 This week we welcome Andy Duncan from the UK. Andy is an expert on financial derivatives and lectures on the topic in New York, London, Dubai and Singapore. He's also been a writer, speaker and contributor for the Cobbden Center, Gold Money and Casey Research. Andy is a dedicated Austrian and anarcho-capitalist with a jaundiced eye for UK socialism and UK politics. We discuss the rise of UKIP in England and whether it represents a real populist anti-state uprising or just rightist politics. Andy skewers the strutting political class in London and the charade of voting Labour or Conservative based on minute policy differences. We also discuss the upcoming Scottish independence vote and whether the land that gave us Robert the Bruce and David Hume has succumbed completely to socialism. Could an independent Scotland become the Singapore of the North or just another Eurozone basket case? Stay tuned. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mises' weekends. I'm your host Jeff Deist, very happy to be joined by Andy Duncan. Andy, how are you this evening in the UK? What's very nice to be with you again, Jeff. Andy, I'd like to get your impressions about UKIP. In the Western media it seems to be portrayed as a populist nationalist anti-immigration movement, but I'd like your thoughts. Well, the thing about UKIP is it's mostly a wing really of the Conservative Party. If you take the British Conservative Party from the 1970s, there were some very, what the media would call right wing people in there like Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher and people like that. And there was also a big body of people behind them and they wanted to be independent with England. They wanted England to be like a free market, like a Singapore of the world, only a big Singapore. But the Conservative Party itself, the larger party, was much more kind of status socialist with a small s. So there was always this rump inside the Conservative Party and about five, 10 years ago, they just had enough, these people and they just created the UK Independence Party because they didn't believe the Conservative Party anymore, which has always been playing the rhetoric of we will leave Europe one day and they didn't believe it anymore, so they decided to go it alone. So that's how I see UKIP. It attracted a few people since then. As all political parties do, once they grow power, they suck in intellectuals of various kinds. But the core to UKIP is a very, what you might call, what the media in this country would call a right wing Tory element. And it's very funny that today a Conservative MP, Douglas Carswell, has actually defected from the Conservative Party and has joined UKIP. There might be about a dozen others in the Conservative Party in Parliament who might defect as well. He's standing again for Parliament in a few weeks' time or a couple of months. If he wins, I suspect a lot of Conservative MPs will ditch the Conservative Party who are pro the EU and will get out and will join UKIP and that will hopefully wreck the Conservative Party. And so just to clarify, there's no elected UKIP members of Parliament, i.e. in the House of Commons. Well, Douglas Carswell is technically a UKIP MP now, but he has said that he will resign his seat immediately on his declaration today and he will stand for re-election in what we call a local by-election probably in a couple of months' time. He has a very, very big majority at the moment of something like 28% and he's very, very popular in his constituency. So the chances are that he will win and then he will be the first UKIP member of Parliament. Nigel Farage is going to stand at the next election who you've probably heard of in the United States and he will probably win the seat that he chooses, which I think is somewhere in Westminster. And I'm hoping that, I don't really follow politics that much, but when I do follow politics, I just follow the successionary part of politics and I'm hoping that maybe 10, 15, 20 UKIP MPs will be elected at the next election. Of course, being a Hopian, I don't vote. Well, what seems odd about the system in UK is that UKIP sends many members to the European Parliament in Brussels, but it's scarcely represented in Parliament. Well, the constituency elections are what we call here first past the post, so a town say like a Reading, which I live near, I live in Henley on Thames, say Reading will be divided into, say, five constituencies and in each constituency, there'll be about 100,000 voters. Those 100,000 voters in each constituency will vote for one MP. So if, say, everybody voted for one person, if everybody voted, if 51,000 people vote for one person, they become the MP. Whereas with the European elections, it's a big area and there's party lists. So Nigel Farage, I think, is an MP for the southeast of England. So they take 15, 20 million people. There's usually very low turnout in these elections. And then, depending on your vote across this huge area, I mean, nobody knows who their MP is. Nigel Farage might even be my MP and I have no idea. Very few people do. There's a party list system comes in place and then they just go down the lists until you've used up your votes across this 15, 20 million kind of area. Andy, Scotland has a proportionally higher representation in parliament. Is that correct? Yeah. Well, actually, that's not the case for Scotland. Now, this is an interesting thing. In Scotland, they have a lot smaller population size per MP. So out of about 600 MPs or so, about 40 of them are Scottish. Now, if you were just to go on the population size, I'm not exactly sure of the exact numbers, but they'd only really get about 15 MPs. They have 40, whereas they should have 15. What this has done is this has created this huge kind of political battering ram, the Scottish political vote in the House of Commons. If Scotland becomes independent, most of those MPs in the past have been socialist MPs. And so the socialist party in England called the Labour Party is going to lose a huge amount of power because they're going to lose all these Scottish MPs. And I think they only need about 30,000 people in each constituency in Scotland. And so almost the Labour Party will become unelectable according to the current democratic setup in the UK. And so the Labour Party is very, very keen on keeping the union and stopping Scotland going independent, because if they let Scotland go independent, they'll lose these 40 MPs, they'll lose the balance of power. And then the Conservative Party in England will be the dominant power for decades. Let me ask you this, apart from the political aspects, is there any libertarian element to the UKIP revolution? There is a tiny libertarian element in the way that, for instance, the EU is just, on the 1st of September, is going to ban vacuum cleaners that have a certain wattage. This is obviously to keep the eco-intellectuals on side, which all governments need the intellectual support. What this means is we're all going to buy cheaper, nastier, less powerful vacuum cleaners. And we're going to spend longer in misery, hovering our houses, just so that eco-intellectuals can be happier with less powerful vacuum cleaners. The EU has been doing this kind of thing for decades now. And people just resent this interference of people they don't know, people they've got no idea where these people got their power from in this kind of feudal setup of the EU. And they're just kind of a very primitive level, just ante this monolith, ordering them around and making their lives worse all the time. They've banned decent light bulbs, for instance, and there's now a black market in light bulbs. We all have to use these horrible mercury things, which are poisonous and difficult to get rid of and produce this white light that keeps you awake in the evening. I think the root of it is, I think people generally know deep down that bigger government is worse for them. And I think this is driving a lot of this secessionism and a lot of these feelings. And obviously, as governments grow larger, more islands of socialism arise within the area that they control. And then we get more chaos. And we've seen with the EU, we've seen basically the destruction of Portugal and Spain and Greece and Ireland by the EU, these islands of socialist chaos spreading in the EU. Andy, as I mentioned to you, I would love to discuss the upcoming Scottish independence vote with you, although I fear I'm going to get some angry emails. Here I am asking an Englishman about Scottish independence. Well, my name is Andy Duncan and the first king of Scotland, according to some in 1034 was King Duncan the First. And my clan, the Duncan clan, were at Bannockburn on the winning side. So I'm not entirely English. I'm kind of culturally half Scottish. So I do have a little bit to say here. The thing about the Scottish vote is they'll probably lose. The secessionists, unfortunately, will probably lose. And the reason for that is because Scotland has been bought and paid for. I think it was Robert Burns who said we're bought and sold for English gold and a quarter of the adults in Scotland work for the British government. So they take a salary from the British government. There's, you know, maybe a million pensioners are all receiving British government pensions. There's all sorts of even private companies. A lot of their contracts are to the British government. So Scotland is bought and paid for by the British government. And I think people will vote with their wallets without any kind of morality about thinking this one has been stolen from others and given to me. They wouldn't think that far. They'll just think who's paying my salary? Who's going to pay my pension? I'll vote that way. The general feeling in Scotland though is that people, you know, even in 1707 when Scotland had this active union, it was only the elite that did that. They had this project called the Darien project you might have heard of where when they were in independent country, they tried to form a colony in Panama. And they basically took all the money in Scotland, this political elite, invested it in these ships to go to Panama. Everybody died of diseases. Oh, they created a legal monopoly for the company there that had a legal monopoly for all trade in the world with Scotland, just like monopolies and elites do. These people all went there and died of dysentery and whatever down there. And the few that remained got killed by the Spanish. So the elites in Scotland were going to be poverty stricken. So they basically sold Scotland to the English in 1707. And all the people in Scotland were horrified by this. I mean, there'd been Banach Byrne, there'd been the Battle of Sterling Bridge, there'd been an independent Scotland for a thousand years. And then it was just sold down the river by this elite in Edinburgh for English gold. A lot of the MPs in Scotland at the time of the political power elite voted for the union. They were paid off by backdoor maneuvers. The treaty was rushed down to England under armed guard, massive armed guard. It was totally hated this thing in 1707. And ever since, the people of Scotland have had this general resentment about English interference in their lives. And although many of them will vote to stay in the union, there's still a general feeling of antipathy towards England, even though many will go into the voting booths on September the 18th and vote for the union to remain. Andy, we were speaking off Mike earlier about how we as libertarians tend to see secession and separatist movements as ever and always good things. Can you elaborate for us? Well, I think if you take an area, let's say there's two million people and there's a million people in one half and a million people in the other half. They'll have a very powerful government. But if you split that area into two governments of one million people each, those two governments together are less powerful than the one big government alone. And if you break that all the way down to the county, the town, the local area, and then eventually the individual, every time you shrink a big government in half, you're more than half its power. And so the elite in Westminster in London, for instance, are terrified of losing Scotland because once we just become England here in England and not the United Kingdom, then all those people swanking around London in big cars and going to fancy foreign ministries and so on will have less right to swank around like that. They'll have less right to do these big foreign policy announcements. So I always believe that the smaller you can shrink government, the better because every time you do that, you more than shrink the power of the two governments which are left over. Can you give us your thoughts concerning how well the Scottish banking system and Scottish currency would operate without the backing of the Bank of England? Well, I mean, this is the great threat from the no campaign, which is you must stay with the UK and hold auntie's hand. Scotland has a tremendous opportunity here to become a kind of free market Singapore of the North. I mean, many of our kind of free market and libertarian ideas come from Scotland. You've got David Hume and Adam Ferguson and various others. I won't say Adam Smith because I know Murray Rothbard doesn't like Adam Smith, but many of those great libertarian ideas came from Scotland. And so it'd be great if they did form this free market place. And if they were booted out of the pound and then didn't have a central bank and had to bring in a currency board to follow the pound or a currency board to follow the euro, what they would lose is this ability to print money out of thin air, which would mean that the government would shrink massively. If they can't print money out of thin air, they will just shrink and the welfare state will shrink and the state will shrink and they really will have a Singapore of the North. And within 10, 15, 20 years, they'd have this massively wealthy dynamic on enterprising society. However, they don't quite see it like that. The SNP, which is the driving force of Scottish independence is a mostly socialist organisation and how they're couching it to the Scottish people is this. Yes, you will lose the English taxation for the welfare, but we will keep Scottish oil and you'll get more welfare from the Scottish oil, none of whose revenues will go to England, than you will just being in the union and receiving English taxation welfare. So that's how the couching is. You'll have even more welfare than you've currently got, whereas I would love to see them argue you'll be freer, you'll be more independent, but unfortunately, most people are terrified of being freer and more independent. They just want a bigger nanny state, I think. Well, you bring up an interesting point. The independent seems to be a left wing phenomenon in Scotland and it seems to be portrayed as a right wing phenomenon in England. Well, here's the weird thing. I think in the Labour Party, there's this deep antipathy towards what Einrand might have called the rugged individualist, best summed up in the kind of Anglo-Saxon free market thing. I mean, the Anglo-Saxons, when they were in Germany, fought off the Romans, defeated them in the forests of Tudorburg and then faced away that bureaucratic threat and then eventually came to England and then were quite free and independent and had very strong freedom traditions. They took a lot of those traditions to the United States and to other parts of the world. So the Anglo-Saxon culture has always been seen, I think, by socialists as being something to be despised, this treasuring of the individual and of liberty and so on. So Scottish independence, strangely, is seen as a way of throwing off the yoke of English right wing kind of thinking and being able to become even more socialist. So it's the English who are seen or the English mentality of freedom and liberty may be actually typified by Nigel Farage of UKIP, which is seen as being the problem. So it's a great socialist thing to throw off the English yoke. Whereas in England, of course, the socialists in England, most of whom there's millions of them and lots of them read the Guardian newspaper, they love us to be in the EU because what that does is that's a big blanket over the kind of English free spirit. So the EU is a way of moderating this Englishness, this kind of Anglo-Saxon thing. So it kind of works if you see it like that. Scotland wants to get away from England to throw off the English yoke of freedom and England should be kept within the socialist yoke of the EU to keep it in check. So perversely, it sounds like the rise of UKIP in England actually bolsters the yes independence vote in Scotland. Well, here's a weird thing. The UK Independence Party led by Nigel Farage as a kind of a political statement is actually against Scottish independence, which sounds a bit weird, doesn't it? UK Independence Party is against Scottish independence. What Nigel Farage, it's quite murky what he says, but I've tried to interpret it and what I think he's saying is this, if Scotland becomes independent, it's not actually going to become more independent. It's going to become more dependent on the EU because the first thing it will do is it will join the EU properly, maybe even adopt the euro as a currency. And instead of becoming more independent and having a free Singapore of the Northern Hemisphere, it will just become another area inside the euro zone. So it will actually become less free than it currently is joined to England. Andy, I'm sure you understand as libertarians, it seems ludicrous that the Scots view the British government as some kind of bastion of free market thought. Well, I mean, that's the problem in the UK. I mean, I try to not be involved as much as possible, but we have three political parties here, three political elites, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrat Party and the Labour Party. And the Conservative Party is supposed to be right wing and the Labour Party is supposed to be left wing and the Liberal Democrat is supposed to be somewhere in the middle. But they can all dance on the head of a pin. I mean, the leaders are indistinguishable, they read out indistinguishable speeches, they all believe in the same policies. And when the horrible Gordon Brown, the Scottish Prime Minister, was thrown out a few years ago in an election and David Cameron, the Conservative Prime Minister, came in, I personally haven't noticed a single difference in my life. Absolutely nothing has changed. So they just dance on the head of a pin. It's all rhetoric. I think the British government spends something like 700 billion pounds a year, which is about 200 billion pounds a year more than they take in tax and they borrow the rest. And the three main political parties argue about spending measures of around 10 billion pounds. Well, 700 billion pounds would probably be about 1.2 trillion dollars. So they argue that they get really vitriolic about these tiny, tiny, tiny changes in policy from each other. So I find it very weird that we even believe that there's politics in this country. It's just a group of people who just play musical chairs every four or five years. If the yes on independence vote somehow was to prevail in Scotland, do you think that that would inform other separatist movements that are currently percolating in Europe? Well, unfortunately, I because of this, the Bolton paid for nature of the Scottish electorate, don't stay up late that night burning any your candles or anything. It's not going to be that exciting that the Nova will win and that they won't buy. I would I would bet a substantial sum of gold that the Nova will win. However, just like Robert DeBruce, I do believe that they will try try and try again. And hopefully they will win eventually if they keep trying. The problem is, is once they have this vote and the independence vote loses, it might be another decade or so before they get to have another go. But you know, the spirit of Robert DeBruce will be there. I'm not a historicist like the Marxists, but I do believe, though, that as we get these bigger and bigger governments, we do get these bigger and bigger islands of chaotic socialism within the areas that these governments control and that these these islands of chaos eventually lead to people wanting to secede away from the chaos. So I actually personally think we have a greater chance of secession somewhere more like Texas. And that would be fabulous if Texas seceded rather than Scotland. However, I think it is good that at least they're trying and they'll probably get 40, 42, 43 percent of the vote. And the bigger the vote, if they got 48, 49, that would be fantastic because that would bring on the next secessionary vote to be a lot sooner, maybe within another five, six, seven years. So it does inform us that there's problems in the EU. It does inform us that people instinctively know that smaller government is better for them as an individual. But I see the future of secession as being another part of the world. Andy, do you think the urban versus rural mentality still plays a big role in the UK mentality? I don't think it's an urban rural thing. I think it's more of what some people in this country call the chattering classes. These are the intellectuals, the political elites, the met, the metrosexuals, the metropolitan people. And some of them have houses in the country and there's lots of people in cities who are opposed to these people. They have this shared view. Sean Gab, who you might know calls them the enemy class. I call them personally the Guardian Easters because their house newspaper is this terrible rag called the Guardian newspaper. It's more of an intellectual elite versus everybody else. So this intellectual elite read the times, the independent and the Guardian and they constantly bicker and chat about politics. They all favor the EU. They're all in favor of environmental measures. They're all socialists with a small s, even if they're in the Conservative Party. Their political positions are virtually identical in every possible way, bigger government, bigger government involvement. But the mass of people who are just doing daily jobs, you know, being plumbers, being truck drivers, delivering milk or whatever, they just don't want any of this, but they're too busy earning money and paying taxes to take much notice. So it's not so much an urban versus rural thing. It's a political intellectual elite with a smaller socialist versus everybody else. So in the last Euro election, which UKIP won, I mean, UKIP actually won that election. All the newspapers were against UKIP. Everyone was deriding them. Every day, Nigel Farage had some story made up about him saying how he'd done this and he'd done that with this woman and he'd done this with this gambling and all fictional. But the people saw the message and they saw what he was saying. And what he was saying is you're better off without this massive superstructure of this elite and the costs associated with keeping them in the manner to which they've become accustomed. Andy, one last question in closing. Just give me your thoughts on the current state, if any, of the libertarian or Austrian movement in UK? Well, the problem with the libertarians in the UK is it's like cats in a bag. I mean, if you put 30 libertarians in a room, there'll be 30 different positions. It's quite frustrating at times. I mean, I go to the occasional conferences and people, again, they'll be having vitriolic arguments with each other about the tiniest, tiniest thing. So this is why I always try and push the session because we all believe in secession. We all believe in coming down to the individual. And I try to avoid conflict. And there's not many Austrians. And if they are Austrian, they tend to be Hayekian Austrians. This is because of the link with Hayek and the London School of Economics. And if you take a look at the most Austrian website in the UK, which is probably the Cobbden Centre, which was founded by Steve Baker MP, who's a conservative MP who's very much a Missessian, and it would be interesting if you got him on your programme sometime to talk about his views. It's still a bit Hayekian. In the US, you've got George Mason University, and you've got Auburn. I won't go into the politics of that because I might get slapped by you. But there's that distinct thing. We have the same thing in the UK. We've got most people in Austrians are in London and they're Hayekians. And then there's a few of us, not many. I probably know them all and I can probably count them all on one hand, a kind of Missessian Austrians. But we are working on things. I mean, watch this space. A few of us Missessian, Hopian, Rothbardian Austrians are thinking about doing something and you'll be the first to know when or if we do that. But it's very much a mixed bag in the UK. It's very much a socialist country. Everybody believes in democracy. Every most, except for a tiny, tiny handful of people believe in socialism of one form or another, i.e. statism and government intervention and government running the schools and government running the NHS, the National Health Service. I mean, you're having a taste of that now with Obamacare and you're seeing what that's like. Most people believe in the state in this country and even getting your hair cut at a barber. I mean, I can hardly dare say anything because a barber almost threw me out of his barber shop recently with half a haircut because I dared say something that didn't believe in the state. And the whole of society is driven with this belief that you are owed welfare and that the state has the right to do this and the state has the right to do that. I mean, just this year, children are now being compulsorily kept in education from 16 to 18. So, I mean, I see state schools as basically day prisons and so there's two more years of day prison being forced upon people and that pleases the teaching unions because they get to have more jobs and more work and more bureaucratic privileges. And everyone's just gone along with it. There hasn't been a single murmur of complaint that I've seen anywhere in any of the press. And these kinds of constant abrogations of people's rights are just going on all the time. So with the vacuum cleaner ban of anything that's too powerful, there's a few murmurs of complaint, but hardly anybody really challenges the right of government to decide how powerful your vacuum cleaner can be. So Libertarian movement in England, very small, very not very strong. Everyone's against each other. Everyone holds different positions. But there are a few of us who are trying to work on making something stronger and basing it securely upon Misesi and Austrian economics. Andy, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for a fascinating interview. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.