 So, ladies and gentlemen, you're very welcome to the Institute of International and European Affairs for this very important and interesting event. We will have an introduction for Professor Gartnash in just a moment, but just to remind you all to put your phones on silent. We would prefer you don't take any calls during the course of the proceedings, but do feel free to tweet at IIEA. And I just wanted to let you know that this is the first in a series that we are hosting here at the Institute. Can you hear me at the back there, folks? No. Okay. Well, we'll attend to that straight away. While I'm talking, it doesn't matter, but it will matter in a short while. So, what I will say to you is this is the first in a series of speaker events. We are hosting on the issue of challenges to the liberal order. We're going to have a series of these events up until February of next year, and we hope to develop a policy paper looking at the implications for both Europe and Ireland. And we're doing this in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin, and in particular with Tris. So in that regard, I'd like to introduce you to Eleanor Denny, who is here at the front, who will introduce the speaker. Eleanor, thank you. Thank you, Barry. Thank you, Barry. And I'd just like to reiterate that as representing Tris and Trinity College Dublin here today, we're delighted to welcome this collaboration with the IIEA, bringing the fantastic network and outreach activities of the IIEA together with the world-class and policy-relevant research in Trinity College Dublin. This series in particular is being hosted together with Trinity Research in Social Sciences, which represents over 250 academics in Trinity College Dublin, in the social sciences, so in economics, political science, law, business, and so on. And if we look at the themes of the IIEA, future of the EU, Brexit, energy, climate, and so on, these are the major challenges of our time, and to a large part they are social science issues. So I think this collaboration is a wonderful opportunity to bring together the network and the industry and the policy expertise of the IIEA with the academic expertise in Trinity College Dublin. So on behalf of Trinity, I'm delighted to launch this series, and in particular to co-host our distinguished speaker today, who is Timothy Garten-Ash, who is a professor of European studies in the University of Oxford, the IIEA Berlin Professor Oriole Fellow at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford University. He has authored ten books and writes a column in The Guardian on International Affairs. In 2017, he was awarded the prestigious Charlemagne Prize, which is awarded to those who have worked in the service of European unification. I'm not going to take up any more of your time, and I'm going to hand over to our distinguished speaker. Thank you. Well, thank you very much. Can you hear me at the back there? It's a great pleasure to be here again, also in the homeland of my maternal grandmother, like thousands of British Europeans. The day after the referendum, the fact that I had an Irish grandmother became fantastically important, as it had not been before. To my great dismay, I discovered that very inconsiderately, she'd chosen to be born in Montana. So otherwise, I'd be asking a lot more about Irishness, but as in the Gilbert and Sullivan song, in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, he remains an Englishman. But an English-European, and let me say, just to be absolutely clear about my own position on Brexit, I regard Brexit as the greatest and most gratuitous act of national self-harm in modern British history. And harm to others, too, to Ireland, obviously, but also, and I think this is being underestimated, to the rest of the EU. I think the rest of the EU is underestimating the long-term negative impact of Brexit. Now, today is both a good and a bad day to be talking about this subject. It's a good day because everybody's thinking about it because they're meeting over there in checkers and their phones have actually been taken away, not just turned to silent. It's a bad day because we don't know what's going to come out. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to start with a bit about the causes of Brexit, go to the way in which I think Brexit is an instance of the much wider phenomenon of populism. Say a little about how we might combat populism and threats to the liberal order altogether and then come back to Brexit at the end. And I can try and do all that in about 25 minutes so we have plenty of time for discussion. So it will be fairly telegraphic. I mean, the first thing to say about Brexit is there was absolutely nothing inevitable about the outcome. We must be aware of what Henri Bergson called the illusions of retrospective determinism. If there were, say, 10 causes of Brexit, if any two or three of them had gone the other way, if we'd had a different leader of the Labour Party, if Gove and Johnson had jumped the other way, if Merkel had conceded an emergency break on free movement of people, it could have gone the other way. And historians for generations to come would be explaining why it went the other way. Those causes are divided into long and short term British and European. Everyone knows about the British causes and the specifically English causes. The extraordinary emphasis of the English historically are based on strictly legal sovereignty, which goes back to the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome. The legacy of Empire, the legacy of our finest hour in 1940, I would argue no other country in Europe would have had the self-confidence, not even the French, there I say, to believe that they'd actually be OK on their own. All the way through to more recent factors like our very transactional relationship with the EU. More interesting for me are the ways in which Brexit is actually a very European phenomenon. In which we are behaving like many other European countries. In which it's actually a classic example of the subject of this project with Trinity, of populism and threats to liberal order. It's a classic populism. Populism is defined by defining political authority and legitimacy as coming directly from the people. That legitimacy being held to trump all other sources of legitimate authority, independent courts, for example, the famous Daily Mail headline, the High Court judges or enemies of the people. And on closer examination, it turns out the people are only part of the people. Populism is characterized by rhetoric against liberal metropolitan elites, experts with their facts. Against it, it puts a single, strong, emotionally appealing narrative nationalist. Populists are always nationalist. There's no such thing as a non nationalist populist. And the Brexit slogan, the brilliant Brexit slogan, take back control could have been the slogan of the RF Day in Germany, of Viktor Orban in Hungary, of peace in Poland, of the Freedom Party in Austria. It's a classic popular slogan, popular speak in the name of sovereignty, but they also speak in the name of democracy. And this is in the European context, a really important point, sovereignty and democracy against what is seen as undemocratic liberalism, a European Union which says, little country, you voted the wrong way in your referendum. Go away and vote again until you give the right answer. A European Union which says, you want someone who's an enemy of the euro's finance minister? Go away and think again. Come back and give the right answer. This is a genuine feeling to which populists appeal, a genuine concern. And what we actually have, which is quite significant in terms of Europe where democracy doesn't address it. Now this populism has deep causes. It is, in my view, put it in the simplest terms, a reaction to profound changes over the last 30 years brought about by liberalization, globalization and Europeanization. Europeanization being an intensified form of both globalization and liberalization. Financialized globalization leading us into the 2008 economic financial crisis from which we still not recovered. Economic inequality, familiar, but also as important cultural aspects of inequality. The economic explanation of populism simply does not work in the case of Germany or Poland. Real wages in Poland increased 50 per cent since 2004. The Gini coefficient has declined in Poland since 2004, whereas it's not the economy's stupid. It's the culture's stupid. It's the culture's stupid. The cultural explanation is at least as important as the economic one. And there are other kinds of inequality. Besides economic inequality, they're what I call the inequality of attention, the inequality of respect. That is to say, there are large parts of our societies which simply feel that they are being completely ignored by liberal metropolitan elites, not even noticed, let alone respected. And you know what? They have a point. How many articles did you read written with real sympathy about the sufferings of the white working class in the American Rust Belt in the New York Times until Trump came along? How many articles did you read in The Guardian written with real sympathy and understanding about the suffering of the post-industrial white working class in the north of England until the crisis came along? This inequality of attention and respect is about education. Having higher education or not having higher education is one of the most reliable predictors of voting behavior on the axis populist anti-populist. And always about geography. There's a geographical inequality in the US, the inland, the Rust Belt against the coast, in Britain, the northern parts of the west against the south-south-east. In Poland, the poorer south-east and east. And so you can go on. And it focuses on the issue of immigration, but the issue of immigration, as we see in the politics of Merkel versus Zehofer, Orban and Salvini, is not just about the immigration of the last few years. It's about a deeper unease about the speed and character of change in European societies. Bertelsmann, who do very good polling on this, had a question in 2017. They asked people to agree or disagree with the following statement. Quote, there are so many foreigners in our country, sometimes I feel like a stranger. The EU average was 50%. So half of the EU average agreed with that statement. In Italy, 71%. In Germany, around 60%. And populists, of course, speak directly into that feeling. It was a very important part of the Brexit vote, but in a rather peculiar way. Because of the foreigners, it was directed against. I went campaigning, canvassing, for remain in the referendum in East Oxford, which is a poorer part of Oxford with a large immigrant population. And my conversations consisted of shopkeepers and householders of Bangladeshi, Pakistani or Indian origin, complaining to me at great length about the bloody foreigners who were taking the housing, the jobs, schools and hospitals. It is an interesting tribute to the success of integration policies in Britain that this was Muslim Asian Brits complaining about bloody foreigners who were white Christian Europeans. But it was a form of xenophobia nonetheless. Not racist, but xenophobia nonetheless. And so in all those respects, and I could go on, the Brexit vote was just an instance of a wider phenomenon brilliantly captured by the wonderful French analysts of international relations in a really prescient article he published in 1991 in which he said, while we celebrate the triumph of liberty and universality, we should not forget that the passions that led to nationalism and socialism, namely, and then he says, the yearning for community and identity on the one hand and solidarity and equality on the other have not gone away. And that brilliantly captures the essence of the point. Community and identity typically concerns more of the right. Solidarity and equality typically concerns more of the left. And that's exactly what we're experiencing. Now, in order to fight back against this wave of populism, which is still advancing in the part, it is still advancing in the politics of Europe, we liberal pro-Europeans need to come up with quite deep, radical and difficult answers to questions like what the hell is the future of work, not just because of globalisation, but because of the digital revolution, now machine learning artificial intelligence, which is certainly going to destroy more jobs before it maybe creates new ones. What is our answer to these fundamental inequalities that have emerged in our society? What are we doing in terms of education for the other 50% who aren't going to hire or further education? What about those regional differences? I mean, if you're going to address regional inequality, that's a long-term project. It's about things like transport infrastructure, not to mention the structural problems of the EU itself. The malfunctioning of the European Parliament, in my humble opinion, and particularly of the European Party system, I can explain that if someone asked me in discussion, the still really considerable problems of the Eurozone, not to mention Donald Trump trying to destroy the liberal international order and China on the rise and a couple of other things. Think about it. The post 1945 Social Democratic consensus, how does that emerge out of the disaster of the Second World War of the 1920s and the Great Depression? First, you have to have your John Maynard Keynes, who comes up with the analytical answer, the theoretical analysis. Then you have to have your Beveridge, who turns it into a concept, and then you have to have your Labour Party under Clem Atley, who turn it into an election-winning programme. That takes at least ten years. Now, I think in many ways that's where we are, also because we don't necessarily have the parties to win the liberal fight back. But I think Macron with en marche is the exception who proves the rule. He's not just the person and the programme, he's also got a movement. But most of our countries, including Britain, we don't have the parties for the fight back. Our two-party system, like the American one, has held, but in response to the new provisions that have opened up in our societies, which I've been talking about, each party is itself two parties. There are two Labour Parties and two Conservative Parties, and at the moment you have the Liberal Left running the Labour Party and the Liberal Right running the Conservative Party. And the Liberal Centre Left and the Liberal Centre Right are going to be that's going to put that programme to the electorate. In short, and this is your longer project, pushing back against anti-liberal populism across Europe is going to be a long struggle. Five years at a minimum, more like 10 to 15 years. But Brexit, we have nine months. And this is where the British case and a couple of others, and here I come back to Brexit, differ from the other European and Western democracy cases. If you think of populism in the US or Germany or the Netherlands or Austria or Spain or Poland or even Greece and Italy, one can imagine that process over five, 10, 15 years in which eventually the pendulum springs back, the Liberal fight back succeeds and the structure, the system while damaged has not been fundamentally changed or destroyed, right? There's no absolute fundamental structural change. In the case of a country like Poland, you're at a cliff's edge. Because what is at stake in the next year and two is whether a fragile Liberal democracy will survive or not or become something different as has already happened in Hungary. And Britain is like Poland because our populism took the form of the Brexit vote nine months cliff's edge. So that all these longer-term things that we as British Liberal pro-Europeans have to do are no bloody use at all when it comes to stopping Brexit because we've only got nine months back to Brexit. So my last five minutes before opening it up and I apologize that was a lot to throw at you in rather telegraphic style, but I wanted to lay out the basic analysis and then we can deepen it in discussion. So nobody knows what's going to happen today, let alone in nine months time in Brexit, let that be said. I'm not going to second-guess trekkers, I'm not going to second- I'm not going to go into the technicalities of the border issue because you know them much better than me. What I want to say is something about the British and European politics of Brexit and I'm going to end with a little message or appeal to Ireland. So first of all I still think my hunch is that there's a better than 50% probability that at the end of the day of May we'll get some sort of a massively fudged deal with the EU 27. It'll be October. It'll be November. November will become December. It will have to be a special European council. They'll have to stop the clock. May will have to move on her red lines. The EU will also have to move further than it is conceding at the moment. That seems to be quite clear. And at the 11th hour I wouldn't be at all surprised if France and Germany come back to Ireland and ask Ireland to move a bit too. But my hunch is just in my sort of historically informed bones that that's where we're going to go because that's what the EU generally does at the end of the day. And I think that France and Germany and Italy and Spain have themselves a strong incentive to get a deal. However unsatisfactory and patchy it is because they have so many other much more important and pressing issues on their agendas. That brings us to the second part. The meaningful vote. And again here I would say with regret that I think there is a more than 50% probability that it will just squeak through the meaningful vote in the Commons. Labour although extremely divided depressingly divided on Brexit will probably vote on block against because that's a politics, it's a Tory Brexit with a few died-in-the-wool Labour Eurosceptics. But I don't think as it looks at the moment there are going to be enough Tory rebels to bring it down. And Dominic Grieve voting against his own amendment was a very depressing sign because he was key to the rebellion they're now calling him the Grand Old Duke of Beckinsfield and I just and with a massive pressure being brought to bear on Tories do you want to give us Jeremy Corbyn do you want to be deselected not to mention the attention paid to sensitive parts of the anatomy by the whips I think that it's quite possible by the way this may be the 29th of May or the 29th of June I'm not persuaded we'll get there for the 29th of March but I think it's still odds on that it will just squeak through and that deal whatever exactly it is is going to be a very bad deal for Britain which has currently been leaked some of you will have seen Robert Peston's Facebook post which laid it out very clearly namely effectively staying in the single market for goods but not for services is a pretty good deal for BMW and Mercedes a very bad deal for Britain 80% of whose economy is in services there is however the other somewhat less than half chance that it goes another way now I was on the march in London on the 23rd of June this year the second anniversary of the referendum for the people's vote those of you who read the FT will see that the FT described this in the headline as a huge march I have to say if I'm being very unkind one might call that it was certainly wishful thinking on the part of some pro-European sub-editor it wasn't huge huge was the march against the Iraq war that was a million people it was big it was 100,000 people most of them people like me middle-aged middle-class people quite a lot of other European languages I heard on the march it was big but it's not a game-changer that popular movement is not a game-changer nor is the shift in public opinion which is glacial on the question do you still want remain or leave larger on the question is it going to be bad for the British economy but I don't think public opinion is likely to shift in the next six months such that reluctant MPs will think they can vote country before party the key is therefore in parliament there is still a chance that that deal whatever it is will be voted down at that point a number of options open up one is that there could be a second motion in parliament on a people's vote and that could come in two ways one way would be the deal is voted down and then you have a vote to have a people's vote coming from the opposition the other is the government could turn around and say we've got a perfectly good deal you're defying the will of the people we're going to go to the country on a referendum so that's one option another quite plausible option is a new election at that point and everything hinges on the Labour Party and in the Labour Party we have not one but two problems the problem familiar to you is called Jeremy Corbyn who is an old fashioned hard left Eurosceptic who basically thinks the EU is a capitalist conspiracy if any of you have good connections to Jeremy Corbyn someone from Sinn Fein in the room please have a word in the air the other problem which is somewhat less noticed is Keir Starmer who is not what people have often reported to be in his heart a remainer who is just trying to move Jeremy Corbyn he's someone who himself has major lawyerly reservations about the European Union on issues like the ECJ if Labour could be got to the point where they went into an election with a promise to revisit the whole issue of Brexit or to come up with some much much softer Brexit deal that's a potential election winner and as you know in the British constitutional tradition an election result is as valid as a referendum so we'll buy in the next part so that is a potential way forward there is another if and with this I will conclude the question for Q&A this is very relevant to the Irish government position the Irish position I would hope that the EU 27 would have up their sleeve for this moment of political crisis probably in the late autumn a better alternative or at least some evocation of a possible better alternative firstly flexibility on time scale more time I read in the Irish papers today that Leo Varadkar has said no no no to the Austrian Chancellor's suggestion of extending the deadline I don't understand why you're doing that except tactically I think at some point you want to say we absolutely need more time that offer could be to say why not stay in the EU and by the way in the last two three years it has become a different EU from the one you voted to leave because freedom of movement the key issue of the Brexit referendum is now the key issue in European politics across the continent and even though that's mainly about people from outside the EU rather than freedom of movement inside it's sort of the same issue culturally in terms of the politics of it and therefore on things like the posted workers directive welfare benefits arrangements around immigration in the borders sense this is a slightly different EU you would be staying in a more modest variant of that which I think has a better chance is to say why not stay in the EEA arbitration arrangements it's not the ECJ lots of consultation generous consultation arrangements for Britain on things like financial services it's bound to be a custom deal customised deal because Britain is not Norway and there are the clauses on free movement in the EEA treaties and at least initially a generous interpretation of those particularly generous interpretation the point is not the fine print which would be to negotiate it the point is at the one last chance in the last chance saloon in British politics to send this positive message that there is a better alternative to the very bad deal that Theresa May has brought back and that and with this I do conclude for two reasons reason number one because it actually at least marginally increases the chances of the parliamentary vote going the other way it could potentially sway a few wavering Tory rebels but as important because even if it's all completely in vain and the whole alternative goes down you've tried you've shown real goodwill and an attempt to go the extra mile and the reason for that is that when post-Brexit Britain turns out to be a huge disappointment to many of those who voted for it it's going to be a very bad tempered angry and resentful country which will be playing the blame game and you can bet your bottom dollar that the Eurosceptic press and the Eurosceptic right first of all of course we blame the French scapegoat of first resort always for the English and the Germans and the Belgians but who knows maybe even the Irish if the Irish government has taken a very very hard line I already think that while I absolutely understand the importance of EU 27 unity there has been unnecessary toughness on specific points and the obvious example is Galileo completely gratuitous there were no really good reasons there was a political judgment and that gets noticed in other words the blame game is going to happen anyway but don't give anyone actual good reason to say there is blame that the EU position was unnecessarily hard that the EU did not go the extra mile and so with that I think I'll conclude with that slight appeal all to Ireland and to the Irish government I think but that offer to be made I mean to be prepared now I would argue to be prepared but to be made at the right moment at that moment of crisis which is also a moment of opportunity I look forward to the conversation thank you