 All right. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to what I hope will be a fun and fascinating session, short, brief, action packed. What we're going to try to do is to talk about something very simple. What is happening in the societies of the West, particularly in the polities of the West? Why did Trump win? To what extent is this a larger phenomenon of a kind of populist wave that is sweeping the Western world? All that in 45 minutes, and you get a bit of a movie to go with it. So we'll start with the movie. This is a CNN documentary that I did that has aired in the United States and abroad about a few months ago. The weft liked it and asked me if we'd construct a little panel around it. I thought of the two smartest people I could get to do it with me. And that's Zannie Minton-Bettos, the editor-in-chief of The Economist, and George Osborne, the former chancellor of The Exchequer, and currently the editor of the Evening Standard, which George pointed out to me has a circulation of more than the times the FT and the Guardian put together. So it reminds one of the old days of Beaverbrook and Fleet Street. What I thought I'd do is get out of the way and let you watch the movie to start, and then we'll talk about it more. My favorite class at college was called Thursday Afternoon of the Movies. It was actually, of course, called The History of American Cinema. And the great thing about it was you could watch movies in the afternoon and doze off. That's why we schedule it in the morning. So no dozing. Can we start? Woman of the Democratic Party in Mahoney County. Public and turnout tonight in Mahoney. Hush, primary. Thousands of Democrats left the party just to vote for Trump. News Radio 570, Dodie K. Vienna. I am taking a Republican ballot. I'm supporting Trump. They are relating to a billionaire. Voting for Trump. From day one, I have been for Donald Trump. You excited a base of people the same way Obama did eight years prior. You brought out people that had never voted before. This is where Donald Trump has tried to sell, hey, the factory's closed. Hey, I'll rip up NAFTA. In November, the results were stunning. In Mahoney County, compared to 2012, there was a 12-point swing toward Trump. In Trumbull County, the swing was 13 points and Trump scored a win. Thank you, Ohio. I love you. Thank you. A man that shits and goes, I don't know what to say. I want to laugh and cry at the same time. So how did it happen? How did Clinton lose the presidency? And how did so few people see what was coming? Well, this man saw it very clearly. He started talking to people, and I said, we got to warn them that they're massing this up. They're f***ing it up. David Beatrice was the canary in the coal mine. I said, boy, she's in trouble. So my consultant and I wrote a memo. That memo, written six months before the election, went up Beatrice's chain of command, warning that the campaign was losing Ohio voters who had once been devoted Democrats. Had they listened to this memo, we would be talking to President Hillary Clinton. I was having a lot of people just saying, I can't support her. This guy wants to bring back our jobs. They didn't care about all of his misogynistic, xenophobic, racist stuff. They just didn't care. All they heard was, jobs, jobs, jobs, and he's going to try to get them jobs. We're going to bring back jobs, because we need jobs here. We're going to bring jobs back from China to Pennsylvania, to Michigan, and all across this land. We're going to bring our jobs back. And he sold them that, and we weren't giving them sustenance. Beatrice says his Democrats never understood exactly what Hillary Clinton was for. They are working class people who think the Democratic Party has left them. And of course, we know those white working class voters were the tipping point. To understand just how big a deal this is, let's go back a bit, back to the 1970s. We've never forgotten that the Democratic Party is well-named. It's a party of the people. Jimmy Carter was, for certain, a man of the people, a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. Their brand image is the party of the people, the party of working people specifically. It started even earlier, actually, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was mostly the white working class that put him in the Oval Office four times. The author and scholar Thomas Frank. This is who they were as a party. Note Frank's use of the word were. All that changed, he says, with a Democrat who actually had a unique appeal to the white working class. In the name of the hard-working Americans who make up our forgotten middle class, I proudly accept your nomination for president of the United States. Bill Clinton is the sort of emblematic figure in the transition of the Democratic Party, from a party that cares about working class, middle class people, to a party that is very much concerned with the innovation, economy, and Wall Street, and all that. Frank's right. The Democratic Party did change during Bill Clinton's presidency. Bill Clinton made the party a bigger tent. And into that big Democratic tent went the elites of America, its lawyers, and doctors, and stockbrokers. But let's remember, Clinton essentially tied his Republican opponents in the white working class demographic in both 1992 and 1996. So why did the white working class vote for Bill and not for Hillary? What they've become over the last couple of decades is a party of the professional class. It's highly educated, affluent, white-collar people, sort of up or 10% of the income distribution. David Brooks says Hillary Clinton fits into this category perfectly. Went to a fancy school, went to an either fancier law school, married a guy from a fancy law school, lives in the sorts of places where those people would gather. And they're the sort of zip codes with restoration hardware and anthropology, clothing store. If it sounds like he's simply describing rich people here, Brooks says there's a very important distinction between rich entrepreneurs, people who create companies and make things and employ people, and professionals. People in the working class or people who voted for Trump don't mind billionaires, but they mind our bossy professionals, teachers, lawyers, journalists who seem to want to tell them what to do or seem to want to tell them how to act. And if you had to pick the classic epitome of that person who most defends them, that would be Hillary Clinton. You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. And so she was exactly the wrong person. Maybe, but she seemed to have the right ideas. At least she had ideas, actual policies beyond banning Muslims or building border walls. She wanted to raise taxes on the wealthy. She had a plan for the opioid epidemic devastating the working class. She said she wanted to retrain workers. In fact, said Barack Obama. There has never been a man or a woman, not me, not Bill, nobody more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America. But it turns out voters often do not vote on policy. Instead, they choose the candidate they can relate to. If you ask people after an election which party stood for which policies, like a third of the people don't know, that's not what they're in the business of doing. But one thing we are all in the business of doing is judging people and judging social identity. Which party is filled with the sorts of people I hung out in high school with? And so it was the state of Ohio that voted against Hillary Clinton. And it still upsets Beatrice. I love my country, and I love my valley, and I love my state. And I didn't want this man to be president. And I did everything I could. And we blew it. And I'm angry and I'm upset. George, Danny, if you come up and we can talk about this. So as you can see in the movie, one of the things we tried to do was to highlight the degree to which there was a real economic issue that was driving, that was the undercurrent of this rise of populism and this populist candidate, but also non-economic issues. So here we dwelt a little bit on social class. There's also culture, which we talk about in the documentary, the degree to which immigration really unsettled an older white part of the population and made them feel that their country was changing. The single question that correlated most strongly with Trump voting for Trump was the question, do you feel alienated in your own country or something like that? It may have been slightly different. And I noticed that in one of the analyses of Brexit, that the survey question that was, again, the strongest predictor of a Brexit voter was something like that. Do you feel alienated or you feel like the culture is changing too rapidly? So George, when you look at this and you think about Brexit, how much do you think this kind of idea of capitalism plus culture plus class explains what happened in Brexit and beyond in Europe as well? Yeah, I mean, I was in Downing Street on the night of the Brexit referendum. And the results from areas that, you know, in Britain would be similar to the counties you went to in Ohio, came in for Brexit, the Northeast of England, sort of post-industrial towns. And it was actually the thriving metropolitan areas that voted to remain inside the European Union, not just London, but actually the center of Manchester voted to remain inside the EU. And so I've definitely detected I was a conservative politician for almost two decades. And I detected a shift, essentially, in British politics, which is similar to the shift you've seen in American politics. Away from economic issues, although I think economic grievance is a big motivating factor behind them, towards cultural issues. And you've seen a shift in the appeal of the different political forces in the UK, similar, again, to what you see in the US. So for example, right now, one of the biggest indicators of whether you're a voter for the British Labour Party, although it's led by quite far left Marxist, is whether you have a college degree. And there's a very large majority of college educated people who are voting for Labour, whereas people without college degrees, who would previously have sort of naturally aligned themselves with the left-wing working class party, if you like, would say that they voted conservative now. And so you are seeing quite a big shift in the matrix, away from the kind of left-right on the economic spectrum, to, I guess, a sort of, I don't know how you put it, a kind of globalized and non-globalized approach on culture. Almost sort of open closed. You want an open society. You want a closed society. As any, I mean, if you were to pick, do you think I, I tend to agree with George that economics is the kind of underlying motive. But for some reason, the way people now experience politics is much more through identity, class, culture. Those are the issues that seem to rub them. I think it's actually both of those. I think I would start by saying that I think we all ought to start looking at this with some humility. It's kind of ironic that it's to remain a Brit talking about why Trump won in Davos with you. So, you know, set that aside, I think it is a combination of the economic and the cultural. And there are important differences on both sides of the Atlantic, but important themes that are similar. And the economic, you're right. We had a period, particularly after the financial crisis, of living standards being hit. But we've had a long period of relatively stagnant living standards for a large number of people. People who felt on both sides of the Atlantic for the first time that their children would be less well off than they were. So that economic insecurity, I think, fueled a sense of grievance against a system that produced an elite like the people here. And it was a sense that the system was stacked against ordinary people. I think, coupled to that, the cultural sense, as you say, that societies were changing remarkably quickly, whether it was through because of large-scale immigration, whether it was because of rapid progression on important social issues. Social issues I'm incredibly glad have had progression, like gay rights. But for a lot of people, that meant society was changing very fast. And I think, in both countries, different things were added to that. And so in the UK, for example, I think the sense that ordinary people were feeling left behind was aggravated, actually, by the financial crisis and the austerity program afterward that came. There were people who felt that they didn't see the public services they used to. They then thought that's because there were too many migrants from Europe. And that pushed the anti-Brexit or the pro-Brexit vote. And on both sides of the Atlantic, I think it's important to remember that this sense of frustration and anger, while very real and important, wasn't the only thing that drove victory for Trump or the Brexit, the levers on the Brexit side. On both cases, whether it was affluent, elderly, conservative Tories who voted to leave for reasons of sovereignty or in the US, Republicans who stayed with the Republican Party, even though Trump was the candidate, it was. And this is a phrase that has been said of Britain. But people say that Brexit was won by a coalition of blue collars and red trousers. And red trousers are typically worn by the kind of people that George knows very well as a member of the best party. Never worn red trousers. No, not you, but they are members of your party. And I think the same thing in the US. It was a coalition of the disenchanted, angry people who felt left behind culturally and economically, actually with a remarkable number of the elites still voting on traditional Republican lines. So was it, you know, that's in part the puzzle. Was it, George, an alliance of the red trousers crowd, because they shared some of those cultural reactions? Or was it that people like Paul Ryan were cynically making a deal saying, look, you can say all your racist nonsense as long as I get my tax cut? Well, I think, again, speaking of Brexit. And the old thing is the government, the incumbent government, which I was part, had just won a general election. So it was not as if there was a desire to kind of reject the government, because we just had a test of that. I think it was an alliance of, I guess, the sort of insulated and the insecure. Insulated because they were retired, often owned their own home outright without a mortgage. And I maybe were anxious at the pace of social change. And then there were the insecure, the people who weren't in work or were in marginal employment, and looking for something to address their grievance or something to blame. I think, to be fair, you can't totally dismiss the actual substance of the issues. I think there's a danger of people, like myself, to just say, well, Brexit was just an excuse for people to vote the way they did. You've got to accept in the Brexit referendum. There were a large number of British people who were not convinced that we should be in the European Union, had real concerns about sovereignty, and the like. And I think there's a risk that you kind of reject those issues, similarly in the United States, where I would pick, you know, fault if I dare with you, read on your movie, is everyone here could tell you Donald Trump's policies. If I said to you, what were Donald Trump's policies, you would go, he wanted to build a wall. He wanted to stop Muslims coming in. Might not agree with those policies, but actually, I thought he had really recognizable policies. And even if you asked this room before they'd seen your film, give me one Hillary Clinton policy, you wouldn't have been able to name one, or most people wouldn't have been able to name one. So I do think he also cut through with some real policy, even if you don't believe they're the correct policy. No, it's a very good point, and perhaps the way that I should have been phrased was that she had, you know, there's, I think, a tendency for policy wants to look at economic solutions and policies as the real policies. Trump was actually on the campaign trail, if you listen to him. It was, you know, it was often an R meandering, he changes mind about everything. One day he'd like the British healthcare system. One day he didn't like it. But he was very consistent on these cultural, you know, on issues basically of migration, culture, and race, and religion. So it was the wall, it was Mexicans, it was Muslims. There he was very consistent. I think that's true, and it's, and partly, you know, Hillary Clinton was not a good candidate. You know, even when she was, you know, touting her book, she came to London and I did a podcast with her, and asked her, I said, you know, I, we were, you have, we're policy wants of the economy, we're bigger policy wants than anybody else. And yet, if you'd asked me at the end of your campaign to summarize what you stood for, I really would have found it hard to do in less than about five minutes of reading out in list of policies. So she was not a good encapsulator, but I think that's part of a broader problem, which is, if you will, the sort of liberal, internationalist consensus that I suspect we all and everybody in this room subscribe to, do not actually yet have seriously good answers to the grievances that many of these people had. And Trump, he has the wrong answers, but in the campaign he had simple ones, and he said he was going to make America great again. He was going to bring back jobs. That was what people grabbed. I think a lot of people probably discounted the idea of the wall. They thought he'll never actually build it. They probably didn't even necessarily like the extreme racism, but they felt, as you, as it said in your clip, you know, I will bring back jobs. I will make America great again. It was a very clear message to people that their life would get better. I also think don't underestimate the entertainment value. You know, I now edit a newspaper. If we put Donald Trump on the front, it's like a British newspaper, we put Donald Trump on the front page of the newspaper, we get a higher pickup of that newspaper that day. And he's turning up here, and he's, and he'll love- You're already in the room, right? Well, I don't know, I'm gonna still be there. But he's, you know, he's, you know, he would love to know that that's like what everyone's been talking about for days, him coming. You know, he's, I think we underestimate that there's just a kind of, in a kind of reality television age, he was the king of reality television. And he, you know, his use of the new communication technologies was, you know, frankly, brilliant. But, you know, I think that's absolutely true. And, you know, maybe we are beginning to see the dawn of a kind of celebrity politics, because I think there's a wonderful, there's a pointed Tony Blair's memoirs where he talks about what Gordon Brown taught him about the British left. And he said, Gordon taught me everything I needed to understand about Labour Party politics, left wing politics, because I was a middle-class kid. I didn't come from, really meant upper-middle-class kid. You know, came, didn't come from that world. But what I taught Gordon is how irrelevant this was to the vast majority of the British people, that most people live a life entirely uninvolved with politics. Their life is, you know, their work, their family, their sports, entertainment. Trump comes out of that much larger world, you know, and politics and, particularly policy is kind of a ghetto. And I wonder whether this is an invitation for other people, Oprah, you know, the Kardashians, to say, hey, you know, we're much, you know, we're, I've 10 times as many Twitter followers than some senators, you know. It might well be, but I think we would be mistaken if we focus on thinking that this is a shift to celebrity politics, primarily, because I think underneath this, these kind of concerns that people have and the dissatisfaction with the status quo, the dissatisfaction of an economic system that they think is unfair and is not working for them, that's not gonna go away. What we have right now, though, I think on both sides of the Atlantic, interestingly, is actually no sort of new set of policies. If you look at what has happened in America, what Donald Trump has done so far, primarily has been essentially a kind of warmed-over Reagan agenda of deregulation and tax cut slash with a bit of reform. And in the UK, well, frankly, nothing very much has happened, but we seem to be having a debate as one labor MP said to me about which version of yesterday we want to go back to. Is it, you know, the extreme 1970s with Corbyn or the 1950s or possibly the 1850s with various members of Georgia's party? And I think that that's not gonna get us anywhere. And the, for me, the interesting thing is when do we start getting serious policy, you're right, so democratic? Don't we, can I ask you a question? Don't we have to identify the problem is, you see, if you're a classic, you know, as I was finance minister, you're going, well, hold on, GDP is growing more strongly than it has done for a decade in all these countries. Unemployment is lower in Britain, America, and most European countries now than almost has ever been. Okay, let me give you some problems. Real incomes are rising. Actually, inequality is coming down on official Gini coefficient measures and the like. So I think one of the problems that, you know, the sort of collectively the center has is, you know, tell us what the problem is. All right, well, the problem is that real incomes in the UK and across the rich world, at the, for most people, median real incomes have their biggest hit post financial crisis than they did in real terms. They did for more than a hundred years. They may be now starting to grow again, but after a very big hit that was disproportionately focused on the young that was disproportionately elderly, thanks to generous pensions were basically exempted from this, there's a sense that, you know, rising inequality is a concern. People think that the fruits of this technological innovation are going to a very small number of people, most of whom are here, that the system is rigged in some way. They may not be right about that, but they feel very, very cross about it. And I think for me, the interesting comparison is actually with the late 19th century, when you had a similar period of technological innovation, you had a similar globalization, you had similar big periods of migration, and you had a backlash in the form of populists in the US and somewhat similar in Western Europe, and it was a sort of multi-decade process that brought the progressive era and brought really fundamental social change, whether it was the introduction of social welfare regulation, whether it was the introduction of the income tax, universal secondary education in the US, big, big changes. And for me, the question is, what are the big, big changes we need now and when are we gonna get them? But I do think that, you know, George is right that it's not as clear, but I think you partly because, you know, the economist sees the world through this prism, are convinced that at core, this is an economic issue. If you look at Germany, Germany has had the strong, you know, incredibly strong growth for the last 10 years. It has had no loss of manufacturing jobs. It has had no rise in inequality. The same is true of Sweden. The same is true of Holland. And in both of those cases. They all have right-wing populist movements, all of which seem to be about immigration and culture. Absolutely. And we started this conversation by saying it was not just economic. No, but you're viewing the wall as kind of epiphenomenal. Whereas what Trump says in a post election interview, he said, the wall was the single thing that got me through. Every time I would get into trouble, I would talk about the wall and the crowd would go nuts. I'm not suggesting this is only an economic phenomenon. I think we all agreed at the beginning of this conversation that there was a sense of unhappiness with the pace of cultural and social change. And that is driven in large part by immigration. But isn't the uncomfortable question, should you then, should the left be moving right on culture and immigration rather than the right moving left on economics? There's a very good question about what scale of movement of people is compatible with a 21st century welfare state. It's a very interesting and important question. And I wouldn't for a second think we should duck there. Absolutely. And similarly on cultural issues, you know, the kinds of cultural progress that has been made in areas of diversity and so forth, broadly extremely good from an English liberal perspective. But nonetheless, the whole political correctness debate, frankly at some point becomes antithetical to free speech. And I think there's a real issue there. So yes, we should have those debates on a social level as well as an economic level. And I don't for a second think it's just economic. But I do think the part of the dissatisfaction of a lot of people underlying it is a sense of economic unfairness, that this is a system which is not working for them, or working much less well for them than it is for others. But what the trouble is, what is the system that would deliver for those people? I mean, if you will, beyond high GDP growth, low unemployment, considerable income redistribution actually in many countries, what the danger is you pose a challenge that you don't, it's very difficult to find answers. Now you can say, well, young people are getting a raw deal and I would be all for trying to help young people into housing and so on. But it's not actually clear that young people have been the drivers of the populist backlash in Brexit or Trump or whatever. So I just think there's a danger of sort of misdiagnosing the problem or setting yourself up like the system's failing. I mean, as someone who didn't want to leave the EU, I think the answer that was provided, which is leaving the EU is gonna make the country poorer than it would otherwise have been. So there's a kind of risk that you end up with solutions that actually make the problem a lot worse. I suspect that this, and I don't think this is the forum to go into a kind of litany of detailed policy proposals, but I think the magnitude and scale of policy change is much greater probably than you think. And so some things to throw out, I think our education system has changed remarkably little in the face of a dramatic technological change. So this is a buzzword everyone talks about, lifetime learning, why should public involvement and education stop at the end of universities? Trust busting, huge thing happened at the beginning of the 20th century. Do we need to rethink antitrust and competition? American economy is becoming much more concentrated. How do we redesign a tax system for a world that's increasingly driven by, not by sort of industry, but by technology? Have we got, is income tax the right way? Are we taxing labor much too much? Should we be thinking about taxing immobile, taxing wealth, those kinds of things? There are lots of areas where I think we could, can and should have just a much broader and more ambitious discussion than one that says, well, GDP is fine. And I mean, I agree with you. It's great that GDP is great and it's great that unemployment is low, but those I don't think are sufficient metrics of the health of a 25-year-old. No, I agree with all those outlines of policies you set out, right? I suspect the tech world is coming in for heavy government regulation over the next 10 years. And I'm all for, you know, doing more for lifelong learning and so on. I just, you know, I wonder if that's really going to the heart of some of the anger and the concern you have out there. It's not that people, you know, want Google broken up that they're voting for Brexit or voting for Trump, even if it might be a legitimate policy debate. And I think the other thing you have to kind of ask yourself is how, you know, how enduring is this challenge? You see, a historian, you mentioned the 19th century. I don't think a historian would have much problem in 100 years time saying, well, you know, they had a massive financial crash that always creates a political reaction at any point in human history. And he also happened to have a big technological revolution which shook up traditional political structures so people could launch political parties off their phone as essentially Donald Trump did and Emmanuel Macron did. And, you know, but it's essentially the world will adjust. Is this a fundamental crisis of globalization and capitalism? And I'm not sure we know yet because the financial crash was so such a hit to the economy that it has colored, I think, you know, political decision making for a decade. Is Macron going to be the savior? Is he the centrist? Who knows, but as you and I have discussed this before, I think there are interesting parallels just to push the historical analogy a bit more between Macron and Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt, one of the main characters in the US progressive era, cloaked a progressive domestic agenda in a kind of national greatness approach. And he was also very big on symbolism just as Macron is. And I think that Macron is the first leader who gets the fact that politics is now less about left versus right, but more about, as you said earlier, open versus closed. And I think that sense of remaking society so that it is possible to remain open is something that he certainly understands the challenge. He certainly has the self-confidence that he thinks he'll do it, whether he will or not, we'll see. But I think he's probably the best hope in Europe for that. I think right now in British politics, at least in serving British politics, there's nobody with any ideas. The Prime Minister, when she first became Prime Minister, you know, gave a speech outside Downing Street that kind of raised some of these issues and talked about correcting the burning injustices. I don't think anything, nothing very much has happened there. I don't think you're gonna get George to leap to the defense with the Prime Minister. What about Eastern Europe? Another puzzle, you know, it seems to me, George, is this is a place where it has not gone through the traditional post-industrial problems economically. I mean, Poland was growing very well. They barely have any immigrants. You know, in Eastern Europe, I'm struck by, for example, the fact that the resurgence of anti-Semitism, which is extraordinary given that there are no Jews there. They've managed this, you know, what is going on? Well, I would say it's, broadly in a world where quite a lot of things are going quite well at the moment, compared to a few years ago, I would say Eastern Europe is the area where there's a lot of concern, because you do see the rise of these nationalist parties and governments that, you know, I guess are sort of challenging the European consensus. By the way, I think the result of the reaction of the European Union is increasingly just going to be to marginalize them and focus on the eurozone, particularly now Britain is leaving the EU. Well, I mean, I guess the right in Eastern Europe originally was a kind of neoliberal right that emerged out of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and they were called kind of supporters of Reagan and Thatcher and based in Prague and Warsaw. And it turned out to be a very narrow base to try and construct a right-wing party. Remember, successful right-wing parties, including the British Conservative Party, you know, are not just a kind of pro-capitalist party. They will have a kind of cultural dimension and a conservatism to them. And I don't think because of the history of those areas, those forces have been allowed to emerge over the 20th century, and they have emerged more recently. I think you also have to accept, and I'm someone who's very much in favor of immigration, that you have seen, particularly in Europe, even if not directly into these countries, at least the threat of significant movements of people because of what's gone on in the near neighborhood of Europe, like the Syrian Civil War. And I think if you're watching television in Warsaw or indeed in London or indeed in Munich and you see just sort of boatloads of young men coming across the Mediterranean and it's chaotic and obviously tragic, often for the people involved, but it just looks out of control and no one's in charge. And that is an environment in which people who stand up and say, I will put you in charge. I can be the strong person. They have an appeal. And that's, I think, one of the things that's gone wrong in the handling of immigration in a European context. And actually, Trump's wall is an echo of that in the United States, which is, whether or not you think, you know, bright Indian graduates to go to Silicon Valley and let's at least stop, you know, numbers of people we don't even know who they are crossing our border to the south. And, you know, they've sort of latched on to the inability of governments to apparently exercise control on the border. Yeah, Trump would often say, in fact, he would say it in response to the images coming out of Europe because there actually aren't many images. In America, Mexican immigration was down to a trickle. But he would look at the European case and say, if you can't control your borders, you don't have a country. And it, again, was one of these lines that would resonate very powerful. Let's take a few questions before we close up. Yep, sir. What happens in Europe affects us. What happens in the United States affects us. We have a tendency in the region, as you know, Farid, to blame everything on the outside and we never blame ourselves because we are perfect and everybody else is not. But having said this, during the Cold War, during the time when oil was more important than it is today, there was a lot of interest by foreign powers, the United States and Europeans in what's happening in the Middle East. Unfortunately, that's not the case anymore. The Middle East has been disintegrating as we've seen it over the last seven years. Call it the Arab Spring, the Arab Winter, as you wish, but that situation has not ended yet. As a result, you've seen millions of people who have become refugees, displaced, and the story goes on and on and countries have disappeared from the map. Isn't it time for Europe and the United States to look at the Middle East at a time when we see this society being divided, when we see right wing, whatever you want to call them, populists, nationalists, right wingers, taking shape, taking hold of power in the United States and Washington, but also you see in the French elections, we see in Germany, we see in Austria, we see elsewhere, that we see Brexit. All of this trend of moving right wing is happening at a time when we in the Middle East need foreign positive intervention much more than ever. Maybe a Marshall Plan, maybe some kind of humanitarian intervention along liberal old theory, but if in the absence of this, with what is going on in Europe, we are really doomed, and unless we do something on our own and we are not capable of doing something on our own unfortunately, then this situation is going to be further exacerbated and you're going to see millions and millions of both people in the Mediterranean, I'm afraid, in the years to come. Let's take a few more and then we'll come to you. What is the role of the change in the way the information is delivered in all of these we are talking, because of course there is no, the time where mainstream was made by CNN or the economy is gone, people receives just the information they want to read, so mainstream is split and atomized, and this brings islands in the population that are very, very committed. For example, in the case of Trump people that only read whatever satisfies their egos and desires, and this is perhaps 20% of the population no more, but having 20% very committed is a lot and enough. Most of the times to get elections gone. Let me take one more, is there the lady there so we can first achieve a little gender balance? Yeah, I came in a little late, so sorry, but I caught an important element in the middle where you're talking, I think, you talked about the left moving right to keep pace, and then it just got lost in the conversation. We didn't hear an answer to that, so is there an answer? Or should the right move left? Right, so the point I was making was that the uncomfortable part that the left doesn't like to talk about is, does it need to move right on social and immigration policy? It's more than happy to plunge leftward. Anytime you bring this up in the United States, certainly the immediate answer of every Democrat is, yes, we need to be more like Bernie Sanders, we need to embrace universal basic income, but the polling shows that the public is already with the Democratic Party on most economic issues, the public is basically left of center, where they disagree with the Democratic Party, is on immigration, on transgender bathrooms, unfortunately on gay rights, I agree with you entirely, Zanni, it's, you know, and there, I mean, you'd say there's a very spirited minority that disapproves of a kind of tepid majority support for these things, and that's the conversation that's very hard to have, so when I did an interview with Hillary Clinton, I raised this issue with her, and she absolutely said, no, we will never give back, you know, hard for gains, and I admire that as a, you know, as kind of a moral principle, it does seem to me it has a political effect. Let me ask you guys, you can wane on this, but also, does the West have the appetite to do something that Basam was describing, go into the Middle East and reorder it? No, because we tried that. Look, I completely agree with the... We worked out well for Jordan, they got a Hashemite monarchy. Yeah, the days when Britain picked the ruling families in the Middle East have long gone. Look, I had, you know, of course, the Middle East is an incredible state of flux. I think to be honest, you know, and I saw this over the years that not just I was in government, but I was a member of parliament, you know, I voted for the Iraq War in 2003 as a British member of MP. You know, there is zero appetite in any Western democracy for large-scale foreign intervention again, you know, certainly until memories fade of the Iraq incursion. Second, I think a lot of us put our hope on the Arab Spring and got excited about Tahrir Square and what was happening Tunisia and the very early days in Syria. And I think we've all been rather sort of dumbfounded by what has happened and not really clear whether we now support large populist uprisings in previously stable countries, or apparently stable countries. So we've kind of run out of answers and into that space has come two things. One is other players, Russia, for example, for the first time since Henry Kissinger kicked them out, there's back in the Middle East and looks like a more reliable partner to an authoritarian state that wants to maintain control than perhaps a Western ally. And then second, you're actually seeing a return of actually rather classic Western strongman policy with Donald Trump, for example, supporting the Saudis. And he's not the outlier. In many ways, George Bush and Barack Obama were the outliers and he is returning to a much more classic post-war US policy and other European countries are doing something similar because the other approaches of sort of neo-conservative intervention and support for Arab Spring populism don't appear to have worked. And of course, there's been a large number of people called up in that tragedy. So I just don't see the energy or willingness to get involved, I'm afraid. And I also think there's quite a lot of now a kind of feeling in the West that we don't really understand this anymore. And we therefore are extremely nervous of stepping into the space of sectarianism and conflict between Arab states. Zanni, close this out with some thoughts on the issue of communication. To what extent are these forces of populism strengthened, accelerated by this extraordinary narrow casting of media? Where, as George said, very cheaply, you can create your own channels of communication. You can create your own reality. You can create your own facts. I think to some degree that's clearly right. And it's interesting that when the Arab Spring first happened, Twitter and social media was seen as the great force for democracy and everyone was very excited that this was going to be a way that positive change was coming. Now we're incredibly jaundiced that social media is actually threatening democracy. And so I think that's, you're absolutely right. That said, Donald Trump is the creature of TV as much as he is the creature of his Twitter account. And so it reminds us that he very brilliantly used TV which has sort of divided in the US into extremely polarized television. But I think it's worth putting this into context. Every time there is a new medium, we think that society is irrevocably being ruined. I think it happened with the printing press. Certainly happened with the introduction of mass media at the beginning of the 20th century. I suspect over time, as societies, we will adjust to this new media. And we're already seeing it now in the backlash against the social media companies and the way they're being forced to change. So while I think you're right, it's clearly made it worse in the short term. I don't think we can sort of blame everything. And of course I would say this, but we can't blame everything on the media and the way the message is propagated. There are underlying real social, cultural, economic issues that we've talked about. And for while they're still there and while people are feeling unhappy and dissatisfied, it doesn't matter necessarily which medium it's expressed in that unhappiness is still going to be there. So it's not a sort of tiny phenomenon that's being magnified by social media. I think it's a very real sense of unhappiness with the status quo in lots of countries. I do also think some things are just worth fighting for. Just because at the moment there's a lot of pushback on some of the social changes happening, doesn't mean we have to kind of give in and follow that. You can fight for it, and which Emmanuel Macron has proved is politically possible in France, which is why he's significant. And as for quality journalism, yeah, sure, everyone two years ago said, well, no one will ever be buying a newspaper or a magazine anymore or watching a big network television. Well, actually it feels to me, you would know better than me, but in the US that there's been a resurgence of interest in quality publications like the Washington Post and the New York Times. And there's more people watching. It's in the US. So I'm coming, don't worry, we're coming on to the economists. And you know, and there's a huge, you've got more and more people turning into some of the networks like CNN. And the economist is doing, well, and the evening standard circulation is up. And so I just think in the end it's not, it can't just be about fellowship. It can't just be like, where's the crowd and let's go and chase them. You've also got to have a certain set of values, which I don't think are the wrong values, even if they're derided or regarded as out of touch or whatever, I still think they're the right ones. Go and find a popular way to express them. So I'll end on a hopeful note, picking up what George said. One thing that's true in Europe and the United States is that young people are much more comfortable in this open world. They are much more comfortable with social diversity, cultural diversity, sexual diversity. They're much more comfortable with immigration. They're much more comfortable with the idea of a degree of insecurity in the job market, even though obviously they would like more and they understand they don't have one job for life and one pension attached to it. So it feels to me like the great challenge is to get over this hum of a period where you have an older part of the population that understandably is much more resistant to change. And if you could get to that point, then you do need a new politics. I agree with you entirely, but you have a population that's much more broadly, culturally sympathetic to it. So I guess there's light at the end of the tunnel as long as the train doesn't blow up on the way to the left of that. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.