 felly hefyd, mae'r cyfnodd cyfnodd yng Nghymru, efallai efallai y cyfnodd y cyfnodd yng Nghymru, a'r cyfnodd Cymru yn yr ysgol, ond mae'r cyfnodd cyfnodd yng nghymru, yn yr hynny'n ei fod yn gwybod i'r byw yw'r cyfnodd cyfnodd. Mae'r cyfnodd cyfnodd cyfoedd, yn archif, yn llwyddiant, dylai'r amser o'r gwirioneddau o'r cyfnodd yn y bydd y bydd ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn America. Felly mae'r cyfnodd ymgyrch yn dal yn gymbig, mae'n cyfrifiadau'r Fflau Llari Sommers, a o'i ddiwedd y Dynedig Llywodraeth, fydd yn cyfrifiadau'r Fflau Llywodraeth, i'r Fft, i'r fflwch i'r llyfrgell yn ddechreu. Yn hynny, ond, mae'r ddysgu i fynd i'r IIEA. Ddodd wedi bod yn cael ei gweithio i'r ystoddau. Rydw i'n meddwl am ffordd, ac mae'n dda i felwod am gweithio ar gael, dwi'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r ganllunio. Rydw i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r Sryd ddau. Rydw i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r Sryd. Y rhai ymddill yw'r ddweud o'r lleidog o'r ddiweddfaeth, ac y ddweud o'r ddweud o'r cyfrannu, Mae'r gwrth yng Nghymru'r gwybod gyda'r problant yn gallu'r byw rydych chi'n tynnu'r gweithio. Dyma'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Mae hynny yn ffordd 4 o 5 o 5 o'r gweithio. Oherwydd, mae'r ysgriffeith yma'r ysgolwch ar y cyfnodig yn cael ei bwysig. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Shouldn't we start with a New Yorker cartoon that some of you might have seen – in fact it was a New Yorker piece by their comic sketch writer Andy Borowitz which was produced on the June 24th, the day of Brexit, last summer. He said, Britain loses long-cherished right to look down on Americans as dumber than they are. On the 8 of November, the playing field was leveled. Yn ymdweud yng nghymru yma o'r Llywodraeth, ac rwy'n dweud ymddiwch yn ein bodi'r gweithio'n gweithio. Mae Theresa May yn unig i'n ddod o'r union eu Uniau Europei sydd oes i'ch gweithio i'r ymddiwch yn y brifysgol Brindig. Llywodraeth, nid o'r llwyddiadau ddiwedd i'r llwyddiadau dros y byddwyd y Prifysgol Trun o'r Llyfrgell yma, ac mae yna 106 oed o'r llwyddiadau o'r Llyfrgell, 107 oed o'r Llyfrgell. Felly, mae'r eich oed o'r prifysgol drwng, o'r 1er 20-30 oed oed. Mae'r Uniau Europei hefyd wedi'i gwybod yn ystafell o'r pantheid, ..tydd y gyrhaeth i Llyfridog wedi wastadde yma.. ..i'w cyfrwch y nato, y llyfrurasio babog.. ..ym rhan ficwr yn iaith.. ..y gallu ffyrdd y llyfrwch y Llyfridog wedi llyfrwch.. ..y'n ysgrif fod yn cyflawni'r rhaglen... ..sydd eu cynhyrch yn mhrwys yn yr heddiw.. ..y pryddysgrifio'r Tauwan yn ffyrdd i November 8. Mae sydd yn ydym nhw'n gweithio ar gyfer yr hyn.. ..y'r rhai hyn yn ei fynd yn rhoi. Trump fel Nato fel Opsolete. Trump fel Europe fel Good Health. Trump a Jei-Jing Ping had a wonderful meeting in Mar-a-Lago where over the most beautiful chocolate cake he's ever seen. And Steve Bannon has been sidelined. Steve Bannon of course made the fatal error of appearing on the cover of Time magazine. The headline was President Bannon. This was in the first 20 days of Trump. Now if Trump cares about one thing more than he does his poll numbers, it's how many times he's been on the cover of Time. He boasts this number. I've been on the cover 30 times, 40 times. Whatever the number of times is, he keeps saying it. In every speech he'll mention how many times. So Bannon made the fatal error of sharing the limelight or robbing Trump of some of the limelight. And he has been sidelined. And as you know professionals, mostly uniform wearing professionals have taken key jobs in the administration. So Jim Mattis is Secretary of Defense. He's a very sane, experienced general. HR McMaster replaced Mike Flynn as the National Security Advisor. Bannon was deprived of his role of being a permanent member of the National Security Council. And of course Jared Kushner, the President's son-in-law, has sort of supplanted Bannon as the horse whisperer, if you like, the sort of key Trump whisperer of the administration. And so therefore we've gone really in the space of a vertiginous 106 days from thinking, oh, the republic's about to end. It's all normal. Trump's a bit eccentric, but this is going to be a conventional Republican administration. And I think both these sort of bipolar readings of the situation are wrong. I think that Trump has made a deal with Xi Jinping to take the trade piece of this first. He's made a deal with Xi Jinping that Xi Jinping helps him on North Korea to fulfill Trump's pledge that North Korea will not have nuclear weapons. I think Xi Jinping probably knows better than Trump that North Korea already does have nuclear weapons and that it's a vow Trump's going to have a great deal of difficulty fulfilling. Nevertheless, for the time being, there's been a trade-off that high tariff rates, countervailing duties on Chinese imports are not going to be imposed. It will not be declared a currency manipulator. We will work together on North Korea. I think similarly you've seen Trump back off from building a war with Mexico. He's pretending that he's building it, but he's not going to get the funding to build a new war. And even if he did get the funding, the eminent domain problems along the border with this 3,000-mile border are so deeply complex and so thorny. That it would be very difficult to imagine any serious kind of new war being built within 10, 15 years. It's just too complex. So there are grounds for believing that Trump has sort of come to his senses and that we've gone from America first to a pro-globalist America in the space of 106 days. I think, though, that that's far too sanguine. I think that Bannon is still in the White House. Trump's got a very good instinct with people. Are you a threat or are you a help? And Bannon, as you know, was editor of Breitbart News, the media vehicle, which is still, of course, functioning, that did more than any other to help Trump in his campaign and to spread the sort of alt-right message. That was Bannon's baby. It was funded, as it remains, by Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebecca Mercer, who are big hedge fund figures from New Jersey, who were also independently the largest contributors to Trump's election campaign. There are hugely important America first voices in the sort of Trump universe. And I think that Trump knows if Bannon was expelled into the darkness from the White House that he would go back to Breitbart and he would be enthusiastically funded to continue the job he was doing, which is to spot fake Republicans wherever you look. Rhinos, Republicans in name only. And Jared Kushner, it's interesting to point out before Bannon was downgraded about a month ago, Breitbart was targeting Kushner every day as a traitor to the Conservative-Trumpian cause. It's now on ceasefire. Bannon is still in the White House. And I think on Bannon, this is a guess, but I think he will stay in the White House because Trump understands viscerally at some kind of reptilian level that you need to keep your enemies close. So Bannon will still be there. But the more important point is that Trump is not actually a very competent figure. And I think that's, in Washington, I live in D.C., a source of great reassurance to people there that they imagined that there was this grand strategic America first plan that would be competently unrolled. And in fact it wasn't a plan. It was a sort of bunch of instincts. Bannon and others wrote these very badly drafted Muslim ban executive orders. And the system has been working. Courts have been stopping Trump. They've been staying. They understand the ban on religious discrimination part of the Constitution and they are upholding it. So the sense that America first was going to be implemented, that's receded, the fear of that was receded. And a sense of reassurance that Trump is actually, it really does, he is what he is. He is how he looks. Somebody who suffers from attention deficit disorder who doesn't have the sort of temperament or the character to do these sort of really grand sort of chess games that you need to play in order to get stuff through this very complex slow moving political system. There is that sense of reassurance. I think against that though is the fear that Trump remains this very impulsive character whom you would not trust in a crisis. And we can talk about that in the Q&A if you like. The main point though I think that's worth making about Trump about what we know he's going to be pursuing is that he is, roughly speaking, doing a very good imitation of what my colleague Martin Wolff calls a Pluto populist. That he campaigned on a populist basis but he's pursuing a plutocratic economic agenda. We saw yesterday the House just scraped through the healthcare repeal, the Obama healthcare repeal. I think it's very doubtful that the Senate is going to pass the same bill. So that's sort of anybody's guess what this comes out as in the end. But this is a bill that if it were passed in the same form by the Senate would throw 24 million people off health insurance. Many of them have voted for Trump. Then there is infrastructure, almost the sort of central plank of the economics of his campaign. Not just the war with Mexico but infrastructure modernisation across the United States. That's been dropped. There is no plan. What we have instead is a single page ten days ago released Trump administration tax plan which will become the centrepiece of the next year of the Trump administration and probably the defining issue of it. Now I don't really want to get into too much about whether this particular tax plan such as it is, it's only 239 words long shorter than the Gettysburg address which is what they keep saying. I don't want to get into too much of a detail about whether the economics of the American picture need this kind of plan. I think it is worth pointing out that to the extent we can project the detail from it about 95% of the gains would go to the top 1% of Americans and they are not spending constraint. So the stimulative effect of this would be very, very limited because they are not constrained. This comes after many years of unprecedented income growth at the upper levels. So there is that point. I don't want to get too much into the detail of whether it would be unfunded but it's clear that having abandoned the border adjustment tax which was going to raise about a trillion dollars a year and having looked at VAT and rejected it that there are no equivalent revenue raises to pay for these tax cuts. So this would be a big deficit boosting measure assuming Trump had the competence to actually marshal a legislative majority. This would be a big deficit boosting measure. The important thing though about this is the equality effect of it which is this doesn't pay any attention to his base to the blue collar sort of beating heart of the Trumpian white working class and white middle class voter. And that gets me really to the question everybody keeps asking which is since Trump appears to be carrying out what you could describe as the very very large bait and switch that you campaign on one basis for the forgotten American, for the forgotten American man, the forgotten American woman was one of his taglines. Having campaigned on that basis to then switch to really what is a fairly conventional Republican Paul Ryan Wall Street approved agenda aren't his base going to take their revenge on him? Isn't he going to feel the backlash from this in the midterm elections and when he comes up for re-election? And the answer to that is well we don't know. But one good guess is that the nature of politics such as it is in America at the moment is that what political scientists call negative partisanship is really the prime sort of motivator for people to join and be active in political parties and negative partisanship means that you are in your party you are motivated to join your party by hatred of the other party not by a positive sort of vision of what your party will do and you might remember there was quite a famous observation during the campaign that the media take Trump literally but not seriously whereas the Trump supporters take him seriously but not literally. Well if you follow the negative partisanship sort of way of looking at how deeply polarized and how better American politics is at the moment then Trump is catering to his base he is ridiculing the liberal New York times he's ridiculing CNN the Clinton news network Hillary keeps obliging by popping up again and again he's ridiculing Hillary he is mocking the Aspen, Tribeca liberal elites to a degree that gets very very high intensity approval from his base so we shouldn't overlook the fact that by that measure Trump is catering to his base even while he's not drawing up infrastructure plans this is a large part of what people voted for Trump for but we also shouldn't overlook the fact that he gets to the Pluto bit of the Pluto populist that if he's able to carry out his tax plan and if this healthcare bill passes and if his budget in any shape or form with its massive domestic spending cuts gets anywhere near being implemented then Trump will have very directly exacerbated the economic conditions that led to his election he will have dramatically accentuated the times of the hollowing out of the middle the withdrawal of investment in the middle classes that led to his election so that brings me to the to my book which I'm not going to give you a full presio but let me just mention one or two salient features one of the debates that I've been involved in the last few days and yesterday was asked this question when I was talking about my book in London is that well look 2016 was a blip, you had Brexit it needn't have happened David Cameron was incompetent he shouldn't have called a referendum and Trump well you know if 77,000 votes had gone the other way in the midwest Hillary Clinton would be president now so 2016 was a blip and 2017 with Macron most likely to be elected in France on Sunday and Gert Wilders having lost the Dutch election and so on 2017 is the cure to this blip we call 2016 and I think this is a profoundly wrong reading of the situation we find ourselves in I think that to take Norbert Hoffa and Austrian presidential election as a good example I think when we celebrate the breaking of the populist wave because a post-modern neo-Nazi or maybe that's libelous a far right nationalist Austrian loses with 47.5% of the vote then we have set the bar extremely low for measuring the health of liberal democracy now let's presume Le Pen loses with 38, 39, 40% of the vote which is roughly where the polls are right now her father lost with 18% of the vote and that was a national emergency between round one and round two Jack didn't celebrate he was solemn he led the funeral procession from round one to round two of the French presidential election socialists followed him in that funeral cortege there was a degree of solemnity that this is an abnormal deeply threatening event that's not the case this time this time we have a normal candidate called Le Pen and if Macron wins which I think he probably will in mind that he was minister for the economy in Hollande's government until two years ago Hollande's government which didn't manage to get much done and was deeply historically unpopular had a majority in the French assembly Macron's party on March will I'm sure pick up some seats in the June assembly elections but there is no majority there and there is no clear program he's winning this very skillfully on a political level by being all things to all people by not being too precise by being catch all in his program it's clever stuff it's Obama-esque in some ways and I think and hope Obama's endorsement yesterday will help him but it's not a recipe for fixing the Couch Moyan left behind problem that is fueling French populism and so I don't think Le Pen will see this as the breaking of the populist wave I will think well five years from now I'll have a better chance and in the United States and in Britain where I know in Britain there's a sort of certain sense and every time I go back that Brexit was sweet generous and Trump was just an accident caused by a sort of dying white majority kicking out and assisted by Putin I think that we are also telling ourselves stories that are far too reassuring about the sort of accidental nature of these two election results they're actually very very similar results each country like a Tolstoyan family is uniquely sort of populist in its own way but the causes of this I think are common across the western world you will all be familiar so I'm not going to sort of trot out the statistics but you will all be familiar with the middle class income numbers over the last generation in the United States in particular but also in Britain and large parts of western Europe that with the brief exception of a four five year period in the mid 1990s essentially it's been flat for household median income but that masks the fact that when this trend began in the 70s households were generally single earner households we're now at a flat level with two earner for the most part households so this masks the fact that the male median wage the blue collar male wage has gone right down I think it's no accident that the Brexiteers and Trump campaigned on the basis of restoring jobs from the past very unrealistic in economic terms to talk about coal restoring jobs in the coal industry very unrealistic to talk about restoring jobs in the steel industry there are 77,000 people still employed in steel in America very highly productive workers some of them with postgraduate degrees there are 84,000 somewhere there about still down the mine the coal mines these jobs these male jobs dominated the sort of imagery of what Trump's going to restore no mention during the campaign of the 810,000 jobs as home health aids in the economy they're mostly women and they're less vocal I guess but if you are looking forward to the economy of the future you're going to be talking about making those jobs more secure having a new deal for the gig economy what are the kinds of stuff you want to be hearing from politicians but Trump is not selling that and the Brexiteers are not selling that they're selling in Trump's case I think a sort of authoritarian nostalgia that as I say in practice is going to lead to an exacerbation of these conditions now if you look at the bigger picture people often accuse me of being too depressing and gloomy the bigger picture is really a very positive one the world is coming out of poverty at a more rapid rate than any time in human history being in Ireland I don't need to emphasise to you how quickly and effectively this can be done that countries can go from being poor to being relatively prosperous within a generation and that is what is happening in large parts of the world within one or two generations that 85, 88% of humanity that isn't from the west a large part of it is being lifted out of poverty has higher and higher life expectancy rates higher and higher literacy rates lower and lower infant mortality and mortality rates and the millennium development goals were fulfilled and the next crop of goals look realistic too so in a larger sense this age what some economists call the great convergence where the rest catch up with the west in a larger sense this is a very positive story indeed the other piece of it though is the effect of digital technology and automation and the potential effects of artificial intelligence on the future of work and on the present tense of work and I mentioned the steel workers and the coal miners more people are employed nowadays behind the wheel in America as cab drivers, Uber drivers, delivery drivers, truck drivers than are employed in manufacturing and they're going to come pretty soon under threats of varying degrees of threat of obsolescence since the beginning of Trump's administration in the first three full months of employment report for 2017 100,000 retail jobs have been lost in America 100,000 that's more than employed either in steel or coal in total in just three months because of the impact the rapid impact of technology on retail now there are some new jobs being created in Amazon warehouses and in other forms but they are fewer and they're better paid the impact of technology and of global convergence are both in their early stages and I'd say the catch up of India, Sub-Saharan Africa, China of course leading it is about a third of the way through technology who knows but we know there is a lot more to come so that other 12% of humanity, us the West the impact on us is what I've written a book about the relentless structural downward pressure on the middle skilled and the middle income on the vast bulk of our workforce is what we're experiencing politically was what I'm talking about politically today and the question is what we can do about it because I think we have decades more to come of this and the answer I think in theory is not that difficult it's a marshal plan for the middle class it's massive resources efficiently spent but huge resources devoted to middle class lifetime training skills upgrading to helping people cope with a rapidly changing marketplace Denmark is a really good example every year and this is an employer government thing every year everybody has the right to train in something fully paid for two weeks on full salary to train in some skill and most Danish employees avail of this or I'm not sure if it's most but I think it's a huge, huge number and quite uncoincidentally the Danish have far higher job turnover than any other part of continental Europe because people are confident to switch jobs they've got skills, credentials a sort of multi-skilling optimism that comes after having that kind of investment in your workplace versatility I suppose so it's not in theory very hard to talk about the main item on the agenda that any centre left or centre right sane political program would recommend which is a marshal plan for the middle classes and I would add to that something I briefly referred to earlier which is in the American sense a new deal for the gig economy people are hopping jobs they're no longer getting benefits from having one job that's contractually secure people are, this is just the reality moving from job to job there is zero hours in Britain there is contractual labour in America they need a government insurance system to help them to have portable benefits to build some kind of economic security out of their lives and I think it is no accident we have America First campaign we have a Brexit campaign in Britain both of which appeal to the sentiment to take back control and of course with Brexit it was about sovereignty with Trump it was take America back again this backward looking thing but I think it's no accident that this resonated very deeply with people who feel they've lost control over their own economic lives the so-called precariat people who once had a sense of security about income and about employment that's gone and there's a sense of helplessness which is something that I don't think is impossible to address I think that it is within our it was within our means to imagine how you would build a program where I am pessimistic is imagining the politics that will carry out this program as I say, Trump came to office that America in relative decline not in absolute decline and America in a way is actually oddly enough quite triumphant the world is growing and being lifted out of poverty at a faster rate than ever in human history in a Pax Americana world in a world where America has set the rules and is upholding the rules so in a way this is a ironically a moment of American triumph from a sort of larger global perspective but nevertheless an America in relative economic decline its share of the global economy dropping as others rise with a middle class that finds it very very hard to cope with the costs of that politically Trump could have pursued there were hints of this kind of program in his campaign not very well developed ones but the infrastructure piece was certainly something he mentioned but he's dropped that so I think I'm not going to predict whether Bannon will be fired next week or whether Elizabeth Warren will run against Trump in 2020 but I will predict one thing and I'm afraid it isn't a very uplifting prediction that this relative economic decline that America is in and the geopolitical consequences of that which I deliberately haven't talked about foreign policy will be accelerated under Trump I don't think the republic is going to come to an end I don't think democracy is over but I do think the deep structural conditions that meant 2016 wasn't a blip and 2017 isn't a cure are actually going to be made worse by Trump quite markedly worse where that ends politically I just don't know but I think there's a phrase I do like quoting from Bertolt Brecht and I'll end on this because the question is always much more interesting than me talking Brecht said power comes from the people but where does it go? and I think we're watching a real live experiment in how that question is answered