 I'm first going to say a few words of introduction concerning the topic and afterwards I'm going to introduce our speaker, Gary Young. So the topic of imagining a world without borders actually developed out of courses which I'm teaching here in religions and world philosophies. And the first reason is philosophical because in a course on world philosophies we talked about utopias what kind of utopian visions were developed and as you may know a utopian vision is a vision of a world as it should be of an ideal world which is different from reality and so I had this idea of a kind of mind game of thinking of what would happen if a world without borders were created. Would our world as it exists now and humanity as we know it now would it be prepared for such a world or would it lead to chaos and killings and various other bad things. So the idea of a world without borders is a very complex idea and it's complicated to determine and concerns many different issues. For example, should one allow some immigrants to enter and others not then the question comes up who is a good immigrant and who is a bad one. How can one identify those who are going to contribute to society and distinguish them from those who have criminal reasons and might commit terrorist acts. Also one might ask is a borderless world more practicable in some regions of the world than in others? So many different aspects can be discussed from a philosophical perspective and we will hear more about this by Gary Young Soon. The other basis is historical so as you probably know borders as we know them today developed in connection with modern European nationalisms and the creation of nation states in the 19th century but it was not the same in other historical periods. So the period I'm specializing on late antiquity was quite different. On the one hand the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire were enemy empires who fought against each other but nevertheless people were able to move freely between these regions they could go back and forth for example from Rome, Palestine to Persian Babylonia without any hindrance and you might ask what the reason for this is and the reasons were probably that both the Romans and the Babylonians were interested in trade and they benefited from trade so that was probably one of the reasons why they were keen on having this kind of exchange going on. The next reason for developing this topic is personal. As you can probably already hear from my accent I was born in Germany and I'm now what is in Germany called from a so-called migration background because my father was a refugee from communist Hungary who eventually settled in Germany but decided to remain stateless. And so now this also leads me to contemporary issues because we are now in the development of Brexit and you have probably also followed discussions about the wind rush scandal in the news so now like many other EU nationals I ask myself should I leave or should I go? So on the one hand we are all used to the internet where there are no borders and where we can make easy connections to people worldwide and many professions especially academic professions and sciences require professionals to be very mobile but on the other hand in Britain and also in many other European countries especially for example in Hungary and Poland movements have developed which stress national identity and an ideology which is very much based on the local which seems almost retroactive going back to some kind of earlier period of time. So what could be the reasons for these developments in a world which has become so global nowadays? So I'm very excited that Gary Young, the editor at large at the Guardian was willing to talk about this topic and he's actually my favourite Guardian writer and also reason why I'm a subscriber to the digital edition of the Guardian and he has published many very very interesting articles on the topic of migration, immigration and immigrants from the Commonwealth nations in the Guardian recently but he's not only a writer but also a filmmaker so some of you might be familiar with this documentary film about angry white Americans where he explores possible reasons for Donald Trump's rise to power and what I especially like is that he tackles difficult subjects and he doesn't hesitate to really express what needs to be said and also expresses himself in a very clear and persuasive way. Concerning this documentary he also has a recent book published by the name Another Day in the Death of America. He holds a number of honorary doctorates for example from Cardiff University and London South Bank University and has received various awards and prizes for his journalistic work. I look forward very much to welcome Gary Young and to hear what he has to say about our topic. Thank you, thank you so much Catherine, thanks for having me just before I start I'll remind you vote today if they took away that right you'd soon notice. Imagine that Martin Luther King never had a dream. Imagine instead of thinking outside the narrow confines of his time and place he'd resolved to work only within them. Imagine he had instead risen to the steps of the Lincoln Monument and announced a five point plan that he thought he could both sell to the black community and win a majority for in both houses of Congress that would bring civil rights legislation that one step closer. He chose not to engage in the nitty gritty of the here and now and instead address not what will be or could be but what should be. And it's in that spirit and tradition that I want to make this contribution to the world turned upside down. I'm fully aware that no nation is going to get rid of its border tomorrow or even next year and if you're looking for a discussion of workable immigration policies that can be enacted in this country or elsewhere within this parliamentary session or the next then watch question time or listen to the today program. There you will find people going round in circles about what is practical rather than bothering themselves with what is ethical or moral. Idealism is the flesh on which pragmatic parasites feed and it's not naive to hope that what is not possible in the foreseeable future is nonetheless necessary and worth fighting for. As a descendant of slaves and a child of an immigrant working class single parent family I owe my life and my presence on this stage to those outrageous and brave enough to fight for a society that they insisted upon even when they could not imagine it ever materializing. If politics is the art of the possible then radicalism must entail the capacity to imagine new possibilities. Oscar Wilde once wrote a map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing and where humanity and when humanity lands there it looks out and sees a better country and seeing a better country it sets sail. The map of my utopian world has no borders no border guards, no barbed wire, no passport control, no walls, fences or barriers. The world I think would be a better place without them. I believe in the free movement of people. As a principal I think we should all be able to roam the planet and live, love and create where we wish. Now I'm about to make the case for why I think that's desirable and what I believe we would need to be and do to get there but I would throw down the gauntlet to those who oppose the notion of open borders for what place Yarlswood Detention Centre, Australia's dumping ground for asylum seekers in Nauru or the jungle in Calais or the vessels in the Mediterranean what place do they have in your utopias? Why would you dream of them? So make no mistake, a world with open borders would demand a radical transformation of much of what we have now. It would demand a rethinking not only of immigration but of our policies on trade and war, the environment, health and welfare which would in turn necessitate a reevaluation of our history and our understanding of ourselves both as a species and as a nation. This is partly personal for me. I am from a travelling people. My parents were born and raised in Barbados, a small island in the Caribbean caught in the crosswinds of colonial ties and post-war labour scarcity. I have 14 aunts and uncles along with my parents, nine of them left Barbados for lives in Britain, the US and Canada. I have cousins scattered across the globe. Borders are no friends to diasporas. They privilege form-filling of a family. Borders exist by definition to separate one group of people from another and the primary two issues then become which other that will be and on what basis they should be separated. And as such they are both arbitrary borders and definite. Arbitrary because the borders could be drawn anywhere and they often move. Our countries are in a word to Benedict Anderson imagined communities. Indeed nation states as we commonly understand them are a relatively new idea. We've made Italy, said Massimo d'Aseglio at the first meeting of the newly united Italy's infant parliament in the mid-19th century. We have made Italy, now we must make Italians. We have lived far longer without countries than with them. And if you look at what's happening in Catalonia or Scotland or Flanders then some of the ones we are living with are far from being a settled fact. But if borders are arbitrary they are definite because wherever they are we have to deal with them and because the process that determines who is allowed to move where and why is exercised with extreme prejudice. America's 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act the White Australia Policy a series of measures lasting 70 years or Britain's 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act are among the most crude filters. But while the othering changes with time recently in the Western world the shift from race to religion has ground to suspicion over a generation has been breathtaking the fact of it remains the same. Some people won't be welcome not because of what they've done but because of who they are even if the groups of people in question may change. There was a Home Office report in 2007 about who gets stopped for extra questioning when coming into Britain and it revealed that non-white South Africans are 10 times more likely to be pulled aside and non-white Canadians 9 times more likely to be pulled aside than their respective white countrymen. Moreover, even though when translated into sterling the mean income of a black Canadian is almost double that of a white South African a black Canadian is still 4 times more likely to be stopped than a white South African. So to anyone who seeks some other explanation I point you to the faces of those who have been caught in the Windrush scandal and ask you if that is a coincidence. This is not a glitch in the system this is the system. But it has relatively recently been compounded by a further contradiction which is that even then even as borders have become tougher for people they have all but been lifted for capital. The world now operates according to the Golden Rule and that's those that have the gold make the rules. Money can travel the globe virtually without restriction in search of regulations that are weaker and labour that is cheaper and when it does it often displaces people sucking investment and resources from one place at the flick of a switch shutting down factories and shifting them to the other side of the globe or introducing automation that renders some professions obsolete. But nobody asks a machine or money when it's crossing a border will you put someone out of work. Those who find their lives turned upside down by the free movement of capital are often prevented from moving country and looking for work. People should at least have the same rights or more since I believe humans are more valuable than money as machines. Sadly that is not a principle that underpins the system we live in. The rich can buy themselves citizenship virtually in about 20 countries cashed down. Meanwhile desperate people are turned away at borders all the time. It's a fact rarely stated but generally acknowledged and accepted that the global poor should not be allowed to travel. Indeed one of the more intriguing aspects of seeing Sergeant Javits life story of the new home secretary held up as an uplifting example this week is the detail that his father came to the country with just one pound in his pocket in 1961. That means where his own father to arrive at Britain's borders now Javit would not let him in and he's okay with that. It's absolutely right he said three years ago that today we should have an immigration policy based more on skills. That's most of the world as such the border stands as an ultimate point of confrontation in the broader dystopia that we have made possible. I think poor people should be able to travel not least because if they couldn't I wouldn't be here. Now in a time that remains I want to dwell preemptively on the more obvious retorts regarding open borders. The first relates to security. If we open the borders we will compromise our security goes to claim the overwhelming majority of people who've committed terrorist attacks here were either born here or are here legally. That shouldn't surprise us. So long as Britain has had colonial or imperial interests elsewhere it's had a terrorist problem here. We have been growing our own terrorists for years for the best part of a century we mostly were engaging with Ireland and our security that resulted that came out of that conflict emerged not as a result of tighter borders or more stringent policing but from a political settlement. Similarly the source of our terror problem isn't strong or lax borders but a thoroughly misguided foreign policy in which we either commit acts of state terror ourselves as in Iraq or in Yemen. This would also help if we address this problem with the issue of refugees. First of all we don't take anything like our fair share of refugees even compared with other European countries let alone the rest of the world but what's particularly galling is because a significant number of refugees are fleeing from wars that we've created and states that we have failed regimes we subsidize and regions we have disabled people to come here then maybe we could start by not going there and messing it up. Similarly with our trade policies which punish poorer countries by preventing them from developing as we did with nationalized industries protected by subsidies and thereby confine them to the volatile markets of raw materials on the whims of multinationals. These are often countries which Britain and other western nations actively and intentionally underdeveloped during colonialism so there we have a historical responsibility. Much of the migration in the world at present it should be pointed out is not voluntary but forced by extreme poverty natural disasters and wars it would be a better world if people only moved if they wanted to and if they did not have to move to eat. Environmental policies particularly on climate change arms control and responsible foreign and trade policies would all assist in allowing many people to stay where they would rather be at home. Put another way those who insist that we cannot afford to take in the world's misery should make more of a concerted effort to ensure that we are not helping to create the world's misery. And that brings us on to the welfare state and the health service and so on which is our core. How do we sustain with national taxes these things that we value if they are then free to the world. Now clearly if we didn't contribute so much to global poverty this would be less of an issue but and we shouldn't forget the huge health inequalities within nations. A black man in Washington DC has a lower life expectancy than a man on the Gaza Strip. But even then just because you have no national borders doesn't mean that there can't be national rights and obligations. The pragmatist in me says we have free movement in the European but in the European Union so far because we're still in it but I'm still not eligible for an Italian pension. So ring fencing a system whereby those that contribute can benefit should not be beyond our can. That's a pragmatist in me. The idealist in me though asks the question do you want to live in a world where healthcare is determined by an accident of birth and if your answer is yes is that because the accident occurred in your favor. But the thing that all of these caveats have in common and I know there are more is fear. A fear of others that others might take what is ours might pollute what we share and that fear is a potent force. It can drive people into the arms of fascist, racist, bigots and bullies. We have seen recently where that fear gets us. What happened with the wind rush generation was not a mistake. It was a whole point of the hostile environment policy. People are treated as illegal unless they can prove otherwise. Not content with the physical border on the water's edge and the airport frontier it revealed that we now have borders that are invisible and omnipresent dividing communities and generations at whim and will. The border now represents not a physical space but a political one that can be reproduced without warning in places of learning at any moment almost anyone your boss, doctor childhood master or landlord can become a border guard. Indeed they may be legally obliged to do so and on the basis of their judgment you may be denied livelihood, family home and health is that the world we want. The great thing about dreaming is that you always have something to wake up to and I don't want to wake up to this anymore. Nation states are a relatively new concept. Migration is as old as humanity. Borders seek to regulate and restrict that basic human custom to travel for the distinct purpose of excluding some and privileging others. They discriminate between all people with the express intention of them being able to discriminate against some people. They do not simply set boundaries for countries they are metaphors for how we might imagine other human beings. Immigrants are not the problem. Borders are. Thank you. That was a fantastic discussion it raised all kinds of questions. I'm going to exercise the Chairman's prerogative and ask the first one how do we move from dystopia to utopia? You start with the smallest question obviously. Arguably for example something like the European Union and we weren't in Schengen but nonetheless that was the beginning of something. That was a test case and what we saw was that Greece or Portugal did not empty out that not everybody left Poland or Romania and that while I think we as a country were not prepared and could have been prepared in terms of investment and social investment and so on the sky did not fall in the sky did not fall in. The problems that we have are not problems due to immigration I believe and I think it was working class who traded in credit default swaps and crashed the economy that's not the problem. So I think that we've had this experiment and this experiment has I believe enriched us. I think Britain is better, more interesting more engaged place for having new and different people in it and we went from 12 to 15 to 27 countries so I think all of the problems I have in the European Union and I have many that would be an example of how that move is possible. That's great. Ladies and gentlemen Gary has kindly agreed to take some 20 to 25 minutes of questions if your hand is recognized wait for the roving microphone to come to you say your name and then please feel free to ask your question. Do we have anyone who wants to lead off from the audience so gentlemen with the glasses in the back there please. Thank you for the talk. I guess I have one quick question which is to what extent in this country anyway is some of the ills that you diagnosed to do with the failures of social democracy over the 20th century and to what extent do you think internationalism is ever possible within a social democratic party particularly the Labour Party in this country? I mean increasingly I think it's vital that I can't imagine what kind of program you would have social democratic or otherwise that isn't internationalist because of the nature of both globalization generally a neoliberal globalization in particular and the problem with most social democratic responses to this moment has been the uncritical embrace of the free movement of capital and the very limited engagement with the free movement of people so there's a range of ways in which you can have transactions and have capital controls and a range of things that you can do about capital that everybody just threw their hands up and said what are we going to do and they've got computers now on the one hand and then on the other hand when it came to people what they did was build bigger and bigger walls employ more guards Tony Blair stood in Dover and what you had was a kind of constant reiteration of the muscular border another question please yes I think our pro director would like to ask a question so I thought it would be really interesting to hear more about the role that borders play in that economic system because the issue isn't that capital doesn't want flexible labor it wants flexible labor with limited rights it wants cheap labor and labor becomes cheap when people feel insecure when they're desperate for jobs and when they don't have social rights and I guess that's the problem of getting to your vision of utopia we're not just looking at a system that's created by racism or by social forms of exclusion but one that's really premised on economic success yeah I think economics really shapes a narrative in race ethnicity, religion just describes a protagonist within that narrative at any given moment but in a sense to kind of combine some of the question that the young man asked with yours is that if you do have laws against capital dumping so that people can't have predatory people can't say right we're going to go to island because they have no minimum wage or whatever we're going to go here because labor is weak and that's the kind of thing that we can do that is possible instead of what you have is a kind of race to the bottom in which everybody ends up competing with whoever the least secure group of people are in the world and then blaming them for it and that's not acceptable and what we've had in Britain and I think why immigration has become the kind of issue that it has in Britain is because for too long we pursued a low productivity, no wage low skilled economy and then we're surprised when the kind of people who want to come to Britain and work are a significant proportion of them have low skills so that's the kind of economy we have and that's not inevitable we could do something about that but the skill in the racism is diverting people's attention from the economic to the ethnic, religion or racial and kind of saying well that must be them they must be they have they are the reason why your library is closing down they are the reason why you can't get a place in school and diverting our attention from the broader economic framework and I think that's a good question now Felix at the back there please thank you I was wondering if you could say something about the place of a political system in your utopia how do you imagine the places where political deliberations and decisions are taking place is it a layered system from the local to the global how does it work I mean in my utopia as much anything that can be devolved would be devolved and there would be there would be a range of things that you can't devolve but that the things that are more local are more accessible are more kind of meaningful when I've done work in Scotland and you can really see how the size of Scotland and the accessibility of its parliamentarians and so for example Scotland has been incredibly successful in tackling knife crime and the reason one of the reasons that they've been successful I believe is because there were the political unit was small enough that people could pick up the phone to someone and say why don't we do this and so we could move at a pace that I think England or Britain couldn't so I think wherever it's possible to devolve power we should not at least because as time goes on within nation states regional variations becomes so vast that London could really have more in common with I don't know New York or Berlin or something than it could with Shropshire then all the more reason for Shropshire not to be taking too many orders from London so that's that would be my visual for it I think Catherine in the front here has a question here Professor, who is that? Since the 1970s Britain has become so much more multicultural society and yet since Brexit attacks on the Muslim and Jewish population have increased so what I find difficult to understand is that how people with whom one has lived for decades also in connection with the Windrush generation suddenly seen as others Sadly it wasn't that sudden I think I mean we I would say that we were not doing as well as we thought we were I was deluded and I didn't think I didn't think Britain was fantastic, had solved it was but I thought that we were further ahead in terms of educating the general populace that we were further ahead than we were and it seems that many of the gains that we made were fragile much more fragile certainly than I believed but I think that many others I think there are others who have been shocked not by the fact of it but by the scale of it the nature in which people now feel emboldened to say certain things that it wouldn't have surprised me if they had thought it but what surprises me is that they are bold enough to say it one of the things that I found really intriguing and clarifying in the wake of Brexit was the the ease with which people moved from the xenophobic to the racist and the Islamophobic there was no suggestion that women wearing hijabs were in any way involved in the debate about Europe as it was understood of Polish Romanian Bulgarian that's what that debate was ostensibly about and yet you didn't have to scratch the surface very hard after the vote to see that the the xenophobia against a certain kind of other slid very easily from language to religion and race and that for a while and I don't think this will be true forever the Poles and the Romanians and the Bulgarians were black people that they had become racialized now they were that's obviously talking about black as a political color not as an actual color but they were the audible other and if people heard them speak in the street they were vulnerable they didn't know whether they should speak their own language maybe in some areas they still they still don't in a couple of cases people were killed when they were heard to be speaking a different language and but I think that that canary was always in the mind if we look at how UKIP had been doing in the years prior that it had always it had always been there but this gathered a lease of life yes the lady at the white top there please I was just wondering in your idea of utopia do you envisage there being one global currency if it was a real utopia I would envisage there just being no money just no money just stuff you know what I can't that's not money isn't in my utopia in my head when I the trouble with there being one kind of money is that money needs to be regulated I'm not a big fan of the euro absolutely no democracy within the institution that governs that currency and if someone's going to part of my mortgage I want to be able to get my hands on them or at least be able to remove them wherever there's power it should be accountable and there is a severe lack of accountability in the European Central Bank and so to have a global currency you would have to have a global organisation that could work that currency and that seems like a tall order to me gentlemen in the front here please I think it's fair to say that SOAS is a university with a strong activist tradition so just following up on the question from the back there about sort of political solutions and ways forward what kind of role do you see activism in moving towards your utopia every role that kind of mind is the king the arc of justice is long but tends towards progress but it doesn't bend by itself none of this stuff happens by itself and when we think of the things that we do have we have them because we fought for them it's a constant frustration to me and it's been intriguing this whole windrushing has been very intriguing to me on a number of levels because it coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Enoch Powell speech and 25 years since in Lawrence's murder and a whole lot of other things that there is this belief that British tolerance and fair play is a product of our genius we're just decent bloody people that's the truth of it how could we not be when the fact is that all of this stuff has been fought for and that if it hadn't been fought for and because it's been fought for it could be lost and we have to keep on fighting but also that there were people who resisted it so this notion that the Windrush generation are now this benighted generation somewhere around the kind of Queen Marmel Mother Teresa is a kind of fabulous national treasure well if only that had been true at the time and that is they've suffered a huge amount of racism and it was activism that's got us to this point and what is truly fascinating about this moment is that people can keep in their heads these two things on the one hand here's a group of old black immigrants who paid their taxes contributed to the country made the country better all of these things which are readily accepted even by the Daily Mail and then on the other hand here's this other group of immigrants who are taking things away lowering our wages making everything worse ruining the country how can that be? how can you keep those two things in your head at the same time and it's activism that we don't know what the future holds but we do know that if we don't fight for our version of it that it won't exist and so activism is the key and if you go to the states at the moment and you speak to most of the liberals I've spoken to while reporting they're all doing things now that they didn't do even two years ago because they feel they were asleep at the wheel and that they let this happen and bad things happen when good people stay at home so go vote yes lady in the center here please in the very brightly designed t-shirt do you think a world of our borders would also abolish a class system? sadly not no it's a good question and I would like that too that would be a different talk though no what you'd be doing is opening not just the thing that's often not said about when it comes to immigration is that with a few exceptions if you happen to come from a country that's been banned for whatever reason rich people can travel anywhere in the world and western people can travel anywhere in the world which is why it's a difficult concept for western people because we have open borders just not for them and so there is a class issue here which is that poor people can't travel poor people are not allowed to travel and that's accepted that's what when he says I wouldn't let my dad in well no because he's poor we don't want poor people no more and that's said and it's accepted and if we look once again at these windrush stories they're working class people wealthier people could get a lawyer on the case or would have engaged with the system at some other point because because they wanted to travel or some of these are people who and it's a key point this that when confronted people thought there was no consequence to me denying you your benefits denying you your job denying you your healthcare what are you going to do you're an old black man that is all part of the mindset that makes this particular group vulnerable so I do think that it's it's a class issue but I don't think you get rid of class by by opening the borders yes in the centre here the gentleman in the grey jacket please hi thanks for a very stimulating conversation but up till now the discussion has all been about presuming the flow has been from the rest of the world to Europe and of course migration and immigration takes place all over the world by poor people Colombia has just closed its borders to Venezuela because of the mass immigration fleeing that dreadful economy but I just wondered how you imagine a world without borders the effect on the rest of the world not just on Europe well a lot of the rest of the world often does have quite poor as borders if you look at where the lion share of refugees and asylum seekers are they it's not that those countries don't have borders but that they are relatively they don't have places like the jungle in Calais that's not the problem and my experience of people moving around some parts of the world like if you're in the Caribbean and you want to go from one Caribbean country to the other that is fairly easy it's much more difficult if you want to go from Zimbabwe for example or a poor African country to South Africa but then South Africa I would kind of consider to be a bit more like Britain in that in that regard so wherever one would have open borders there would be the challenge of how do you cope how do you cope with this flow of how do you cope with this flow of people but if you have people fleeing tyranny then there is international law that you go and let them in that's law and then the problem there would be do you have the international capacity to actually engage with that tyranny which of course we don't but I think that's a different question we look at Syria or Afghanistan or places where people are legitimately fleeing awful things we have a structure within UNHCR within the UN but we have a structure that most powerful countries don't really respect and if more powerful countries were doing their bit then there would be a bigger distribution of those people who are fleeing those things but actually I think in an awful lot of the word the borders are less definite and more understood to be arbitrary not least because the people who live within them didn't actually draw them and so the kind of movement between various bits of West African countries I think is quite is quite fluid so I think it very much depends on where you mean and it very much depends on why people are moving but if we have the kind of international structures if we have the kind of international enforcement of the international policies and policies and structures that exist we could most of the world could cope with this okay we've got time for I think one more question and I think I want to keep this as gender equal as possible so can we have a lady here please hi thank you so much for your talk talking about arbitrary borders obviously you can think about borders within a nation state as well as around and dividing between other nation states I was just wondering about how you feel we can reconcile the border that seems to have been drawn between London and most of the rest of the UK or south north within the UK and how you see that kind of developing the future and what solutions you see we could work towards I mean it's been I was in America for 12 years and I only came back three years ago and I was quite shocked just by what London had become in terms of price inequality stress this might be partly my personal story I didn't have kids when I left so I might be stressed about prices because I've got kids but I don't think that's all it is Britain is horribly imbalanced and that's you don't have to spend 10 minutes in this E if you've been anywhere else in the country to kind of understand that I do think and some of this came from the work I was doing on knife crime that regional government in this country would be a really good thing that the conversation just as an example the conversation that we're having about knife crime that we should be having about knife crime in London is very very different to the one that they should be having in Wolverhampton in the West Midlands which is very different again than the one that they were having in Scotland and that it would really help to break that conversation up not least because the national conversation we're having is dishonest and is mostly kind of disfigured by a kind of overwhelming concentration on London and then London the other problem is that London becomes not just a place but a metaphor and the metaphor is misleading because it is assumed that London means rich and powerful and connected in the kind of national conversation you London metropolitan types and so on and so forth when actually a huge amount of London is none of those things kind of some of the most poor least connected people that you'll find in the country and so the way that London dominates the conversation the national conversation is not just bad for the country it's actually really bad for London so the more this speaks to the other question about politics the more regional governments and city-wide governments want politics that we can have I think the better now you don't want to build up layer upon layer upon layer of bureaucracy but increasingly as I was saying earlier it does feel like the northeast is having a conversation that might maybe I'm just making stuff up but it might be closer the northeast might be having a conversation that's closer to Slovenia whereas London's having a conversation that's more going to be closely tied to Madrid or Paris or something and that they should be allowed to have those conversations and at the moment they're not really Ladies and gentlemen we've had a very stimulating discussion and I'm afraid it's time to wind up we've been talking mostly about Utopia from a British perspective in a way we've enclosed ourselves but when you look at Gary's writings his columns he has always approached things not only from the perspective here but from international situations I think that some of his articles written on the American situation have become legendary and I've seen friends who talk about them all the time this interrogation of the terrible othernessing that's going on in the United States for instance and appreciated by friends in South Africa because precisely they're trying to emerge from exactly that kind of situation of apartheid where people were officially othered and there was nothing that they could do about it we're facing a worldwide problem a global problem which very few public intellectuals in this country are prepared to grapple with one of the hugely honorable exceptions is Gary but I think that he raises all kinds of major questions which are touched upon in your question for instance about an activist community so as is a very activist community it's one of the most diverse universities in Europe and it certainly has the most diverse faculty in all of Europe and we keep wondering what is it that we fail to do by way of contributing new ideas to exactly these problems so it's a responsibility that comes to left and right the implicit I think question that is left hanging in the air from Gary's talk and from many of his columns is there a global failure of the left in general to come up with new imaginative and vibrant practical ideas to move towards utopia to move away from dystopia ladies and gentlemen we have very few public intellectuals in this country in any case very few that right with the elegance and the articulate expression of provocative ideas as Gary does reading his columns in the Guardian is always a source of immense pleasure to myself and I'm sure to many of you he's taken time out of his very busy schedule to talk to us tonight and I'm sure we're going to beg for him to come back to encourage him to come back why don't we thank him in a rousing fashion