 Welcome to Tisgy Sour, the second from our brand new studio. So thanks again to our subscribers for making this possible. We are out of the shipping container and into this gorgeous Burmese room with, what did I call it yesterday? Well, naked brick, exposed brick, exposed brick. It's very professional, looks great. Now, I was thinking today about who has had a good Brexit. Not necessarily who has benefited from it, that would include Boris Johnson, Jacob Riesmog, Joe Swinson, but who has come out of it with increased stature. And I couldn't think of many. I could think of Nicola Sturgeon. I think she's had a good Brexit. Keir Starmer, I think has had a good one. And third, I had Anand Menon. And Anand joins me today. And Anand Menon is director of UK in a Changing Europe and professor of European politics at King's College London. Thanks for joining me. My pleasure. How have the last three years been for you? Have you found it to become, I suppose Britain's go-to guy on Brexit? Brexit expert is a very low bar. Brexit guru. Yeah. It's been weird. I mean, I've loved it because it's been a complete change of job. I was a bog standard academic in 2014. Now I'm not anymore. And I think, I mean, it worked for me. I was getting a bit bored of academia and now I get to do all sorts of fun stuff and I'm a bit of a show-off. So it suits me just fine. And I mean, so your organisation, UK and the Changing EU, the idea is... Changing Europe. Changing Europe, sorry. Oh, because Europe's a bigger concept than the EU. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's live. It's live, Anand. What's the purpose of that organisation? You're trying to make a confusing subject clear to the public, but also to politicians and to everyone, really. The hidden agenda, I mean, it's not hidden, but... Oh, a hidden agenda. I didn't realise I was going to get this kind of... Here we go again to the hidden agenda or we're going to start a conspiracy now. We're funded by something called the Economic and Social Science Research Council, who are the national funding agency for social science. And what they wanted to do, what they thought, I think, way back in 2014, when we first started talking about this, was there are all these big national debates coming up. Where the hell are the social scientists? Why isn't anyone asking what the economists think or what the political scientists think? So we're going to put a bit of money into a project that is aimed at talking to non-academics. And so the aim of our funders is to promote social science, to make people, whether it's Navarra Media or Boris Johnson or the CBI or whoever, hang on, before I do that, let's see if any social scientist has written about it. Now, on the surface, that's laughable, isn't it? No one thinks, oh, what have the social scientists done? And that's partly because academics have been rubbish. Academics in the past have either just written 10,000 word articles with 100,000 footnotes that no one in their right mind would try and read or haven't bothered communicating the message from it. So it's partly about teaching academics to do stuff better and it's partly about making other people take notice. Do you think, how much do you think you've, well, I mean, I think your organization seems to have done pretty well, but obviously at the time of the general election, there was this idea that the country hates experts. I suppose economists, especially, were held in pretty low stead. Yeah, I don't like it. Do you think you've kind of lifted the bow or shifted the tide when it comes to how the public feel about social scientists? I don't think it's ever been true. You didn't buy the whole, people are tired and hate experts. No, and actually the Michael Gove quote was a quote particularly aimed at IMFWC. He talked about experts from institutions with silly acronyms as their name. So it was a slightly more specific point than it's been quoted as. But no, we've never found that. We do lots of stuff around the country. What we find, so take the economics. I mean, that's the most sort of argued about thing, isn't it? And you say, if X, then why? There are different sorts of responses. There are those people out there who will say, you know, London academic, you're a liar. You're predicting your vested interest, whatever. So there are those people. At which point you say, you can trust me, I'm from Leeds. You could say, trust me from Leeds or you say, absolutely, I'm a liar and move on. The second group of people are people who sort of think, yeah, that might be true, but actually telling me that GDP is gonna be up or down makes no difference, because actually my conditions have been getting worse over the last 20 years, whether the chancellor says things are going well or badly, so who cares? And there's a final group of people, I think, who would say, okay, fair enough, but actually this is more important than money. Ah, one second. People are saying in the comments that we didn't actually start when the video started. So what do we need to do? We need to restart the whole thing again. Re-intro. You can just talk to me. You want me to re-intro it, but start the whole conversation again? Just re-intro it. Re-intro it, okay. I don't know when you joined me, but welcome to the show. I am joined, I don't wanna repeat everything in case you've heard it already, but I'm joined by Enand Menon. That bears repeating. It's been so good. Who is director of UK in a Changing Europe, Britain's top Brexit guru and a professor of politics, professor of European politics at King's College London. How long have people been listening for? Do we know? Three minutes. Let's just get on to today's politics. We've done some small talk. Maybe you're gonna miss the small talks. Sorry about that. Okay, let's start with, we're gonna talk about how we got in this mess, what's gonna happen next. I wanna start with what happened today. Yeah. So last night we did a show about the program motion being pulled. Boris Johnson wanted to railroad through his withdrawal agreement bill in three days. Parliament rejected that. We were expecting that potentially he was gonna stand up in parliament and say, if I can't do it in three days, I don't wanna do it at all. We're gonna call a general election right here, right now. He didn't, he stepped back from that and said, actually, let's pause. We'll go away, we'll have a think about that. What happened today was Jeremy Corbyn went to meet Boris Johnson with a few of their aides and they were discussing whether or not they're going to try and bring back this withdrawal agreement and have parliament debate it over a proper period of time or whether to have a general election. We are now back in, I mean, it feels a little bit like Groundhog Day. There's either one party or the other is always calling for a general election and then one party or the other always seems to be trying to wiggle out of it or find some reason not to have one. I suppose most of our audience are interested in the labor perspective of things. Do you think it's time for the labor party to say, let's do this now. There's no more excuses. We want a general election now is the time to go back to the people. Do you know what? I don't particularly, but a load of labor people have said the opposite to me. Let me give you the two sides of the argument. We can talk about it and decide which we think might be right. One side of the argument is- It's very good, it's very good as an objective academic there. Well, no, I'm happy to voice my, I will as we go on voice my prejudices. Sorry, you're gonna go on. It's part of my best efforts. So there's one side of the argument that says, Boris Johnson promised to get us out of the European Union by the 31st of October. What's the best thing that could possibly happen to the labor party is to make him, to show him to be a liar yet again and to have an election when we're still in after that debate, preferably as late as possible. Preferably why not keep him hanging there helpless? He's in office, but not in power. The worst thing in the world that could happen to Boris Johnson is he becomes a laughing stock. If you hold off on this till spring, he's done nothing. All he can do is shout and bumble and scream and maybe say 40 hospitals every now and again. But he can't actually do anything. And maybe that sees his ratings go down. It sees heaven forbid, but there's a point for the labor party. Farage is polling go up and it sees labor improve as they're seen as an opposition that actually might be better than the incumbent. So that's theory A. Theory B is we help him to get Brexit done. We wait a couple of months and then no one will be talking about Brexit anymore and we can have an election that is about austerity, 10 years of Tory cuts, the NHS and so on. I've never found the latter argument convincing because I think if he gets Brexit done, it'll be plastered on every single billboard across the country forever. He'll probably launch the election by saying, we're gonna have a day of national holiday called Boris's Independence Day every year and he will milk it for all it's worth and it will help him. Now, I don't know which is right, whether A or B is better. There's also a C though, right? Because you had your A which is they, well in your A they had a spring election still, right? So what Boris Johnson potentially is calling for now and what some people in the Labour Party are saying is let's go for a general election right now. The public have had enough of this wrangling. Let's have an early December or a late November election. Then there's the other position which seems to be the default position really of the leadership which is we're not gonna vote through his deal but we're gonna keep him hanging for as long as possible until we can't possibly bear the pressure any longer at which point we will accede to the demand for a general election. And then the third one is actually let's just have some of the back benches pass it and then ultimately we can have a post Brexit general election and talk about health and education. Yeah, this is where the personal hits the professional, isn't it? I don't know whether I discounted your quite legitimate third option. Just because you wanna do something else for Christmas. Yeah, because I can't face it or because I don't think it's, I mean it is obviously real and there is obviously pressure on both parties to go for it and I think by the end of this week, if they haven't done it, it can't be November. By the end of next week it can't be the first week in January so we're ticking the dates off as we go. From a labor perspective, I mean and I know there was 2017 I would look at the polls and say, you know we need to get rid of the Boris bounce and there's a very clear Boris bounce and a very clear reason for that which is that since he became leader a significant number of those voters who deserted the Tories as of the 29th of March and went to the Brexit party of comeback. Do you think that Boris bounce will end because I suppose the Labour, as I say we've been here before Labour were deciding in September whether or not to call or to support a general election for October and what people hoped was that if Boris Johnson gets held up in Parliament if Parliament are running rings around him if all of Dominic Cummings genius plans are getting scuppered by MPs, you know scrutinizing or blocking or doing amendments, whatever, then he will start to look weak and he'll start to look like a failure. In fact, if you look at the polls at the moment it seems to be like he is looking like the man of the people and the Parliament and especially the opposition is shying away from the public and is, you know, intensifying this crisis by not letting it escape from Westminster and the polls at the moment look like the Boris bounce isn't subsiding but is in fact increasing. Well, let me say two things. Firstly, yes, saying no to an election isn't a good look for a political party, OK? That being said, the sort of chicken Corbyn thing that the Tories are coming out with ceases to be effective on the day that Corbyn says let's have an election. Whenever that is, that argument ends. OK, I have agreed to an election, so shut up, let's have the election. That's a Westminster story as well, isn't it? Should we or should we not have an election? That's the first thing I'd say. The second thing I'd say is your favourite answer, I don't know. This is the big question for me. Is Boris Johnson as vulnerable to a hit for missing his self-proclaimed deadline as Theresa May proved to be? I think he's probably less vulnerable for a variety of reasons, not least because he hasn't been there for longer, for that long, and secondly because his popularity seems a bit stickier than Theresa May's amongst his supporters. But there's going to be some sort of hit. I mean, what is the most striking thing about politics now? Is that eerie silence where Nigel Farage used to be? Well, he hasn't, so I was actually expecting Nigel Farage to be a bit more silent than he has been, so... Well, he's coming out a bit at the moment, isn't he? But he's trialling lines about the deal. Yeah, and they seem a little bit desperate. So I suppose at the moment why you would worry about... And obviously I don't want to inflate the potential popularity of Boris Johnson. I'd like to try and find his vulnerabilities more than, say, where he is strong. But it seems at the moment that the deal he's come back with, and we'll go into the details of the deal a bit more in a moment, but because the deal that has come back has united the entire Conservative Party, people aren't getting the kind of cues which makes them feel like, actually, this is a sell-out deal. I would quibble with that. The deal he's come back with hasn't united the entire Conservative Party. It has forced the Conservative Party to coalesce behind it because we're having an election. I did a thing with... I mean, he's not a Tory anymore. I keep forgetting who is and isn't with Ed Vasey last night. And basically Ed Vasey said, this deal is crap. Theresa May's deal was far better. I voted for the deal. Anything? Okay. But you realise that actually that is... So he's from the softer Brexit wing of the Conservative Party. He's a non-T Tory MP now. But this is one of the crucial things, is the context is very different to March. The context is different, one, because more and more people are saying, just get it done, and that has become a thing. And the second context is, everyone knows an election is round the corner, so everyone is keeping an eye on that. And for some on the Conservative side, the ultimate trade-off is this. Do I... What do I think is worse for the country? Boris Johnson's Brexit or Jeremy Corbyn government? That's... I mean, rightly or wrongly, that's how some of them are calculating it. And so a lot of them are swinging behind the Prime Minister. Let's talk about that deal, because I think, if a general election happens now, or if it happens next March, or if this deal passes, I mean, this deal is not going to go away. I think that's going to be the constant, right? Whether or not a general election happens before or after Brexit, that's what's on the table. Let's start with what Boris Johnson is claiming as a victory. So there were lots of people on the Remain side, or skeptics of Boris Johnson's ability to go to the EU and negotiate who was saying, the EU are not going to reopen the withdrawal agreement, they're not going to get rid of the backstop. So his only option is either to push for an ordeal, or after the Ben Act, there was confusion about how that possibly would happen, or come back with his tail in between his legs, and say, I gave it a go, but ultimately, I'm here with May's deal, and with all the clauses that that contained. He was going to have to, I suppose, make an apology to the country, or try and find someone to blame. He's coming back saying, actually, I've proved you all wrong. It was an enormous success. I've got rid of the backstop, because there's a democratic exit mechanism. There's about five questions so far away, you know that, don't you, I'm sort of... Okay, tell me, tell me, are you surprised by Boris Johnson's success, or do you think he is fair to say he had a success in Brussels in getting concessions from the Europeans? Let's start at the beginning. The European Union never said, we're not going to reopen the withdrawal agreement. Lots of people on Twitter said, the European Union will never reopen the withdrawal agreement. European Union itself never said that. What the European Union said is, we've got a series of red lines around Ireland, notably, but also about protecting our market. Those are red lines we simply will not cross. So if you want to come up with a better way of dealing with the Irish solution, the problem, that's absolutely fine. But unless you do, we're not renegotiating the backstop. That was what the EU said. Now what Boris Johnson did, surprised everyone, not least the EU, because he went back essentially to a kind of scheme that Theresa May had first talked to the EU about way back in February last year, which was carving Northern Ireland off economically to a degree from the rest of the United Kingdom. Theresa May had looked at that deal and thought it'll never fly with Parliament, the DUP will never buy it. So she was half right. But Boris Johnson went back to that. So the EU had never said no to that. In fact, the EU had already accepted that before. Now from the EU side, this is a win. The one triumph, the one, absolutely not the one, but one of the triumphs of Boris Johnson in this negotiation for me is as a sort of person who's had to study the EU for hundreds of years now, is he's got the EU to accept a deal that is incredibly ambiguous on some key areas, like what happens about VAT regimes? What happens to regulatory checks at the border? There seems to be on some uncertainty in government that there shouldn't be about customs checks, but why did the EU accept that? Well, because for them economically, this deal's a lot better than the old deal. Why? Because a lot of people in the European Union hated Theresa May's deal. They thought they'd made too much of a concession to her because they'd given her the all UK backstop that gave the whole country tariff-free access to the EU market without signing up to all their rules. Ah, that's a perspective I hadn't heard. So I'd been on the perspective that it was that what Boris Johnson has come back with is a harder deal. You might like it or you might not like it. It is a harder deal. But it's not better for the EU, but you think it's actually, they've achieved a victory vis-a-vis or with respect to or compared to Theresa May's deal. There were a lot of people in some of the member states, notably France, who were really uncomfortable about the all UK backstop because they saw it as, you know, in the classic phrase cherry-picking. Yeah. The UK got access to the market without signing up to all the rules. How the hell is that fair? Yeah. Whereas now it only applies to this special case, which is Northern Ireland. Well, it's not a special case. It's a very small case. Yeah, okay, right. It's also a special case, but actually it's a tiny... A special and small case. Yeah, it's special because of the Good Friday Agreement. It's special because of the interests of Northern Ireland and it's small, which is worth stressing because for those Scots who think we'll get a deal like that, no way. Yeah, because they're not small or special enough. They're quite small. They're not that special. Yeah, there's no Good Friday Agreement relevant. To the EU, I'm stressed. I mean, they're very special to me. All right, let's talk about what will be the consequences of that deal. So the labor line is obviously that this is an attempt by the hard right within the Conservative Party to slash regulations, to sell out the NHS to the United States. And because they've shifted protections on workers' rights and environmental regulations from the withdrawal agreement, the legally binding withdrawal agreement, to the non-legally binding political declaration, there's a lot of suspicion that what they are trying to do is a neo-factorite revolution where they are trying to slash rules and regulations even further than they already are in neoliberal Britain and basically make it a bit more like Singapore. How much do you think that is a political slogan and how much do you think that is the reality of what's going on here? Let me go through this in stages. One of the weird things about Theresa May's deal, again, people didn't talk about it enough, was that even though the EU said we're not doing it, she negotiated a trading relationship for the future with the EU when she was doing the withdrawal negotiation. How did she do that? Because it was the backstop. If all else fails, we'll have the backstop. If we have the backstop, there's a customs relationship and we're under EU rules. So what Theresa May's deal gave us was a degree of certainty about the future because the backstop was a baseline. That's as low as you can go. Yeah. Because Boris Johnson has stitched the backstop, we can talk about Northern Ireland in its status later on, if you want. Let's talk about GB. There are no constraints on GB now because he hasn't signed a trade deal with you. We signed a withdrawal agreement that basically covers Northern Ireland when it comes to the future. The short answer to what's gonna happen is we don't know. It'll depend on the next British government. We are not tied by EU rules, we're not tied by EU customs. It's hard to avoid the suspicion if you look at some of the people on the Tory benches that a deregulatory agenda is brewing somewhere there, being kept nice and quiet for the moment because they want to win an election on the back of Labour voters. But there's a filing cabinet somewhere where deregulation plan A is being kept. The other thing that is worth saying about Boris Johnson's deal is he wants a looser relationship with the European Union than Margaret Thatcher, than Theresa May did. And that matters because there's not just the impact of what a Tory government might do in the future, which we don't know but we can guess, but also the impact of the kind of relationship with the EU that he wants. Now he wants a looser relationship so there's no customs deal like there was. You think about manufacturers with those just-in-time supply chains, there will be checks, there will be rules of origin, and the shortcut explanation of that is it makes the business model of car manufacturers, aerospace, virtually unviable, okay, because so much stuff crosses borders with so few lag times. And we're out of all EU regulations, which means that for companies that trade chemicals, for instance, if we're outside of the Reach Chemicals directive, it's a nightmare. If we're outside of the medical agency, pharmaceutical firms are gonna struggle. And the final thing to say, sorry, I know I'm droning on, let me make this quick. I'm learning a lot. I'm sure our audience are, although I can't see them at the moment because my internet- Can you not tell they're awake or asleep? You continue. All right, okay, the final thing I'd say is there's this thing called level playing field. Now the EU has these sets of conditions called level playing field conditions, and they're around environmental standards, workers' rights, all those sorts of things. They don't usually impose those when they have trade deals, but the reason why is they usually sign trade deals with countries that are far away and not that big. So they didn't need them with Canada because the volumes of trade don't make it worth it. With us, we're big, we're close, we're a competitor. The EU say, if you want a very close relationship with us, you have to sign up to the level playing field because otherwise you'll become Singapore on terms, you'll have access to a market, you'll undercut us all, and there'll be a race to the bottom in the European market. Boris Johnson has said, I won't sign up to those things. They're in the political declaration, as you said, not the legally binding withdrawal agreement. And they're not in the political declaration, the political declaration just says, level playing field conditions will be commensurate with market access. That means very little market access. Now the point of this long and rambling story is, because this deal is a harder deal, because it makes trade more difficult than Theresa May's deal did, most economists, by which I mean 99.9% of professional economists, think there will be adverse, short to medium-term consequences for our economy because if you make trade harder with your nearest and largest trading partner, the impact will be negative. This is not a prediction about how our economy does. I mean, if we discover diamonds or if we invent a new iPhone battery that lasts longer than 30 seconds or whatever, it'll have a massive, so there's all sorts of other things that can happen in the economy. But all things being equal, which is the economists sort of escape hatch at times like this, the economy will be damaged by this deal. How helped that's something I wanted to ask you about because recently your organization put forward an impact assessment. Obviously, the government is refusing to do an impact assessment on this deal, presumably because they don't want the results to be made public. Oh, that does you a favor because now your impact assessment is the most. Well, now everyone's 42, I wasn't saying that. Yeah, exactly. So I suppose tell us a bit about what's in that. I think the headline figures were that all other things being equal, you predict that every person in Britain or the per capita effects will be that in 10 years time, everyone is 2,000 pounds poorer than they would otherwise be. What we're saying is the aggregate impact on the British economy. You can divide it per capita if you want. We did that for effect, but quite honestly you shouldn't believe those figures because they're just... You're not supposed to say that about your own report. No, but I mean, let's be honest about this. It is very hard to be specific. Let me give you the caveats. It's very hard to be specific, but the economy will be smaller by a significant magnitude. That's to say Boris Johnson's deal in terms of its impact falls in between Theresa May's deal and a no deal Brexit. So, and halfway in between. So it's significantly worse, all right? You can't make a prediction for the reasons I've just said about the British economy because that depends on everything from the size of the Chinese and growth of the Chinese economy to what the government does. Our economy might do quite well. I mean, our economy might keep growing. But what we're saying is it would have grown faster if that trade with the EU was still going. What do you think about lexit arguments? So lexit being a left exit from the EU. And I think this relates to the idea of these impact assessments because people who want a lexit also want a fairly hard Brexit because they don't want to have to... They're less concerned with the level playing field when it comes to workers' rights for environmental rights, but they want more state aid. They want the ability of the state to favor certain industries. And I think they'd probably say that these all other things equal sort of reports that are being put out that says, we'll be this much poorer, blah, blah, blah. Doesn't take into account that if we left the EU in a kind of hard way, we could have a super active government that turbocharges the economy and makes everyone's incomes, or at least poorer people's incomes higher. What do you make of that kind of lexit? There are some sensible arguments. In some senses, the EU is deregulation on speed. And the reason why is because you need a qualified majority to regulate, and the bias of the single market through its legal system is through deregulation. This is about stripping down protections between economies. And that sometimes means that those economies that are better protected suffer, and so there's a danger of a race for them. The EU has never been that good at regulating. And for all the talk you hear amongst conservatives about these social provisions or whatever, they're relatively weak, very weak compared to the Scandinavians say. So yes, there is a danger, there is a deregulatory bias about the European Union. And in a way, it's a kind of Republicans wet dream, isn't it? It's a market without a government. It's what the Tea Party bought. Republicans in the American sense. Yeah, listen about the Queen. So yes, but there are limits to the lexit argument. So for instance, there's nothing in the 2017 Labour manifesto that would be illegal under EU law. Nothing at all. You're sure about that? Absolutely, crystal clear. Whether it's the state, whether it's the nationalizations, whatever. Now, you could say to me quite legitimately, yeah, but that was just the taster. Actually, once we're in, we've got another document, which is three times bigger than his farmer. And then I don't know. You will run foul of state aid at some points along that, but not with that. The third thing I'd say is any argument about lexit has got to take account of the process of leaving and the process of leaving so far. And this might be because we've had a government that's not been very good at it, or it might, this is the scary thought, be because it's very hard to do. It's very damaging and painful in its own right, because it leads to uncertainty. It's hard to do. It's complicated. There's been an investment strike. Think about it. If we were in the Euro, there's no easy way to leave. Now, this isn't as hard as if we were in the Euro, but it's still hard. So if you're doing a cost-benefit analysis of Brexit, what the last three years of tortures is, part of those costs is the process. Well, that's exactly, I mean, the much more difficult decision that Sir is out to make in Greece, which was to say, we as left-wing economists recognize that we should not be in the Euro, but the process of leaving the Euro is so painful that we're gonna stay in it anyway. And so there could be that argument from the left, which is to say all other things equal. If we were to, we wouldn't join the EU now, but now we're in it, we're not gonna leave it. Which is not an argument for the stability of the EU. It just turns the EU into some sort of gilded cage where people are trapped because they can't get out. And that's not the basis for solids. Was that not always the idea? No, I don't think that was always, no, I don't think that was always the idea. I think no, because in the early days, it was totally different. In the early days, let's be honest, it was about preventing war between France and Germany. And yes, for the French, it was about trapping the Germans in, but for a whole different setup. Not because you worry they might leave because of the economics, but because you worry they might leave and invade you. But do you think because it's so difficult to leave, that's why it's been, sort of moving away from Brexit now to the politics of the EU in general. But do you think the reason why it has this neoliberal bias is because the technocrats at the top, no, there is no way out. So it's a rebellion against the EU. I think there's been a qualitative change in the nature of the EU since the late 1980s when they created the single market. I think if you'd done Brexit in 1985, it would have been far more straightforward than it is now. That's interesting, because we would have less regulatory alignment as it were. Well, because the single market really didn't exist as a sort of legislative program. All the foreign and security stuff didn't exist. What's one of the big problems about our future cooperation with the EU now? Data, all right? Data for businesses, which we don't talk about enough, access to customer databases and stuff. If we're out, if we're left with no deal, the GDPR databases, no access, right? That applies to the police, criminal databases. On the day we leave, if we leave without a deal, or if we leave with a deal that isn't covering this, we lose access to those databases. They turn them off. And not only do they turn them off, we have to delete any information we've taken from them beforehand. That leaves us blind about who's coming into the country in terms of their criminal past in the European Union. I always thought that whole, the law and order argument about leaving the EU was a bit overblown. I thought that was always, that was always, no, no, not from the perspective of an expert. I can't really dispute what you're saying. Well, you can't, because I'm often wrong. When it's said this idea of, it will damage our security as a country, I've always just thought when it comes to security, because capital isn't so much involved. It doesn't really matter if you pick and choose, we come to security, does it? If you want to be cynical about it, this is a data and data is linked to capital and it's linked to profits and so whatever you can do it that way around. But data is fundamental to contemporary policing. Yeah, and so it would be, I mean, who would have the problem with the EU just being a bit cut and loose with data and saying someone will just keep, oh, their court. Their bloody law, son of a, yeah. Justice. Controlling who we can give our data away to. Yeah, someone would say the Germans would sue. The Germans would say, hang on, you're giving away our data to non-members. Are you surprised at the death of soft Brexit? So there was quite a, well, I suppose Theresa May had a fairly soft Brexit, but we've seen it this point now, you can dispute that, but we've seen over a three year period the complete collapse of the idea that you can have a Brexit and remain in the single market and we're now seeing the collapse of the idea that you can have a Brexit and stay in the customs union. So did I say stay in or leave? The idea that you can have a Brexit and stay close to these various economic institutions. You surprised at how hard Brexit now looks. The only Brexit people accept is a very hard one. I am. And one of the interesting things about the Brexit debate is how the extremes have turned on the middle. So both extremes, whether it's a sort of no-deal hard Brexit or remain and revoke, have spent an awful lot of time in the last two and a half years having a go at anyone who wants what they see as a compromised Brexit. And the degree to which those forces have just crumbled has surprised me, yes, but partly it's partly because Brexit mobilizes a values division in British society. And because it mobilizes that values division on values, there's very little scope for compromise and the country's got polarised as we see MPs polarising. So if you look at Brexit preferences, they go like this now. There's nothing in the middle. Everything's tending towards the edges and that's true of public opinion and it's increasingly true of parliament as well. So I've been surprised that it's happened. On the other hand, imagine a Norway-style Brexit. So Norway or Norway Plus, and I'll explain what I mean, we can't do just Norway because to sort Northern Ireland, you have to have a customs union as well. Norway doesn't have a customs union. So Norway Plus is Norway Plus a customs union. So imagine that sort of Brexit. On the one hand, the economic damage would be minimal. The only real economic damage would be the damage we accrue from being subject to regulations over which we have no say. So the French might have a laugh and pass regulations that say, you know, we really will ban the British banger this time because they've got no say. All right, so there'll be economic damage, but that's minimal. The British banger, the sausage or the car? What was sausage? The sausage, yeah. Did the French want to ban British sausages? Well, there was a big story about the fact that this French wanted to ban British sausages at one point and there was another fight about chocolate, which I can bore on about if you want later on. So really, this chocolate one's really interesting, we should come back to it. But so the costs are minimal, but the politics are atrocious. For a start, the leaf campaign said, control of our laws, our borders and our money, you'd keep paying, you'd have to accept free movement and you would be subject to a load of laws over which you had no say whatsoever. So whether that was ever gonna be politically sustainable here, I'm not so sure, and whether if we joined Norway in the European economic area, we wouldn't just have balls that up for them. I'm equally unsure about it because we're a massive economy and Norway is what, five, six million people, I think, off the top of my head. And we'd have gone in there and demanded, well, actually we don't accept that, you need to come, we'd have changed the tone of the whole thing. So while I think yes, there were lots of soft Brexit options out there that would have cushioned the economic shock and there was some on the Brexit side who argued in the referendum, what we should do is leave, do a Norway, adjust, figure it out, and actually there's a degree of sense to that. As a long-term model, I think politically that would have got us nowhere. So if you're gonna be the benevolent dictator of Britain, so after that huge democratic exercise, oh, are you pulling the strings behind the scenes? No, no, I am one though. You should pull them in a more coherent way, please. Actually, not necessarily coherent, I've just got some tips for you, some things I'd like you to sort out. But if you were a benevolent dictator over the past three years and you recognize that the final, well not the final, but let's say there's a huge democratic exercise which is that people want to leave the EU. Most people at that point said we should probably leave and we should leave in a way which is economically sustainable or doesn't do that much economic damage and is politically sustainable. If at that point you could just say, here's the model, I think it's gonna work, what would it have looked like? Knowing what I know now, I mean the truth is knowing what I know now, Theresa May's deal is a pretty good deal because it gets us as close to the European market as possible whilst convincingly allowing us to say we have respected the red lines. Yeah, you know, it's not an easy thing. There is the red lines, I mean, you know, if we go back to 2016, I wouldn't have made the speech to the Tory party on the Sunday in 2016 that she did. And what were the red lines that she said that were super important there? European Court of Justice, we won't have. Trade policy. Stuff that people don't give a shit about, right? Because I was really surprised how this customs union has become a politically salient point because who the hell wants a free trade deal with the United States? Because the Brexiters want free trade deals, yeah. So, yeah. That's just people taking cues from the people who want free trade deals for nefarious purposes. But I wouldn't have given that speech and I wouldn't have given the Lancaster House speech. The one thing, not the one thing, but the fundamental thing that I resent about what Theresa, well there's two things I resent about what Theresa May did. Firstly, she pitched the impossible. So what she said was I wanna leave the single market, I wanna leave the customs union and I want frictionless trade. Yeah. Sorry, doesn't exist. Now, fair play to her team and to her, the deal they negotiated almost made that look like it had happened. I mean, not quite because it's impossible. Boris Johnson, to his credit, has said, we're leaving, we're leaving the single market, we're leaving the customs union, things are gonna have to change. Sorry about that, but that's just how it is. That has the benefit of honesty, at least. I think that was the thing about Theresa May's. Theresa May's strategy was inherently dishonest because the plan was always to say, I'm gonna give you everything you want and then say, oh, it's the last minute, you're gonna have to take this and there's no other option. And that's my second complaint about Theresa May, is she didn't, if I can get all X-Factory on you, take us on that journey. She went from January 2017 and Lancaster House to Autumn 2018 and checkers a long way, partly because of the election, we can get into why that happened if you want. And what she never ever did was stood up and said, look, I was wrong. Actually, we're gonna have to make some compromises. These are the things I've made. The other thing she didn't do, which was bizarre, was when she got this deal from the EU, which as I said, included a significant concession from the EU, which was the all UK backstop which gave us an unfair competition in their market, she never came back and said anything. She didn't sell it. Well, what she thought, and this is why, I think when she first resigned, there was a line I really liked about her, which is that most people learn a theory of mind when they're about five, which is that other people have egos, other people have pride, and you have to imagine that you're them when you try and encourage them to do something. And she thought that actually other people are robots and you say, it's either this or that, it's in your rational self-interest to say this, so obviously they'll choose that. And what she didn't realize is that if you bully people into voting for something, if you don't give them any reason to want to vote for it, you have to because I'm going to threaten you. People are going to say, well, no, actually, I don't like that. Also, I mean, I'm a politician with a big ego and you don't get to push me around, which I think is what happens to her. Well, it partly depends on context because Boris Johnson wasn't that far away last night, and it was the same thing, do this or it's going to be a nightmare for you. But the other thing about Theresa May that was really striking, and we could talk about this a bit because I'm having a bit of a crisis about our political system at the moment, is she lost the election in 2017, but continued to govern and to act as if she had a majority of 150. And that probably wasn't the best way of going about it. Well, again, I think that's because she thought other people were robots. Yeah, it could be that. It's in their self-interest to vote for this. Well, not their self, but you know, the rational thing to do is to vote for my deal because, as you say, it wasn't the end of the world, that deal. I think the Labour Party is a right. No, but the end of the world is a very low bar. I mean, it's, you know. Is this deal the end of the world? Not quite. No, again, it's a very low bar. I mean, Britain will continue to be a big economy. There will be pain. There will be economic dislocation. One of the big areas of difference between this deal and the old deal is manufacturing. You know, if you go back to the referendum, there's a guy at Cardiff University called Patrick Minford, who is one of the economists for Brexit. Now, I don't agree with all his methods, all his assumptions or whatever, but one of the things Patrick said during the referendum was, this allows us to reshape our economy if we leave the European Union. One of the things we can do is get rid of manufacturing. Oh, wow. Because I thought the argument was normally that then we can, you know, make Britain great again by reinvesting in manufacturing. He was saying, fuck it, let's get rid of it. Well, no, he was very straightforward, and obviously just said, look, that's old hat, get rid of it, move on. Now, I imagine you and the people watching this are probably thinking that's not the best idea I've heard in my whole life, all right? And I imagine the people who work in those industries will think, but you know, this is the kind of greater good kind of Brexit, isn't it? Where, you know, a little bit of personal suffering in the West Midlands, the Northwest and the Northeast is a price worth paying for that. Well, I suppose that was factorism, really, wasn't it? It's to say that Britain's ready to move beyond manufacturing and she's sort of destroyed it. Well, collateral damage. And actually, can I just... Boris Johnson wouldn't stand up and say that, but that's not a political moment. Boris Johnson's political fate depends on getting his Brexit sorted out, okay? That's fair enough. He's acting like politicians act. I might not agree with what he's doing or his objectives or whatever that's what he's doing. If he said, look, let's be honest, chaps, what we are doing is something that is gonna have an enormous impact on the way the British economy works. It's gonna be disruptive. There's an end point in sight where we'll recover, we'll be able to cope with this fine, but for a period of many years, this is gonna be disruptive. It's gonna cause us pain because of the lack of trade. Here, alongside my Brexit deal, is my plan for investment, retraining, reskilling and building employment in the Northwest and the Northeast and the West Midlands. I wouldn't say I'd jump up and down with joy because actually you're creating sticking plasters for wounds that are self-inflicted, but I would say, okay, fair enough. You're being realistic about this. And there are some things that might be worth some economic pain, be honest. And you don't think he's being honest? Well, I don't think the government has, I don't know, I mean, I wouldn't expect any politician in office to say, this decision I'm taking is gonna be economically very painful, so brace for impact. Though, you know, it is interesting the number of Tory politicians who have said things like, it won't be the end of the world. But I mean, I suppose the reason why you can set the bar that low is because one reason you can say, you know, the sky is not gonna fall in if we have a no-deal Brexit is because there are quite a lot of people who are screaming if you have a no-deal, no, but what I mean is there are a lot of people screaming if a no-deal Brexit happens, the sky will fall in and there'll be riots in the street and loads of diabetic people will die because there won't be any medicines on the shelf. Yeah, so cliff edge, right? Take this phrase, cliff edge. Leaving under the terms of Theresa May's deal or even Boris Johnson's deal, wouldn't be a cliff edge. If neither of them were cliff edge Brexit was a no-deal Brexit, wasn't it? Yeah, but people talk as if leaving is gonna lead to this immediate fall. I mean, you know, with Theresa May's deal, the analogy I always use was a slow puncture. So if you, I don't know if you cycle. All right, you cycle and you get a slow puncture on your bike. There's two- I've got so many punctures I can't be bothered in. Yeah, all right, well, there's two things that happen. Firstly, it takes you ages to realize. I'll be my relationship to Brexit as well, I suppose. Yeah, really funny. Pay attention, it's very important. The first thing is it takes you ages to realize you've got a slow puncture. I mean, when you get to my age, you start thinking, oh my God, that's just like, that's a run out of testosterone and muscle completely now. And then you sort of really chuffed to find you've got a flat tire. So it might be 10 years later in the case of the economy, you turn around and you think, hang on, that doesn't look right. It's not gonna be sudden. And the second thing is because it takes so long, you'd never quite know for certain where you picked that slow puncture up. And so 10 years down the line, you try making the argument, actually that's because we left the European Union. And people say, no, it wasn't. The Chinese had a recession in 2025. The Germans did that in 2028. You'd probably get confirmation bias, right? So people who are always for remain would say, this was for the Brexit. They were always saying if you actually tried objectively to do it, it would be hard. No one knows so you can't really use it as a good government. The causal chain will be messy. Let's move on to the upcoming general election. Yes. So from a, obviously the Labour Party is, I mean, so maybe struggling is too strong a word, but they're not precisely sure how they're gonna go into that general election, what, who they're pitching to and why. From a purely hard-nosed strategic perspective, not about what's right. If you're putting aside, putting aside for once, what you think is the right thing to do, if what they wanna do is maximize their votes and maximize their seats in Westminster, what Brexit policy should the Labour Party have? Quite possibly something like this one, actually. Because we are where we are now. I'm not sure if you, if the Labour Party suddenly pivoted to remain now on the verge of an eve of a general election, it's gonna be particularly convincing to people. I'm not sure people would believe it. So at this point, I think it makes sense for, one of the strengths that the Labour Party has when it comes to the Conservatives around this debate, I think there's two or three. One is Labour is obviously the party that's got more to say on things that aren't Brexit because they did it in 2017 and that's what they're talking about. You always got a leader who doesn't like talking about Brexit. Let's talk about others. The flip side of let's get Brexit done is let's talk about other things. Yeah. And in that, at least, it strikes me that Corbyn starts from quite a good position because all he wants to talk about are other things and everyone knows that, all right? The second thing I would say is all those Labour leavers and bear in mind, even in constituencies that voted leave, right? It is perfectly conceivable that the majority of Labour voters voted remain. Yeah. All that the people who did vote leave are soft leavers in the sense that it's not their number one priority. Yeah. So there's not a straightforward correlation. My constituency voted leave. So the best thing for Labour Party to do is to support you. So that's not a straight correlation but also bear in mind, one of the other things is in a number of these places, there is a visceral opposition to the idea of voting Tory. I mean, the place I came from, Wakefield, you know, I thought Mary Craig was gonna lose Wakefield in 2017 and I think one of the reasons she didn't was a lot of those people who were really adamantly opposed to her position on Brexit and she voted against triggering Article 15, was upfront about it, couldn't quite bring themselves to vote Tory because, you know, this is a place where, you know, the mining strike still resonates very, very strongly and we know who we blame for the mining strike, why the hell, you know, I can't vote for them. So there's still, it's not obvious that Labour Leave has switched the Tories. Labour Leave has might switch to the Brexit Party, right? And then it's gonna depend on the maths in each constituency. If that takes the Labour MP down below the Tories, that's important, it matters, if it doesn't, if they're switching away from Labour to the Brexit Party but not giving their votes to the Tories, it doesn't help the Tories as much. So there's complicated maths there. Starting from this position, I would say, Labour needs to talk about not Brexit. It needs to talk about broken promises if we're still in the European Union and we're having an election. It needs to talk about place because actually, we did some work with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation a while ago, we did these 18 focus groups in some of the poorest parts of the country and just talked about what they thought about their places, how they could be improved. Enormous local pride, enormous pride in place. Little stuff, litter, state of the high street, all that kind of stuff. Labour actually is quite good at talking about place. I mean, to be honest, everything you're saying is gonna be music to the ears of Labour leadership because these are all things they fucking love talking about, right? They love talking about the planning towns and they love talking about things other than Brexit. I don't know what's gonna happen in a general election. The polling doesn't look good and perhaps the numbers that would concern a Labour person most if they looked at the polling is, is I don't think, certainly since major onwards, that a leader who's been behind in the leaders contest has won, right? So, and you can spit 2017 back in my face and you can say actually times are different now and that's all true, so I'm not for a moment- Well, Donald Trump is one as well. He got the presidency, he was, I think, a historic, probably the least popular candidate that ever stood to be president of the United States. But probably against the second most popular candidate. I mean, that was it. Bernie had a great line where she, Hillary Clinton had said something a bit bitchy about him and he was like, you know what? She stood against the least popular candidate that ever stood in a United States presidential election and she lost. So I think she's a bit bitter, which I thought was quite a nice line. Bernie kind of became well-sharfed way through that sentence. Yeah, I'm not very good at accents. I always try them and then they always break up half with me. It started off really well. But no, I mean, so that would concern, but I don't think it's, I think there is lots of fruitful ground on which to fight this election from a Labour perspective. What do you think about the Lib Dems? Do you think they're moving towards a revoked position was potentially driven by hubris and a bit of a mistake? Do you think it's made them less credible or do you think by signposting that we are the remain party? It was actually a stroke of strategic genius. As long as, well, we'll see, but it might, well, it was an election strategy. Okay. Interesting discussion to have about the Lib Dems is whether this was the strategy best suited to stopping Brexit, whether it was a strategy best suited to getting votes in a general election or whether it was both. I suspect it was the best strategy for getting votes in a general election and not the other. So, you know, all the parties are at this, gaming Brexit for their own party political ends. This is an interesting question. For someone who follows this super closely, who do you think really cares about Brexit? Because the past three years, there have been a lot of people who have to almost pretend they care about Brexit. So there are a lot of MPs who have to pretend they're really hard remainers, either to fight a factional battle within a political party, which happens a lot in the Labour Party or to try and win over voters, which the Lib Dems do, or to, you know, take a kick at Theresa May. How many people do you think really, really care? Oh, loads of people, but not the people in politics, necessarily, some of the people around College Green, some of the people I know in Oxford, some of the friends from Wakefield. I mean, a lot of people, a lot of voters care viscerally about this. Some of the reaction of some of my friends to this just like couldn't believe it. It was one of the most interesting days of my life when I woke up, I didn't wake up, I didn't go to bed, so I was down on College Green on the 24th of June, and in a sort of idle moment, I was flipping through my Facebook feed, and it was just bizarre, because it was just my Facebook feed has split into two. There was Wakefield, there was Oxford, and nothing similar between, that was really, really weird. I think the curse of the European Union since before we joined actually, but certainly since we joined, is it has always been condemned to being used instrumentally in British politics? I mean, that was one of the problems of our membership was that people, you know, bit of short-term gain, let's criticize the European Union for that, let's make a stand at that summit. Eroding people's sort of notion that this is a good thing, Gordon Brown was at it, you know, always came back from something saying we won, insisting on a separate signing ceremony for the Lisbon Treaty, because it was a bit embarrassing to turn it with everyone else. So we've always used this for other ends, and we're doing it again now. I mean, in our politics now, Brexit is an electoral issue. It is not an issue in its own right. Everyone is positioning themselves as well they can for what they know is coming. One of the sad- Which is why everyone's position's changed all the time, is all right. But one of the sad things about that is we've all of a sudden got to this position with people saying get it done, get it done, and you hear Tory MPs say it doesn't matter what sort of Brexit, just wave it through. And it's like, yes, it does matter. It matters quite a lot actually in terms of the future of the country. I mean, yes, it's taken a long time. Yes, it's getting dull. Yes, we need to get it done. But no, that doesn't mean just finding the quickest, fastest, easiest way of doing it without thinking whether there are better alternatives for the functioning of the British state and the British economy. I'm gonna have a couple more questions for you, but I also want some questions from the audience. But because my laptop's internet isn't working, can you, what's that mean then? So put your questions in the comments, and some of them will get sent to me. A second referendum. It seems to me like there's no chance of that happening in this parliament. Do you share that analysis? I'm glad you hedged that at the end. Yeah, I agree. I think it's very, very unlikely indeed. I mean, this parliament, what are the problems? One, there's no majority to vote for in the first place. Two, you would have to have the Johnson government legislate for it. So I think you're absolutely right. Next parliament, who knows? Don't fall into the trap of thinking that another referendum is a panacea. I mean, I've never done that. Which was actually, I mean, my question was actually going to be from a different direction, which was, is a second referendum going to be hell? Politics is hell at the moment. So I think the second referendum would be like hell on speed, if that works. It'll be, my fear is that a second referendum makes the first referendum look like a high quality referendum. Interesting what you think, because it's going to be even dirtier. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, that's just a hunch. But let me just say, yes, it'll be nasty, it'll be divisive, you know, social media will explode into a froth of hate. And it might not actually settle things particularly well. What are the two ways that would settle this thing? Perhaps a 70-30 vote for leave on a good turnout, or a 51-49 in favor of leave on whatever turnout. But what about remain? Oh, sorry. A 70-30 in favor of remain on a good turnout, or a 51-49 on whatever turnout in favor of leave, I think settles it. But if you end up somewhere with, if you end up with 51-49 remain on a smaller turnout than you had in 2016, with fewer than 17.4 million voters having voted remain, I think then we just start the sad procession towards the sort of toyn cost, you know, the best out of three. Well, so I suppose there's two ways of looking out from a sort of labor strategy perspective, which is that if that happens, right, that the thing you have ended is the legal impact. So in the second referendum, if remain wins, obviously you just remain. There's no problem that parliament has to solve. And if labor in power and a soft Brexit wins, you'd have written the legislation already, and there can be no parliamentary wrangling. And the idea there would be that the reason people care so much about this at the moment is because it's a live issue. If the issue is sort of killed in parliament and people can move on to other things, the idea of leaving again will become slightly more of a niche issue. And the Tories will continue to tear themselves apart for the next 20 years over whether or not their policy should be to leave again. And Labour can just say, we're the party of moving on now. So yeah, that could, I mean, I can't think that. I mean, my God, you know, people say they can't see the wood for the trees. I can no longer see the trees for the leaves. So actually looking that far ahead is just, it's just sort of physically beyond me. What I would say though is if we end up with a significant body of people whose feel betrayed let down because they voted for leave, it was never implemented. And actually that means that we have a rise of populism on the right in the form of a rejuvenated Brexit party. You could be cynical and say that's great because they're probably Tory voters and it means that Labour are in power or you could say actually that's gonna really start. That cycle might start. The danger is, we have that referendum, we vote just to stay in. If you've got a Tory government at the time, and maybe they'll resign maybe they will, I don't know, is you wake up again in 2012 where the Brexit party is UKIP, the Prime Minister is David Cameron. They suddenly think, oh my God, some of my MPs have defected to them. Oh my God, immigration. Oh my God, oh my God. I better promise a referendum. I mean, I can make an even more optimistic, even more far-reaching suggestion. That wasn't intended as an optimistic scenario. No, no, no, I mean, they're my previous one. Oh, all right, okay. It sort of like, it happens and it tears the toys apart and the Labour are in power for the rest of the night. So an even more optimistic look into the decade future if we have a second referendum and remain wins is that, and this is too starting, I don't think, but that all the reasons that people wanted to vote leave because we have such a successful policy of reinvesting money across Britain and people feel now that they are part of the economy and they have less anger towards the European establishment because they no longer feel left behind, then we can move on as a country inside of the European Union and people just feel less angry in general. Do you think I'm deluding myself? No, no, I like people who can think that way. I envy them. I'm gonna go to some questions. Oh, this is interesting. Almas Quach, in hindsight, should Labour have supported May's deal? Well, what I do know is there are a number of Labour MPs who wish they had, yes. I suppose the definitive answer to that is given after a general election. If we have a general election and Boris Johnson comes in with a majority of 30, 40, 50, passes a very hard Brexit with all the repercussions, absolutely yes. Yeah, although I suppose then the example, Labour has still got their hands clean. I think one big reason why Labour didn't wanna vote for May's deal is because they wanted their hands clean. Yeah, but having your hands clean while your constituents lose their jobs is not necessarily, you know. Fair point, I'll take that. Red Laws asks, if Brexit happens, so I just gave you the scenario of there's a second referendum and remain wins, and there's a fringe, let's re, no, let's relive, or let's try again to leave. If the opposite happens, so if Brexit happens, is it realistic that the UK could rejoin the EU in the near future? Oh, so this isn't, I was thinking how big would the let's rejoin movement be, but this question is, would they even have us back? So if we decided- Well, let me answer both, because I think both questions are really interesting. Yes, they'd have us back. There would be a process. It's the accession process. Bear in mind, about 10 days ago, the French vetoed further enlargement because the French don't like enlargement, not least because they have to have a referendum now, which would be a laugh. Every time a new country joins. Yeah, imagine that, the French having a referendum on British. Why is that so bananas? That's what a weird policy is. Well, that's because they don't like, it's not a weird policy. It's a policy that signals the other member states, you better not do this because, you know, so imagine the French having a referendum on British membership, that would be a scream. Just imagine that campaign, all right? But anyway, so there would be a process. It would be political. They'd have to accept us and we wouldn't have the same terms as we have now. So the notion that they'd give us the rebate is obviously for the birds. Whether or not they'd make us join the Euro, I don't know whether or not they'd make us join Schengen, quite possibly, but it would take time. It wouldn't be immediate. And as far as businesses are concerned, you've then had to adapt to where we are now, transition, leaving, back in, it would be very disruptive. Your question, which was, what was yours? I suppose how big and how politically significant will the movement be to rejoin the European Union? If we... I went on the Iraq march and I was surrounded by people telling me they would never, ever vote Labour again. The polls I saw suggested that quite a lot of them were telling porkies, all right? A lot of those people... Oh, because they went on to vote for them again in 2005, right? Yeah. It wasn't even a long time. Two years later, war's been done. Well, it's not been done, but it's been fought. A lot of those people sort of faced with the prospect of this choice, voted Labour again. So I don't know whether the same thing happens with the European flag lot, with the marchers, with the remainers, whether they move on to something else, whether they coalesce back behind Labour, let's say, those who've got fed up with Labour because of Brexit, because actually then the next fighters are with the Tories, whether they go on to build up a green movement that we don't have in this, but I don't know, I do not know whether a rejoined party would have the same levels of support that, you know, Brexit is... There are a hundred million ironies about Brexit, one of which is Britain has the biggest pro-EU movement in the whole of the EU, all right? Who'd have thought you'd say that? I don't know if they'll last beyond the referendum, to be honest, I just don't know. I mean, the big danger for the Labour party is, sorry if I seem a bit obsessed about it. No. I'm obsessed about the chances for Labour at the next general election. It's pretty much my expectations, so that's fine. The worry for them is that if we do leave, then I don't think let's rejoin the EU will be a majority position for decades. Oh, I don't think it will be a majority position, but it could be... Whether it's an irritating position, and whether it's a... And it might mean that the Lib Dems can play the same, or that UKIP plays the same party. Whether it means the Lib Dems can play spoilers, yeah. And bear in mind at that point, there aren't gonna be many conservative Lib Dem swing voters left, I don't think, if the Tory party continues its current trajectory. So at that point, that's a related question. You kind of asked it, answered it earlier, have the Tories had that much success in realigning British politics so that they are the one nation party of which... The one nation in the sense that, they're the nationalist party. Okay, that's very different to one nation, yeah. That's very different to one nation Tory to me. So I suppose a Christian democratic kind of, they've got some working-class people voting for them, but they're the party of... The cross-class party of the nation, which I think was Theresa May's plan, and Boris Johnson sort of leans into it slightly. To what extent have we seen an electoral realignment where the Tories have picked up new voters? Stopping when you get bored, this is quite a long answer. I mean, I remember watching Theresa May in July 2016, when she went into Downing Street, she made that speech, it was a pretty good speech, just about managing burning injustices. I remember watching it thinking, you know, it sounded like a Tory to me, and I remember saying to a friend, this was the first of my Brexit ironies, it wasn't the first, because it was some of the referendum, we've just decided to leave the European Union, and we've got a Christian democratic party after we've left, how weird is that? So, okay, that was step one. Step two, the next thing that made me sort of sit up and really think was during the 2017 election campaign, Tim Montgomery wrote a piece in The Sun, and I read it, I thought, hang on, then I read it again, then I read it again, I thought, I agree with every single thing he said, now that's not normal for me. He's in number 10 now, isn't he? Yeah, he's doing housing or social... I think he's social justice. Anyway, so I read these things, and what did he say? He said, we need to reallocate wealth between north and south, we need to tax the rich a bit more, we need to help out the young who've been disproportionately hurt. And I thought, well, blame me, this is weird, I think he's right. So there was obviously an attempt, and there was an attempt in that 2017 election for the Tories to park their tanks on the Labour lawn. All right? It worked a bit, there was a partial realignment. Bear in mind, this realignment had been going on since about 2010, if you read, there's a wonderful woman at Bristol University called Paula Surridge, who studies... I follow her on Twitter. Yeah, he does values. And she'll say, you know, for those who are looking, that value stuff was happening earlier, but it really came out in 2017. And what we find in 2017 is that shift led us to say things we thought we'd never have to say out loud, the Tories win stoke, Labour win Kensington, Labour win Canterbury. Did the Tories win stoke? Did they win one of the stokes each? They won the stokes each, yeah. So you get that, but it is still the case that the most important driver of how you voted in 2017 was the traditional left-right class one. What we don't know is whether that movement away from that class division goes further. The Tories increase their share of the working-class vote. They're obviously trying to do it again, which is why they're knocking around West Yorkshire the whole time and the West Midlands. They're trying to do that. They're trying to make this as much about values as it is about class. And of course, what the polling seems to show is that there is a majority, that the electoral sweet spot is left of centre politics, right of centre values. Do you buy that? That's always been a, that's been a meme for the past three years. It's been a bit, do I buy it? I've seen polling. It's someone like Matt Goodwin is pushing and many of our viewers would be very resistant to that idea that what you want is a sort of left-wing nationalist, socially conservative politics. Me too. I'm a liberal in many ways. I'm slightly confused liberal in some ways, when it comes to things like immigration, I'm a liberal. I've seen numbers that make it look relatively convincing. I'm not sure it is a election-winning strategy, not least because I'm not sure either big party can pull it off wholly convincingly because of their track records. That's partly the problem is, how do you sell that message? But I mean, I've got experience of that kind of thing. When I was growing up, my family used to call, everyone used to talk about South Yorkshire as the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire. We used to call it the National Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire because they were just so hideously racist. I mean, you know, you couldn't walk around Sheffield without getting abused shouted at in the 1970s. And so, I mean, in a sense, that was that, wasn't it? It was very left-wing economically and sort of culturally quite right-wing. Piketty has a really good paper on this. It's called Brahmin Left. Brahmin and yeah. So the bit I thought was most persuasive is he has this, you know, the political axes where you've got economically left, economically right, socially conservative, socially liberal. And he says there's no correlation between the two and there's pretty much 25% in every quadrant, which he says is basically what the French presidential election was like in the first round. So he has 25% who were right economics, left, or socially liberal, blah, blah, blah. You can put the different presidential candidates in each corner. It's not as forensic and it's not as analytical, but Thomas Frank wrote a book just before Trump was elected, which now looks very prescient, called Listen Liberal. And it's about how the Democrats lost the working class. And it is partly about this values thing. You know, while there were people on really badly paid jobs in traditional democratic heartlands that the Democrats forgot about because they didn't think they needed them because they were busy wooing tech companies, the Democrats made it about values and they lost. It's a salutary tale and it's a brilliant book. Let's do two more questions from the audience then we'll wrap up and I'll let you get off. Tichard Rice, who I assume is not Richard Tyson in disguise, but someone who's somewhat trolling him. What place does questioning the legitimacy of the referendum result have in an election campaign? Given leave lied and broke the law in order to win, should we just seed that ground to the Lib Dems? Yeah, I would say so, quite honest. I've never seen anything that convinced me that it was the Russians what won it for a start. I think for the late, if you're talking specifically about the Labour Party, which I think you are. It is not easy to go into an election telling your voters they've been commed, but you'll see them right without making it sound a little bit patronising. I agree. I also find that actually in... The fact that there are some people that believe that can be helpful to get a hearing, so if you're having a conversation with someone who's a breaks to you, you say, look, I'm not one of those people who says that the election was bought by Russia or that it was an illegitimate vote. I just happen to have at this point this different position. I think the standard of debate in the referendum of 2016 was frankly absolutely appalling and I would love to have a clever idea about how to do something about that, but I don't. You don't. So if there was another one, you said... I don't think, you know, Truth Commission's all, you know, put it whatever. No, I don't know how you do it. I suppose there are some simple things, which is like... They've already done it on Facebook, which is you can now see what other parties are using in their advertising. Well, I think it's all transparent now, obviously. Yeah, but the fact-checking thing is nascent, hasn't it? No, not fact-checking. This is much simplest. This is the simplest thing, which is just to say anyone who puts up a political advert, it can no longer be a secret. So dark ads, you know, so the point of a dark ad was that you can advertise something to people in the stock which no one else sees. What I would say, though, is before the 2017 election, and it was a real eye-opener, I went out and I liked a whole load of things that I don't like, politically. And bloody hell. It's a dark place, isn't it? I haven't seen an advert for slippers for about four years now. And that was all I was getting before, though. I went out and I liked all these sort of far-right organisations just to see what happened. I'm getting some really dubious adverts now on my Facebook feed. Mm-hmm. All right, final question. Jack Meyers, should a second referendum contain no deal to not alienate hard Brexit supporters? Would this cause issues? Well, I don't know about the first. I don't think it will. Will it cause issues? Yes. I think if it doesn't, we will have an abstention campaign led by Nij. The Dutch had a referendum a few years ago on the Ukraine Treaty with the EU, and there was a very, very big abstention campaign which kept turnout relatively low. How strongly did people feel in Holland? Sorry, it's a bit niche now, but I'm just intrigued as to why the Dutch didn't want to pre-trade equipment with Ukraine. I think it was in the context of a Malaysian airliner that had been shot. I think it was all that. So it was quite politically salient. Let me tell you the choices, because I think the choice should be between the deal and remain, but I keep changing my mind. You can have a choice between three with a transferable vote. You can have two referendums, don't laugh. The first of which is leave, remain. And if the first one comes out, leave, then you choose between the two leave options. There is no easy way to do it. And actually one of the problems with getting to a referendum is the nightmare time parliament would have agreeing on what the question should be. I mean, what lots of people say. I'm sorry to ever ask that question for failing to answer it so completely. Do you think no deal is a legitimate thing to put on the ballot? What lots of people say is it's not an outcome. So because no deal just means you have to go back to the renegotiation table and negotiate something completely difficult, not difficult, different, it's just silly to put it on there. And so another option would be to say, I think this, I'm not in favor of this, but you could have three options where one is remain, one is the deal, and one is go back and renegotiate something different. And you just keep doing that forever until people consent to a deal. It's not a future that many people want. It's not on there. Well, is it an outcome? I think no deal will be dreadful. I think no deal will be dreadful, particularly politically. I mean, it wouldn't be great economically. But I think it's a little bit naive of the EU to think if we have no deal, the British government will go back on its knees within weeks to beg for a deal. I just don't think that's how politics works. I think actually, I mean, thinking about this a lot, and one of the perennial problems about Brexit is the lack of analogies, because this hasn't happened before. So I looked at the literature on sanctions. Bear with me, I know this sounds a bit weird. But what happens when a state is the object of sanctions? You watch Erdogan over the last couple of weeks. Trump imposes sanctions. Does Erdogan say, bugger, bring the troops back? No, he says, screw you. We're gonna double down, we're gonna finish what we're doing, then we'll have a talk. And I worry about the sort of politics of no deal in this country. You'd have immediate disruption both sides of the channel. You have immediate finger pointing both sides of the channel, I need the IRC, particularly the IRC, as people, as governments blame the other side for outcomes that were hurting their people, both sides would double down. The nationalist rhetoric would be hideous. And under those circumstances, with the tabloids in full-throated support, no doubt, we could be in that limbo for an awfully long time. I've always been saying no deal won't make the sky fall in, and we should be a bit more realistic about it. It won't make the sky fall in, that's a very low bar. That sounds really hellish, what you're describing there. But I think the politics of it could be horrible. What happens, imagine, so you have a no-deal scenario, there's disruption, the French are blaming us, Brussels are saying, sod them, you think Boris Johnson says, actually I've made a mistake, I'm gonna go and ask for, I'm gonna go and apologize. Ask for the equivalent Theresa May's deal. And sign that withdrawal agreement that I've just, that's not happening quickly. What might happen though is that, because people always use this analogy of the blitz spirit, but the problem with the, the disanalogy there is that in the blitz, everyone was on the side. On the same side. On the same side, whereas now you've got a culture where 50% of people are saying, why the fuck am I queuing for oil and petrol when actually all I wanted was to remain in the EU or to have a soft deal. Let me give you a quick analogy, we looked at the polling from 2000, I don't know if you were even born in 2000, but the polling team, I'm not 20, 19. Under about 40 of them, it's the same to me nowadays. In 2000, we had refinery blockades, if you remember. And so they blockaded the refineries. We almost ran out of petrol. That was the extent of the crisis. We almost ran out of petrol. The queues were quite long. If you went on a Friday, it was a nightmare, but any other day of the week was just about, okay. Prior to those blockades, Labour were polling at a pretty healthy 49%. So far ahead of the Conservatives that you had to go like this and then put it against the scale to measure it. Three days after those blockades was the only time in that parliament where the Conservatives had a lead over Labour. Which is one of the reasons why I never really thought Boris Johnson was serious about doing no deal than having an election, because we do not react well to disruption. I mean, most people, I mean, I've normally said, and most people who've come on the show, James Meadway or Tom Kobasi, people have said that no deal was always just a bluff anyway. It's never gonna happen. Do you kind of share that? Yeah, yeah. Let's end it there. You don't have to worry about no deal, but the future is still looking pretty fucking up in the air. Unless you accept my really, really rosy decade-long process, whereby we have a second referendum with, I don't know, the Nirvana solution, yeah. In any case, thank you so much for joining us. It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for watching Tiskey's Settler. Thank you for watching Nirvana Media. As you know, this show, this organisation is only possible because of your kind donations. So please, if you want to help us grow, go to support.nivaramedia.com and donate the equivalent of one hour's wage a month so we can get some full-time people in this gorgeous new studio. I'll see you, I'm not exactly sure when I'm gonna see you next, actually. So follow our Twitter, follow our Facebook, and I will see you soon. Good night.