 Good afternoon, you're very welcome to this event with Professor Menon, who runs the think tank in London called the UK in the changing Europe. Maybe it should be the changing UK in an unchanging Europe. He's also a professor at King's College in London. You'll frequently have seen him and his articles in places like the FT and other British journals. He's a great expert and he's a great talker. It's a delight to welcome you. Thank you very much. That was a lovely way of saying he goes on a bit. I'm going to try and keep this short so we can have lots of time for questions and discussions. Being an expert on Brexit is a very, very low bar because there's so much uncertainty. There's so little in the way of agreed upon fact, particularly in the United Kingdom at the moment, and I'll come on to that. What I want to do is just talk a little bit about what's happened over the last couple of years. What's happening in the election and what the outcome might mean and what might happen going forward in British politics. I'm happy to talk about the economics. I'm first and foremost a political scientist, so it's the politics that interests me. But if you want to talk about the economics in questions, I'm very, very happy to. Let me start with that. That is the Brexit map of England. The blue are the lead voting bits. The yellow are the remain voting bits. We've puzzled over this since the referendum a little bit, thinking to ourselves, what accounts for this? Is there a pattern? Finally, a few weeks ago, I got a clue. I don't know how closely you follow British politics, but you might remember about a month ago, Rory Stewart, the former Tory MP who's standing to be Mayor of London, was asked, this whole story is so weird, actually, on reflection. But anyway, he was asked what his favourite pub in London is. And he replied, Pret. Obvious problem is that Pret isn't a pub, but anyway, leave that to one side. Then the story got even weirder, because after he said this on Twitter, the whole of the sort of Corbyn Outrider gang jumped on Rory, accusing of being a hideous liberal metropolitan because he liked Pret, and that this was the new front in the English culture war. People who liked Pret are evil metropolitan Tories. And we were pondering this in the office, and we came across this, which is a map of the locations of Pret in England. And that map reveals several things. It reveals, firstly, and I hope Rory never watches this video, why Rory wants to be Mayor of London, because in his current constituency we figured he's got an 18-hour walk to his nearest Pret, whereas, of course, in London you're never more than 30 seconds away from one. So it explains Rory's professional ambitions. But I think it also speaks to a geographical and economic divide around our country that helps to explain what happened in that Brexit vote. It speaks to what my colleague Will Jennings refers to as the two Inglings. Two Inglings that are divided by differential levels of capital spending of private sector investment and, indeed, of productivity. The productivity gap between the most and least productive parts of the United Kingdom is on the same sort of scale as the productivity gap for the whole of the Eurozone. So, you know, I'm not going to try and give you a monocausal reason as to why Brexit happened, but if you look at this and look at the bottom one, you know, there's lots of... There are a lot of correlations with the Brexit vote. Young people voted remain, educated people voted remain, relatively more affluent people voted remain. And I suppose that Pret map points us to the fact that cities are the places where younger, more educated, more affluent people live. So there's a lot going on, but one of them is, I think, that Brexit is about more than simply our relationship with the European Union. It was fundamentally as well a judgment on the state of our country passed by a number of voters in that referendum of 2016. I'm going to come back to that towards the end, but what I'll talk about now a little bit is what's happened over the last three years. And over the last three years, you've all watched as Parliament has wrestled with the Brexit issue, and God have you all watched. In January of this year, the viewing figures for BBC Parliament exceeded the viewing figures for MTV for the first time ever in the two-channels history, and let's hope it was the last. And of course, a narrative has taken hold that somehow Parliament failed us, that that angry, bitter, divided Parliament just couldn't figure out what to do with Brexit and somehow let the country down. And yes, Parliament was angry, and it was bitter, and it was divided. Those are the results of the so-called indicative votes, and what those indicative votes show us is that Parliament was very, very good at telling us exactly what it didn't want, but never actually quite got round to telling us what it did want. But there's an interesting question here, which is whether this is a Parliament that is failing or a Parliament that is doing its job, because yes, Parliament was angry, yes, Parliament was divided, and yes, Parliament didn't know what to do, but in that, it almost perfectly represents the state of the British people, because the British people are totally polarised on the question of Brexit as well. And what you'll see from that slide, unless you're at the back, in which case you'll have to believe what I'm about to tell you, is no deal and remain were the two most popular first choices. They are also the two most popular last choices. There is no majority either amongst the British people or in that old Parliament for any sort of Brexit outcome. And in that sense, at least, it's always struck me that Parliament's been doing its job quite well, because what Parliament has been doing is representing the British people, and if I may, I'm never happy when I give a talk unless I get a quick chance to have a dig at the French. Let me give you a little comparison. We are in Britain, a deeply polarised country, and you can see it every day on the Parliament channel in our Parliament. We are divided ideologically by values. Okay? France is also a deeply polarised country. If you think back to the last French election, where I think just for about 42% of the French electorate in the first round voted either Mélenchon or Le Pen. They voted for profoundly anti-system parties. What did they get for their trouble? They got uber-liberal Macron and on-march dominating Parliament. In other words, they got a political system that totally failed to represent the divisions in their country, and I would posit from that it is no coincidence that the French are experiencing the Gilles Jeune. And I would just pose the question to you. What is the better way of addressing the issue of a polarised and divided society? Is it by having it out there for everyone to see and wrestling with it day-to-day in your politics, or is it by pretending that it doesn't exist at all? And I don't pretend to know the answer to that, but I don't think we do know the answer to that. So I think it is too soon to simply conclude that British politics has failed. British politics is starting in a very difficult position. There's no doubt about that. But the proof of the pudding will be ten years down the line when we look back and say, OK, what has happened to British society to those grievances I mentioned in the past and to those divisions that are all too obvious now. That was my rather lame attempt to put a positive spin on what's going on at the moment. So let me turn to the election. Firstly, it is worth saying that there is a degree of uncertainty around this election. There's a degree of uncertainty for several reasons. Firstly, electoral volatility, which means the propensity of people to change the party they voted for. The British Election Study, which I heartily recommend to you, their website is the single best source of data on elections and this election in the United Kingdom. The British Election Study found that between 2010 and 2017, 49% of the British electorate changed the party they voted for, which is unheard of. And more recent data suggests that that number, if anything, has gone up subsequently. So the first thing is we have a genuinely volatile electorate which makes it hard to predict what's going to happen. The second thing is, whilst everyone's talking about tactical voting, there is some evidence that actually the Brits are a bit uncomfortable with tactical voting. There is some evidence out there that when we do it, we tend to get it wrong. So, you know, you can go to all the fine websites and there's a real cottage industry now in the UK of websites telling you how you should vote if you're a remainder or a lever in a certain constituency. There is absolutely no guarantee either that loads of people will do it or that they'll do it right and not basically make a mistake on polling day and vote wrongly, well-tried. So you need people to be tactical and rational in the sort of social science sense of having access to full information. And so that's another reason, I think, to be slightly uncertain. The third reason to be uncertain is, of course, it depends what this election is about. We're halfway through now. Brexit is still there. There's a big fight going on in the United Kingdom that's quite interesting at the moment in that Skye's tagline for this election is the Brexit election. And the Labour Party hate this because the first page of the Labour manifesto says, this election is not just about Brexit. It's about calling it a Brexit election. But if it's a Brexit election, that changes how people think about it. Think about the Southwest of the United Kingdom in Cornwall where the Lib Dems are enjoying a renaissance but where people voted to leave in the referendum. If this is framed as a Brexit election, it might have one set of implications. If it's framed as another sort of election, it might have other implications. And remember, back in 2017, for all Theresa May's best efforts, it ultimately wasn't a general election about Brexit at all. There's a lot of transparency. However, there are also the polls and this is a little bit old now but what the polls are consistently showing is that the Tories have a significant lead and as well as we can tell, because of course our electoral system makes this quite hard to do, are probably headed towards a majority in Parliament in December. We don't know because one of the things, one of the problems we're wrestling with is the fact that we might no longer, the days of a uniform national swing are behind us. That is to say, it's all very well if the Tories pile up votes in parts of the country where they're already winning. The key will be if they manage to gain votes in parts of the country that they need to win and obviously we're not going to know that till polling day. But if I were a betting man which I am but only on sport as a rule, I would say that the Tories being the biggest party is your safest bet and at the moment as things stand with the polls, they probably go a little bit further and predict that the Tories will end up with a majority in Parliament after the election. So then I suppose the question is what happens then? Okay, so I'm going to try and talk about the two scenarios. There are two broad scenarios after this election, a Tory majority or a Corbyn minority government, some form of confidence and supply arrangement with Corbyn as head. Let me talk about Johnson first. Boris Johnson has said several things. He said he won't extend transition and he said in his trade deal, the Tory manifesto is quite stark in this way, the Tory manifesto lists what we do not want in a trade deal with the European Union. So no ECJ authority, no level playing field conditions, no customs union, okay? Boris Johnson reckons he can sort out a trade deal for us by the end of next year so the transition can end by December of next year. In theory that's possible. In practice it is very, very difficult. In practice it is very difficult because it is hard to see how even the minimal sort of deal that Boris Johnson wants is compatible with what the EU is willing to give. And by that what I mean is, the European Union, even if Boris Johnson says let's get rid of tariffs and quotas, he's going to say yep that's fine but actually you're very close, you're very big, and if we're going to give you that sort of deal he's about standards, which talks to precisely the level playing field conditions that Boris Johnson has so far said he won't sign up to. Now I don't know what happens in January, I don't know whether the new Boris Johnson Prime Minister with a majority comes back and says you know all that stuff I said in December, or I don't know whether in conjunction with the European Union he cooks up a really clever way to extend transition without actually extending transition. So we find a sleight of hand, a form of words, a legal trick that actually keeps the status quo going while transition comes to an end. Both of those things I suppose are theoretically possible. But it does seem to me as things stand, it'll be very very hard for the Prime Minister, if he wins a majority, to wriggle out of the promises he has made, particularly if the parliamentary party is more Brexit-y than the last one was, which looks absolutely certain. And so there is a real prospect that Britain will end up leaving the European Union in January and then falling out of transition at the end of next year on World Trade Organization terms. And the economic impacts of that will be significant. The one thing I don't know about is whether number 10 believe, you can leave number 10 on, you can leave the European Union on those WTO terms, with the economic damage that brings. Because let's face it, that effectively means the end of manufacturing as we know it in the United Kingdom because none of those supply chains survived that kind of outcome and realistically hoped to win an election four years later. That, it seems to me, is the key calculation. I don't know what the thinking is in Downing Street about that. I'd always assumed that in a sense the politics of bluster would run into the wall of economics and the wall of economics would send us reeling backwards saying, OK, let's rethink. I'm no longer so certain about this. So I think that kind of outcome is possible at the end of next year. We can talk about that further in questions. Let me turn now quickly to Jeremy Corbyn. If he is Prime Minister, what has he said? He said he'd renegotiate a deal with the European Union in three months and within six months we'd have another referendum and that that referendum would be the end of the story. Now, that, it seems to me, just about makes sense as a strategy for an election because Jeremy Corbyn has to keep together a coalition, though let's face it, let's not overstate this coalition idea. Yes, Labour holds some of the most leave seats in the United Kingdom, absolutely. It's still perfectly feasible that the vast majority of Labour voters in those constituencies will remain voters so it doesn't necessarily follow that Labour voters in those seats will leave voters. But still, there is a coalition to be held together so this is a compromise. But whilst it's a good strategy for an election it strikes me as an absolutely ridiculous strategy for government. Why? Because it holds out the prospect that Jeremy Corbyn goes to Brussels, gets a new deal to be fair to the Labour Party, some of the worst unicorns that have figured in their rhetoric to date have disappeared from the manifesto. There is no talk of the United Kingdom being in a customs union with the European Union and having a say over EU trade policy, OK? But there is still talk of alignment with the single market and of course if that means we'll have the bits we like then it's a unicorn hunt again, so we have to see. But he will come back with a deal at which point the vast majority of his MPs, of his voters and indeed possibly of his own cabinet will go out and campaign against it. And whilst Jeremy Corbyn says I will be set up to be the honest broker in this debate it strikes me that politically, as David Cameron found in 2016, being on the receiving end of attacks from your own colleagues over your own Brexit position is not a comfortable place for a Prime Minister to be. Let me turn to the other side of this very, very briefly. Michel Barnier's Steps of Doom. Let me say a few things about the EU's negotiating position in the Brexit talks. Firstly, that's a fiction. For the reasons I've just said, none of the off-the-shelf models of third-party relationship that the European Union currently has were on offer to the United Kingdom. Why? Because we're big and we're close. And the French, to name what, but you see I've got a bit of an obsession as you can tell now, will not want a country like the United Kingdom to enjoy the same terms as Canada without signing up to extra conditions. I suspect they wouldn't give us the same terms as Norway without signing up to extra conditions and I don't know whether they would give us the freedoms of Article 112 of the EEA Treaty to opt out of free movement in certain eventualities because we're a big, noisy and troublesome neighbour. So I don't think those things in their actual form were ever really on offer to us. I also think, and again if you want to come back with questions on this you can, that during the negotiations the European Union has negotiated in far too process-driven and legalistic away. I honestly do not think, I'm slightly scared to say this out loud again just because of the rubbish I had to take on Twitter the last time I said it in the Financial Times, but here goes, that the Republic of Ireland is the only one of the 27 that has actually bothered to sit down and reflect in detail on the sort of long-term relationship it wants to see built between the United Kingdom and the European Union. I think in a sense what other Member States have done is simply passed the buck to the Commission and said, you deal with this. And you hear this now if you have private conversations with officials from some of the East European countries who are now starting to think, oh my god, what about the security relationship? This is all heading in the wrong direction. Now I worry now with this new Prime Minister with his new majority that actually it's too late to do anything about this because British demands have become minimalist. But I do think there are questions to be asked about the way the European Union has approached these negotiations to date even though I accept the fact that, let me just say, because you have to say this, this is not for a moment to defend the conduct of the British government during the negotiations. But I do worry that both sides have not helped themselves, if you assume as I do, that ultimately a close relationship spanning both the economics and security is in the interest of both sides. Okay? Now, let me switch back to the United Kingdom and just talk to you briefly about where our politics go from here before I wrap up. Brexit, as I showed you in that map, has divided our country. And the divisions run deep. More people now will say they have a Brexit identity than say they have a political identity. So more people will say, well, I'm a lever or a remainder, then we'll say I am Labour or Tory. And some of the survey work carried out by people like Sarah Hobalt at the LSE shows that these divisions go very, very deep. So, for instance, if you ask people how the British economy has performed since the referendum, not how it will perform after Brexit, how it has performed, how it has performed and remainers will. So it shapes our views of facts. It shapes our views of each other as well. A majority of remainers would not want to rent a room in their house to someone who voted leave. A large number of remainers would be uncomfortable about seeing one of their own kids marry a lever. This is a deep values divide that is taking hold inside our society. And it's values not politics. This is one of the reasons why our politics have struggled to digest Brexit is it's a completely different societal cleavage. It's about social identity. So if you're a social conservative, chances are you voted for Brexit. I mean, obviously, this is aggregate and you'll find counter examples. But it is this social liberal, social conservative divide that has been triggered by Brexit rather than the traditional left-right division of politics. Now what we don't know is the degree to which this becomes the division in our politics. And I suppose one of the great unanswered questions we'll find out the answer next year I suspect is what happens if we actually leave the European Union? What do remainers do? Do they set up party rejoin? And do they become a force in British politics? Or do they gradually dissipate? Do all those EU flags outside College Green in Westminster gradually rot and get taken away? That I don't know. But one of the interesting things is that before the bottom lines and look at the top two, the top two are the Brexit tribes. And for all the volatility in the showings of the individual parties, what you're finding is an eerie stability when it comes to leave and remain tribes in our politics. And I think that's one of the things that will determine the direction of our politics in years to come. How, to what extent this leave-remain divide continues to figure as a force shaping our politics. The other thing about our politics that is quite depressing at the moment is that whilst the British people are divided on many things, the one thing on which they show a side of consensus is the fact that politics has letters down. That our institutions, that our parliament have failed us in delivering Brexit and you have seen this real erosion of faith in politics. But one of the saddest things about this election is that three of the four big primarily English parties have adopted explicitly populist tones. Boris Johnson with his people versus parliament rhetoric. Nigel Farage, what I don't need to tell you about Nigel Farage, she's a populist. Jeremy Corbyn with his people versus the establishment versus elites. Three of the four big English parties are explicitly fighting this election on populist terms. And that's why. And of course one of the reasons for this which takes us back to the first slide and the map of Pret is the fact that for the last three years, even though as I tried to argue at the start, part of the reason for the Brexit vote stemmed from genuine grievance about the state of the country because of Brexit we simply haven't been governed for three years. Nothing has happened. Brexit has sucked all the life out of politics, out of the civil service and so economic grievance has got if anything worse. What you find is a British people that even in 2016 were deeply dissatisfied with the status quo are now even more dissatisfied with the status quo and slightly more irritated with their political class to boot. And I suppose the lesson that teaches me and it's a pretty sad lesson for our politics in the years that lie ahead is that we face the prospect of continued uncertainty, of continued populism in our political system for the foreseeable future because of the melding of these two things which is dissatisfaction with politics and prevailing and continuing dissatisfaction with the state of our economic settlement. Can I stop there? Thank you.