 It really is a great pleasure to be here, so thank you for inviting me. I maybe want to do something that I think is necessary which is try and explain to you what I think happened in 2016, not because I want to talk about the past, but I think sometimes it's not understood. So that's what I'm intending to do. I want to say that I think at it's heart Brexit is about the relationship between people and power, ac mae'n dweud o'r llwyffordd Euron Cymru, ond mae'n rhai o'r llwyffordd i'r UK. Rwy'n cael ei wneud o'r llwyffordd, y Brexit yw, ac mae'n dweud i'r gweld ffantasig o'r ffordd o ffobl oesolfynu ac yn ddimogrofi. Felly, mae'r rhai o'r llwyffordd technocratig oeddo i'r cyfnodd, oeddo i'r lleolig o'r llwyffordd technol, oeddo i'r cyfnodd, oeddo i'r llwyffordd o'r cyfnodd, ac yn cael eu cwylwch i'r cyllid o'r meddlion, a'n dechrau i ymddiriaeth amdano'n gael gael. Mae'r dweud y Brexit yn cael y dda i gael bod'r Gweithdoedd Brytysg, iawn i'r dweud i'r ddechrau a'r dweud a'n cael y ddweud i'r ddweud arall i dweud i gael cyfans. So, mae'n gweithio. Dwi'n cael ei gael Brexit yn cael ei ddweud i'r dweud i Britysgol. Mae'n dweud i ddweud i'r ddweud, y cozi, y zombie-like closed world of Westminster Parliament, parliamentary politics. It's broken open, the traditional line between left and right, which was already an exhausted tradition. It's supplemented, it's been supplanted by new divisions, but nonetheless it means that politics has been shaken up across traditional bases of political parties. And I think that's exciting, not frightening. That's even been true if you look at what's just happened to Northern Ireland in the general election as well. Despite a council of despair that Brexit was undermining the Northern Irish peace settlement, it would reignite political violence. Those arguments were used by remainers, particularly in the UK over recent months. I've always seen Brexit as possibly having a more positive outcome in terms of Northern Irish politics. Disruptive in a positive sense, able to breathe new life into Northern Ireland's crisis-ridden political system. And the general election results have shown us that Northern Ireland's electoral geography is changing, and Brexit has acted, I would say, as a catalyst encouraging more people to think and vote outside of traditional party loyalties. In other words, I think a lot of the consequences of Brexit are a good thing because I think that the status quo, as it was, and the political status quo, as it was, was not good enough. But ever since 2016, that 2016 referendum vote, there's been a sense in which nobody in the UK now, I don't mean here, understood what happened. You know, the establishment have been, and all its different groupings, the British establishment, have been groping around to explain why there was this popular revolt. They saw it as unbelievable and incomprehensible. People were described, voters were described as having low information, too easily juked by demagogues and puppet masters. It was assumed that people voted Brexit because they read what was written on the side of a bus about the NHS, which was alive. I hear anyone else tell me that Brexit was because of the side of a bus. I never met a leave voter yet who voted because of what was on the side of the bus, but everybody on the Remain Camp thinks that that's the only thing that anyone ever voted for. Or maybe people voted leave because of fake news spread by state-sponsored Russian bloggers and bots. Every insult in the book has been used to explain the motivation of leave voters. You've got your own brand of it here. Fintan O'Toole says that Britain voted leave because many citizens regret the loss of empire. So this is the kind of idea that it's all little Englanders sitting round wanting to colonise the world and want to go back and so on and so forth. Fintan O'Toole, and I mentioned Fintan because he's regularly cited in UK media as an authority from Ireland, as an understanding, as an outsider, what happened. Fintan O'Toole also says that the Brexit vote indicated a certain SNM tendencies in the British voters. A certain pseudo-massacism kind of comes up with a whole load of psycho-bubble around that. I think obviously a lot of that is rubbish, but there's a whole range of demonising insults. Xenophobes, people were anti-immigrant rather than concerned about immigration, they were racist, I myself have been called a fascist enabler. Too often political and academic elites have displaced their own lack of popularity on to the public calling the public populist by way of explaining why the public voted for something that was popular and unpopular, and pathologising Brexit voters as morally inferior, predisposed to emotions susceptible to post-truth fake news. It's a kind of own UK version of a basket of deplorables. Now you in Ireland should be familiar with this approach to voters who go against the establishment because when the Irish had the temerity to reject the EU in terms of the Nice Treaty the Irish were branded as quote ungrateful, quote ignorant of the issues, quote backward. When in 2008 those backward ungrateful Irish once again rejected the Lisbon Treaty one EU official spoke for many when he texted to his colleagues the Irish people the bastards have spoken. The thing that's really interesting about this is that or you might be interested to know that I took a particular interest in what happened especially in 2008 in relation to Ireland and it was at that time that I made a decision that if there was ever a referendum to leave the European Union in the UK in solidarity with Irish people I would vote to leave and I would not allow a second referendum to tell us to do the right thing. So the Irish ought to blame for me being in the Brexit party. More broadly I think that the kind of what's called now the populist upsurge and that includes everything from the vote for Brexit to the Gilles Jaunes to the rise of a whole new set of anti-elitist parties across Europe is regularly presented as a far-right phenomenon even a return to the 1930s a kind of fact-free Philistine rejection of evidence and experts but I think that actually that is a caricature and unfair and wrong and what's actually happening is primarily ordinary people are demanding a reckoning with the political system and confronting a technocratic style of politics at which they were the victims of and seeking new opportunities to have their voices heard. Sometimes when Brexit is discussed through the prism of trade agreements endlessly through the prism of trade agreements I think it can miss the bigger picture as well that this is a democratic upheaval. There was for example much debate I was brought up in Wales and there was much debate in Wales about how Wales would definitely vote remain and I was told this by lots of people in the Welsh Assembly and in Welsh local government and the reason was because the EU gives the largest proportion of its grants to Wales and it was assumed that Turkey's wouldn't vote for Christmas as was the phrase was used. Actually what happened was that despite the fact that it would affect the cash in their pockets Wales overwhelmingly voted to leave and I think the reason I'm mentioning that is because people sometimes don't understand what happened they can't see, well can't you see that this could affect our trade relations it could affect our economy, it could affect our jobs you might not be able to get the EU grants but this is something about values and deeper principles around self-rule and self-determination and that's why that take back control slogan had a resonance people understood the risks in fact the official leaflet that was presented by the government and given to every household actually said this voting to leave the EU would create years of uncertainty and potential economic disruption and this would reduce investment and cost millions of jobs that's what everybody got in the country don't mind the side of a bus that's what everybody got if you vote leave it will affect the economy disrupt it, reduce investment and cost jobs and people voted leave and they voted leave because they decided that it was more than just about money in their pockets they couldn't be bought off in that way something else was going on so I want to sketch out very crudely what I think has happened and I think we are witnessing the exhaustion of the post-war political order that order was summed up by Francis Fukuyama and the end of history when he announced the triumph of the post-ideological world in which the market became naturalised that theme was picked up by Margaret Thatcher who used the phrase there is no alternative Tina there is no alternative it was basically a way of saying this is it this is the best that you get where this is it look at it isn't it great and for many people it wasn't it also meant that ideology and political principles were told we were told were no longer necessary because this was it and they then became replaced by expert-led managerialism and technocratic governance throughout Europe that led to political parties losing their soul and their support in many instances and a kind of series of identikit parties very little difference between them increasingly professionalised and divorced from their traditional supporters with low turnouts in election a certain amount of apathy politicians in that atmosphere sought to justify their policies not on the basis of ideology so much as of expertise of evidence of process rather than political vision and it created a new relationship with voters voters were no longer to be won or convinced but they were to be done to offered a whole series of we'll look after you kind of objectives they became passive objects of intervention patronised by nanny state public health officials, nudge theories and so on turned into hapless victims of condescension told how to live their lives by their betters and armies of policy wonks and public health experts interfering in the minutiae of lifestyle decisions how much to drink, how much to smoke how to rear the kids, what to feed them at tea time their habits, customs and traditions and inclinations attacked as in need of refinement and change by the technocrats it was literally demoralising it ate away at agency it grabbed the soul of people and it just made them feel as though they had no worth and I hope that you'll recognise some of that as being quite a widespread phenomena then came along the European Union referendum it was a kind of peculiar thing it wasn't as though millions and millions of people were demanding it ok, UKIP had mobilised somebody but it wasn't as though the vast majority wanted it but we were given the European referendum there's something you ought to know when the European referendum was called it didn't excite that much excitement in the country and I, because I was one of those policy wonk types was at a meeting in Westminster with some people in the government and they said, oh my god we've called the referendum and we're worried no one's going to vote in it what are we going to do we've got to have a big mobilisation so somebody, very senior said, I've got an idea what we need to do is we need to tell people that this referendum is the most important vote that anyone will ever have and that they will be able to change the British constitution it'll be a once in a lifetime generational vote where their vote for the first time ever will matter because in the UK first pass a vote means that your vote often doesn't matter in truth and anyway, as I've said the political parties are just taking you for granted and that's what the government did they went out and they told everyone that I would call this referendum that this was the most important thing that they would ever decide and what happened was that British voters who were being fed up of being kind of looked down to and patronised and kind of not taken seriously went, oh my god we're being asked to go out and decide on a really important issue it's about the EU that meant that in the build up to the referendum up and down the country there was a really vibrant debate at the school gate in pubs on buses, not on the sides of buses everywhere you went everyone was saying, what are you going to do are you going to vote to stay in or out I went to visit my mum who had dementia in a care home in north Wales and the care workers stopped me at the door and said, you're on Sky News aren't you occasionally by the way and I said yes and they said we're having a row in the staff room about tariffs I said, who are you I can assure you they knew more about tariffs than I did and I was there for an hour while they were taking unpaid time off to discuss this thing my mother luckily had dementia and didn't realise that I was neglecting her the local Catholic priest that my mother went to an Indian priest came up to me and said I'm a lever we've got a secret group in the parish who are talking about it, will you come and discuss it with us I mean, this was what it was like I went to a meeting in Yorkshire in Wakefield and people there said, one woman said well we don't know everything but we're having a family meeting at the weekend, we've got the whole extended family coming to our house Joe's gone off googling the economy side of it Sarah's gone to the library to look up the whole history about the European Council and the European Union that was what it was like there was packed meetings, a vibrant political discussion something that nobody ever acknowledges or talks about and then to their surprise leave us one now that mobilisation that discussion about a low turnout at Westminster the idea was we need a very high turnout so that everyone will go out in that referendum and vote to stay in the European Union they were mobilised to give back up to remaining in the European Union and put the question to bed but that's not what happened and so it literally was you were mobilised so you can do what we want you to and then you go back home and that's that but as we know something else happened and there was jubilation and in a way voters felt that they were back on the stage of history as citizens but effectively the rest of the story has been much more difficult because following on from that having thought that they'd won that referendum or that something exciting had happened they were immediately told that they'd got it wrong if the British establishment had implemented Brexit in 2016 it would have been the mildest populist revolt you'd have ever seen because actually people would have been delighted that in a way it could have been fine but because the establishment then sought to undermine that referendum result it consolidated and politicised people who started to follow intensely what was going on in the ruling echelons of power in the UK and started to scrutinise everything from the House of Lords to the Supreme Court to everything and so now you have a mobilised, politicised population who basically don't trust the British ruling class and so on and it revealed a kind of chasm between the elites and voters and I think that's an interesting thing to note but what I think is really interesting as well is that the establishment were not expecting it and in a way what I want to talk about now is how the era of there is no alternative was created a new breed of political elites that brought this about I just want to start at this section with a quote from Mario Monti the unelected technocrat who was charged with running Italy on behalf of Brussels who boasted about the aloofness of the regime and kind of summed up what he saw as a kind of ideal political moment he said that the thing that was important he said was the absence of political personalities removes any grounds for disagreement the absence of political personalities removes any ground for disagreement in other words the ideal technocratic regime has no personality and no debate that's politics at its most anodyne and it sucks the lifeblood I think out of democracy but I myself have found that the kind of technocratic elite that dominates society has huge institutional and legal power but has just got very little experience of winning hearts and minds or leading political struggles and is estranged from the lives of most people in society is a very much chopped down affair that means that decision making is done in seminar rooms and committee rooms but is far removed from the pesky opinions of ordinary voters but that means it's got no finger on the pulse and misreads the mood so the day after the referendum result in 2016 a leading journalist said I don't recognise my own country to which I wanted to say well you ought to get out more during the build-up to that referendum people kept saying at panels that I was on does anyone know anyone who's going to vote leave and I'd say yes and they'd say well who are they and you think well go and meet them people didn't expect it to happen and even in this general election people were shocked and horrified that leave still meant as much as it did to people when you turn citizens into a passive object it means that technocratic regimes become insulated from public pressure and create their own closed loop world of echo chambers public figures in the media and think tanks and cultural institutions political parties basically a lot of the places that I hang out generally know that their career advancement depends on not on the public but on networking well on learning PR skills on going on media courses on learning a whole set of linguistic rules you have to know what you have to know what cisgender means you have to understand intersectionality you have to understand about trigger warnings you might need a whole dictionary associated with diversity etiquette in order to survive but people know it there's a kind of lingo when I'm going to the European Parliament coming from the Academy of Ideas which I'm the director of normally I was expecting I'm used to argument and debate and reason is the norm and I wanted to go to the European Parliament as I expected though if I'm going to have to be there then at least I can join in the debates but actually I discovered there was an absence of any meaningful debate the EU Parliament in a way is exactly my example of where there's no sense of argument and discussion is we'd normally understand it European Parliament is all about a kind of discussion on prearranged communicase carved out positions around political groupings indulging discussing what are basically predetermined votes it's kind of imperatable to rational debate in fact the only debate there is is how to enforce or respect the rules rules are what is everybody talks about there's no real sort of spontaneous open discussion but everybody seems to feel at home there and everybody speaks the same lingo but there's no passion and there's certainly no feel for the lives of ordinary people and I think it explains why so many people in so many countries a layer of people in so many European countries are so attached to the European Union if you're increasingly ruling a void at home and you're increasingly conscious of a yawning gap between the rulers and the rules then the European Union provides a safe haven where you recognise everyone else and you ironically speak the same language despite the fact you don't speak the same language there is a kind of language of technocracy I think the process of European integration since 1992 master agreement was actually all about a retreat from alienated voters at home seeking legitimacy in terms of ever closer relations with other EU member states and in that sense the EU is a club of ruling elites and by the way the UK was a willing member although that's not always how it's presented so just to say this to you this is a contested point for traditional Eurosceptics ie the people on my side of the debate the European Union is out there something foreign a super national entity that threatens national sovereignty by its multitude of regulations and directives and rules but I do think that they misunderstand something it is of course stuffed with unelected technocrats at the European Commission who lord it over national governments and national parliaments but the view that the problem lies in Brussels not London or in Rome or in Dublin or in Paris is I think wrong because in my opinion that super national entity that somehow has that sorry the EU is not a super national entity that has somehow used power from member states in fact if you think about something like the European Commission the EU's central bureaucracy employs 25,000 people but the idea that those Eurocrats have taken over and have run what's happening of 741 million citizens is just ludicrous I don't believe that at all I don't think that they are the problem in a straightforward way my argument is that the EU was set off as an institution to put a break on democratic decision making at home but with the agreement of the ruling elites of each of the countries that joined it it actually curtailes popular sovereignty in nation states that's often superficially seen as a democratic deficit question is that if only EU citizens could vote for the EU president if only the EU parliament elected MPs could initiate legislation but I think that misses the point the democratic deficit is not a design fault it's in the design because European integration locks in a rigid set of rules that denies the demos in each country accountability the European Union structure breaks the link between decision making and the public more decision making from popular contestation in each nation state it's not a product of an EU power grab but rather the dynamic towards European integration is driven by a decline of faith in democracy at home in each nation state and absolves national governments of the burden of having to consult us the voters about important political social matters in favour of various expert cleats and technocrats in other words, the ruling class at home assources decisions to the EU is done voluntarily the EU's rigid rules based system allows political elites to make decisions in private amongst themselves and this is the idea they then return to their own populations and pretend those decisions were an external imposition I know that the British establishment wrote half of the legislation that's imposed on Britain by the EU what happened was they say we've got an idea they go over to the European Union they put it forward as an idea but it's far easier to persuade the EU than it is to persuade the British public and then they come back and they say we didn't do it, it's the EU rule what can we do so the EU becomes that alibi, a way of getting out of being held to account and so I think that that means that the EU to me represents there is no alternative institutionalised ok, to finish one of the most galling aspects of any debate on the European Union is the conflation of Brussels based oligarchy with Europe per se the idea that if you're anti-EU you must be anti-European or that you must be a petty nationalist a little Englander versus being pro-EU and an internationalist if I can just say I consider myself an internationalist and I'm a proud European I consider that the EU greats against everything that is brilliant about European values some of the key values to emerge from Europe particularly its enlightenment project were things like freedom popular democracy sovereignty, nation states take that very European value of national sovereignty that wouldn't exist hadn't been for the European Enlightenment project when the EC president Claude Juncker proclaimed when he was borders are the worst invention ever made by politicians we have to fight against nationalism and block the avenue of populists that is a constant theme that nation states are problematic ever so yesterday that nationalism is dangerous but for me nation states are not inherently reactionary and in fact in a democracy democracy happens at a national scale historically and those geographic units are the only way that ordinary working people have managed to exercise any political influence so the anti-nation states rhetoric of the EU is an attack on voters we have national parties national parliaments national police, nation states for good reason because that's how we exhibit our ability to hold people to account and that's what I am trying to leave the EU to do in terms of making UK politicians accountable to voters when the supporters of the EU tell us that the EU is an inspiring union of European peoples I think that's rubbish it's a union of European elites who want to avoid the people of Europe and their own electorate and want to insulate decisions about business about the economy so many challenge at home why don't we ask the Greek people about how they felt about the austerity imposed on them so now we have the Brexit populist revolt and I think that the insulation tape has been ripped away and the British public have said this is what we think you've got to listen to us our voice matters as much as yours and I demand that you listen to me and I think at last with the general election the British ruling class have been forced to listen to the British people and I think it's about time and the start of an exciting new era thank you very much