 It's a pleasure to invite you to this session with David Goedhardt, who is head of demography at the policy exchange in Britain. We've had a few words before we came up and did some very interesting things to say indeed, so I'm looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks very much. Thanks for the invitation. I am going to talk a bit about Brexit, but this is not really about, at least not about Brexit current affairs, as it were. It's more about the background to the value divides in Britain that led to the famous protest vote. There we go. I'll just run through some of the basic thesis in the book I wrote in 2017 called The Road to Somewhere, which was trying to explain and understand what had happened in my country. I will then move on to some of the current flux in both in British party politics and indeed on the Brexit front. My basic thesis is that 2016, Trump, Brexit, the rise of populism in much of Europe, not so much in Ireland, happened not because of demagogic populist politicians. They played a small role perhaps, but because of this extraordinary 30 year liberal wave really from the end of the Cold War I guess through to now that we had this extraordinary unprecedented opening of markets, of movement of people. Thanks in part to the end of the Cold War. I think an important element in the story that is often downplayed is the acceptance by the main centre left parties, the new democrats in the US, new labour in the UK, of the substantial part of the market reforms of the Thatcher Reagan era. We had a movement towards much more open trade. What Danny Roderick called the hyper-globalisation of the WTO compared to the gas arrangements, China joining the WTO in 2001, the movement of the supply chain, large parts of the supply chain to the Far East. Of course that was replicated to some extent inside the European Union. 1992 represented the Maastricht Treaty with the beginnings of a political rather than an economic euro, the introduction of the idea of EU citizenship, which was later to have such an impact in the form that free movement took after 2004. Just generally a kind of weakening of national social contracts that inevitably accompanied that opening. One might call what Ivan Rogers has called technocratic depoliticisation, the idea that rational people in committees WTO or EU or other committees can come to entirely rational decisions about the future of economic. Things that go right to the heart in many cases of national autonomy and national sovereignty were increasingly decided in sort of anonymous committees that were not directly at least accountable to national democratic voters. Then of course we had the financial crisis in 2008. My main point is that there was a kind of reckoning that was coming. I think for various reasons that I'll go on to explain, I think we didn't predict this but there was quite a large body of opinion in our democracies that felt very uncomfortable about much of this change that we didn't hear from. Partly because the main parties of centre-right and centre-left, not just in the UK but across much of Europe, had accepted this so-called double liberalism, market liberalism plus social and cultural liberalism. What was happening, I think, is that sort of below the surface there was a certain inarticulate hostility to what was happening. It wasn't really expressed politically until suddenly, well that's not true, we go back to 2001 or 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen in France got into the final round of the presidential election. We had the sudden implosion of the model multicultural state, the Netherlands, I think in the same year. Of course there had been early tremors but what was really happening was that under the surface political concerns were switching from the standard socio-economic concerns of the post-war era, a politics based around social class, arguments about the rightful place of markets and states, levels of public spending, levels of redistribution and so on. This was the main stuff of politics and this was shifting below the surface. It was shifting to a much more socio-cultural value-based form of political identity. The switch from socio-economic to socio-cultural meant a switch to a much greater concern with identities, with national identities, with borders, with immigration issues, etc. Obviously these two forms of politics coexist and overlap but the way I expressed it in my book was to look at, I talked about the people who see the world from anywhere, an increasingly significant minority in our societies, people who are overwhelmingly highly educated. In the case of the UK, I think to a slightly lesser extent in Ireland and actually to a considerably lesser extent in continental Europe and indeed even in America, there is a very strong connection between being educated and being mobile in the UK because of residential universities. Even now we have many more working class and ethnic minority students going into higher education and that has reduced the proportion somewhat of the residential experience in higher education but it's still something like 75% of undergraduates in the UK leave home and invariably never go back to home, at least to live permanently in wherever they've come from. It creates a much more sort of derasinated, I'm not just talking about elites here, I'm talking about a big professional class who socialise amongst themselves, I mean when I first wrote my book and I was doing sort of book tour, I would often talk to audiences of mainly anywhere, highly educated people and I would say how many of you are graduates and almost everybody would put their hand up and I'd say how many of you have close friends who are non-graduates and very few people would put their hands up. That is actually much less true even in the United States and much of continental Europe. You can be a liberal minded graduate and still have a friend who's a plumber or an electrician. That's relatively rare recently in any case in the UK because of higher education partly. So the people who see the world from anywhere tend to be educated, mobile, tend to be secular, tend to value all the things you'd expect. People who live that life to value autonomy, openness, they can ride the social fluidity of modern societies relatively comfortably. About 20-25% I put in that category, there is then a larger but much less politically influential group called the somewheres, tend to be much less well educated, tend to be much more rooted, value security, familiarity, tradition more. I think the two key differences between, the two key political differences in a way between anywheres and somewheres is attitudes to social change, like I say, anywheres tend to be comfortable with it, somewheres much less so and also attitudes to group attachment, something that anywheres tend to have quite weak group attachments because of their mobility. Whereas somewheres, often their identities are bound up in place and group and indeed the sort of alongside my anywheres somewhere categorization is quite useful I think to think about the American sociologist talk at Parsons, talked about human identity being on this sort of spectrum between achieved at one end and ascribed at the other Anywheres tend to have achieved identities meaning they have a sense of themselves that comes from their own achievements. You pass exams when you're young, you go to more or less good university, you have a more or less successful professional career, you have a sense of yourself as kind of self invented And that gives you an identity that is sort of inherently portable, sort of porous and portable, you can fit in almost anywhere. You know, you're quite happy living in a sort of edgy in a city area surrounded by ethnic minorities say because you have a sense of yourself that is not particularly related to place or group. Whereas if you're somewhere, you tend to be at the ascribed end and your sense of yourself comes much more from your group and place, you know, you're a working class Geordie, you're a Scottish farmer, you're a Cornish housewife, your sense of yourself comes from those things And that means if your group or your place changes for whatever reasons, social change, high levels of immigration or whatever, your identity is much more susceptible to being discomforted by that. Now these differences, it sort of seems very simplistic and binary and one of the main criticisms in my book was that this was all too binary, but actually if you as authors tarsamly say at this stage if you buy and read my book you will discover that in fact it's full of shades of grey. There are lots of different kinds of anywheres, you know, at the sort of high end you have the people I call the global villages, the kind of people that Theresa May was having a pop-out in her famous citizens of nowhere speech. But they're quite a small, you know, the kind of metropolitan elite is a subset. I mean, you know, anywheres are a much much bigger group, like I say 25-30% of the population now probably. And similarly with somewheres, there are lots of different kinds of somewheres at the bottom end. There's probably, you know, 5-7% depending on the context of people who are genuinely authoritarian and xenophobic, but most somewheres I wouldn't put in that box. But the important thing I want to emphasise here is also I've invented these labels, but I haven't invented the value groups. They really are there in the data, as the academics like to say. I mean, I spent a lot of time with my nose in the British social attitudes surveys. It's a wonderful source that began in the early 80s. And basically they've asked the same question across a whole host of political and cultural and social factors over the last, whatever it is, sort of 40 years or so. And, you know, if you kind of interrogate the British social attitudes surveys, this I would suggest is roughly what you would come up with, roughly what I came up with anyway. One could argue a little bit about the proportions I've attributed to different groups. But so I haven't invented the value groups really are there. And of course both of these, both of these sort of big fuzzy worldviews are also completely legitimate, at least in their mainstream form. And they're in, in a way, lies the problem that we have this value divide and it manifested itself very much in the Brexit vote, obviously. I mean, my next book is kind of on this subject. I mean, I'm sort of delving deeper into the problem of meritocracy in a sense, the kind of way in which we kind of value people. And one of the arguments I want to make is that one form of human attitude, cognitive ability has become far too much the gold standard of human esteem. And we've seen, you know, it's part of, you might say it's part of liberal modernity and the rise of the individual as against the group that, but many institutions that used to give you unconditional recognition, family, God, religion, organised religion, nation, you are unconditionally recognized by these institutions. And they have all weakened and will continue to weaken, leaving some people feeling more psychologically naked. So I think we've seen the rise of a kind of cognitive class. Obviously they've always been there to some extent, but they can become much more self confident, much more powerful. They have shaped the institutions of modern society. You know, just look at the list. I mean, you know, it's the knowledge economy. We call it the knowledge economy. I mean, it's there in the title. It obviously works in the interests of people who are highly educated more than others. You've seen a draining away of status from lots of non-graduate employment. You've seen the huge, as I've touched on already, huge expansion of higher education in Ireland, Britain, everywhere, pretty much. And certainly in the UK, not perhaps so much here than the sort of historic neglect of technical and vocational qualifications and so on. The massive economic openness, I've talked about earlier, mass immigration, you know, the kind of double whammy effect. You know, if you worked in a factory in the Midlands or the North of England, your factory closes, you sort of accept that. You know that you live in a more interconnected global economy. You realize that your part of your own increases in your income depends on that. So your factory closes and goes to China or Vietnam or whatever. But then when a whole workforce is imported to compete with you in the new service jobs you're then doing, you're sort of thinking, well, hang on a sec. What about kind of national citizenship? Is there not such a thing as fellow citizen favoritism? It turns out there isn't when it comes to welfare, the housing, social housing list and so on. We've had the whole kind of motherhood and apple pie stress on meritocracy, which leaves a lot of people feeling very resentful. I think the idea that people like Nick Clegg go around basically saying, we've got to save you working class people from your horrible little lives and you've got to become like us and go to Russell Group universities. Christine Greening, who was our education secretary, made this extraordinary speech at the Social Mobility Commission a couple of years ago in which she comes from Rotherham. She basically said, you know, when I was growing up in Rotherham, I used to dream of owning my own house, having a well-paid job, having a stimulating and challenging career, and I knew I couldn't have those things in Rotherham. I mean, many of you will know Rotherham and this is not a one horse town. It's a town of about 120,000 people. It's seen better days. The steel mills have closed. It's half an hour commute from Sheffield. I mean, there are a million and a half people who live in that South Yorkshire conurbation. The idea you cannot live an achieved life in Rotherham is a, I mean, well, it's partly true and that is a bit of a problem. It's partly true, but it shouldn't be true and it should not be said so insuciently by a cabinet member. I mean, obviously we have problems of economic geography that you don't have, but then, anyway, family policy. I think, you know, anywheres tend to have a bias against the private realm, a bias against domesticity. I mean, all our family and gender policies about making it as easy as possible for both parents to spend as little time in the family as possible. That's not much of a family policy in my view. The kind of technocratic depletisation that Ivan Rogers talked about. I think it's really interesting to sovereignty often matters more to people who have relatively little in their own lives, I think. If you are a highly educated, relatively affluent anywhere, you kind of get why we have to kind of trade things off between, you know, in order to sort of have more leverage over, you know, I don't know, the sort of, you know, the bond markets or the environment. Obviously you have to dissolve your sovereignty. You have to share your sovereignty with other people. People sort of get that. You know, you're in any way. You get that. You probably have a friend who works at the OECD. You're kind of in that world. You understand the trade-offs. If your own life has very little feeling of sovereignty, I think you kind of identify more with the levers of national sovereignty that seem to be disappearing. Anyway, how am I? I'm not running over yet, I hope, am I? Very quickly. I touched on this earlier. I think most of the people who have been voting for populist parties, most of the people who voted for Brexit are not bad people. I call them decent populists, meaning that they've accepted, most of them, not all of them, but most of them have accepted what I call the great liberalisation of our 30 or 40 years on race, on gender, on sexuality. You know, just to think about homosexuality, about 60, 65% of people in Britain as recently as the late 80s thought that homosexuality was wrong and now what, 70, 75% of people that support gay marriage haven't you seen? But that doesn't mean to say that they're liberals. I think what they tend to be is kind of David Owen Knight hard centrists. They tend to, the American political scientist Daniel Bell, end of ideology, cultural conflicts of capitalism, he's dead now, but he was interviewed by a journalist I think in the 1980s and he talked about how, he was asked for his political credo basically. He said I'm a kind of market friend, I'm translating slightly, I'm a market friendly social democrat in economics, I'm a liberal in politics and I'm somewhat conservative in social and cultural matters. I think that's the kind of hidden majority in our societies for all sorts of historical and contingent reasons. We've not seen the party system create a party that catches that sort of triad. Partly because the left went off in a quite a libertarian, culturally libertarian direction in the 60s and 70s and never really returned. The right obviously became a very free market in the 80s. I think actually probably the closest in my adult lifetime, the closest we've got to that kind of bell hidden majority was the Tory manifesto at the last election in the UK. By Tory standard it's very left to centre, somewhat culturally conservative, obviously emphasising nation state, restricting immigration through honouring the Brexit vote and so on. How does this impact on the... Obviously Brexit has been collateral damage in this value division, the fact that people have not had the opportunity to express their discontent with the new consensus because the new consensus was so strongly established in all the major political parties. So general elections were... I mean there's some statistic, I can't remember what it is exactly, but something like three or was it four million of the people that voted for leave had not voted in the preceding five or six general elections. It was that kind of non-voter, people who thought you're all the same because to a certain extent they were right. They were all the same on many of the very basic things that I've described. I think the average Brexit voter would have certainly been happy enough with a kind of... I mean one of the great opportunities that I think was missed and actually David Owen coincidentally was one of the few British politicians I think to argue strongly for this was the idea of a more sort of two-tier evolution of the European Union. And in a sense the creation of the euro provided an opportunity for that. And in a way Britain's natural role would have been as leader of the outer ring of the European Union, not only not being in Schengen and the euro but also not being in the free movement regime at least as it was post 1992. That would obviously have kind of solved the problem in some ways but I think we kind of lacked the... we lacked the kind of statecraft in some ways. I think probably after the second world war generation died out or left politics people didn't sort of think in sort of strategic terms so much but also there was a sort of coincidental fact that when this was happening, I mean when it was clear that the euro was going to be political and not economic, it was going to include the countries that probably shouldn't have... I mean with all due respect to Ireland, possibly including you, countries that shouldn't really have been in a kind of hard euro. When it was clear that it was going to be political and not economic, that was the time when we should have been saying right, let's go for a proper two-tier European Union. But of course that was just the time in the run-up to 1997, Tony Blair, it was our sort of second go at a kind of neo-federalism after the Third Heath era. Anyway, hurry, hurry, hurry. Okay, bit of Brexit. So, yeah, this is not May 1940. This is not the winter of disintent. This is not even 2008. You know, we are going to leave the European Union. We are not going to destroy all our relationships. We are going to remain as close as possible economically. And I do think, I mean the best joke really about Brexit is that we used to be, when we were in the European Union, we were kind of half in, half out, and after Brexit it's going to be the other way around. That's basically it really. I mean of course, but I do think, I mean the way in which remain is kind of a car-con about economics. We've spent almost all of the time, including talking about the Irish backstop, talking about money. Brexit isn't really about money. I mean the best single slogan, I think, to sum up Brexit is, it's meaning not money about the things, about the value things that I've been talking about. And it is sort of extraordinary how, I mean everyone says it's a mess, and of course it is a mess, but in some ways it's a kind of healthy democratic mess, and it was an almost impossible situation for the British political class. I mean nobody had expected the vote to go the way it did. The vote is bold and complete googly at the political class by voting to leave by a pretty narrow margin, but a decisive enough one, and of course without, I mean it was impossible for the leave campaign to come up with a sort of collective coherent idea of what leave would be. I mean that was bound to be, as it were, sort of a post referendum matter. And in my language, I mean Brexit has been essentially a somewhere vote being implemented by very reluctant anyways, both in the political class. We've got 75% of MPs. Obviously the entirety of Whitehall were absolutely horrified. Their heart was, to put it mildly, not in it. And of course we've compounded that by making stakes. I mean Theresa May has the political acumen of a tree. We should never have triggered article 50 before coming to at least a bit more of a consensus than we had, appalling management of public opinion, particularly leave of public opinion. She's lurched off into the hard Brexit at the beginning and then has been sort of backtracking all the way without managing leave of expectation. All reaching out to remainers allowed the EU to set the agenda. They were always going to set the agenda, but the whole sequencing thing, and then just the political failure to sell, what is a potentially really attractive deal. I think her deal is potentially really attractive. It kind of takes us back to 1973 in a way, which is something where a lot of moderate leavers and moderate remainers will be happy to be. Remaining as close as possible economically, but regaining sovereignty in important areas and not being part of the kind of integrationist train. I do think we will get a deal. I think the DUP are desperately looking for a way out. Perhaps we can talk about what that might look like, and we are obviously in this sort of multidimensional game of chess, which is mainly about everybody being able to save face. I do think, sort of almost in parenthesis, I think some of the writing both in the UK and in Ireland, I'm thinking particularly of Fenton O'Toole's notion that we are all sort of desperate to recreate the empire. I mean it's absolutely pure isle. There is no yearning for empire in Britain. I can absolutely assure you. Indeed, reading all that stuff made me go back and read some of the stuff. What is remarkable is actually how little anti-decolonisation spirit and movement there was in Britain in the fifties and sixties. There were a few crazies in the Monday club and a few people who represented white settlers in Southern Africa. But if you compare it to France, Portugal, lots of other countries, lots of other European countries that had extensive land empires had their politics seriously disrupted by anti-decolonisation movements, obviously particularly France. We obviously had no equivalent of the 4 million Piennoir in Algeria. But think of the dominant politicians in the Tory party in the 1960s, people like Ian McLeod, Ted Heath, Reginal Mordling, none of them were interested in empire. It's just not, it's a complete myth or rather what is it confusing, I think a desire for sovereignty and that may be particularly strong in a country that has had an empire or has been a kind of rule maker rather than a rule taker, I completely concede that point. But I think it's more than that. I think it's that quite a big part particularly of English identity is based around political institutions. You sort of send a postcard from London, it'll have big Ben on it. Partly because the English language is obviously not ours, whereas most continental European countries have an identity that is based on language, on culture, on way of life, on cuisine or whatever. I mean our identities I think are much more tied up in political institutions which has made the European Union much more painful experience for the British in some ways. And yes you may say that is partly to do with having historically been a kind of rule maker rather than rule taker, but the yearning if there is a yearning is for self-government and sovereignty, not to dominate other countries. But quick, quick, quick, quick. I mean just a quick thing, obviously we've had the gang of seven yesterday. I mean something that perhaps is making Brexit even harder is the fact that our party structure is sort of in flux or you might argue actually not in flux enough. That these new identities have emerged obviously from the Brexit vote and John Curtis, the political scientist, I think did some research finding that of the voters in the 2017 election only 30% of them identified very strongly with the parties they had voted for, but 80% of people identified very strongly with their remainder or lever vote. So I mean the interesting thing to watch I guess in the next couple of years is to what extent those identities will either form the basis of new political parties tricky in the first part of the post system. This is not Italy. We have a party in government that didn't exist five years ago. It's obviously much easier in proportional representation systems to create new parties, much harder in the UK with our system. So it may be that the existing parties will get taken over by these identities. I mean that's the interesting thing to watch. The 2017 election itself I mean was often seen as a kind of backlash against the backlash. Brexit was a sort of backlash against 30 years of the double liberalism. We then had all the kids who'd stayed in bed on June or whatever it was 2016 actually managed to get out of bed and vote in 2017 for the ridiculous Jeremy Corbyn. But it was kind of seen as a sort of youth backlash. I think actually as the sort of dust has settled it's become clear it wasn't quite so much of a youth backlash as we thought. There were these various issues, tuition fees and housing shortages and so on, but I think a lot of people voted Labour despite feeling that Corbyn was really not a serious figure because everybody assumed she was going to win such a large majority. I mean you don't often start an election campaign 22 points ahead in the polls and I don't think there's been a huge left to the left. I mean the Corbyn phenomenon is a sort of interesting thing in its own right, but that's a sort of party coup. I don't think it represents a deep sort of deep structure in British society although it is true that the over expansion of higher education has produced a large class of people who expect to get reasonably well paid secure middle class professional jobs and I think it's probably true that they are not there for all sorts of reasons. Those that are there are often very heavily routineised, they're kind of administrative routineised jobs, so-called digital Taylorism. Also these jobs, I'm not a pessimist about AI, technological change always produces new jobs where it takes them away too, but I do think these are the kinds of sort of middle level professional administrative jobs that are being done by the new class of people, many of whom are the first person in their family able to go into higher education. They are going to be very vulnerable to AI and also to export to the Philippines. Increasingly now the global internet really does work pretty well. You can really subcontract these jobs to places where you pay people one tenth of what you pay here. I don't think there is a big lurch to the left, I think there is a bit of austerity for tea which is a slightly different thing, but I think final, let me go final, because what I'm sort of interested in is in the sense kind of leaving Brexit on one side, I mean how do we bring these two value groups together more? What is the common ground? We might be going through a sort of value divide version of the kind of class conflict we saw in Britain in the 1970s and people used to talk if you remember of a sort of stalemate in a way. You had these very powerful organised labour in the 1970s and a sort of strong organised middle class you might say too. Neither side was strong enough to assert itself until Margaret Thatcher appears at the end of the 70s. Maybe we are going through a similar sort of stand off but in a more value conflict form. I mean I think it's interesting to reflect on how the logjam can be broken. I do think part of it does come down to anywheres being more emotionally intelligent recognising the extent of their domination over recent decades, conceding that they are their world view actually adopting some of the pluralism that they claim to believe in, actually accepting that there are small sea conservative views that are perfectly decent and legitimate. Not everybody has to be a Russell Group University Liberal and I do think that means trying to sort of shift, like I said in an earlier slide, that too much status has sort of accumulated itself around cognitive functions. We see the world farting. Just a final example perhaps. People say that what is an explanation for the fact that people who work in social care homes are so poorly paid. I mean leave aside the fact that local authorities pay for the public side of it and that depends on central government and that's subject to austerity and so on. But a labour economist would say, well they get low paid because anybody can do that job. Well we all know that is not true. I mean any of you who have elderly relatives who in a social care home or in a hospital know there are good carers, there are middling carers and there are frankly crap carers in many of these places. But because we're judging, we're kind of judging by cognitive criterion that you don't need A-levels to work in a social care home so anybody can do the job. But not everybody can do the job and we need to become much more aware of the way in which cognitive thinking has become sort of overheadgemonic in our heads and we need to somehow shift status and value more to things like caring functions and manual and technical functions. And obviously that's partly about money, status tends to follow the money. And I think there are signs that we are moving that direction. As I said AI I think is going to remove a lot of the sort of middling strata of, I mean a lot of kind of anywhere politics has been based I think on the myth that we're just going to go on creating more and more middle class professional jobs. Well we're not. We'll still need lots of very clever people to run our organisations and to invent new drugs and whatever but a lot of the kind of middling professional middle class jobs are going to disappear and I guess I hope that will make those people potentially more sympathetic to the idea of sort of shifting the value bounds as it were. And for a very final point, so this is really about how can Liberals and Smallsea Conservatives live better together. And obviously Brexit vote has not been a very good advertisement for sorting these things out but I think sorted it will be. I think this time next year I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Tory party are riding a wave of popularity having got the deal through, will be in the middle of negotiations but it will be reasonably clear where the end point is. People don't realise they like the deal as much as they actually do at the moment partly because she's been so terrible at selling it. But there are places in Europe where the combination does work. I mean you think of Bavaria, laptops and ladderhosen. Bavaria is the most economically dynamic part of the whole of Europe for goodness sakes. One of the richest parts of Europe and yet it's also one of the most socially conservative parts of Europe. All the kind of shicky mickies in Munich who sit around inventing their apps or whatever they do. They think that Bavaria belongs to them but so do the little farmers outside Munich in their funny leather trousers. They think it belongs to them too and it belongs to both of them and they somehow managed to create this rather good thing. I think they're a model for all of us, actually perhaps more for Ireland than for Britain. You should be the new Bavaria. Perhaps you are already the new Bavaria. I think the shicky mickies in Munich, the Irish version, then possibly have too much power at the moment. So you need to think about your equivalent to the guys in the leather trousers. Anyway, thank you very much.