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Planning a glorious revolution, with James Price
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If there is any glimmer of hope in the UK (and it is a faint one), it is that a new government in 2029 may just be able to reverse the catastrophic economic, demographic and cultural trends that the country is enduring. In order to do so, they'll have to navigate the treacherous world of the Westminster Civil Service. No one understands that world better than the former Former Chief of Staff to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and former Chief of Staff to the Chairman of the Conservative Party, James Price.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
Introduction: UK's Political Challenges
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will. I'm Will Kingston. Everyone knows that the UK is in a very dark place right now. And even those who see a glimmer of hope in the form of reform, or perhaps even a rejuvenated Conservative Party, see one big, perhaps insurmountable challenge the blob, the deep state, the administrative state.
Administrative State: Conspiracy or Reality?
00:00:47
Speaker
For some, it is a right-wing conspiracy. For others, it's just an unfortunate reality of how most Western parliamentary democracies have gone over the last 70 years.
00:01:00
Speaker
A huge layer of bureaucracy that makes it almost impossible to get anything done. Many people fear that with the incredibly serious economic and cultural challenges that the UK faces, even if a government enters with all of the right policies, they'll be blocked at every turn.
Insights from James Price on Deep State
00:01:20
Speaker
So how does Westminster really work? What is an insider's guide to the deep state? There's perhaps no one better to help me with that question then the former Chief of Staff to the Chairman of the Conservative Party and former Chief of Staff to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Price. James, welcome to Fire at Will.
00:01:41
Speaker
Hello, my friend. It's good to be with you. And hopefully we get through this whole recording without this shadowy, insidious blob coming and cutting us the ground. Well, that's actually a very good place to start because you will hear some people say that this is all just one big right-wing conspiracy.
00:01:57
Speaker
And the way that, say, a Donald Trump would speak about it, for example, can... lend a certain air of conspiratorial sounding. yeah
Government Transition and Continuity
00:02:10
Speaker
it can It can sound a take conspiratorial in the way that he puts it.
00:02:14
Speaker
What is the administrative state? Is it actually a thing? And how prevalent is it in the United Kingdom? I think it it is the question to ask if we're looking at why it is that everything is so so crummy in Britain today in so many different ways.
00:02:30
Speaker
So where to start? We could start with a year and a bit ago with the election of the Labour Party. ah you know the The Labour Party wins, Keir Starmer becomes prime minister. And unlike in the American system or some other systems where there's the victory and then there's a three-month transition period where thousands of people prepare to leave their jobs and thousands of people prepare to take them up. And then they're all kind of Republicans coming in or Democrats going out or whatever. it doesn't happen in the British system. The next morning after the election, a very tired Keir Starmer gets driven to Buckingham Palace, kisses hands with His Majesty the King, and is asked to form a government. And he goes straight
Roles and Power in UK Government
00:03:06
Speaker
on with it. Great. Okay. Fair enough.
00:03:07
Speaker
The problem you've got is that there are only 200 people in the whole of the British administrative state who change jobs when that happens. And they change jobs basically immediately.
00:03:19
Speaker
So we're talking 100 ministers of the crown. So that's the people that make up the British cabinet and the sort of junior ministers in all those departments below them. And those are almost all also members of parliament because obviously we've got the fusion of the legislative body and the executive, if we're if we're doing it in kind of political science terms.
00:03:38
Speaker
And some of them will be members of the House of Lords, the the upper chamber as well. A hundred of those people, lots of them in in the case of July last year in Britain, were Tory ministers who lost their seats, let alone their their ah their jobs as ministers.
00:03:50
Speaker
And Labour people will come in and there were shadow cabinet ministers. So There was it at the time David Lammy, for example, shadow foreign secretary becomes the foreign secretary. And Rachel Reeves, God help us, was the shadow chancellor, becomes the chancellor. And then there are a load of other appointments down of Labour MPs, newly minted MPs, or sometimes lords who get made ministers in those departments, a hundred of them.
00:04:10
Speaker
And then there are 100 people known as special advisors or spads in the horrible jargon that people may have heard of. I was one of those people. Dominic Cummings was kind of king spad. People will ah obviously have heard of him.
00:04:23
Speaker
And the sort of chief of staff to the prime minister is always a special advisor. What are they? Those are political appointments who get chosen either by the prime minister and his top team or by the secretaries of state, the top people running those departments.
00:04:37
Speaker
They're the people who count legally as temporary civil servants, but they are immune and that that they're free from all of the other kind of impartiality rules. around not being able to be biased and all the rest of it. and they are essentially political appointments whose job it is to back their minister, back their boss, and try and force sort of political appointments through the system and political ah narratives, political decisions, sit in on as many meetings of civil servants as possible and say, that's not the way we want to do things. That's not what was in our manifesto and pushed
Civil Service Power Dynamics
00:05:08
Speaker
up through.
00:05:08
Speaker
Fair enough. But there's only ah salaries fund. Are there salaries funded by the taxpayer or by the parties? They will have been funded by the political parties in opposition, where they're known just as pads or or political advisors.
00:05:21
Speaker
You get the special bit when you get into government, you get on the public teat. But of course, ah like almost all public sector roles, the pay is actually very low compared to what you would hope top talented people running the country could make in the private sector.
00:05:34
Speaker
And their job security is absolutely nil. So Your boss gets done in ah in some kind of cocaine and prostitute scandal or whatever else it may be. And boom, you're done like that. You get a kind of three or four month payoff, but that's it. You're out on your elbow.
00:05:47
Speaker
And those people have absolutely no constitutional right or ability to order around civil servants, except in very specific scenarios. When Tony Blair came in, i think it was Alistair Campbell and Jonathan Powell who were given rights to what's called an ordering council. Again, a bit technical, but a bit like ah an executive order in the US.
00:06:07
Speaker
And those two alone amongst special advisors were allowed to kind of give orders and things to civil servants. But otherwise, you're not allowed to do All you can do is sit there in the room with the boss. So when I was the special advisor to the education secretary, sit there in a room, there'd be load of civil servants and they'd say, oh, minister, we think you should do this or that.
00:06:24
Speaker
And I couldn't stop them. All I could do is sit there and say, boss, they're lying to you. Again, I've read all the papers. Please don't pick option B. It will screw us over in these many different ways and they don't care. So you've got no executive power.
00:06:35
Speaker
So just to reiterate, when Starmer comes in, 200 people change jobs, 100 ministers and 100 special advisors with no executive power whatsoever. And everybody else stays the same. And that everybody else, to answer your question in a very long-winded way, is the administrative state. It's the permanent bureaucracy.
00:06:54
Speaker
I imagine the question that is going through most listeners and viewers' minds is, well, someone has to hire these people and someone therefore has the capacity to fire these people.
00:07:07
Speaker
And in a parliamentary democracy, i would have thought, for example, to take yeah the education department, that would be the education minister. So when a new education minister comes in, why why can't he just clean house, he or she, clean house and get rid of that civil service bureaucracy in the education department and hire who or he or she wants?
Obstacles in Civil Service Reform
00:07:30
Speaker
Oh, that's a very brave minister would come back the answer. First of all, there's the problem of of scale. So in the Department for Education in Britain, which only covers really England, because education is in most cases devolved.
00:07:43
Speaker
So you're talking schools, talking universities, technical training and childcare, basically, and then sort of children with special educational needs and disability. It's a big, chunky brief. It's, what is it, £90 billion pounds a year or something like that spent?
00:07:56
Speaker
How many political people are there in there? There's the Secretary of State who comes in, four or five junior ministers. And at my time, we had four special advisors, which was a massive number. So 10 political people.
00:08:06
Speaker
Will, how many civil servants roughly were there at the same time for the 10 political appointments, do you think? after I don't even want don't even want to think about it, but I imagine a lot. It was over 8,000, right?
00:08:19
Speaker
And that's not one of the biggest departments. And and there there are many bigger ones as well. So firstly, you're going to fire 8,000 people straight away. It's not going to be able to be done necessarily very easily. how are you going to refill those?
00:08:30
Speaker
Who knows which of those jobs are actually useful and which are not. You're going to have ah endless judicial reviews and lawsuits and sacking tribunals. And the rest of the civil service could easily just down tools and solidarity and go on strike and things like that. So there's a practical problem there. The next practical problem being that if you just fired the top person known as the the permanent secretary, who's the person who really runs the education department or any of the others, kind of top level you get in the civil service, you just fired that one person. which is what Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng did at the Treasury.
00:09:03
Speaker
They fired a guy called Tom Scholar. They didn't really realize that the system may react like ah a sort of system of antibodies or immune system would react, which is that it started serving them up crap ideas, didn't say, hmm, there's maybe this mini budget of yours might have some market ramifications.
00:09:20
Speaker
None of that. And so there is some credence perhaps to Liz Druss's claim that she was betrayed by the system. I still don't think she was very wise, but that's been a conversation another day. So you've got ah that the system will then move to defend itself very quickly.
00:09:31
Speaker
It's even then, if you were determined to do it, very difficult to do. You've got to get the prime minister on side with it. You've got to get the cabinet secretary, who is the sort of permanent secretary, but for all the departments, the very top of the civil service,
00:09:44
Speaker
who is the head of the civil service, often these days also the first person who knows when there's a terrorist attack or when there's some horrendous act of war or famine or plague or whatever it may be, not the prime minister. They are it really de facto, the most powerful person in the country.
00:09:59
Speaker
And they'd have to sign to her off as well. And that's not to be a friend of theirs or a colleague or someone they've worked with a long time and all the rest of it. So technically, legally, you could get rid of one or two of these people.
00:10:09
Speaker
but you would have all these cascading problems. Who do you then use to fill the gap and so on? And so the system has been so structured to make that kind of radical change very, very difficult, if not impossible to do.
00:10:20
Speaker
Okay. I've now got an idea for how we structure this conversation and you've given it to me. Thank you. Basically, we know that it is most difficult It is more likely than not that there will be a change of government in 2029. Three and a half years is a heck of a long time in politics.
Evolution of UK Bureaucracy
00:10:39
Speaker
So I say that as a qualifier, but let's run on the presumption that say a reform government gets in or a reform conservative coalition government gets in and they recognize the need for radical change. And everyone recognizes the need for radical change in this country if it is to have have any hope of survival.
00:10:59
Speaker
There are blockers in this system. There is the administrative state that you've just laid out. There's also the judiciary that Tony Blair did so much to build out as a blocker to a parliamentary democracy.
00:11:13
Speaker
There are the quangos, which, you know, we've heard the term the bonfire of the quangos. needs to be needs to be lit in order for real power to go back to where it should be, which is the parliament.
00:11:25
Speaker
We can go through each of those those areas, but before we do, let's just put this into a a historical context. This is nothing new in some respects. that The whole premise of Yes Minister is is is exactly this tension between the civil service and elected officials.
00:11:44
Speaker
Has it got or did it accelerate under Blair? Has it got worse in the last decade? Has this always just been a problem? Put this tension between elected representatives and unelected bureaucrats in a historical context for me.
00:11:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, yes to all of the above, almost. We can go back, and and Dominic Cummings, people will know, is a bit of bogeyman, but is very, very good on this. And I recommend people looking at his is slightly mad, but definitely wonderful substack on these issues.
00:12:13
Speaker
You go back to something like, if we want to go in a proper ah historical context, so someone like Pitt the Younger, who comes into power just as the French Revolution is about to kind of kick off. And Britain is licking its wounds from losing those rebellious colonies across the Atlantic, thinking, how did this happen? We need to sort of modernize and and get with the plan. And Pitt being a very young man was very good and very energetic at this.
00:12:36
Speaker
Cummings has described the Whitehall, the bureaucracy that Pitt builds as being more like SpaceX than Whitehall today is like SpaceX. It was the cutting edge of technology.
00:12:47
Speaker
The Royal Navy was having all this investment and inventing all these amazing things, probably the most advanced organization. in the world at the time in order to counter the threat from first revolutionary and then napoleonic france and all kinds of amazing innovations the one of the main reasons that they could set up a penal colony on a barren desert island on the other side of the world i might add and turn it into a veritable paradise, right? that That's the power of when you get institutions right. You get Australia that has not had recession for how long, and it's turned, as you say, a barren bit of land into just the most one of the most gorgeous places
Impact of Bureaucracy on Government
00:13:22
Speaker
on earth, not to brand-nose you too much.
00:13:24
Speaker
And whereas if you have all of that inheritance and you mess up those institutions, you end up with Britain in 2025 with all the horrors that I wouldn't bother repeating because they're too manifest to to go on about it but So you've you've got a situation where Pitt manages to revolutionize all of this and modernize and all the rest of it.
00:13:40
Speaker
And Britain manages to keep doing that with the very best of human capital, spend some time inside the bureaucracy and out again, whether as an MP or otherwise. And it's always interesting to me how many people at Edmund Burke was an MP on the side. John Stuart Mill, I think, was an MP on the side of writing on liberty. And all these great people come in well before. So of course, these people were members of parliament, but they were doing other things as well.
00:14:01
Speaker
You can fast forward to something like maybe the 1860s and you've got Palmerston, one of the kind of high watermarks of great British Victorian power, ah boasting that we would never have a permanent bureaucracy. We didn't need it. and You want people shifting in and out.
00:14:15
Speaker
and think eight hundreds of years before that, Isaac Newton was drafted in to set up the post host office, the postal service in Britain in the midst of and discovering gravity and all these sorts. I didn't know that. It's amazing. Yeah, and and and those sorts of wonderful things, which is kind of I guess, echoed a bit in people like Musk in the States and all these amazing tech bros starting to put their shoulders to the wheel. Look at all the geniuses ah who got involved in Bletchley Park, for example. when When the nation calls, the great talent comes along. So that was a kind of a temporary thing that would happen. And by the way, you still do get that to some extent in some systems like the American one, where you draft people in for four years. And maybe then you know the that the president loses, they go off again, and they they go back into business. They learn what's what's been going on. They take those skills back with them four or eight years later into a bit of government, and they manage to modernize it.
00:15:02
Speaker
But as an aside, Farage, perhaps more as a thought bubble than anything else, has floated something similar if reform were to get into government. Yeah, and this and this is where it all starts to go wrong. though After Palmerston, the sets of reforms, often known as the Northcutt-Trevelyan Report, around that time, and it gets built on as as time goes on, you get this kind of permanent, professionalized civil service, where that doesn't happen so much.
00:15:27
Speaker
and there are entrance exams and people stay in. And then around the time of the kind of Wall Street crash, you get a similar effect happening in lots of countries. It happens in the United States and FDR with the New Deal spends huge amounts of money building out the federal government, much, much bigger than it ever been before.
00:15:43
Speaker
And a similar thing happens during the war in Britain, and then it carries on afterwards. And this is where Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom comes from, where he warns that all the stuff that you've done to make a total war economy and have everything directed from the center towards fighting the Nazis, if that was to carry on in civilian life, you would end up as serfs. You'd end up with total poverty.
00:16:04
Speaker
And that's, of course, what we did with the post-war consensus. As the state grows, private industry contracts, private liberty contracts, and you end up with these people in Whitehall saying things like,
00:16:16
Speaker
The man in Whitehall knows best, which was an infamous line from a Labour minister in saying, look I know better than you plebs, you pipe down, essentially. And that happened on both sides of the Atlantic. And it's best recorded in a book called The Managerial Revolution by a man called James Burnham, who again predicts all of this stuff. And the book comes out in 1942 and Hayek's Road to Serfdom is in 1943. So even in the midst of the Second World War, people are seeing this trend of a kind of managerial class who don't know anything about the outside world, but care more about the process than the outcome. And these are the people, whether it's in the civil service, whether it's in the judiciary, as you mentioned increasingly, certainly whether it's in the quangos and the executive agencies and the regulators, where the actual power
00:16:59
Speaker
gets filtered out to.
Inefficiencies and Cultural Issues
00:17:01
Speaker
And that's why we're stuck in the problem we've got now, because as more power goes to those groups, less power is held by the politicians themselves. So the people who are held accountable and can be changed by democracy don't change.
00:17:12
Speaker
And they end up going, well, what's the point in me being around? If I can't do anything, I'm going to bugger off. And then only the dross or the psychopaths end up running for parliament. And you get that kind of vicious cycle that we're in now.
00:17:24
Speaker
Yeah, we spoke to David Starkey a few weeks ago and he focused specifically on the judiciary and on the quangos as two of those institutions that have taken power away from elected representatives.
00:17:38
Speaker
We can get to that as well, but I do want to continue to hone in on the civil service because it's an area that you know so well. You mentioned, what, 8,000-odd publicly paid education departments yeah you know, Johnny Pencil pushes in that building.
00:17:59
Speaker
Give me an understanding. Let me take a step back. In a former life, I was a management consultant. I tried very, very hard to avoid government jobs. I tried to stay as much as possible in financial services. So you keep your tenancy.
00:18:12
Speaker
Exactly. Unfortunately, i was on the bench in consulting terms and they just had to put me somewhere and I found myself on a government consulting project. And all of the cliches around the culture of government,
00:18:28
Speaker
officialdom proved to be the case to the extent that when the clock struck five o'clock on the wall literally in unison everyone stands up and heads straight to the door in a way that you would never see in the private sector And so my question is twofold. a does that type of culture, which we kind of assume is the case in cushy publicly funded roles exist in the United Kingdom?
00:18:57
Speaker
And b
Post-COVID Challenges in Civil Service
00:18:58
Speaker
give me a feel for, like, out of that 8,000 people, what are these people doing? What are the jobs? How are they spending their time? How are they filling their days? I don't know. and i i say that because I tried to find out.
00:19:11
Speaker
I asked in day one, I'd like an you know an organogram of of everybody and what they're up to. And in the year that I was there before we got reshuffled and and moved because of all the drama, they never told me. You you can't find out. you I think I got to guy into kind of like director level or so, but not how many people worked under any of those people.
00:19:29
Speaker
So it was impossible for the special advisors, the people who were appointed technically by the prime minister who just won a stonking great majority and all the rest of it. to be able to find this stuff out. So there would be teams squirreled away working on a pet project of an education secretary to goes a go, right?
00:19:45
Speaker
and And by the way, you said it hits five o'clock and they all push their chairs back and go. least they were in the darn office because what we found post-COVID was that huge numbers of people weren't bothering to go in And that, you know, it's it's sort of fine in some senses if, you know at least then they're like probably playing golf or whatever and not causing damage. So from a small perspective, that's something. But when you've got the one person who actually knows whatever the widget is you need to find out isn't available and isn't answering his team's calls and you've got the education secretary going, where's this bloody data, et cetera, it's just not good enough. And the number of people, by the way, you know, who couldn't even get their Ethernet cables plugged in properly or whatever, you've got your sat there in the office with a load of faces on the screen and no one's actually answering because they haven't even got their home set up.
00:20:31
Speaker
It's a whole other kettle of fish. But the DFE, for example, had, I think, maybe the worst attendance inside the office going. So we changed the rules that said, we want you in the office two to three times a week, which meant one to two.
Bureaucratic Culture vs. Outcomes
00:20:43
Speaker
We want everybody in four days a week as standard. And you've got to go to your manager and ask for a special request not to turn up. There was a big all staff meeting and the permanent secretary literally had messages saying, you've ruined my life.
00:20:56
Speaker
You've betrayed us. I can't believe you've done this to us. And so about physically coming into the office four days a week. That's how bonkers some of this stuff had got to. And then in terms of what they're all doing, again, I don't know. We we could never find this out.
00:21:11
Speaker
I had examples where you would catch civil servants just openly lying to us. And on on simple stuff, there's an event coming up. Have you invited these people I've asked you to invite? Yes.
00:21:22
Speaker
No, you haven't. I've asked them, they haven't got the invite. Oh, no, we haven't. So you were lying. Yes. And then I find myself with no actual recourse to punish any of those people, to discipline them, to get anything done.
00:21:32
Speaker
So just kind of opens sedition against the government of the day. And that's because although people, I think, assume that they are all kind of total trots or whatever, I think it's a bit more insidious than that. And not just, you know all kind of Bolsheviks or anything.
00:21:46
Speaker
They are all ah kind of centralizers and statists who just think, well, we're the people who are smart and in charge. We'll have all the power. Thank you very much. And if these ministers and these advisors and try and get in the way too much, then we'll just kick them to the curb. We can always outnumber them and we can always outlast them.
00:22:03
Speaker
And so you just kind of go yes, minister, very brave and shunted off to one side. And while you mentioned, yes, minister, just now, was written by a bloke who was a massive Thatcherite, who sent a copy of one of the first scripts to some of the Thatcher advisors signed saying, I hope this helps you out.
00:22:19
Speaker
I hope this helps because you know I'm a fellow traveler and I know that you guys need public to see what they're like. There you go, right?
Incentives and Coordination Challenges
00:22:27
Speaker
Perfect. That's exactly it. And and and that so for that kind of stereotype is exactly right. and And one example of this I'd give you is coming into people will have hopefully forgotten all about lockdowns, but they may remember the Omicron wave when we almost had that fourth lockdown.
00:22:42
Speaker
And all of the chat, for example, inside the DFE at the time was, well, the teaching unions don't want to have to go in and teach. They want to get to go back home again and maybe teach on Zoom or whatever. so they haven't got to bother going up and they don't want to get a sniffle from the kids.
00:22:55
Speaker
no particular interest or care about the children themselves. You had people from the unions coming in and from the science department in the Department for Education saying, let's mask up all the primary school kids. Yep, even when they're sitting down at their desks all day long, it's a zero cost intervention.
00:23:11
Speaker
Well, the idea that making small children wear masks all day long is zero cost and won't hinder their development at all. And so I i did manage to force through a review into this to see if it was true. And even the DFE said, no, it's going to hurt kids quite a lot to make them wear masks. But that was so far down their their rank order of priorities after stakeholder engagement of the trades unions and their own whims of not wanting to come into the office and have an early Christmas and so on and so forth.
00:23:37
Speaker
but that The incentives are totally out of line because you can't fire those people and they're not part of the team that won the election. So they care if the manifesto gets done? Well, maybe, but not particularly.
00:23:48
Speaker
Yeah, and for anyone who who may be wondering whether or not this is an intractable problem to solve, we will get to how you can potentially go about reforming the civil service a bit later. But I do want to continue diagnosing the problem.
00:24:05
Speaker
From what I've heard, there is a lack of accountability. There is a lack of transparency. There is obviously mass inefficiencies. It's interesting, though, because I was about to go to culture, it's interesting to hear you say that there may not be a progressive, woke, left-wing ideology that just permeates the civil service in the way that perhaps I had assumed.
00:24:30
Speaker
You're saying that these are people more who don't necessarily really believe in anything other than bureaucracy and process. Is that the case? Well, I think if you've got an organization, and we we' just we might as well stick with the DfE for this, because actually the civil servants in the treasury where I worked were annoyingly excellent.
00:24:47
Speaker
And those in the cabinet office were excellent as well. And and there are plenty of good ones around. But the DfE is big enough that you can see all the multitudes in there. You have, of course, got people in there who care desperately about children, who care about the future of the country and how important it is that you have an educated workforce. And the reforms that the Tories did, just to be partisan for a second, were really impressive and and life changing for lots of people. where you know 66% or something of schools were good or outstanding when the coalition government came in in 2010.
00:25:15
Speaker
It's now like 90%. So there have been massive changes that will help counterbalance a lot of the decline that we've seen. So there are people, of course, who care about that. There are people who care about genuine safeguarding issues and all the rest of it.
00:25:27
Speaker
In that mix, you have also got all the woke warriors. And it's it's really very difficult to fight against some of that because in the kind of trade-offs inside the system, you don't really care about that. You're definitely not willing to lose your pension over saying it's mad that we're saying it's okay to chop children's genitalia off. You're not going to fight about that particularly. It's not worth your while.
00:25:45
Speaker
And it goes against all the civil service impartiality, but it happens anyway. And for a while, it felt pretty much a fate accomplished. There's nothing you could do about it. And Amanda Spielman, who ran Ofsted, the school regulator, has an excellent piece recently in The Critic about this that people should go and look at, where she was the only person really not to make an announcement about George Floyd and not to make you know alliances with all of these sorts of very, very progressive bodies because she wanted to stay impartial. And she was a very, very small minority of of leaders in the public sector in doing that. So you've got people that are super mad and woke, and it's big enough that you can have that. And you've got you know specific religious groups. as the kind of There's the Muslim network in the home office.
00:26:26
Speaker
And there have been stories about how they think, oh, what we're doing is very terrible and evil and trying to curb immigration. You've got the LGBT movements doing their things. And some of it's marvelous and lovely, and some of it's definitely not. And it's hard to get to grips with it.
00:26:38
Speaker
But because if you're a special advisor and you're fielding all this stuff and the attacks from the opposition and trying to get your own stuff done, you never get anything done at all. And you're like the catcher in the ride trying to stop things. And then you've got all the jobs worth who don't care.
00:26:50
Speaker
So in the mix of these huge organizations, You've got all these different competing interests, but what you should just have is a Rolls-Royce machine that is trying to get done what the elected government of the day would do. That seems
Political Navigation and Reform Planning
00:27:02
Speaker
to me legitimate. And all this other activity, whether it's lovely and marvelous or not, is increasingly illegitimate. And that's the real problem that we've got.
00:27:10
Speaker
You said the mix of competing interests because that's where my mind was going next. And it looks to me as if one of the great problems in the running of this country over the last 20 years has been misaligned incentives across departments. And the classic example is the economic imperative, which by the way now I think has been conclusively debunked, but the economic imperative to pull in huge amounts of cheap migrant labor to artificially boost GDP numbers.
00:27:42
Speaker
And then you have, for example, the immigration department imperative to lower immigration numbers in line with the cries from people at this stage now on both sides of the political spectrum for a long period of time.
00:27:59
Speaker
Is there any coordination across these departments? How do those sorts of misaligned incentives get addressed, if at all? It's a great question. I can see your your management consultant brain picking into gear on on the systems process of all of this stuff.
00:28:15
Speaker
Well, the way it used to work is that everybody would sit around the cabinet table, all the top members, and they would hash these things out. And then they would take whatever had been agreed back to those officials who would then go and work it up.
00:28:26
Speaker
But now you have this sort of weird kabuki theater. And again, Dominic Cummings has described this very well, where you have these people sitting around the cabinet table and they'll get a bit of paper and they'll go, My department has blah, blah, blah. And they'll just read out the lines that have been written for them. And then it'll come to the next person and they'll read their bit. And it's all been stitched up and agreed beforehand.
00:28:43
Speaker
And where the debates really happen is between the departments fighting all against the Treasury, which is in Treasury, civil servants, much more powerful than most of the members of the cabinet, if not almost all of them, in determining where the money comes from and where it goes in in what you can and can't do. And there's not really any joined up thinking. That's what the prime minister's job is supposed to be.
00:29:02
Speaker
But a huge amount of his or her time is taken up with other stuff. And you get this kind of crazy bottleneck where, you know, they're doing silly photo shoots at the same time as deciding matters of life and death in secret service operations at the same time as trying to compete in fights between these different groups.
00:29:18
Speaker
And it tends to be that the Treasury wins very often. and And that's good in some ways because the Treasury is the one bit that is trying to stop public spending from going absolutely tonto. And yet, of course, with that very powerful Treasury, we've seen debt absolutely skyrocket. and they're not doing a very good job of that either.
00:29:35
Speaker
and and And I think it's worth bearing about how they're, to really go into the the weeds a little bit, how they're supposed to talk to each other. There's a system called the right-round system, as in W-R-I-T-E.
00:29:45
Speaker
So again, in the old days, before you had emails or whatever, Ministers would write letters, there'd be copies of those letters made, and they would go around to all the members of the cabinet to say, i am proposing to do this, this, and this. So transport secretary, I'm proposing to give money for these roads and rail and whatever.
00:30:01
Speaker
If you've got any particular interest in this, as a member of the cabinet who will be soon signed up to this through collective cabinet responsibility, let me know. And you get a bit of a back and forth on that.
00:30:11
Speaker
But that whole process has almost entirely been, again, taken up by the civil s servants, discussing it amongst themselves. And a very pressed and harried secretary of state doesn't have a lot of time to deal with that. Because remember, of course, that the secretary of state's time is run by diary secretaries who are civil servants inside their private office, whose job promotion depends not on the secretary of state themselves, but on the other civil servants. So it's totally in their interests. to fill up the minister's time with all kinds of other gumps so they can't bother doing any of this.
00:30:41
Speaker
Then you see these silly stories about trying to put the special advisors as far away in physical terms in an office, as far away as possible from where the Secretary of State is. So we were stuck in a glass box around the corner and couldn't see when senior civil servants would sneak in to see the education secretary and say, please don't do this. Please do it that way instead, even though we told them that they were lying and they would press gang you and say, if you do this, we'll get something else done for you in these sorts of trade-offs. And it's all done behind the scenes and it's all done by these unelected people. So the level of kind of coordination doesn't actually happen properly either.
Lessons from Trump's Administration
00:31:13
Speaker
And it's done sort of, I suppose, with a veneer of legitimacy by the prime minister at the end. But he's so harried as well, or she's so harried as well, with different things going on, that they don't really understand any of the detail about it. And they don't trust the secretary of state enough for it to be worth their while to really get into the weeds of any of it.
00:31:30
Speaker
Yeah, you you've just talked about the prime minister ah in the abstract, but the problem I imagine is compounded when you have someone like Keir Starmer, who is the very embodiment of a bureaucratic, managerial role.
00:31:46
Speaker
political ideology as opposed to someone who has genuine conviction and a plan for where they want to take the country. So whilst the the role itself may be incredibly difficult, I imagine having someone like a Starmer in this position at the moment has compounded the problems that we've just talked about.
00:32:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think that the fact that um this maybe will help come on to how you fix some of this stuff. Labour significantly failed to plan for any of this stuff. So Starmer, who himself is a creature of this kind of world, and he was the director of public prosecutions at the Crown Prosecution Service, a job by all accounts he quite liked and probably should have stayed in.
00:32:26
Speaker
and which is very much a kind of block machine. No one elected him to it. He got a knighthood off the back a bit. He liked being in his little area where process mattered much more than actually locking away people like Jimmy Savile or and any of the people that s slipped through his net.
00:32:39
Speaker
And so he gets in there and thinks, oh, thank God, those evil Tories are gone and everything is going to be fine now. What do I do? And then just takes the advice of the civil servants. A great example of this was the winter fuel allowance being taken away very early on.
00:32:53
Speaker
don't think it was in the Labour Manifesto. Something that that the civil servants tried to do for ages, because it does make sense economically. Why would you give this bung to everybody and not means test it, especially when there is a means tested winter fuel allowance separately for pensioners who are actually in poverty? So in economic terms, you can see it.
00:33:11
Speaker
But obviously, politically, a stupid thing to do if you don't roll the pitch or or balance it in other ways. And yet, Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer totally walked into this because they just believed the civil servants were all lovely and marvelous.
Conservative-led Reform Potential
00:33:23
Speaker
And I think more than that, they got high on their own supply of saying, it's just the Tories, the Tories, the Tories, and everything was going to be fine afterwards. So you're not coming into into a new administration on day one with a whole battle plan really by this point, because the odds are so stacked against you as you, your 100 ministers, your 100 special advisors, maybe some kind of think tank bods out there who are vaguely aware of some of this stuff.
00:33:45
Speaker
versus the literally half a million civil servants. And certainly they're the ones with all the actual power. They're the ones who know where the staplers and the pens are, let alone how to log on to things, let alone how to actually talk to the police and the military and all the rest of it. If you don't have a plan and Starmer didn't have a plan because he thought it would be fine, you're sunk on day one.
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah, so what I'm trying to work through in my mind is how much of this is an intractable problem, no matter who is the elected representative, and how much of this could be reversed by seriously great leaders.
00:34:20
Speaker
let's Let's assume, let's let's you know kind of go full-on political nerd and pull together a dream team. yeah Let's get Disraeli in there. Let's get Pityunga in there. You mentioned...
00:34:31
Speaker
I didn't know, let's get Newton to deliver the mail. Let's get, you know, Thatcher in there. Let's get Churchill. Let's get, you know, our all time United Kingdom dream team. and We want Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore in there, definitely. Sure, why not? You clearly can kind of chuckle of the migrant rapists in prisons.
00:34:53
Speaker
let's assume that you have the absolute best of the best in leadership roles across the cabinet and in the broader the broader parliamentary party.
00:35:04
Speaker
how much of it like How much of that of a difference would that make? How much of this comes down to the fact that we have at the moment, I would argue, uniquely weak political leaders and how much of this now is just an insurmountable blob that no matter how talented you are, you wouldn't be able to overcome it?
00:35:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's a really, really good question. I think the the the need for talent is always obviously massively high. And through most of human history, I suppose, the most talented people would rise in in in good scenarios to being involved in some way in the administration of the of the state.
00:35:43
Speaker
Even in, you know, the kind of Roman senatorial class, you had ah a novice homo, a new man like Cicero who made it to the very top because he was so much better than everybody else. And I'm sure that listeners can think of other other versions, Richie coming through or or whatever.
00:35:55
Speaker
and And Thatcher, right? The ah grocer's daughter of humble means who makes it to the top just by being so damn determined and talented and the rest. If you've got all those people in there with all that executive experience, bear in mind, I suppose, play the the thought experiment out. They've got experience already and some scars on their back.
00:36:11
Speaker
They can wrangle and wrestle this horrible blob into doing things at once. People always use Michael Gove as the example of someone who managed to make the Department for Education do all these great reforms and in other ways as well.
00:36:23
Speaker
What happens when those people, when when Isaac Newton gets done in a honeypot scandal by the CCB or something, and then he gets replaced by someone who goes, oh, God, I don't fancy that much. And they're not very high quality.
00:36:34
Speaker
You can't just rely, I think, on having it a supremely talented team to deal with this sort of rubbish system. Yes, you need talent and we should find ways to attract that talent in. a big chunk of it's going to have to be money, by the way. And you could peg it to the strength of the economy, right? The economy goes up.
00:36:49
Speaker
Ministers and MPs get paid more. Economy goes down, they get paid less. The public will probably quite like that element in there. and does My understanding is that Singapore does have a model which is not unlike that. And by the way, they they pay the prime minister a million pounds a year.
00:37:03
Speaker
And Lee Kuan Yew did once say, it's true, we've got the best paid politicians in the world, but I can guarantee you they're not the richest because, you know, any whiff of corruption and they're out. The transport secretary got arrested and put in prison only a few years ago for taking a ticket to watch the Formula One, I think, because he was being paid $850,000 a year or something like that.
00:37:23
Speaker
So that's very, very strict
Cultural Challenges in Governance Reforms
00:37:24
Speaker
on these things. And by the way, the reason I mentioned Lee Kuan Yew and you mentioned Singapore rightly is that they looked at Britain in the 1950s, just as this trend was starting to kick off, saw how incredible a place it was. Kuan Yew talks about when he's in Cambridge and he sees this honesty box for newspapers, take a newspaper, leave a penny or whatever it was. And that's funny. so But people don't don't nick them.
00:37:44
Speaker
What? ah How wonderful and incredible a society you've built. And goes there with that iron in him and determines to build that, to carve that out of a kind of sweaty island in the southeast of Asia.
00:37:55
Speaker
And so he's a great example of this and just has to plow on for 30 odd years to try and hammer this kind of stuff in. I think that the problem is is deeper. It's not intractable, as you asked. It's deeper. It's a philosophical one.
00:38:08
Speaker
But the reason that I'm hopeful is that we, I think, nailed the formula in about 1688, 1689 with the Glorious Revolution. And if you bear with me for just a second on this, you've got the aftermath of the Civil War, where Thomas Hobbes comes out and writes the Leviathan saying what government actually needs to have is all the power to get stuff done to keep people safe from when there's from the threat of another civil war.
00:38:29
Speaker
And that's where he writes the biathlon. And I think that some extent the British state should have that because after an election, there's no stupid checks and balances because we didn't lie about George III and have to invent all of that so that we can have you know huge power. If the parliament signs something, it can just happen. So you've got that there.
00:38:45
Speaker
Then you've got what John Locke was talking about, again, just before the glorious revolution in his second treatise on government, where he kind of brings in the idea that government gets its legitimacy via the consent of the people who are governed. And we kind of get the idea that a popular democracy is a legitimate source for people. And that's obviously where Jefferson gets the idea from almost 100 later.
00:39:06
Speaker
later The lovely thing about that, of course, is if a government is doing something and gets it wrong, you can change course. And God, we've seen that in the United States in the last election. And we've seen the opposite in our last election, where you change the government and no one changes because of the blob.
00:39:20
Speaker
So we should have, we have elections. That should be something that makes John Locke happy. And finally, you've got a parliamentary system, the mother of all parliaments, as as England was called by Churchill. A thousand years plus of it being kind of unitary state.
Historical Lessons for Current Reforms
00:39:33
Speaker
We've got all this history.
00:39:34
Speaker
We've got all these great seats of education. And so we should make someone like Edmund Burke very happy with what he'd call the wisdom of the ages and all these great ideas. So why in that system that we had by about 1688, and certainly refined by the time Pitt comes in and Burke is writing,
00:39:50
Speaker
Why has all this stuff fallen down now? And why are we probably possibly closer to a civil war than we were at any time since Thomas Hobbes was writing? Well, because that that power of Leviathan that Hobbes wanted has been frittered away by the executive agencies and quangos and stuff that you mentioned.
00:40:05
Speaker
Locke's idea of of consent and the the mechanism being able to change course has been destroyed by the fact that the blob never changes. And you've got all these sort of year zero morons who are the people who are in the civil service right now, who think they know better than everybody from every age past, which is why we're getting rid of jury trials and mad stuff like that.
00:40:23
Speaker
So if we just go back to these kind of three great ah English British philosophers and re-remember the glorious lessons of that revolution, and the the way that our constitution should work and we kick out all of this detritus, there's no reason why you can't see a great resurgence and a great restoration of that system that made us top nation for so long. It's just about having the plan and the will to get there.
00:40:47
Speaker
Okay. Well, that's a really good segue into how this could actually happen. But before we get to what that would look like, I think there is an important premise in question, and that is whether particularly reform genuinely has the will to do it.
00:41:03
Speaker
So, the obvious the obvious analogy would be potentially the first Trump administration where there was very clear policy views on immigration.
00:41:17
Speaker
on the economy on a range of different policy areas and yet very little got got done because of the resistance from the administrative state.
00:41:27
Speaker
Trump, to his credit, learned his lessons. He got people like Stephen Miller in place and he said, right, for the next four or five years, you are going to be writing policy you are going to be investigating, how the administrative state works, so on day one, we can absolutely hammer through my agenda as quickly as humanly possible.
00:41:49
Speaker
And as a result of that, whether or not you agree with but Trump from a political perspective, he's been much far more effective at getting things done his second term than his first. The criticism of reform is that Nigel Farage doesn't appear to have the desire to build a team around him that would have the capacity to be able to take on the blob.
00:42:12
Speaker
The Dominic Cummings as of this world. Dominic Cummings, for me, is the closest equivalent to someone of Marcus Stephen Miller who would be able to actually try and and come up with some sort of a plan to to take on the administrative state.
00:42:26
Speaker
Do you think Nigel Farage, and let's assume, reform wins the election. That's, again, a long way away. Do you think he actually has the desire to do what is necessary to actually turn around all of, to your point, the detritus that has built up over now decades and decades and decades?
00:42:45
Speaker
it's It's, I suppose, the the the question, isn't it? and And millions of people are wondering it. There are those, obviously, who are members of reform and say they'll vote for them, who, I guess, believe that.
00:42:56
Speaker
There are Tories who intensely dislike Farage, which I think is a bit silly because... fundamentally, he believes all the same things that all the Tories from free Cameron, and actually most of them through Cameron as well believed, ah definitely is a kind of Thatcherite at heart. so it's a bit silly to dislike him. But all those who are wavering are wondering, do they have exactly as you say, the seriousness and the the ability and the will to get all this stuff done?
00:43:18
Speaker
So I suppose, I i ah There are people that say, oh, Farash doesn't really want it, which I think is complete cobblers. ah Why on earth would he have given up, you know, a sweet lucrative life in the States on Fox News, bigging up Trump, chilling out in Mar-a-Lago, having a lovely old time,
Nigel Farage and Reform Politics
00:43:34
Speaker
relaxing? Because, you know, he's been through what? A plane crash and cancer and God knows what else.
00:43:38
Speaker
When he could just be hanging out at Boysdale's and having, as the the the old UKIP lot used to call it, PFLs. The P stands for proper, the L stands for lunch, and people can guess what the F stands for. Why would he bother going through all of this and the death threats against his life and having to wander around with huge, great burly security around him and all the horrible intrusiveness and all the rest of it if he didn't want it? So I think that fits slightly for the birds. I'd like to perhaps see him you know cut down on the on the boozing and the fags just to make sure he makes it to the start line, if nothing else, for the the sake of democracy.
00:44:09
Speaker
But I think that when it comes to ah the the the the iron wheel and the ideas and stuff, what he's got in his favor that people before him haven't had is the lesson, exactly as you say, of Trump one versus Trump two.
00:44:23
Speaker
And he's in you know constant communication with a lot of those people. hed think he's the first person to speak at a J.D. Vance fundraiser many years ago. So he's known the vice president for a long time. knows all of those guys, has seen and learned the lessons of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, and as you say, Stephen Miller and all the preparation.
00:44:41
Speaker
But he's also got the salutary lesson of the other big beast of of right-wing politics in Britain in the 21st century, Boris Johnson. Someone for whom for a while was Teflon and could walk on water and won that stonking majority in 2019, was close to being world king and all the rest of it, and threw the whole damn thing away with his own hubris and laziness and mendacity and pettiness.
00:45:06
Speaker
And so he looks, I think, at Boris, who has become, i'm ah I'm afraid to say, and I'm someone who worked on one of the leadership, i worked on one of the the teams that did events for Boris and led one of those teams. So in the great Grimsby fish market at 4 a.m. in the general election campaign saying, here you Prime Minister, I've got you the most photogenic fish to hold for this and all that kind of stuff.
00:45:25
Speaker
He's someone who's become ah a bit of a laughingstock. And when Boris had a pop at Nigel Farage at Margaret Thatcher's 100th birthday celebrations a few months ago, having a go at him for being insufficiently sound on Ukraine, which is a legitimate criticism in some ways.
00:45:39
Speaker
And all the media ran to Farage and they said, go on, what are you going to say back? you're going to hit him back because they want nothing more than the kind of big ding dong. Farage just went, sad, isn't it? Look at him, which is a great response. And he can see that Boris has turned from the the world king into a bit of a joke and seen that Trump managed to turn that around and the Boris won't be able to. so He's got those lessons. And so I think that if he wasn't serious, he wouldn't be trying to do it.
00:46:03
Speaker
There's a difference, of course, between trying to do it and having the plan to be able to. Let's take what I think is a less likely scenario, but not outside the realms of possibility, and say that there is a rejuvenated Conservative Party that can somehow turn it around over the next three and a half years and either gain some sort of a position where they can they can have some sort of coalition government with reform,
00:46:28
Speaker
or win outright. At the moment, it looks very unlikely, but let's play the thought experiment out. Kimi Badenoch, to her credit, has actually become more popular in last few months, and there has been some signs that the Conservatives improving in in in the polls, albeit from a woefully low base.
00:46:45
Speaker
Could the Conservatives be trusted to try and go about this epic task of effectively taking on the Administrative State, given that they, one could argue, extended and continued on the Blairite project of or building out that Administrative State over their 14 years in power?
00:47:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that there is definitely the prospect that that could happen. i'm much more confident that if they were given a chance, they could do it. It's whether, as you say, they'll be given that chance again. and And why I think in some ways, some kind of coalition looks electorally more likely.
00:47:23
Speaker
depending again on how these various things play out. And as you said earlier, well, three and a half years, maybe still of this rancid Labour government to go. So it's lots of big ifs. But if you took, you know, you asked about a champion cabinet of all the historical greats. You took a modern day version of that and you had the kind of reforming zeal and the energy and the not giving a toss what the Guardian thinks of reform.
00:47:44
Speaker
And you take the scars on the back of we Tories who went through that system and realised where some of the bodies were buried and some of the games that were played and all the rest of it. That to me seems like a great a great sort of scenario, a great pairing in some ways.
00:47:57
Speaker
The Tory party's big risk is that it does just get spliss
Future Political Scenarios and Coalitions
00:48:01
Speaker
completely in half. And some of the people who should never have been in it in the first place do finally toddle off to the Lib Dems where they belong. And some of the kind of rancid careerists who should never been in in politics anywhere and should be off, don't know, mining cobalt in a mine somewhere as a penalty for their their crimes against government, should be nowhere near it. And that the sound ones go off to reform. That's the danger.
00:48:21
Speaker
And they could get split down the middle. But there is a huge amount of of talent in there still. You think a lot of the kind of bigger, bigger beasts have disappeared off and a newer generation are coming through. And just a few to watch. mean, everybody will know Rob Jenrick, who is totally radicalized by his different experiences. i don't think it's a fake at all. You know, goes into the home office to watch mad Suella Brabhamun, realizes that it's everyone else but her who's mad and ends up quitting the government because Rishi Sunak doesn't care enough to of ah obsessing the Guardian to do the things that are necessary to secure the border. Everyone knows about that story.
00:48:53
Speaker
But of course, he had the same same revelation when he was in the housing department and realizing that not enough houses were built. But there's someone else called Alex Burghardt, who won't be a household name. is the the It's a great title, the Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who his job it is to think about all the kind of Whitehall reform and constitutional reform and all this sort of stuff. And he's got a PhD in Anglo-Saxon mercy and history or something, and has a massive great brain.
00:49:18
Speaker
and is doing a lot of this kind of heavy thinking as well. And so they've got the talent and they've got the experience of people like Katie Lamb coming through and Jack Rankin and some of these guys. It's is more for me a question of will the public ever forgive and forget?
00:49:31
Speaker
Or can there be, despite all the kind of mudslinging that goes back and forth, a kind of grand coalition on the right? Because the only thing that's going to stop the right, I think, from getting in, with Labour being as awful as it is, and the Green Party being as completely cuckoo for coca puffs as they are, is if reform and the Chories fail to come to some kind of merger or understanding or deal or one eats the other or whatever it may be.
00:49:55
Speaker
But that's the big concern for me, that if they can't get in and and make that deal and swallow their pride in some way. Yeah, and the loathing of Farage is such that it is not outside the realms of possibility. In fact, I think it is very possible that you could have some Frankenstein coalition of the Greens, Labour, the Lib Dems, a few nutty...
00:50:16
Speaker
sultana corbin types for it to come hearty the fruit and nut party all come together basically to to to stymie reform and in order to be able to overcome that you're right there may have to be some pride being swallowed on both sides of the right to say that well that's the hour That's the way forward.
Collaboration for Governance Challenges
00:50:39
Speaker
You summarise the elements of the Conservative Party quite nicely there, and it was summarised in a way that I'd heard myself, in that about a third of the current Conservative Parliamentary Party are rancid careerists who don't really believe in anything other than attaining power for its own sake.
00:51:00
Speaker
About a third, you know, wets who really should be in the Lib Dems. And about a third are actually good, solid conservatives. Is that break down about right? Yeah, i I don't know that the exact number. bit And of course, those those careerists, some of them may finally discover what made them conservatives in the first place and and feel liberated from the old paradigm of, you can't say that-ness. which is, i think, what's afflicted so many. That's meant that people have had to go along for a while with Greta-ism and with sort of, you know, it's okay to chop off kids' bits-isms and all these sorts of mad, evil things, and they'll feel unencumbered by it. And Jenrick, to some extent, I think, has admitted this.
00:51:38
Speaker
and He said when he came in, he just said and did all the things he had to do at the time in order to get into politics. He came in in a by-election in 2014 and did the stuff you've got to do to climb the greasy pole, which, by the way, has been and a feature of politics.
00:51:51
Speaker
for all time that there's ever been this, going back to Rome and Athens, you have to kind of hold your nose for a certain while on some of these issues. Not everybody can be ah Cato the Elder or Cato the Younger and sit on the sidelines and and be a purist. Sometimes people have to hold their nose and run up their sleeves. Cicero always complained of Cato the Younger, that he acted as if he lived in the Republic of Plato, not the shithole of Romulus. And it's very much the latter in in Westminster and and Washington and and Canberra, and I'm sure, for all the rest as well.
00:52:19
Speaker
so was he that was he Was he the one who drew a bath as Vesuvius was blowing up? Yeah, that sounds entirely right. It's that kind of laconic, it card doesn't matter and all the rest, right? so So there are some people that can be won over by just saying, look, it's okay.
00:52:32
Speaker
Trump won. You don't have to pretend that there are 87 genders again. It's fine. Show some spying. You're actually quite a talented administrator. It's all right. And then you've got some who I think just do need to go. A woman called Caroline Noakes, who's deputy speaker, who voted in a tie motion the other day something about rejoining a customs union or something that voted in favor. like, you're a Tory and you're just voting to ruin all the kind of free trade deals we've signed and go back inside a chunk of the EU. Like, what the hell are you doing?
Cultural Changes for Effective Reform
00:52:59
Speaker
What's the point of you?
00:53:00
Speaker
And then you've got a couple of people are most people who are indistinguishable from between reform and the Tories. and And the nice thing about what we're saying were in terms of what's going to be required to reform the state and to get us back to a kind of constitutional settlement that hundreds of years of Brits and then Australians for that matter will would recognize.
00:53:18
Speaker
There's no difference between what reform and the Tories want, not really. They all want to have you know more executive power again, as our constitution should be. They want to take power out of the hands of unelected bureaucrats and judges.
00:53:29
Speaker
They want you know sounder money, which reform are getting better on, because as this reform have made the Tories have a better immigration policy. think the Tories are fighting to make sure that reform have a better economic policy from some of the the mad sort of spending that they were talking about a little while ago. So for a bit longer, it's okay, I think, to have two parties of the right taking chunks out of each other.
00:53:47
Speaker
because it pushes them into a more sensible right-wing position. Something is going to have to happen, and it's out of our control to some extent, but you just hope that the egos are not going to get in the way of the absolute imperative of saving the country. Because unlike the the Trump example, I don't think our demographics allow us that many more elections that we get wrong as our problems stack up, as the demographic challenges stack up, as the number of Islamists in the country stack up, and as the debt stacks up.
00:54:14
Speaker
Yeah, five-year terms are certainly a very, very long period. And before I get letters on reflection, I think it may have actually been Pliny the Elder who was the one who was drawing the bath as Vesuvius exploded.
00:54:27
Speaker
Final question. The term glorious revolution is a wonderful term. There is a doom and gloom in the United Kingdom at the moment. Very few people have any sort of optimism for the future, which is why you see so many young people fleeing to Dubai, which is why you see so many people sitting on the couch claiming benefits without any real sense of purpose.
00:54:51
Speaker
It's grim. There's no two ways around it. It is grim. But I do like that term glorious. I like how you are trying to reframe this conversation. How optimistic are you that things can turn around?
00:55:03
Speaker
I'm super optimistic in in all kinds of ways. that the phrase glorious revolution is supposed to have come about because it was a largely bloodless coup of of parliament re-asserting itself over James II welcoming in William of Orange and and the start of this kind of constitutional settlement we've talked about that turned us from a sort of slightly odd balmy nation. they were wonderful in our own
Optimism for UK's Future Reforms
00:55:25
Speaker
ways, but into top nation that managed to invent Australia and America and New Zealand and Canada and, oh by the way, the rest of the modern world.
00:55:32
Speaker
And the dog that people may have heard wandering around, I named him Tennyson after the poet, who's, I know, incredibly pretentious and partly because it's a funny name to shout in a field. But Tennyson has that great line in Ulysses, though much is taken, much abides. And that gives me a lot of succor, a lot of hope, because although things are as grim as you say, there's still so much that abides in the United Kingdom, in that constitution, in our language, in our what's called human capital, let's just say in our people, in the educational institutions that we've got, in that bloody mindedness to turn things around when it goes wrong.
00:56:08
Speaker
And the sheer fact that we haven't tried really to deal with any of this stuff. there's a bit of an attempt by the coalition government to reduce spending and it did that mo okay for a bit. But we haven't really tried to get to grips with our debt.
00:56:19
Speaker
We certainly haven't tried to get to grips with any of our demographic problems because we've voted for the last 50 years for the party that says it will cut immigration. And with the exception of the Thatcher period, we raised immigration. So we've been doing the opposite of what the public have been telling us to do.
00:56:32
Speaker
We haven't tried anything to assimilate people from all these countries or to deport any of them for that matter. So as soon as we start trying to do that and we start saying, I'm sorry, it's just not British to allow five-year-old girls in the school around the corner from me to be forced as part of the school uniform to wear hijabs and never be allowed to feel the wind in their hair. Or we might just have to now ban cousin marriage and ban barbaric practices for for killing animals for food. Just simple things like that to see if it turns the dial, let alone, as you say, the massive fact that we shell out huge, huge amounts of money, 100 billion a year or something on the welfare system that doesn't actually get many people out of welfare. And as we talk a big game about wanting economic growth, we do absolutely everything we can to strangle it.
00:57:15
Speaker
So the thing for me that is different from the the crises that we've faced in the past of of Hitler across the channel, of Napoleon across the channel, of the Armada across the channel, all the rest of it, is that these are all self-caused problems. And if we if we just take a step back, have a bit of a plan and have some iron will, to quote Lee Kuan Yew again, to fix these things, then we could be having this conversation in 10 years thinking, bloody hell, that was a bit weird, wasn't it?
00:57:41
Speaker
when we kind of had a wobble on our own brilliance and self-confidence, so glad we turned it around and we killed off socialism and we killed off woke and we kicked all the Islamists out. And we once again live in a country with the highest GDP per capita as confident in itself, where it's safe to walk down the streets and your children can grow up and you can start a business.
00:57:59
Speaker
That isn't pie in the sky. If you can do it in the desert in Dubai and you can do it in the swampy jungle in Singapore, then damn it we can rebuild it again in this island where we invented all that great stuff in the first place.
00:58:11
Speaker
So no, I think we can have a glorious future. We can't
Closing Thoughts on UK's Reform Potential
00:58:14
Speaker
lose hope. And please, God, just don't ever vote for a socialist party again. said well a second glorious a second glorious revolution will require courageous and incisive voices such as yours james i know that there are a few little projects that you are working on to make sure that that dialogue does emerge in the public discourse over the next three and a half years we're looking forward to that mate thank you very much for a fascinating conversation and keep up the good work thank you my friends great to be with you