Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
"It's the culture, stupid" - Matt Goodwin
2.5k Plays1 year ago
Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
Bill Clinton's strategist James Carville memorably said, "It's the economy, stupid". Times have changed. The great political battles of our time are not waged over economics, but cultural issues. Today, "It's the culture, stupid".
No one understands this better than Matt Goodwin. Matt is an academic and bestselling author, known for his work on political volatility, risk, populism, British politics, and Brexit. His book, 'Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics' is one of the most influential political science books of modern times.
Follow Australiana on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
Subscribe to Matt's Substack here.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Western Democracies and Migration
00:00:13
Speaker
Good day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. For over 50 years, most Western countries have been ignoring the same species of elephant in their rooms, to massacre the phrase. Declining birth rates, dramatically increased rates of legal migration, and weak border policies that have encouraged dramatically increased rates of illegal migration
00:00:40
Speaker
have combined to radically change the social fabric of Western liberal democracies from Australia to Sweden to Germany to the United States. But no country has experienced this phenomena as acutely as the United Kingdom.
UK's Unique Migration Challenges
00:00:57
Speaker
Few people in the UK have had the courage to question bipartisan policy settings that have had serious consequences for the economy and the culture.
00:01:07
Speaker
Matt Goodwin is one of those few people.
Guest Speaker: Matt Goodwin on Political Volatility
00:01:10
Speaker
Matt is an academic and best-selling author, best known for his work on political volatility, risk, populism, British politics and Brexit. In my opinion, there is no better analyst of the populist forces that have defined global politics over the last decade. Matt, welcome to Australia. Thanks for having me. Well, I appreciate it.
00:01:31
Speaker
It's great to have you on. We will get to those issues around immigration that I mentioned in my introductory remarks, but I want to start with a slightly wider lens.
Rise of Populism: Farage, Brexit, and Realignment
00:01:42
Speaker
There's been three big populist revolts in the United Kingdom over the last 10 to 15 years. You had the rise of Nigel Farage, you had, of course, Brexit, and more recently you had the realignment of conservative politics under Boris Johnson in 2019.
00:02:01
Speaker
How would you assess British politics today in the wake of those revolts? Yeah, well, I think you're absolutely right to say we've had a trilogy of rebellions in British politics, Nigel Farage, Brexit, and then
Public Sentiment: A Push Against EU and Mass Immigration
00:02:15
Speaker
Boris Johnson. And I think in essence, you know, if you look at all of the research on why those things happened, why people push those, those renegades and those insurgents forward, I think fundamentally it was because many people wanted to build a very different kind of country. They wanted a different
00:02:30
Speaker
a different consensus if you like to the one that dominates Westminster they didn't want the country to be in the european union they didn't want the country to be defined by. Large scale mass immigration and they didn't want the economy to only be built around london and financial services in the city of london and that essentially is what delivered.
00:02:51
Speaker
the majority vote for Brexit that gave Boris Johnson that big 80 seat majority in 2019, including lots of gains in working class areas and led to what we would call the realignment of British politics. So working class voters, non-graduates, older voters moving right, younger voters, professional middle class workers and graduates and increasingly women moving left. And that is partly also reflected in Western politics, you know, more generally.
00:03:17
Speaker
What's happened since, however, is that our political leaders have failed to deliver on what that realignment was all
Status Quo: London-Centric Policies Persist
00:03:26
Speaker
about. All political realignments are about supply and demand. You've got to have demand in the country for a different kind of politics, but you've also then got to have politicians who supply that with the right messages and the right policies. And what we saw since 2019, particularly under Boris Johnson, but also under his successors, Liz Truss and now Rishi Suna, is really a continuation of the old broken status quo.
00:03:46
Speaker
So a continuation of a London centric economy continuation of mass migration which is risen to even higher levels we're now running net migration at seven hundred thousand the year meaning seven hundred thousand more people are coming in than leaving Britain each year at the continuation of what we might call a socially liberal consensus which.
00:04:05
Speaker
appeals to about 15-20% of the country, but alienates everybody else, and an ongoing lack of interest among the new ruling class in areas that are outside of London, and in voters that basically don't want to be living under this orthodoxy.
Emergence of the Reform Party
00:04:20
Speaker
So I don't actually think we've managed to respond to what those three rebellions were about at all, and you can see that in the continuation of national populism, we now have
00:04:32
Speaker
party called the Reform Party, which is a sort of successor to Nigel Farage. That's now beginning to do well in the national polls up to 11, 12, 13%. You have a large scale apathy among conservative voters who say they're not going to vote at all at the next election because they've been let down on illegal and legal migration. The borders are out of control. We've got a number of alarming cases of
00:04:53
Speaker
of asylum seekers and illegal migrants committing very serious crimes. And you've got the Conservative Party, historically one of the most successful parties in the history of democracy around the world, currently struggling on about 24-25% of the vote and is facing a historic defeat at the election later this year. So has the country responded to what those rebellions were all about? Absolutely not. Is that populist moment in British politics over?
00:05:18
Speaker
Absolutely not.
Crossroads in British Politics: Potential for Populist Rebellions
00:05:20
Speaker
Are we likely to see more rebellions in the future? I think absolutely we are. And that essentially is where I think British politics is at the moment.
00:05:30
Speaker
Interesting analogy in that answer to economics and supply and demand. What we are seeing and what you've laid out there is the political equivalent of market failure. There is a disconnect between what voters want and what politicians are willing to supply to them, which is unusual because politicians are in the business of winning elections. How has that disconnect taken place?
Disconnect Between Conservatives and Working-Class Voters
00:05:54
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think it's a great question. Essentially, what's happened is that the Conservative parliamentary party, the people running conservatism in Britain,
00:06:02
Speaker
are very different from the kinds of people that have been voting for them since 2019. So, you know, if you think about Boris Johnson, you know, a member of the elite, he's somebody I would really refer to more as a liberal than a conservative, a sort of bohemian liberal, if you like, very comfortable with migration. Never really saw that as a particular problem. Didn't really understand who was voting for him. These new kind of working class voters, Northern voters from Northern England, non-graduates, people that hadn't gone to university and so on. They just brought a very different
00:06:30
Speaker
Set of demands to the table and the conservative parliamentary party like all of our big political parties dominated by graduates from the elite universities dominated by people who lean much further to the cultural left than the average voter who do not see.
00:06:46
Speaker
Migration is a major issue. I talk to cabinet ministers all the time. I write about those conversations on my substat. What they will tell you is illegal migration is an issue that they need to get on top of, but legal migration is absolutely fine. So there's never been really a political class that has reflected the public mood on that specific issue. And the gap between the elites and the masses has become
00:07:11
Speaker
Increasingly visible because these cultural issues have risen up the agenda because we've had, you know, one hundred and twelve thousand people enter the country illegally since twenty eighteen because net migration has surged to seven hundred thousand because crime is increasingly out of control.
00:07:27
Speaker
And voters have been looking around saying, but I thought Brexit was about taking back control. I thought Brexit was about controlling the borders. I thought it was about lowering migration. I thought it was about delivering what we called at the time an Australian base point system.
Brexit's Migration Impact: Low-Skill vs High-Skill Debate
00:07:40
Speaker
We were going to get the best of the best. We were going to get global talent. We were going to get high skill, high wage, highly selective forms of migration. But actually what happened is because Boris Johnson liberalized the whole system, what we ended up getting was low skill, low wage,
00:07:57
Speaker
non-selective migration, which as every major study has shown in Europe, when you rely on that kind of migration from outside of Europe, it's actually a net fiscal cost to the economy. It's not a net fiscal
00:08:09
Speaker
benefit, it takes more out of the economy and public services than it puts in. And that is why ultimately Britain, even now, you know, a few years on from Brexit, 14 years on from David Cameron winning that first conservative victory in 2010, you know, we've got a sluggish economy, low rates of growth, very low rates of GDP per head, low productivity, because we are still clinging to this broken
00:08:36
Speaker
pre-Brexit economy which is dependent upon importing large amounts of low skill migrant labor in order to keep big business happy and in order to appeal to the 10 to 15% of social liberals who like to project their beliefs by campaigning for migration. Now that works if you're part of the 15 to 20%. That works if you're a conservative member of parliament in Southern England in a leafy constituency. But if you're part of the 70, 80% who do not share strongly liberal
00:09:03
Speaker
Strongly progressive views on these cultural questions this isn't working for you and that's why we're seeing about a third of boris johnson's voters today now saying they're not gonna go to the next election that's why about a quarter of boris johnson's voters have now affected to this you know kind of populist reform party.
00:09:23
Speaker
with Nigel Farage quietly sort of encouraging them to do so even if he's not officially leader. And so my frustration on this wheel is we've not really learned the lessons at all of the last decade. We've not actually changed anything fundamentally to speak to what voters wanted. We've just gone even more into a high tax, big state, mass migration dependent economy
00:09:46
Speaker
which is not delivering us the kind of growth rates and the kind of gains that we're going to need. And this will only get worse in the years ahead. And we might want to come back and talk about this. But if you look at the population projections for Britain over the next 12 years, I mean, we ain't seen nothing yet. The demographic forecasts are alarming, to say the least.
00:10:04
Speaker
and England itself is not a big island that will have radical consequences from an economic and cultural perspective. What I find interesting in that answer is that some of those challenges that you just mentioned are to varying degrees, consistent across the Anglosphere, and particularly the challenges that the right of politics is having adjusting to this new paradigm. So you've correctly pointed out that the
00:10:31
Speaker
debates of our time have migrated from economics to cultural battles. Now, the rights seem to have a real challenge here in that they don't appear to want to know really clearly whether to lean into these culture wars topics or alternatively to say that's a distraction. We're going to focus on bread and butter issues like cost of living.
00:10:54
Speaker
In Australia, Peter Dutton, the leader of the Liberal Party, has started to wade into some of these culture wars issues. Rishi Sunak, in a pretty unconvincing way, has done it here and there, say in the trans debate. If you're a Conservative politician in the UK or in Australia today, how should you approach these issues? Should you be leaning into the culture wars or should you be saying that they are a distraction and we need to focus on the things that actually impact the bottom line in people's lives?
Cultural Issues and the Conservative Dilemma
00:11:24
Speaker
The first thing I would say to conservatives is not to use that language at all. So to refer to these issues as culture wars is essentially using the language of their political opponents. So we need to be absolutely clear on this. If you're referring to the sex-based rights of women, if you're referring to the rights of our children not to be exposed to
00:11:45
Speaker
highly contested, non-scientific theories about gender and so on. If you're referring to our history, how we think about our history, our national identity, our culture, if you're referring to all of those issues as being somehow toxic, problematic, culture wars, then you basically ceded off a large amount of your own conservative territory. And that's one just a starting observation. And I think too many conservatives fall into that trap. The second thing I would say is on all of those
00:12:14
Speaker
issues, what you often find when you poll voters about them, and I'm a pollster, I spend a lot of my time as well doing polling, a lot of these, let's say, woke issues, for lack of a better word, there's always a perception out there that this is sort of a 50-50 battle, that, you know, 50% of the country says, let's rename pregnant women, pregnant persons, and 50% says, no, let's not do that, or 50% says, well, let's redefine the history of Western nations as being institutionally racist, and 50% says, let's not do that. Actually, that's not true. Most of these issues
00:12:45
Speaker
really break about 80-20 against the woke position. One example of this we had was in Scotland where Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish National Party tried to introduce legislation that would allow 16-year-old children to legally change their gender without essentially any supervision.
00:13:01
Speaker
Now, because radical progressives tend to dominate large parts of the media and the cultural institutions based on the national conversation, you might have thought this was a reasonable position supported by the majority. But actually, when you poll it, only 20 percent, one in five people think this is a good idea. So should conservatives lean into those issues? Absolutely. Not because of crude electoral politics, but because it's the right thing to do. Many of these ideas are being pushed don't really have a sufficient evidence base, particularly when it comes to things like
00:13:27
Speaker
you know gender transition or it comes to things like interpretations of our national history so from a polling electoral perspective absolutely and just broadly thirdly. I've always argued that particular to british conservatives that the answers to today's questions do not lie in nineteen eighty eight and by that i mean you know there is a temptation among torries.
00:13:45
Speaker
and conservatives around the world to look to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and say, well, you know, they have the answers. They came up with a particular set of answers to a particular set of questions. And the questions were very different from the ones facing us today. Their primary objective was to establish economic freedom in the era of the Cold War and against the state, particularly a Soviet state that was encroaching upon individual freedom and liberty. And their response was robust and rigorous. And thankfully, it was a response that won out. But the challenge today, the questions today are very different.
00:14:15
Speaker
Most voters today are not only looking for economic freedom, they're looking for cultural freedom. They're looking for a sense of, as Jimmy Carver once said to Bill Clinton, it's the economy stupid. Actually, many voters today feel it's the culture stupid. It's an oppressive political correctness. It's a state that is politicizing public institutions, that is politicizing the education of children, that is racializing and sexualizing children, that is doing the opposite of what Bobby Kennedy once talked about.
00:14:41
Speaker
appreciating the fact that we need to preserve and protect the importance of things like joy and play and happiness for children. They are increasingly becoming a pawn in these political battles. And most voters don't want that. They don't want to see that. So the challenge for conservatives is, I would argue, is to lean into this realignment. And it's interesting, if you look at the British Tories through an international lens, they are really the only centre-right party
00:15:02
Speaker
particularly in Europe and North America that's currently doing very badly. And you've got to ask yourself, why is that? Well, maybe one answer is 14 years of incumbency and being on the throne when we had inflation. Very, very difficult for any incumbent party that's been in power for that long to navigate those challenges. But I think actually it is about
00:15:20
Speaker
realignment because if you look at say Trump's strong numbers in America, if you look at what's happening in France with the right in French politics being reshaped, you look at Maloney in Italy, look at Sweden Democrats, look at what's happening in Germany, the centre right or radical right parties that are leaning into this realignment that are speaking very loudly to workers, to non-graduates, to pensioners, to saying we're going to give you both economic and cultural security are the parties that are doing much better at the polls and that is
00:15:48
Speaker
What I would argue is reflecting the importance of a national conservatism, not a liberal conservatism. And maybe we want to get into the philosophical differences later on the podcast, but it is a new brand of conservatism that I think is much more in tune with the zeitgeist out there with the public mood, but which is also much more in tune with the new groups of voters that are voting for right wing parties.
00:16:11
Speaker
And at an even more fundamental level, those more successful parties, you know what they stand for. I think one of the big problems for the British Tories is it's very hard to work out what that group stands for when you've had Bohemian liberals like Johnson running the party, when you've had
00:16:26
Speaker
technocrats now like Rishi Sunak, I don't get an essence of what they truly believe. I think you can probably say the same thing for the coalition in Australian politics, where there is this tension consistently between whether they move to the conservative side of their party or whether they move to the more
00:16:45
Speaker
libertarian liberal side of their party. You mentioned the 20% of new elites that now have such sway in pretty much every major societal institution across Australia, the UK, US. We almost take it for granted now, but if you take a step back,
00:17:04
Speaker
It's extraordinary that we now have a relatively small group of people in positions of power that tend to think the same way across a wide range of social and cultural issues. Now, I'm conscious that you've written entire books on this topic.
00:17:23
Speaker
How have we got to this point where such a small group of people can have such a consistent line of thinking, which is so out of step with a majority of the populations that are in inverted commas underneath them?
00:17:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think if you look at the new elite, who I call the new elite, a useful starting question is to think about why are the people who dominate the institutions different from the people who used to dominate the institutions? And the old elite was more of a conservative leaning elite, very, very wealthy, very affluent, and disconnected from people in a different way, mainly around material resources and experience of economic life. Go back to the 50s and the 60s in Britain, for example, the old elite was
00:18:02
Speaker
You know, a kind of old boys network in Palma and St. James and, you know, was very disconnected from what was going on elsewhere in the country. But there was an important difference, which is that in general terms, they shared the more small c conservative values and beliefs that the rest of the country shared, particularly when it came to things like nation.
00:18:22
Speaker
identity, institutions, history, belonging. Even politicians on the left, Clement Attlee, among many others, Peter Shaw, Tony Benn, broadly shared a belief in the importance of parliamentary democracy and the importance of, for example, Britain's contribution to the world beyond its own borders. What's happened today, however, is quite profound and quite different. The new elite who mainly came through the universities, pushed forward by the expansion of the universities,
00:18:50
Speaker
have become a very different kind of ruling class, very financially affluent, tending to live in the big cities and the university towns, married to or in a relationship with other members of that elite graduate class, often went to to Oxbridge, like the old elite, often went to one of the more prestigious Russell Group universities. But what we've seen over the last 20 years is actually the graduate class has moved sharply to the cultural left.
00:19:15
Speaker
what the Americans will call the great awakening of the kind of white graduate liberals, basically. And they've done that partly in response to things like Brexit, partly in response to things like Trump, but they've doubled down on their social liberalism. They've become much more conscious of how that is a key marker of their identity. So exhibiting their kind of radically progressive credentials on social media, embracing
00:19:37
Speaker
these contested beliefs critical race theory gender identity theory and then bringing those into the institutions which they tend to dominate so this isn't the conspiracy it's simply that the elite graduate classes move sharply to the cultural left.
00:19:50
Speaker
And as they've moved sharply to the cultural left, they've taken the institutions that they tend to dominate with them. And so they wield enormous economic, social and cultural power. David Brooks has written about this in the US. He said, you know, it's not just that they dominate the institutions. It's also that they've consolidated their power over the last 10, 20 years in a number of big ways. They've discriminated against people who hold conservative or gender critical views. We've seen that most sharply in universities, but I'd argue
00:20:17
Speaker
We've seen it with big tech. We've seen it with media. We've seen it in the political realm. They dominate the epicenters of economic power. So they dominate London. They dominate the university towns. They're in the places where they benefited the most from the increase in house prices and from the much more affluent areas. And they've also cemented their networks. You know, there's lots of work, for example, in sociology in Britain, which shows that the new elite are the most likely of all to only associate with people like them.
00:20:44
Speaker
but they're the most likely to unfriend people who have different views, to block people who have different views, to harass or bully people who have different views. So there are some important differences with this ruling class and I think that's why increasingly and especially on these cultural questions, free speech being perhaps the most important, the new elite as survey research has shown, they're the most likely to say they're willing to sacrifice
00:21:08
Speaker
free speech on the altar of social justice. If they perceive speech to violate their obsession with minority rights, their obsession with diversity, which is a new conformity, a new orthodoxy, a very dogmatic belief system, they're the most likely to say, well, let's limit free
Cultural Norms and Elite Influence
00:21:25
Speaker
speech, right? Let's cut down on free speech. And the 70 to 80% of people in the country consensus. They consensus a new orthodoxy. They consensus that there's a political correctness. They consensus a belief system
00:21:35
Speaker
that they're not really part of and so they're not just feeling left behind by globalization by this new economy financially services led financial services led economy london economy what they can sense is that they're being left behind by the values are now dominating the national conversation and public square which is excluding them at the same time and that i think is ultimately what is really driving. You know the likes of reform the likes of my job for a large.
00:22:00
Speaker
like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Maloney. And my final point here is that I've spent 20 years looking at the people who vote for those parties. And one of the points I always make, which irritates many of my academic colleagues, is that I actually do think many of the people who vote for those parties have some pretty understandable and legitimate reasons for doing so. And the imposition of social norms that say, well, these parties are all far right. They're extremists are unacceptable.
00:22:27
Speaker
While simultaneously failing to address the reasons that people are voting for them has got us into this mess. Where you look across Europe today, these parties have never been stronger. Le Pen is likely to do very well at the European elections. You'll probably become maybe the next president of France. Georgia Maloney is running Italy. The Sweden Democrats are essentially running Sweden. Gert Wilders has just won the elections.
00:22:47
Speaker
in the Netherlands. Orban is cemented in Hungary. Donald Trump, looking at his numbers where we are now in early 2024, he's probably going to give Biden a good run for his money at the election in November if he's on the ballot and so on. So we've not actually resolved any of the grievances that were first put onto the table, really in 2016 or in the years before that. If anything, those grievances have just become much sharper and more visible.
00:23:12
Speaker
I spoke to Lionel Shriver last week and she talked about the phenomena that there are a lot of articles written from left-leaning pundits on the rise of Trump and the forces behind it. And they're almost never written in good faith. It's very easy just to say that, well, the voters are ignorant, racist, redneck, hicks. Similarly with Brexit, it was very easy to say that Brexit voters were simply racists.
00:23:40
Speaker
something which frustrates me no end is that there doesn't seem to be a good faith instinct to try and understand these underlying social forces which are leading to protest votes for these types of parties as opposed to just
00:23:53
Speaker
parts of the new elite saying, well, we are superior to them. But just just briefly on that, that also tells us much about the media class, because if you look, say, at Britain or if you look at the US, the media class itself has become more insular, homogenous, ideologically, you know, the same 90 percent of journalists in Britain now went to university. More than half of them went to Oxbridge. Local media has collapsed. Regional media has collapsed. The chances of a working class kid from a Brexit voting area
00:24:21
Speaker
rising up to become a national columnist almost minimal if not zero and so the media class itself has drifted away. From the rest of the country and you know places like the Reuters Institute Oxford have shown this most journalists today lean more to the left than they do to the right we've even got.
00:24:38
Speaker
you know, what would be described as conservative media in Britain, making the case for things like mass migration, because I think fundamentally, today's media class views that as a signaling issue, they don't want to be seen as low status. And what they want to be seen as is high status as having the same luxury beliefs as other elites, because what they crave is more status and recognition from members of the elite class. And you only do that by projecting high status beliefs. So if you project
00:25:06
Speaker
low status police like i like to do on my twitter account or my ex account on a regular basis if you say we should have less migration. We should have tougher positions on crime we shouldn't be teaching children there are seventy two genders we shouldn't be giving children puberty blockers we shouldn't be buying into this ridiculous narrative that western nations are source of shame and embarrassment.
00:25:27
Speaker
We shouldn't be reducing competency in our public institutions in preference of affirmative action. All of these things are considered low status by the new elite, right? What they want to do is project high status beliefs that bring them few costs that they often won't actually practice themselves, but which impose enormous costs on everybody else. And mass migration is the most obvious example of that. Status is such a fascinating ingredient here. It wasn't so long ago that
00:25:56
Speaker
status was tied to sports cars and big houses and trophy wives. It's not really anymore. It's tied to a particular set of beliefs. How has the way that we think about projecting status changed in that way from being, I guess, more materialistic to being very much ideological? How has that taken place? Well, I've been very strongly influenced by some of the writing that was brought to my attention a few years ago. People like Rob Henderson, who was at Cambridge,
00:26:25
Speaker
now a writer, who has drawn on much older work in sociology, which has shown that basically the old elite would derive status by projecting their material goods, by projecting also the fact they had leisure time. They could go on holiday or maybe they had butlers.
00:26:41
Speaker
their fashion. It's very visible. Whereas today, when in broad terms, everybody's become more affluent, it has become more difficult for the elite to distinguish themselves from the masses. And so what we've seen, particularly in universities, particularly in the large public institutions, increasingly private sector institutions as well, hedge funds and banks, financial services with the DEI agenda, is we've seen really that the elite embrace new ways of projecting
00:27:09
Speaker
their social status and that is included things like embracing radical progressivism embracing what we might call woke ideology. It's come with a new vocabulary you know if you're in the boardroom and you're expressing your understanding or your knowledge of terms like white privilege white guilt heteronormativity so on so on what you're saying really is.
00:27:27
Speaker
I went to a good school, I went to a good university, I'm part of this new elite club, you know, if your coffee table is full of, you know, books by, you know, Ibram Kendi and, you know, so on, similar writers like that, Roman D'Angelo, what you're saying, what you're projecting is, look, I get it, right? I've been awakened. I'm on the right side of history here. And progressives love to think of themselves as being on the right side of history because they think history is linear, they genuinely believe history is moving in their direction. And of course,
00:27:53
Speaker
you know the lesson of the last twenty years is actually history is a lot more complicated and i think that that vocabulary in the status markers i think you know social media is obviously played into that way you can align yourselves with the right hashtags the right flags the right symbols of what we might call this new religion big one in britain is fbpe follow back pro european what you're saying to other members of the elite is you didn't side with brexit you're one of the good people you wanna the fifteen to twenty percent who are
00:28:20
Speaker
socially liberal, pro-migration, pro-diversity, pro-Black Lives Matter. Didn't say much after BLM came out in support of Hamas, but nonetheless, there was a kind of, you know, a sort of sense that this is part of a new religion. And John McWhorter, the professor at Columbia, I think he's still at Columbia, a linguistics professor, has made this point that radical progressivism has morphed into a new religion for the new elite. It's filled that need. In fact, actually, Christopher Lash made that point long before McWhorter in the early 1990s when he said
00:28:49
Speaker
identity politics has become a new religion precisely because it satisfies the same sense of self-righteousness that religion used to. That you were able then to project your elevated sense of moral righteousness over others who you see as low status and morally inferior and that now includes the white working class, it includes conservatives,
00:29:09
Speaker
it includes jews it includes anybody who can be perceived to be an oppressor in the new identity politics matrix and that has allowed white graduate liberals to disassociate themselves not along the lines of material goods but along the lines of ideology and that's why today i think has become you know status has become absolutely central to what we're talking about and that
00:29:31
Speaker
Finally, it helps to explain why British Tories won't go near these issues, you know, immigration, border control, leaving the European Convention on Human Rights or leaving any international convention that would allow us to control our own borders, turning back the small boats in the channel, doing anything and everything like Australia has been doing over the years to get to try and get control of borders because fundamentally British Tories
00:29:52
Speaker
view these issues as low status. They are obsessed with appealing to their friends and their colleagues and the liberal commentary at in SW1 Westminster, and they will not really challenge that orthodoxy in any meaningful way. And when they do, like Seysewela Braverman did, who was our former home secretary, they are then instantly maligned and mocked and essentially pushed out of the public square.
00:30:17
Speaker
I've often wondered whether the rise of social justice ideology has correlated with the decline in organized religion, or alternatively, whether the decline in organized religion is actually a causative factor in that rise, whether the social justice ideology has filled a vacuum that has emerged as a result of the decline in organized religion across the West. You see it as very much a causative relationship.
00:30:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's tapped into a yearning for meaning, righteousness, fulfillment, particularly among the elite class, which was also struggling with a crisis of legitimacy. So we have to remember that before the spread of
00:31:02
Speaker
identity politics and radical left, cultural left, woke politics, whatever your preferred use, preferred term. The elites were already going through a crisis of legitimacy. They'd overseen a series of catastrophes, global financial crash, disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, declining living standards, declining rates of growth. And I do view the rise and the embrace of
00:31:27
Speaker
of woke ideology partly as an exercise in trying to reestablish legitimacy among the elite class as a way of saying we're going to ring fence our position here by projecting ourselves as superior and righteous largely because I think they not only crave that status and that that acknowledgement but because they're aware of
00:31:47
Speaker
the way in which they presided over 20 or 30 years of enormous policy blunders. And so how do you ring fence your position where you disassociate yourself from the masses in another way? And that way now is ideology. You see that most blatantly in financial services, right? Where the embrace of DEI or so-called white capitalism,
00:32:05
Speaker
Woke washing green washing has become really an exercise in trying to establish legitimate legitimacy and authority in what is a very damaged industry particularly after twenty ten and the global financial crisis so i think for the elites it really fulfills a number of things at the same time now of course everybody else it makes it harder to.
00:32:26
Speaker
to reassert political, cultural and economic power because once again you're not playing on a level playing field you're actually excluded and maligned because you don't hold the right beliefs and this in Britain at least became especially visible after Brexit where
00:32:41
Speaker
it was quite clear that popular sovereignty had outflanked parliamentary sovereignty that it was basically up to the people not only to vote for something that the elites hadn't given them but to then vote for it again in 2019 via Boris Johnson to actually get that policy blunder fixed which is to get Brexit done so popular sovereignty had to basically deliver the Brexit project which is why
00:33:03
Speaker
the elite struggled with it so much they realized they'd lost legitimacy they realized they'd lost authority and then they reacted to that very strongly they reasserted their beliefs they reasserted the liberal consensus they turned the volume up on immigration they basically didn't do what the people asked them to do by controlling borders they didn't invest seriously in areas outside of london they didn't reshape the institution so we have a wider range of voices in them they basically doubled down
00:33:27
Speaker
I don't think it's a conspiracy, I just think it's the natural tendency that we all have to entrench our positions. Unfortunately, so many of the key people at the time, Nigel Farage being one of them, left the battlefield at that time. The Brexit Party, the UK Independence Party, those were wound up, so there was no meaningful opposition
00:33:47
Speaker
for people to rally around. That now is beginning to change with this new reform party. But yeah, fundamentally, I've always viewed woke ideology like McWater, like Christopher Rufo, like Yasha Monk, I think in the US, as a way of filling the void within the elite, giving them a new sense of meaning and legitimacy.
00:34:08
Speaker
way that the elite have seemingly doubled down to use your, your expression there. I've thought about a lot. It's fascinating. And again, it is a Western phenomenon. There are now several case studies from Brexit, Johnson, Trump, where there are some very obvious lessons for the new elite. And to your point, they aren't seemingly being learned. In fact, the recent voice referendum in Australia,
00:34:35
Speaker
was in many ways a repeat of what we saw with Brexit and what we saw with Trump. In fact, it was very interesting that you had voters on the left and the right would both unironically say this is Australia's Brexit moment, and they mentioned entirely different things.
00:34:52
Speaker
when they've said that exact same statement. One of them saw it as a liberating statement and one of them saw it as a highly derogatory statement. Interesting how their lessons haven't been learned. There is one question before we move on to immigration specifically that I want to hit on. You've mentioned the universities a few times in your answers.
Ideological Influence of Universities on Western Culture
00:35:10
Speaker
To what extent do you see the ideological capture of the universities as the genesis of the ideological capture of so many other of the West institutions over the last period of time?
00:35:22
Speaker
I think it has obviously been absolutely central in that as we've gone through the mass expansion of higher education, particularly from the 1990s, the universities we know this empirically have moved sharply left. To give you one statistic, in the 1960s when only 5% of Brits went to university, the ratio of left-wing academics to right-wing academics was three to one.
00:35:43
Speaker
Today, when closer to 40% of people are going through university, the ratio is nine to one. So for every one conservative academic, you've got nine who are openly identifying on the left. Now, is that influencing and impacting how students are taught? Well, academics will tell you no. Having been in the universities for 20 years, having been absorbed in the culture of higher education, I would say absolutely, that our universities have become highly politicized, and that is encourage a graduate class to move sharply to the left.
00:36:10
Speaker
And as a consequence, many of the graduates who come out of the universities, especially the most elite and the more immersive institutions who go into the BBC, who go into the media, who go into the museums, who go into the galleries, who go into the political parties are leaning much more strongly to the cultural left. And then they shape the national conversation and they also shape the parameters of what's acceptable to discuss and what isn't. So if you're challenging migration,
00:36:34
Speaker
if you're challenging the London-centric economy, if you're just saying we just need to invest more money in non-graduates, which we've not done.
00:36:40
Speaker
If you're saying we need stronger borders or we need to leave, you know, international conventions that were made for the Second World War that are completely out of date with where we're heading with this demographic crisis, you know, they will essentially try and do what they can to shut you down. And universities are at the center of that because they represent what others have called the epistemic class. They represent the gatekeepers to knowledge and how knowledge is constructed and thought of. So if you are a journalist, as you know, writing an article on immigration, you're going to have an expert voice from the universities.
00:37:08
Speaker
if you're the bbc running about running a debate on a friday night about has brexit been a success or not most of the people in that debate are gonna be from the universities are gonna bring a certain set of ideological prize to that debate and i think voters now can sense that which is why my last point public confidence in the universities has collapsed in the u.s.
00:37:27
Speaker
Gallop just showed that the confidence in Ivy League institutions and colleges has never been as low as it is today. In the UK, YouGov show that over half of all Brits now say getting a university degree is not value for money. So we do have a crisis within the universities and I think that is intimately linked to what people out there are watching. The student mobbings, the cancellations,
00:37:49
Speaker
the controversy after the October 7th attacks where you saw, with your own eyes, leaders of Harvard and other elite institutions essentially downplaying anti-Semitism on campus, essentially saying it wasn't really an issue. And I think people have been shocked by what they've seen, and that has eroded, unfortunately, the legitimacy and the confidence that people have in those institutions. So we're undermining our own civilization from within, because these should be otherwise producing a generation of leaders who are well-balanced,
00:38:17
Speaker
Well read can handle views and beliefs they disagree with and are exposed To professors and academics who come from across the political spectrum I can tell you as somebody who's worked within the universities for 20 years that is no longer happening And what I can say that there are two schools of thought as to how you address this crisis in the universities one is I guess led by Christopher Rufo who you mentioned and
00:38:43
Speaker
He would make the argument that we need to reform existing institutions effectively by stripping out DEI departments and trying to turn the tide in terms of the ideological capture of some of the traditional institutions. The other school of thought, potentially led by someone like Peter Bogosian, who you spoke to recently, he would say that these institutions are too far gone and we need to build a new
00:39:08
Speaker
The University of Austin, I think, started accepting students very recently and that has been founded on the express principle of free speech and a rejection of the DEI dogma that now is widely captured by the other institutions. Where do you sit in terms of the build a new or try and reform what we have? How do you think about how we address the crisis in the universities?
00:39:33
Speaker
Yeah, so I think I'm instinctively nervous about establishing parallel institutions because I do think that is a road to further polarisation. I don't really want to see universities where people on the left go and universities where people on the right go. I don't really think that is going to strengthen our society. What I would like to do and see is a reform of the universities. Now, this is where I think conservatives
00:40:01
Speaker
liberals go in different directions and even different factions of conservatives go in different directions. Some people will say, perhaps like Peter, that the universities cannot be reformed themselves. Other people will say it is up to the state to now intervene and reform universities precisely for that reason. And what we've been doing in Britain is leading something called the Higher Education Free Speech Act, where basically we use the state
00:40:27
Speaker
to intervene in order to provide a legal requirement for universities to promote and protect free speech on campus and those that do not or which discriminate against political non-conformists can be fined very large sums if they do that. I supported that bill and campaigned for that bill and helped design that bill precisely because I want to see us
00:40:49
Speaker
really work hard over the next 10 years to reform the universities before giving up on them altogether. And I think after October 7th, with the debate in the US over DEI, which is now being banned in many states, DEI departments are being shut down, donors are withdrawing their money, I actually think there is a new opportunity now to galvanise a much broader debate and support for reforming universities. Whether
00:41:16
Speaker
That is going to allow us to do as much as we need to do in order to push back the rot of the last 20, 30 years remains to be seen, but there are some things we could do immediately. We should be banning diversity statements. We should not be asking academics to basically submit their political beliefs before applying for research grants and positions. We should be reforming the research councils so they are non-political, so they have no trace of critical race theory or gender identity theory or
00:41:43
Speaker
you know belief in an openly political project we should be removing attempts to decolonize university reading list we should be doing the opposite in ensuring that students are exposed throughout their degree to a wide range of speakers for alternative perspectives.
00:41:58
Speaker
we should be removing the importance of student satisfaction as a metric in universities it's not up to students to tell us how they want to be taught it's up to us as adults to provide a leading well-balanced and round well-rounded education higher education so these are things that we could do you know immediately if you had a mandate you know it's five to ten big things you could do that i think would begin to re-balance the universities.
00:42:21
Speaker
So I'd like to see us do that before saying, well, let's go off and establish these alternative structures. A big supporter of the University of Austin thinks it's an important institution. I think the Center for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham, which my friend and colleague Eric Kelfman has just set up here in Britain. I think these are important. They add to the ecosystem. But I don't want to see us go down that road of saying, well, let's just have universities for conservatives and universities for liberals. I don't think that's going to be the answer to this problem. Let's turn to immigration.
00:42:51
Speaker
Help me understand the status quo with respect to immigration in the UK at the moment. What's going on?
00:42:57
Speaker
Well, it's completely broken. What we've seen essentially really since Brexit is the rate of net migration, meaning the number of people coming in minus the number of people leaving go from about 300,000 to 700,000. We've seen the type of migration change. So we were told after Brexit, we get high skill, high wage, highly selective migration. We got low skill, low wage, non-selective migration from outside of Europe.
00:43:21
Speaker
the very kind of migration which is shown to be economically costly, not economically beneficial. Over the last two years, between 2022 and 2024, we've had about 2 million people come into Britain, and only 15% of those won five.
00:43:36
Speaker
came specifically on a work visa. The rest were students, dependents of students, relatives of students, relatives of workers and asylum seekers, refugees. We've had 112,000 people come in illegally on the small boats crossing the channel from the already safe country of France, but coming into Britain illegally. And if you look at where we're heading, and I've written about this again on the substat by 2036, which is only 12 years from now, Britain's population is forecast to grow by 6.6 million people.
00:44:06
Speaker
6.1 million of those will be because of migration. So we're going to see our population grow by what is equivalent to, let's say, five cities the size of Birmingham or 70% on the way to a city the size of London. And we're going to see increasingly, which is already true, immigration being an even bigger driver of our population growth and what demographers would call natural change among the people already here.
00:44:31
Speaker
So migration is going to become a much more, even more visible part of our life. The rate of demographic change is going to be enormous. I mean, to give you one stat, and I write about this quite a lot, if you look at primary, secondary schools in London today,
00:44:48
Speaker
I think white British children are already a minority in something like 23% of those schools. So we're going to see a pace and a scale of demographic change in this country that we've never seen before. And that is going to put enormous pressure on the National Health Service.
00:45:06
Speaker
on housing, we have an enormous housing crisis on schools and on the economy. And as I talked to you today in February, 2024, you know, we just had our new economic data come out, you know, UK's back in recession. GDP per head figures are now the lowest that they've been in our recorded history. They've been going backwards over the last seven quarters. So we've got all of this mass migration, which we were told was going to drive economic growth, was going to drive GDP per head.
00:45:36
Speaker
That's clearly not happening. The economy is flatlining. It's not productive because we haven't got high-skilled migration. We haven't got highly productive migration. And we're just piling up problems for ourselves, which are going to disproportionately impact young people and young British families. And that's going to be especially pronounced in areas like housing.
00:45:53
Speaker
I mean, just to give you another stack, because I'm full of stats at the moment, I've been writing about this a lot. If you look at what that population growth is going to mean for Britain over the next 12 years, we're going to need to build 5.7 million homes. We're going to need to build about 386,000 homes every year.
00:46:10
Speaker
just to deal with that demand for migration and we are currently building about 177,000 homes a year just to keep up with past migration. So even if you just look at it through the prism of housing, this is going to be a disaster over the next 12 to 15 years and nobody is even talking about that. That's why I write about it because nobody in Westminster is even being open and honest with the country about the scale of change that is not just coming but is already underway.
00:46:39
Speaker
pragmatic economic concerns, and there are obviously very important pragmatic economic concerns. There is another strand to this, which is around social cohesion and values. Now, if you are to raise concerns around, say, the integration of Islamic migrants into British society, there is often claims that you are being racist or that there is racist undertones to what you are suggesting.
00:47:08
Speaker
At the same time, there are a lot of people that have raised concerns around what they perceive as the undermining of traditional British values, as the undermining of a national social cohesion or fabric when it comes to culture. How do you have this conversation? How do you raise these sorts of concerns without just getting this instinctive reactionary response of, well, you're a racist. If you bring this up, we can't talk about it.
00:47:36
Speaker
Well, firstly, I don't think you really need to be led by your worries about the reaction. I think we just need a vanguard of people who are brave enough and courageous enough to enter the public square and say these things. That's one of the things certainly I've been trying to do here in Britain and some of my colleagues. And I think if you simply state the facts that are based in evidence and you're not making a highly political point,
00:47:58
Speaker
people will listen to you. I mean, if you look, for example, at how Britain's population will change between today, 2024, and let's say, 2040, you're going to see the percentage of the population that is Muslim increase from 6% to closer to 20%. That's going to be an enormous change for this country. The battles that we've already seen in the streets between young
00:48:19
Speaker
Muslim men from different areas of the world arguing over tribal grievances that they've imported, we've imported into the country. The protests after October 7th, the open celebration of Hamas fireworks going off in London, celebrating the atrocities.
00:48:34
Speaker
anti-semitic slogans record increase in anti-semitic attacks in britain since those since those events we've got schools in london that are now being forced essentially or taken to court to provide facilities where muslim children can pray even though other children are not able to do that and schools have consciously tried to not get drawn into religious battles and conflicts you know this is only going to grow
00:48:58
Speaker
These cultural disputes are fundamentally about who we are. It's about our shared identity, our shared history, our shared sense of community, and unfortunately we have pursued a model of multiculturalism.
00:49:14
Speaker
a policy of multiculturalism which is hardwired to weaken our society from within. Why? Because it prioritizes group difference over commonality. It says the most important thing is that we celebrate diversity but by that what they mean is we celebrate the distinctive cultures and identities and religious beliefs and practices of different groups while we talk hardly at all about what brings us together as a country because
00:49:39
Speaker
we do have an identity and we do have a set of values. And as Francis Fukuyama once pointed out, to say that a country is welcoming of diversity is fine. Okay. But it's also like saying a country doesn't have an identity of its own.
00:49:53
Speaker
And we do have an identity, we have a wonderful British way of life with values and history and we want and expect people to subscribe to that and to share that. But multiculturalism really encourages us to see our society instead as a sort of fragmented mosaic of people that are pursuing their own lives and their own beliefs and even worse among the elite class. It comes with what we might call asymmetrical multiculturalism whereby if you belong to the white majority
00:50:20
Speaker
you are encouraged to basically abandon your identity or reshape it around very international themes of diversity universal liberalism but if you're a minority you're encouraged to promote your own distinctive identity and your own distinctive culture so there is an imbalanced approach if you're within that that white majority group you're told your identity is bad that you're racist that you're something wrong with your country and you really need to embrace cosmopolitanism you need to embrace kind of globalism you need to embrace diversity and
00:50:49
Speaker
and all of these meaningless words. But if you're a minority, you're encouraged to promote your distinctive identity, history, culture, and beliefs and practices. So that's why we've had a number of shocking cases, most notably in Britain, with the sexual exploitation of young white working class girls across Northern England and elsewhere, areas like Oxford, where hundreds, if not thousands, of young white girls were sexually groomed, raped, and abused for years. This was what one report called industrial
00:51:17
Speaker
scale rape mainly by Pakistani Muslim men organized gangs and nobody in our authorities and institutions would talk about it for many years even now they don't like talking about it because of what it reflects and what it reflects is the way in which minorities have been allowed and enabled
00:51:37
Speaker
Some might even argue in courage through this policy of multiculturalism to continue practicing behaviours, beliefs, approaches to lifestyle that run fundamentally at odds with British law and British life and
00:51:54
Speaker
I think now we are beginning to arrive at a turning point, particularly in Britain with these cases. Another recent one, just lastly, is Abdul Azidi, who Australian listeners might have picked up on the case of an asylum seeker who threw acid over a young mother and her two children and then went on the run before, we think, throwing himself into the River Thames and killing himself. What was so shocking about that case, too,
00:52:19
Speaker
was that Yazidi had arrived illegally in Britain on the back of a lorry, had applied for asylum twice, both times rejected, had gone on to commit a serious sexual offence and had exposed himself to a young woman.
00:52:33
Speaker
after that had applied for asylum again and this time was granted asylum despite being a convicted criminal because he claimed that he'd converted to Christianity and a priest had signed off on it he then went on to throw acid over a young woman that he'd been in a relationship with and to her two young children that's why the UK now has was an example of why the UK now has the largest number of chemical attacks against women in the world we have more we've had more than 700 of these attacks over the last year
00:53:01
Speaker
Nobody wants to talk about why this is happening. And nobody wants to talk about maybe what it's telling us about this broken policy and multiculturalism and our failure to get tough on borders, to get tough on crime, to get tough on illegal migration. And these cases, the more and more they happen, will are going to start to change the debate in this country, which you can already see. For Boris Johnson's voters, immigration is a top issue.
00:53:22
Speaker
If you say what you want the government to prioritise, they say stop the boats, bring down migration, because you're absolutely right. It's not just about housing. It's not just about jobs. It's not just about GDP. It is a growing, creeping sense in Britain that actually what we have opened the doors to are belief systems, ways of life and practices that really have nothing to do with Britain at all. And if anything, are going to weaken and damage our country and our children's country.
00:53:49
Speaker
going forward. That's why I think the rebellions are not over yet. I think in some respects, as we saw in the 2010s, I think they're only just getting going.
00:53:58
Speaker
don't have time to go deeper on, on the grooming gangs scandals and some of those horrific crimes that you mentioned, but I would encourage everyone to read the outstanding work that you've done specifically on that topic. It is of course under reported and it is sad and shocking how that still has not got the attention that deserves. And you're one of the very few people who has brought that to light. You've done that Matt through your sub stack, which is one of the great
00:54:24
Speaker
I think anywhere, not just if you want to understand British politics, but if you want to understand some of these global forces that are reshaping both the left and the right. I've read several of your books, which are also wonderful. We've got links to those as well in the show notes. Matt, thank you not just for your thinking on these topics, but
00:54:46
Speaker
As I mentioned at the start of this conversation, the courage that you've had to shine light on some issues which perhaps much of the media class do not have that same courage to do. Thank you for coming on, Australiana. Well, thanks for your time and thanks to everybody for listening.
00:55:01
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.