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S3 Episode 4: In conversation with Douglas Carswell
4 Plays4 months ago
Today we are joined by former conservative and UKIP MP Douglas Carswell. Tune in to hear us talk about the EU, the Civil Service, Elon Musk and more.
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Transcript
Introduction to Douglas Carswell and Discussion Topics
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Debatable Discussions podcast.
00:00:06
Speaker
Today we're here joined by a very special guest in Douglas Carswell, who's agreed to come on and we're going to talk about UK politics, American politics, and hopefully we'll get a very good analysis from Douglas around what is happening in the world today.
00:00:23
Speaker
So thank you for coming.
00:00:25
Speaker
Thank you for inviting me.
00:00:27
Speaker
So it is an honour to have you with us today, Douglas.
Douglas Carswell's Political Journey: From Conservative to Brexit Campaigner
00:00:30
Speaker
So could you start perhaps by giving our listeners a little sort of personal history of your career in UK politics and now over the pond in the US?
00:00:40
Speaker
Sure, very briefly, I was born in Britain.
00:00:43
Speaker
I was raised in Uganda and I now live in America by choice.
00:00:48
Speaker
But between all of that, I managed to find time to be a member of the House of Commons for 12 years.
00:00:54
Speaker
I represented Clacton in the House of Commons in Essex.
00:00:59
Speaker
And I famously, infamously, some might say, switched from the Conservative Party to the United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP,
00:01:10
Speaker
in order to try to secure a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU.
00:01:16
Speaker
And having secured the referendum, I then co-founded the official campaign Vote Leave.
00:01:21
Speaker
And since that was the main reason I went into politics, having won the referendum, I then quit and then moved to the United States almost four years ago to the day.
00:01:32
Speaker
Perfect.
00:01:33
Speaker
So you've touched on the first question there, which is regarding Brexit.
Critique of the European Union: A Failed Project?
00:01:38
Speaker
So could you tell us why did you support Brexit and do you think that has paid off so far?
00:01:44
Speaker
The European Union is a dismal and disastrous project that will bring ruin and destruction to all of those people, unfortunate enough to live within its ambit.
00:01:56
Speaker
It is a catastrophic way of running a continent.
00:02:00
Speaker
Now, the
00:02:01
Speaker
The great secret of Europe's success is, to get philosophical for a minute, that it is organized on the basis of what Hayek called evolutionary rationalism.
00:02:14
Speaker
That means there's no grand plan.
00:02:16
Speaker
You've got competing systems.
00:02:17
Speaker
In management speak today, you would say there's systems competition in Europe traditionally.
00:02:23
Speaker
That's why a
00:02:26
Speaker
pretty nondescript corner of the Eurasian landmass created the greatest art, economics, thought, literature, civilization known to humankind.
00:02:38
Speaker
Unfortunately, what the European Union does is it turns that European tradition of evolutionary rationalism on its head, and it tries to organize European society on the basis of something called constructive rationalism.
00:02:52
Speaker
This means a blueprint and a plan for everything.
00:02:55
Speaker
And it's a catastrophe.
00:02:56
Speaker
It destroys innovation.
00:02:58
Speaker
Indeed, innovation.
00:02:59
Speaker
When the European Union was first created in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Europe was still 40% of global GDP.
00:03:08
Speaker
It was still a hotbed of innovation.
00:03:10
Speaker
Since then, Europe has become ever more of an open-air museum, a backwater.
00:03:15
Speaker
And this is directly because of the European project.
00:03:20
Speaker
is destroying the very continent that it purports to strengthen.
00:03:24
Speaker
It is a catastrophe and a disaster.
00:03:27
Speaker
I believe that if I could persuade my country to abandon membership of that project, it would save itself by its example and save Europe by its example.
00:03:39
Speaker
That's still a, you know, we're still waiting to see that.
00:03:44
Speaker
Britain has been catastrophically run since leaving the European Union.
00:03:47
Speaker
But that is not to say that leaving the European Union was a bad decision.
00:03:50
Speaker
Britain has failed to take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit.
00:03:54
Speaker
It continues to, in effect, shadow the dysfunctional and defunct European model of high tax and high regulation.
00:04:02
Speaker
Britain is only going to really benefit from the advantages of leaving the European Union when it adopts a more, what you might call a more American approach, less regulation, lower taxation, more laissez-faire.
00:04:15
Speaker
I am very, very pessimistic about the future of the German-dominated Euro-Hartland.
00:04:21
Speaker
I think it will sink into a demographic and cultural abyss, and it's already well on the way to that.
00:04:28
Speaker
I think the future of Europe...
00:04:30
Speaker
under the European Union is of debt and gradual process of Islamification.
00:04:35
Speaker
And sadly, we see that it's the death of European culture.
00:04:39
Speaker
Europe mustn't blame outsiders.
00:04:41
Speaker
Europe must blame itself for its own folly in allowing itself to be ordered this way.
00:04:47
Speaker
So Douglas, I agree with you there.
00:04:49
Speaker
And I too am someone, I mean, I was obviously very young at the time, but I always found the argument of like reclaiming the UK sovereignty, becoming less regulated and more laissez
UK's Post-Brexit Leadership Failures
00:05:01
Speaker
faire.
00:05:01
Speaker
I always thought that made very much, very much made sense to me, even when I was younger.
00:05:06
Speaker
But do you think under the Starmer government that is at all realistic?
00:05:10
Speaker
Do you think the shadow of the European Union will always hang over Britain?
00:05:16
Speaker
And yes, do you think it's realistic that we will take advantage of Brexit?
00:05:21
Speaker
Of course we will.
00:05:21
Speaker
I mean, having not been responsible for our government, having lost the art of self-government for a generation, it's always going to take some time to rediscover the art of good governance.
00:05:32
Speaker
I set up immediately after standing down from Parliament something called the Good Government Project, which was an attempt to furnish an incoming Johnson government with a blueprint to overhaul the Whitehall machinery, the essentially dysfunctional triumvirate between Downing Street, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office.
00:05:50
Speaker
Government in the UK and the civil service are essentially dysfunctional.
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Speaker
They need to be fundamentally re-engineered, rewired.
00:06:00
Speaker
Boris Johnson, tragically, I mean, there's no point in really blaming the left-wing Labour government.
00:06:05
Speaker
Left-wing Labour governments do what left-wing Labour governments do.
00:06:09
Speaker
The real...
00:06:10
Speaker
culpability for this lies in the failure of a sensible, credible free market center right.
00:06:16
Speaker
Having secured Brexit, Boris Johnson catastrophically failed to do anything significant with it on many areas like regulation, environmental regulation, energy policy.
00:06:29
Speaker
In fact, he moved further to the left.
00:06:32
Speaker
So, you know, I think the fault of
00:06:35
Speaker
And fine, great.
00:06:36
Speaker
Criticize Starmer for the shortcomings if you want.
00:06:39
Speaker
It's on his watch that we are seeing Britain sinking into the abyss and becoming a second, if not third world country on his watch.
00:06:47
Speaker
But the real culpability for this and the people we should get really angry with
00:06:52
Speaker
are Conservatives who ought to have known better, who stood on election promises to do better and have catastrophically failed.
00:07:00
Speaker
None of this left-wing nonsense under Starmer would even have got the time of day if the Conservatives had got their act together.
00:07:07
Speaker
By moving to the left, what the Conservatives did is shift this so-called Overton window to the left and allow in this left-wing lunatic nonsense.
00:07:16
Speaker
What's absolutely imperative is that the centre-right in Britain, the sensible free market,
00:07:23
Speaker
conservative tradition in the broader sense, and that goes well beyond the party, re-energizes and revitalizes.
00:07:31
Speaker
So you said that Britain has not yet taken the advantage of Brexit, hasn't delivered on this.
00:07:38
Speaker
And I've got two sort of follow-up questions.
00:07:40
Speaker
That is a phrase that we've heard
00:07:42
Speaker
before from Nigel Farage.
00:07:44
Speaker
So number one is from your experience of working with him, do you think he would be a good prime minister and perhaps why?
00:07:51
Speaker
And as well, do you think that in order to fully be able to deliver on Brexit, the UK needs to leave the European Court
Overhauling the UK's Civil Service for Brexit Benefits
00:08:02
Speaker
of Human Rights?
00:08:02
Speaker
So sort of two in one question.
00:08:05
Speaker
I'll deal with both of those and then maybe sort of elaborate further on a third point I wanted to make.
00:08:09
Speaker
I mean, yeah,
00:08:12
Speaker
You asked about Nigel Farage.
00:08:13
Speaker
I don't really care who does the stuff that needs doing.
00:08:16
Speaker
I just want it done.
00:08:18
Speaker
Rather like the analogy with making films, making movies, as they call them, on this side of the Atlantic.
00:08:23
Speaker
I don't really care who gets to be the actor or the actress.
00:08:27
Speaker
I don't really care who gets to win the best acting Oscar.
00:08:31
Speaker
I just want to make sure that people like me get to write the script as to what needs to be done.
00:08:37
Speaker
Now, the reason why Farage is back in business and I get on quite well with Nigel, actually, I've had my ups and downs with him, but I communicate with him regularly and I'm very pleased to see he's representing my old seat in Clacton.
00:08:50
Speaker
I did what limited amount I could from this side of the Atlantic to try and help him get reelected, elected, I should say.
00:08:56
Speaker
I wish him well.
00:08:59
Speaker
Not because I wish ill on the Conservatives, but I think we need the energy and the vitality that reform brings.
00:09:08
Speaker
But, you know, Nigel is constantly being put back in business by a dysfunctional and derelict and moribund Conservative Party.
00:09:17
Speaker
I mean, I think the question we really ought to ask is why is it that...
00:09:22
Speaker
the party of Margaret Thatcher, a party that has had such a good record of being successful, is so bad.
00:09:28
Speaker
And I think
00:09:30
Speaker
The real answer to this is not just a failure on a particular policy question.
00:09:34
Speaker
It's because the creation of a system of A-list candidate selection, centralization of candidate selection under David Cameron and George Osborne allowed, instead of ordinary members, grassroots members to choose who represented them in parliament, it allowed the A-listers to get a whole bunch of diversity hires in.
00:09:54
Speaker
And unfortunately, in the hands of diversity hires, the Conservative cabinet and Shadow cabinet
00:10:00
Speaker
has been tragic, has been awful, has been pathetic.
00:10:03
Speaker
And until we find a way of undoing the damage of the alias candidate selection, I don't think the Conservative Parliamentary Party stands much chance of doing what needs to be done.
00:10:15
Speaker
And because of that, Nigel is very much in business.
00:10:20
Speaker
If Nigel did become prime minister and it's no longer unthinkable, I hope that he would first and foremost, before any policy question, have a template, an almost Marxist template, Leninist, I should say, template for the destruction of the bureaucrats in the administrative state in Whitehall who really run Britain and have done so much to run Britain into the ground.
00:10:46
Speaker
before accepting the job of prime minister, an incoming conservative or reform person,
00:10:54
Speaker
needs to have a clear sense of how they're going to deconstruct the civil service, how they're going to sack civil servants, how they're going to get rid of the civil service code and the ministerial code that have done so much to reduce the power of those we elect.
00:11:10
Speaker
Until you're prepared to do that, until you're prepared to, in effect, treat the British civil servants the way Margaret Thatcher treated the National Union of Mine Workers, as an enemy to be confronted and destroyed, the country will continue to decline.
00:11:23
Speaker
The struggle in Britain, I think, is between those who want to arrest decline and essentially parasitic civil service and quangocracy who are happy to manage decline so long as their pensions and their perks continue to flow their way.
00:11:38
Speaker
We need to cut them out.
00:11:40
Speaker
We need to address them.
00:11:40
Speaker
We need to confront them.
00:11:42
Speaker
We need to take on and destroy them in an almost revolutionary act.
00:11:46
Speaker
If we can do that, then I think an incoming Conservative leader will
00:11:51
Speaker
could unleash Britain's potential and Britain is, you know, undoubtedly probably the most creative piece of real estate on the planet.
00:11:59
Speaker
Unfortunately, its natural abilities have been swamped by an essentially sort of dysfunctional Byzantine system of government.
00:12:07
Speaker
We need to, we need to,
00:12:09
Speaker
The Japanese in the late 19th century had an extraordinary period of upheaval called the Meiji Restoration, where they essentially realized that as an island country, they were falling behind the rest of the world.
00:12:19
Speaker
And if they wanted not to be colonized and taken over like the rest of Asia, they needed to change internally.
00:12:24
Speaker
And it was called the Meiji Restoration.
00:12:26
Speaker
Britain needs its equivalent to the Meiji Restoration.
00:12:28
Speaker
We need to overthrow and do away with the old order in Whitehall.
00:12:32
Speaker
Sorry, I've got so into that.
00:12:33
Speaker
I've slightly lost track of your second question.
00:12:36
Speaker
Your second question was about taking full advantage of Brexit.
00:12:40
Speaker
Yes.
00:12:41
Speaker
So in order to do that, as you know, we've heard Nigel Farage say multiple times that Britain needs to leave the ECHR.
00:12:48
Speaker
What was your opinion on that?
00:12:50
Speaker
Do you think that should be done?
00:12:51
Speaker
That's very much part of what I would call the British version of the Meiji Restoration, not only come out of the European Convention on Human Rights.
00:12:58
Speaker
We need to, for example, abolish the Judicial Appointments Commission, which has done so much to put in partisan, unfair and arbitrary and subjective judges into the judiciary, undermining confidence in the British system of justice, where people are incarcerated for long periods of time for posting obnoxious comments on Facebook.
00:13:18
Speaker
We need not only to...
00:13:21
Speaker
extricate ourselves from the ECHR.
00:13:23
Speaker
We need to overturn the judicial system.
00:13:26
Speaker
We need to abolish the so-called Supreme Court.
00:13:30
Speaker
We need the wholesale.
00:13:31
Speaker
You know, you've got that picture of president of Argentina, Millet, with his chainsaw.
00:13:36
Speaker
We need to do that to the British quango state, not just cut them out of government, but if necessary, take away their pensions, take away their perks, drive them out of public life.
00:13:48
Speaker
It's either that or we become a third world country.
00:13:51
Speaker
I mean, it's literally a matter of national survival, either like, you know, the Venetian Republic.
00:13:58
Speaker
We continue to be the plaything of a parasitic elite and we will eventually be destroyed and become a museum or we're a serious country.
00:14:06
Speaker
And if we're a serious country, we need to drive out of public life, the parasitic civil service and the administrative state that now run Britain for their own convenience.
00:14:15
Speaker
We need to think of it in those terms.
00:14:18
Speaker
Oh, yes.
00:14:19
Speaker
And this sort of quite nicely leads on to the Conservative Party.
00:14:24
Speaker
As pretty much all of our listeners would have seen, Kemi Badenowk in November was elected as the new leader of the Conservative Party.
00:14:33
Speaker
However, she sort of seemed, in my opinion, at least to lack a certain level of competency and leadership within the party because, you know, she hasn't really gotten any policies.
00:14:43
Speaker
The party seems to lack some direction.
00:14:46
Speaker
So, Douglas, what are your views on this?
00:14:48
Speaker
And do you think she has the ability to revolutionise government, as you're saying?
00:14:54
Speaker
I really hope she does.
00:14:55
Speaker
I really I'm I'm I'm maybe 4000 miles away, but I'm willing her on.
00:14:59
Speaker
I'm urging her on.
00:15:01
Speaker
You know, the future of the Western world is too important to allow preferences between Tweedledum and Tweedledee parties to get in the way.
00:15:08
Speaker
I I really want her to do well.
00:15:12
Speaker
But, you know, I'm not expecting her to come out with detailed policies.
00:15:15
Speaker
I wouldn't want her to come out with detailed policies now, but I would want her to articulate clear points of principle.
00:15:20
Speaker
If you listen to interviews of Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s, she went into quite a lot of depth articulating her political philosophy.
00:15:30
Speaker
And that gave people a clear sense of what it was that they were supporting.
00:15:35
Speaker
it meant that when the pervading sense of national crisis in 1979 became a thing, she had credibility.
00:15:46
Speaker
I would like to see Kemi Bedendoc elaborate in quite a lot of detail what her pervading sense of philosophy is.
00:15:51
Speaker
Now, she said some very good things on identity politics, but I'm not sure that cuts it.
00:15:57
Speaker
We also need to see if her principles and her instincts are right on identity
00:16:03
Speaker
a whole range of other things.
00:16:04
Speaker
Of course, Margaret Thatcher needed to revitalize the country economically.
00:16:11
Speaker
Badendocq's challenge, I think, is even greater.
00:16:14
Speaker
It's a cultural and a demographic renaissance that is needed.
00:16:20
Speaker
Margaret Thatcher had to deal with the idea of socialism, the idea that a small elite were better at planning the economy.
00:16:25
Speaker
Badendoc needs to take on as well, in addition to that, the idea that all cultures are of equal worth, because what is so debilitating to Britain and the Western world at the moment is not just the expansion of the administrative state into economic spheres of life, but the idea embedded within the administrative state and public academia that all cultures are of equal worth when they're not.
00:16:47
Speaker
And cultural relativism is at the root cause of so much of Western malaise.
00:16:52
Speaker
We need to see
00:16:53
Speaker
If we have a leader, hopefully Camille, if not that, perhaps Nigel, perhaps Jenrick, someone else, the West, and particularly Britain, needs to produce leaders who are able to outline clearly and succinctly what it is about cultural relativism that has been so toxic, what is so wrong about it, and why we need to take a stand and insist upon people living in Britain recognising
00:17:18
Speaker
the better way of life that is the Western way of life and the superiority of Western rationalism over and above other creeds that, frankly, are, you know, not conducive to Western success.
00:17:32
Speaker
I'll put it that way.
00:17:35
Speaker
Yes.
00:17:35
Speaker
So following on from that, how would you, if let's say tomorrow you are prime minister, how would you attack the civil service?
Entrenched Power of UK Civil Servants: Need for Reform
00:17:46
Speaker
Because we've we've heard a lot about that.
00:17:47
Speaker
I personally am going to say I don't know a lot about the civil services, actual rights.
00:17:56
Speaker
to do, but I don't think a lot of people actually know what they do do.
00:18:00
Speaker
So how would you attack it?
00:18:02
Speaker
Would you go sort of a libertarian way of just getting rid of it?
00:18:05
Speaker
I mean, let me, by anecdote, let me give you an example.
00:18:08
Speaker
I was appointed to be a non-executive director of the Board of Trade to help oversee some of the free trade agreements that Britain negotiated with the wider world.
00:18:15
Speaker
And there's been some success in doing so.
00:18:18
Speaker
Britain has very successfully concluded an agreement with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for example, a
00:18:25
Speaker
a treaty that I think will become of growing significance with the passage of time.
00:18:29
Speaker
But again and again and again, from my perch as a non-executive director, I would see civil servants with no mandate to do so,
00:18:38
Speaker
steering the direction of the discussions in a clearly ideological and partisan way.
00:18:45
Speaker
It was almost impossible to impress upon the civil servants responsible for these negotiations that making it easier for people to import things to the UK was a win for the UK.
00:18:56
Speaker
They had an almost mercantilist view of trade, like a medieval monarch,
00:19:02
Speaker
They regarded exports as good and imports as a sign of weakness.
00:19:05
Speaker
The precise opposite of what Adam Smith teaches us.
00:19:10
Speaker
And it was almost impossible to get them to see any differently.
00:19:14
Speaker
I would find myself in discussions with civil servants gently asking them why it was that in free trade negotiations there was a chapter on women's rights and why there was a chapter on sustainability.
00:19:26
Speaker
It was they, the civil servants, who decided that a free trade agreement, which should basically be about the removal of tariffs and the acceptance of common standards, had to include basically an agenda you would find more often in the pages of The Guardian.
00:19:40
Speaker
So that taught me that the leftist mindset of the civil service is very embedded, very pervasive, and very difficult to actually confront.
00:19:49
Speaker
If I, as a non-executive director at the Department of Trade, with the ear of the minister, couldn't get them to shift direction,
00:19:56
Speaker
What chance have we got of getting them to abandon leftist ideas on immigration, on border control, on managing the economy, on interest rates, on the role of central banks, on multiculturalism, on a whole range of areas?
00:20:10
Speaker
So I think we need to realize that the civil service is not going to get better just because you elect a new government and the civil service promises to be good.
00:20:18
Speaker
You need a wholesale deconstruction of the civil service.
00:20:20
Speaker
This means you need to be able to fire the senior civil servants, appoint people.
00:20:25
Speaker
You need a system of accountability through parliament.
00:20:28
Speaker
You need government departments and quangos to have to annually appear before the House of Commons in order to get their budgets.
00:20:34
Speaker
You need to rewrite the ministerial code and the civil service code so you can frankly
00:20:38
Speaker
Treat civil servants who don't perform the way that in the private sector, the CEO of a company accountable to his shareholders would deal with middle management who defied their instructions.
00:20:48
Speaker
So you need this far reaching transformation.
00:20:53
Speaker
of the UK civil service.
00:20:55
Speaker
Incidentally, you need a civil service that no longer appoints people on the basis of diversity hires and actually starts to appoint people because they're good at the job.
00:21:04
Speaker
Take, for example, the British Foreign Office, once an esteemed institution for years now, it has appointed people on the basis of diversity criteria.
00:21:15
Speaker
And I would say as a consequence, we have a pretty third-rate amateurish diplomatic core as a direct consequence.
00:21:21
Speaker
We need to undo all of this nonsense.
00:21:24
Speaker
It will be difficult.
00:21:25
Speaker
It will require people with a stomach for the fight.
00:21:28
Speaker
It will require people to say things, as I'm saying to you, unfiltered, without deference to social niceties.
00:21:36
Speaker
It will require officials to be prepared to do this.
00:21:40
Speaker
Now, you said if I was prime minister,
00:21:43
Speaker
If I was prime minister, I wouldn't take the job.
00:21:45
Speaker
If the king was to ask me to form a government, I wouldn't take the job unless I had the orders in council that I had brought with me signed by him.
00:21:54
Speaker
I would use the orders in council that the king signs before taking office
00:21:59
Speaker
to enable me to dismiss key civil servants, to fire permanent secretaries, and to dismantle entire Whitehall departments at the swish of a pen.
00:22:09
Speaker
You need that sort of preparation for government because if you walk into...
00:22:16
Speaker
Downing Street, with the permanent secretary there setting out your diary and your agenda, if you allow that to happen, you're lost, you're doomed, you're finished.
00:22:25
Speaker
You've got to go in there and you take control and you decide who is going to be a permanent secretary and who is not.
00:22:32
Speaker
You decide the contents of your inbox.
00:22:35
Speaker
It's that important.
00:22:36
Speaker
Day one, you have to have those orders in council.
00:22:39
Speaker
Now, I started doing some preparation on this, thinking naively that in
00:22:44
Speaker
late 2019, we would have a majority that allowed us to do this.
00:22:50
Speaker
History would be very different if we had had a reformist government then.
00:22:54
Speaker
Sadly, Boris, who wanted to be Churchill, turned out to be a version of Mr. Bean.
00:22:59
Speaker
We're going to have to wait for our latter-day Churchill for a while, I think.
00:23:03
Speaker
I think what you're saying there is really interesting because it reminds me of an MP who's quite local to where I live, Dominic Raab.
00:23:11
Speaker
And Raab had these allegations of bullying.
00:23:14
Speaker
But the key takeaway, I remember him saying, was just as you said.
00:23:17
Speaker
And it was that the civil service has got too much power.
00:23:21
Speaker
They're far too opinionated.
00:23:24
Speaker
And they're just sort of, they're stuck in their old ways.
00:23:27
Speaker
They can't adapt.
00:23:28
Speaker
I mean,
00:23:29
Speaker
Rob was a straw in the wind of what was to come.
00:23:31
Speaker
He was, in effect, drummed out of office, not quite drummed out of office.
00:23:34
Speaker
He was put on the back foot repeatedly by the machine working against him on trumped-up charges.
00:23:40
Speaker
Sure, he was a little mean to people.
00:23:42
Speaker
He didn't suffer fools gladly, and he was surrounded by a lot of fools in the civil service, people who he gave clear instructions to not following through on those instructions.
00:23:49
Speaker
And occasionally, he probably spoke to them in a rather blunt and rude way.
00:23:53
Speaker
But
00:23:54
Speaker
If you're running a big organization, you should be free to talk to people in that way if they don't do what you say.
00:23:59
Speaker
That's how the world works.
00:24:02
Speaker
Raab was not guilty of anything other than trying to get civil servants who refused to do what he was instructing them to do to do it.
00:24:10
Speaker
He wasn't actually treated quite so badly as Boris Johnson.
00:24:13
Speaker
Boris Johnson was literally removed from office.
00:24:16
Speaker
by civil servants, Sue Gray and others, who engineered to oust him from office for allegedly eating a birthday cake or not eating a birthday cake at an event that may or may not have been an office party.
00:24:27
Speaker
But part of me also thought, karma, karma to you, Boris Johnson.
00:24:31
Speaker
You know, some of us offered you a blueprint of how to reform the civil service code and the ministerial code and make sure that people like Sue Gray didn't sit there in judgment of you.
00:24:40
Speaker
Boy, you should have listened to us because that might have saved you, well, it might have saved you your job.
00:24:47
Speaker
Sadly, both Raab and Boris were undermined from within.
00:24:54
Speaker
I think another great example of this is probably Liz Truss.
00:24:57
Speaker
I mean, I think Liz Truss certainly had the right instincts of getting rid of a dreadful man called Tom Scholar, who was a Mandarin in the Treasury.
00:25:07
Speaker
But I think she showed that she didn't go far enough.
00:25:10
Speaker
It's not just one or two permanent secretaries that need to be removed.
00:25:14
Speaker
she ought to have removed the governor of the Bank of England.
00:25:17
Speaker
She ought to have systematically used orders in council signed before she formed a government to systematically root out civil servants who think that they have a greater right to determine public policy than those that the British people elect.
00:25:33
Speaker
So you've said that you were raised in Uganda and now live in the US.
Promoting Freedom: Lessons from Uganda
00:25:38
Speaker
So could you tell us a bit what you do in the US now and what is the Mississippi Center for Public Policy?
00:25:44
Speaker
I try and advance the cause of freedom and liberty.
00:25:48
Speaker
Having grown up in a country run by a dictator, Idi Amin, I got from a very early age a sense that if people are left to pursue their own interests, if people are free, they flourish.
00:25:59
Speaker
If they are denied freedom, economic and political freedom, they stagnate.
00:26:04
Speaker
I saw that as a child growing up very visibly.
00:26:09
Speaker
So my great cause is that of freedom and liberty.
00:26:12
Speaker
To use the phrase of Ronald Reagan, it's lifted our species from the swamp to the stars.
00:26:17
Speaker
I think that America really is the citadel of freedom and liberty.
00:26:22
Speaker
If Britain falls tyranny to the European Union or to Keir Starmer, it will eventually, I think, so long as there's an American example to follow, swing back.
00:26:32
Speaker
But if the United States becomes a sort of extension of California or a North American version of France, then I think the lights really do go out in the Western world.
00:26:43
Speaker
Most of the great innovations that have happened in my lifetime have been innovations produced by English-speaking people overwhelmingly in the United States.
00:26:52
Speaker
We need to keep the essence of American exceptionalism alive.
00:26:58
Speaker
We need to ensure that America remains true to the traditions established in that courthouse in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.
00:27:06
Speaker
I'm trying to do that here in a part of Mississippi, sorry, a part of the southern United States, Mississippi, because I'm basically banking on the future of conservatism in America having a southern twang.
00:27:21
Speaker
If conservatism in America has a future, it will be in the South.
00:27:24
Speaker
The Southern United States is the economic center of the country.
00:27:28
Speaker
It's where businesses are moving to.
00:27:30
Speaker
We famously know that, for example, Musk moved Tesla and Twitter from California to Texas.
00:27:35
Speaker
I think just today, Zuckerberg,
00:27:40
Speaker
announced that he was essentially moving a large part of Facebook from California to the South.
00:27:45
Speaker
The Southern US, I think, is the example of how to run society successfully, low tax deregulation.
00:27:54
Speaker
And we're pushing to achieve that here.
00:27:55
Speaker
We've already had a big win on income tax.
00:27:58
Speaker
We're moving to eliminate the state income tax completely.
00:28:00
Speaker
We're now down to a flat 4%.
00:28:02
Speaker
George Osborne, when I was a member of parliament, promised to have a flat income tax.
00:28:06
Speaker
He promised that until he became a chancellor, at which point he promptly abandoned the idea.
00:28:10
Speaker
If we had a flat income tax in Britain, we would be far more competitive.
00:28:14
Speaker
We have a flat income tax now here in Mississippi.
00:28:18
Speaker
We're on the way towards eventual elimination.
00:28:21
Speaker
We've had a radical deregulation of the labor market and something that Europe and Britain in particular could do.
00:28:27
Speaker
It's having a transformative effect.
00:28:29
Speaker
I think as a consequence of that, Amazon has just announced a 12 billion, 12 billion and not million, 12 billion investment a few miles up the road from where I am.
00:28:38
Speaker
huge amounts of inward investment.
Mississippi's Economic Growth: A Model for Success?
00:28:40
Speaker
In fact, Mississippi now has the third fastest growing per capita GDP of any state in the United States.
00:28:47
Speaker
Having been poor for as long as anyone can remember, Mississippi's per capita GDP has not only now overtaken that of the UK, it will this year overtake that of Germany.
00:28:58
Speaker
I think this shows that free market, low tax deregulation reforms like the ones we're introducing here in Mississippi
00:29:04
Speaker
They work anywhere.
00:29:06
Speaker
If you want to get rich like Mississippi, number one, recognize if you're watching this in Europe that Mississippi is richer than you.
00:29:12
Speaker
Number two, try and do what we do here in Mississippi.
00:29:15
Speaker
Deregulate, let people lead their own lives, quit trying to tell them what to do.
00:29:19
Speaker
have conservatives who actually believe in reining back government control.
00:29:24
Speaker
That's what we're doing here in Mississippi.
00:29:26
Speaker
I'd be more than happy to advise people in Britain and Europe how to do it.
00:29:31
Speaker
I have to say, if I was in the UK, I probably would have had policemen knocking on my door, threatening me with arrest for what I post on social media.
00:29:39
Speaker
I don't want to live my life like that anymore.
00:29:42
Speaker
I can speak and think freely here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
00:29:46
Speaker
I hope that Britain becomes a little bit more like America.
00:29:50
Speaker
I would think it would be a shame if America would become more like Europe.
00:29:55
Speaker
Yeah, and I was actually recently on your Twitter, Douglas, and I did see that sort of infographic you had pinned.
00:30:02
Speaker
And it quite surprised me, to be brutally honest, that Mississippi was so successful because I had this idea of it being one of the poorer states in the United States.
00:30:12
Speaker
However, it's proved clearly with the Mississippi Center for Public Policy to be successful.
00:30:19
Speaker
I think it'd be immodest of me to take credit, but I play a small part in trying to push this agenda.
00:30:28
Speaker
We've got a great governor who believes in low tax.
00:30:30
Speaker
What's really interesting, though, is that when you engage conservatives in Mississippi about tax cuts or deregulation or school choice,
00:30:38
Speaker
They don't treat you as a maverick in the tea rooms the way I was treated for 12 years.
00:30:44
Speaker
If you believe in national sovereignty like I did over Brexit, you don't find yourself marginalized.
00:30:50
Speaker
You don't have your children asked to leave private schools like happened to me in London.
00:30:55
Speaker
If you believe in conservative things in this state, conservatives say, great, how can we make it happen?
00:31:00
Speaker
What can we do to build on these ideas?
00:31:03
Speaker
That's the key difference.
00:31:05
Speaker
Boy,
00:31:06
Speaker
Britain needs to make sure it has some authentic conservatives.
00:31:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:11
Speaker
And I mean, yeah, your reference there to freedom of speech is time and time again, just being brought up in the UK.
00:31:17
Speaker
I mean, figures like Toby Young, he was recently worried about if he'd be cancelled again with his Lord's appointment.
00:31:23
Speaker
But do you see a sort of divide forming in the United States between more conservative states like Mississippi and then more Democrat states, perhaps those in the North?
00:31:34
Speaker
I mean, I think it's interesting, isn't it?
00:31:37
Speaker
Clearly, America has 50 different models, and they talk about this often, to use the cliche, as a laboratory of different states.
00:31:48
Speaker
Undoubtedly, the conservative low-tax, low-regulation model is winning.
00:31:53
Speaker
I think you're going to start to see, and you're beginning to start to see signs of other states looking at what the South is doing and having to copy.
00:32:02
Speaker
It takes a lot for a politician in office to say, hey, we got this wrong.
00:32:06
Speaker
We need to learn from Texas.
00:32:07
Speaker
Boy, Texans have a swagger as it is.
00:32:10
Speaker
No one wants to admit that they need to follow the Texas or the Mississippi model.
00:32:14
Speaker
But you're beginning to start to see that, particularly with crime, actually.
00:32:18
Speaker
I think this is an area where the dial is beginning to move.
00:32:21
Speaker
For a long time, Democrat voting states had this sort of mad view about crime and they fell for the whole kind of Black Lives Matter shtick that, you know, the police were over militarized and, you know, you just need to be a bit more kumbaya, touchy feely to criminals and all would be well.
00:32:42
Speaker
You're starting to see Democrats in Democrat voting states adopting policies that frankly are conservative.
00:32:49
Speaker
I think it's only a matter of time
00:32:51
Speaker
You know, here in Mississippi, when we cut the state income tax to a flat 4%,
00:32:56
Speaker
The neighboring state set theirs at 3.9%, and they deliberately did that just to be a fraction lower.
00:33:02
Speaker
Other northern states are going to have to copy that.
00:33:05
Speaker
So you're beginning to see the effects of this competition.
Conservative Policies vs. Democrat States in the US
00:33:09
Speaker
But the genius of the American system, and I hope that actually America gets through this idea of extreme partisanship, the genius of America is that before too long, you're going to get rock-solid Democrat voting parts of the Northeast implementing essentially conservative policy.
00:33:26
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, America has this this quirk.
00:33:29
Speaker
It's got a two party system.
00:33:31
Speaker
But actually, you know, if the traditional sensible centre right Democrat.
00:33:38
Speaker
tradition, revives, ditches all this kind of woke extremist nonsense, abandons cultural relativism and becomes once again, and it's a good week to say this because Jimmy Carter is being buried this week.
00:33:49
Speaker
If the Democrats rediscover the traditions of Jimmy Carter and actually, dare I say, Bill Clinton, I'm actually, I shouldn't say this too loud, but I'm quite a fan of Bill Clinton.
00:33:59
Speaker
Then, you know, I think you'll start to see Democrat voting states doing sensible things.
00:34:03
Speaker
This is the genius of the American system.
00:34:06
Speaker
So coming almost to an end, obviously the USA has now got a new president, President Trump, who's going to be confirmed in about 13 days from when we're recording this episode.
00:34:21
Speaker
So how do you think he will perform in his second term now?
00:34:24
Speaker
Do you think he'll be better than in his first?
00:34:26
Speaker
Or do you think he'll have some more problems?
00:34:31
Speaker
Who knows?
00:34:31
Speaker
I mean, today I was listening to him talking about wanting to...
00:34:36
Speaker
by Greenland.
00:34:38
Speaker
I assumed it was a kind of a Twitter gag, a Twitter meme.
00:34:43
Speaker
And it may still be a joke.
00:34:44
Speaker
I don't know.
00:34:45
Speaker
But I suddenly thought to myself, maybe he means it.
00:34:49
Speaker
He was talking about Canada becoming an American state.
00:34:53
Speaker
Maybe he means it.
00:34:56
Speaker
I don't quite know what to expect.
00:34:58
Speaker
I don't know anyone who does.
00:35:02
Speaker
I think there's been a vibe shift in America.
00:35:06
Speaker
where for years and years and years you had politicians talking in very scripted, measured, soundbitey ways, ways that were very intentional but intentionally deceptive because they allowed different audiences to hear what the politician triangulating wanted them to hear.
00:35:25
Speaker
I think part of Trump's attraction is that he talks unfiltered.
00:35:29
Speaker
But I'm not quite sure what his priorities are going to be.
00:35:34
Speaker
If he sticks to what he was talking about before the election, school choice, tax cuts, and I think most significantly of all, returning power away from the federal government back to the states, getting rid of the Department of the Environment, getting rid of the Department of Education, then I'm very optimistic.
00:35:50
Speaker
But I do sometimes wonder that maybe he'll go off on a tangent about Greenland.
00:35:56
Speaker
And I'm just...
00:35:58
Speaker
I don't know where that will take us.
Elon Musk's Impact on Innovation and Media Freedom
00:36:02
Speaker
And Elon Musk is proving to be quite an influential figure now in not only US but UK politics.
00:36:09
Speaker
To what extent do you think Elon Musk will play a part?
00:36:12
Speaker
Do you think he'll just be there because he's rich or be there because Trump actually appreciates him?
00:36:19
Speaker
Just stop and think about it for a second.
00:36:21
Speaker
This is a guy who, if he had just built the most successful electric car company in the world, would be up there with Henry Ford.
00:36:31
Speaker
If he had built the most successful satellite distribution network that renders redundant most broadband infrastructure,
00:36:42
Speaker
you would think, wow, what an amazing man.
00:36:44
Speaker
But the fact is, he's done all of that in order to get enough money to try to colonize Mars.
00:36:48
Speaker
I mean, wow.
00:36:50
Speaker
And then as a side hustle, he has bought Twitter and undone the sort of counter-reformation of the elite who, you know, when the digital revolution
00:37:00
Speaker
Revolution came along and opinion forming was democratized, then tried to use algorithms to control what people could and couldn't say.
00:37:08
Speaker
That sort of counter reformation reached its height during the COVID lockdowns.
00:37:13
Speaker
Musk then comes along and having upended various industries and created entirely new industries.
00:37:20
Speaker
He then blows apart the media industry by finally showing journalists what it is they should have been doing all along by giving us unfiltered facts about what's going on in the world rather than the bogus phony narrative we've been fed for years.
00:37:36
Speaker
So, I mean, I'm a huge fan of Musk.
00:37:40
Speaker
Now, don't get me wrong.
00:37:41
Speaker
I sometimes send out a slightly cranky tweet late at night and I kind of think to myself, maybe I shouldn't have said that.
00:37:49
Speaker
I think he probably does that even more than I do.
00:37:54
Speaker
But I think he's a force for good.
00:37:58
Speaker
And I think he's... In every generation, you get a handful of geniuses.
00:38:05
Speaker
You had in Italy an extraordinary random gathering of geniuses that painted the Sistine Chapel and designed some of the greatest buildings we've ever seen.
00:38:16
Speaker
You had...
00:38:18
Speaker
a collection of geniuses in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution.
00:38:22
Speaker
I think Musk is up there with Michelangelo.
00:38:25
Speaker
He's one of those world historic geniuses.
00:38:28
Speaker
His genius is not to paint things.
00:38:29
Speaker
His genius is to create innovation and change through innovation.
00:38:36
Speaker
I think he's a force for good.
00:38:37
Speaker
Now, who knows if he's going to have a bust up with Trump?
00:38:41
Speaker
You know, when people of character and ego get together, sometimes they get along, sometimes they don't.
00:38:47
Speaker
I don't think it really matters.
00:38:50
Speaker
Musk setting Twitter free has already had a knock-on effect.
00:38:56
Speaker
Facebook has abandoned its Nick Clegg-inspired attempt at doctoring what we do and don't say.
00:39:01
Speaker
You know, the genie can't be put back in the bottle now.
00:39:03
Speaker
Musk has transformed the world for better through his acquisition of Twitter.
00:39:11
Speaker
I don't think people in Britain will ever again be prepared to accept the fantasy narratives that
00:39:16
Speaker
that all cultures are of equal worth and that mass immigration is an unalloyed good and that Britain should be ashamed of her past.
00:39:25
Speaker
These narratives that we've had foisted upon us by a small old establishment elite at the BBC, people are never going to accept that again.
00:39:35
Speaker
It's going to be wonderful to watch as this democratic revolution unfolds.
00:39:41
Speaker
But I think we should all thank Musk for,
00:39:45
Speaker
Thank goodness for what he does.
00:39:46
Speaker
Thank goodness for him highlighting the failures of British politicians.
00:39:51
Speaker
Thank goodness for him for focusing on some of the big macro issues like birth rates, which no one else is willing to talk about.
00:39:59
Speaker
I'm a huge fan.
00:40:00
Speaker
I think the world owes him a lot.
00:40:02
Speaker
Weirdly, and don't tell anyone I said this because it might upset some of my Republican friends, but I suspect Musk will be a bigger world historic figure than any politician or any occupant of the White House in my lifetime.
Future Political Leaders and Global Leadership Reflections
00:40:16
Speaker
So the last question for me before we finish is, we've just gone into 2025.
00:40:22
Speaker
If you could pick the best world leader for 2024 and then one world leader to watch out for in 2025, who would they be?
00:40:31
Speaker
It could be Pierre, what's his name?
00:40:32
Speaker
Polyvair.
00:40:34
Speaker
I may have mispronounced that.
00:40:36
Speaker
The Canadian guy.
00:40:38
Speaker
Now, don't get me wrong.
00:40:39
Speaker
He may, in office, turn out to be a disappointment.
00:40:44
Speaker
Actually, I don't think so.
00:40:45
Speaker
I think in his... I mean, he's got that thing kind of... Do you know what I mean by geek chic?
00:40:49
Speaker
He's slightly nerdy, but he's got geek chic.
00:40:52
Speaker
There's that really amazing clip of him eating the apple.
00:40:56
Speaker
He's got that nerdy mastery of detail.
00:41:01
Speaker
But because of that, he's got credibility.
00:41:03
Speaker
He doesn't use angry words, but he's got this incredible mastery of phrases.
00:41:12
Speaker
I listened to him the other day on a podcast with Jordan Peterson, and I thought, wow, I wish I had someone like this that I could vote for.
00:41:23
Speaker
I would watch him.
00:41:25
Speaker
I think he is going to turn out to be something really special.
00:41:30
Speaker
you know, let's wait and see.
00:41:31
Speaker
But Canada could be about to produce the best conservative leader since Thatcher.
00:41:37
Speaker
I hope so.
00:41:38
Speaker
But let's wait and see.
00:41:39
Speaker
And best world leader of 2024?
00:41:44
Speaker
I don't think we've really got one.
00:41:46
Speaker
I mean, I think probably, I'm not trying to be clever here, but I forget his name, the
00:41:52
Speaker
The Indian prime minister guy who died, he was out of office some while ago.
00:41:58
Speaker
I mean, I think he was probably the best.
00:41:59
Speaker
In terms of elevating the lives of homo sapiens, humans, I think...
00:42:07
Speaker
he probably achieved more than pretty much anyone.
00:42:12
Speaker
You know, I forget his name.
00:42:14
Speaker
Singh, was it Singh?
00:42:16
Speaker
You know, I think he is probably the most significant world leader in the news in 2024, sadly, because he died.
00:42:24
Speaker
But, you know, I just, in the Anglosphere, I just don't really see any...
00:42:31
Speaker
credible leaders right now, which is why I'm hopeful that Pierre Polivare will do well.
00:42:38
Speaker
I mean, I'll be honest, if I was in Germany, I think I would vote for the AFD.
00:42:44
Speaker
Now, that might come as a shock to people who spend too much time on the London dinner party circuit or is it the Epson dinner party circuit?
00:42:50
Speaker
I'm not sure.
00:42:51
Speaker
But I just don't see any credible figures in the traditional conservative right in Europe.
00:43:00
Speaker
So I, you know, I, because the conservative movement has failed to produce people like Pierre Polyver, I would, I would look to people like Alice Watson.
00:43:10
Speaker
But, you know, half your audience has probably reached for the off button by now for me having said that.
00:43:18
Speaker
I know, but I can assure one thing, and that is I think people definitely have enjoyed listening from you today.
00:43:25
Speaker
And that message you really, that message you preached of deregulation, revolutionising, is something that we are seeing emerge in the world today and emerge to be successful.
00:43:37
Speaker
And so thank you a lot, Douglas, for coming on.
00:43:41
Speaker
Well, I hope I've given you some food for thought.
00:43:43
Speaker
Not everyone may agree with me, but if you think you can do it better without freedom and liberty, well, good luck.
00:43:49
Speaker
I'm not sure it can be done.
00:43:52
Speaker
Thank you so much.
00:43:53
Speaker
Really enjoyed it.
00:43:54
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:43:55
Speaker
And again, absolutely fantastic.
00:43:59
Speaker
Even if some people do agree or don't agree, this is the beauty of this podcast.
00:44:03
Speaker
They can have their own opinion.
00:44:05
Speaker
I hope I've triggered all the right people.
00:44:07
Speaker
Thank you.
00:44:09
Speaker
Thank you.