not by the process, but by the sort of people who come through. Adrian Waldridge, I've really enjoyed the conversation. I hope you did too. Thank you very much. Very enjoyable. Thank you. You've been listening to The Exchange with me, Olly Dougmore. That was Adrian Waldridge. We'll see you next week.

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