October 21, 2019 • 41 mins
Bethany sits down with Gillian Tett, Chairman of the Financial Times Editorial Board (U.S.) and a British author. Among many other things, she has a way of looking at the big picture questions and implications of Brexit. In the U.S as in the U.K., we’re watching the daily breakdown of the political norms and processes that we’ve all been used to for the last few decades. Which leads to the biggest question of all: Is there a right level of dysfunction in modern democracy?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm Bethany McClain, and this is making a killing interviews,
exploring the headlines you thought you understood, and finding the
long term lessons we can all learn from today's business stories.
So Brexit. I'm a longtime business reporter, but I have
to admit that Brexit seems a bit to me like
tax policy or healthcare reform, A big, thorny, multifaceted issue
(00:25):
that you know you should understand because it's affecting our world.
But where to start? So let's start with a quick
recent history lesson. On June twenty third, twenty sixteen, Britain
held a public vote to decide whether the UK should
exit the European Union or remain. The vote was for
Britain to exit or brexit, but just to highlight the obvious,
(00:46):
that was more than three years ago. Since then, the
world has watched as the actual Brexit date has been
delayed twice. It turns out divorce negotiations are just as
dramatic for political unions as they are from marital ones.
As of this episode recording, current Prime Minister Boris Johnson
has said that the UK must leave the EU on
(01:07):
October thirty first, twenty nineteen perhaps it's not a coincidence
that that's Halloween. Johnson says this must happen with or
without a deal. The latter is called no deal Brexit.
Johnson has actually used the phrase do or die, and
while most economists believe that no deal Brexit wouldn't lead
to death, they do predict serious economic harm. I'm deeply
(01:30):
curious about what the impact of Brexit would be, as
well as the conditions and personalities that have contributed to
this whole affair as the Financial Times. As Jillian Tete,
today's guest on the podcast, has said, Americans used to
think that British politics is all like Downton Abbey, but
now it's turning into Monty Python. At the risk of
(01:50):
analogy overload, you can also think Game of Thrones. Today's
Brexit politicians are famous for their last minute, desperate moves,
playground politics, and for having no long term strategy. Chaos
and unpredictability are the order of the day. As this
episode goes into production, time was running out to secure
(02:11):
a deal or an extension, and Bloomberg reported that the
Bank of England was dusting off its financial crisis playbook.
While the practicalities of Brexit remain in flux. It's critical
to understand how we got here, as the fallout from
Brexit will impact well everything. I'm honored to sit down
today with Jillian Tete, a British author and the chairman
(02:33):
of the Financial Times editorial Board in the US. Among
many other things. Jillian has a way of looking at
the big picture questions and implications of Brexit. In the
US as in the UK, We're watching the political norms
and processes that we've all been used to for the
last few decades breaking down, which leads to the biggest
question of all is there a right level of dysfunction
(02:56):
in modern democracy? So Jillian, let's start with this. Who
are what is to blame for the chaos that is erupted?
Is this, in the end a story of personalities and egos?
Is it a story of this larger trend of nationalism?
Or is it a story of basic economics. I think
what you can see when you look at the data
is a populism right across the Western world has increased
(03:18):
dramatically since twenty ten. There's a very powerful chart which
Bridgewater the Hedge Funds put together looking at what proportion
of the vote goes to populist candidates, and it peaked
at about forty in nineteen twenty nine, having been a
lot lower earlier than the century, and then it fell
back very sharply after World War Two, and from about
(03:41):
twenty ten onwards it exploded again from a level of
around five percent to about forty percent. Now, it would
be very easy to assume that's about economics, and certainly
the two thousand and eight crisis had a very big
impact on the political system in that many people felt
very angry. But unlike the nineteen thirties when populism was
(04:03):
last is high. The overall economy has not been shrinking
in the last decade. On the contrary, America has just
had ten years of growth, and even Europe, including the UK,
has actually done quite well economically in the last few years.
Now you can say, well, in that case it's down
to income inequality, and that's certainly part of the issue.
(04:24):
But in my view, one of the bigger problems is
that our political systems are increasingly out of tune with
our consumer culture and the way that technology has reshaped
our ideas of what's normal in terms of expressing ourselves
and getting what we want. So how does that specifically
impact Brexit or how did that impact the original referendum?
(04:47):
But what's happened in the UK it's essentially we've had
a system based around two key political pillars. Parliamentary democracy,
which means essentially you delegate your chance to have a
say to a politician on important issues. And then secondly,
a three party political system which was dominated by the
Conservatives who were basically sort of free market and Labor
(05:11):
who were sort of blessed free market, but actually the
ideological differences between them ten years ago was not very significant. Ithash,
it's a mishmash. Yes, what's happened is that the referendum
essentially gave power to the people, not to parliament, and
in many ways that actually chimes better with modern consumer
(05:32):
culture because you know, in the UK, like the US,
people are constantly voting on their phones, whether it's just
liking or not liking someone's picture on social media, or
voting for a reality TV show or something like that,
and so having been given a taste of people power,
people seems to have really liked it. At the same time,
(05:52):
the political parties which were based on being pro market
or anti market have begun to fracture because the issues
has become increasingly important. It's not based around free or
unfree markets. It's actually based around the idea of what
the British nation should be and how it should dovetail
with Europe or not dovetail. So let's do the political
(06:13):
parties first before we get to consumer culture. Is it
right to think then, that the political parties are trapped
in an old paradigm of free markets versus not free markets,
where the issues of the day have shifted under them.
I think it's absolutely the case that the issue that
divided the political spectrum really during most of the twentieth century,
which was pro free market or anti free market, is
(06:33):
no longer the only axis on which political parties are based.
And that's true in many ways of America as well
as Europe. These days, question of whether you're a nationalist
or globalist is increasingly the key question that divides and
defines people. At the same time, though, there's also a
bigger problem, which is that the explosion of technology in
(06:55):
twenty first century has created a sense that people have
a god given right to customize everything that you the consumer,
have your iPhone and you can choose to shape the
world exactly as you want. You can order food as
you want, you can choose your friends as you want.
You shape your identity, you shape your news as you want.
(07:16):
And the idea of traditional twentieth century political parties is
a bit like vinyl records in the age of the playlist,
because people today assume that they choose their playlist exactly
as they like, and no one's playlist is going to
be the same as anyone else's. And the idea of
just accepting preset music packages just it isn't in tune
(07:38):
with consumer culture. So would you argue that increases unpredictability.
I think people are increasingly going for what I call
pick and mix politics, like pick and mix consumer culture.
They're going for shiny brands, shiny ideas, shiny people. So,
whether it's nationalism or Brexit or Green New Deal or
(07:59):
Trump the ebody politician, that's been the trend. And it's very,
very volatile and very hard to predict what's going to
happen because what you're seeing are these constant explosions of
what I call cyber flash mobs, people getting very angry
or very excited about an issue online, seemingly out of nowhere.
So is the shininess, the shiny object phenomenon, the cyber
(08:22):
flash mob. This seems to me to be synonymous with
a certain kind of short term thinking that is ruling
our world, is at the expense of a longer term,
more strategic thinking, or is it every bit is honest
and strategic in its way. Well, the good news about
what I call this new era of pic and mixed
politics and people power of you like, is that it
(08:43):
does create a sense of being empowered, and often it's empowered,
and it can sometimes be used for good because if
you think how environmental issues come out of nowhere and
suddenly coalesced around figures like Greta Tumberg, that's an example,
if you like a populism for good or even hashtag
met the gender battles. But the problem, of course, is
(09:05):
that you can't ever have a situation of long term
planning and you can't talk about trade offs very easily
when you're dealing with one dimensional, single issue political movements. Yes,
instant gratification and trade offs are kind of two different
modes of thinking, right absolutely, And if you look at
what's happened in Britain turned up to Brexit, you know,
why did Brexit happen? I do think the cultural politics
(09:26):
has changed significantly. I do think that two thousand and
eight left a group of people in England feeling quite
rightly angry about the way the economic structures had been formulated.
And there's certainly a sense that people were getting fed
up with the bureaucratic remoteness of Brusthels and European Commission
(09:47):
because it didn't in any way, shape or form seemed
to be democratic as far as people were concerned in
their everyday lives. So that all contributed this general direction.
But the way that the Brexit issue was aid amongst
the public was that people seized on it as a
reason for their discontent and tragically voted for it without
(10:07):
really having much idea what it actually was going to
be or what it was. And what's become very clear
in the intervening period of time is that even the
leaders who were championing Brexit had no idea what it
was going to be. So is it fair to say
that Brexit in a way masqueraded as empowerment. In other words,
it was empowerment in the guise of or it was
(10:28):
chaos and the guise of empowerment in the sense that
people ultimately made a choice that may not be in
their best interests. People votive of a Brexit for many reasons.
Some people had sat down and really clearly thought, yes,
I want to be free of the European Union and
recreate Britain in a different image. And those people who
had that feeling tended to split into two camps. Some
(10:51):
wanted to recreate a very free market Britain and make
it turn it into a Hong Kong or Singapore off
the edge of Europe. Others were just filled with nostalgia
year and what I call the Daily Mail party, who
wanted to go back to village greens and cricket and
all those kind of things, and that was very backward
looking and ironically quite anti free market. So you had
(11:12):
two very different visions of how to run the country
in a Brexited scenario for those people who wanted out.
But what's really tragic because I think that lots of
people just voted Brexit because they wanted to kick the elite,
or they were angry, or it seemed like something which
just expressed how they felt at the time in terms
of we just want to shake it up. A bit.
(11:33):
One of the tragedies of the UK, both a blessing
and the tragedy, is it's kind of been quite a
secure place for many, many, if not decades and centuries,
so people in the UK don't really know how systems
can crumble and how fragile countries can be, and I
think they're probably a bit complacent and careless. I want
to come back to that. But something you said it
(11:55):
is super interesting because it seems to me that it's
an odd clash of the nostalgia for an old world
combined with the embrace of the shiny new object. And
so it's this odd combination of these two factors that
helped create Brexit, at least in part. There's definitely a
sense of nostalgia amongst many people in the UK, particularly
(12:16):
the older generation. In many many families, including my own,
the older generation voted for Brexit on some general sense
of frustration with how the world had become and a
sense of nostalgia too, and the younger generation didn't. So
that was definitely part of it, and you can see
that in the polling data. In an overwhelmingly Brexit was
(12:39):
something that older people voted for and overwhelmingly the younger
people did not, but there was also a sense of
just well, you know, stick it to them. We're fed
up with these remote, facist bureaucrats in Brussels, who are
you know, shaping our destiny in ways that we don't
don't like and don't have a saying. How much of
it was this sense that the European Union us bureaucracy
(13:01):
that was unanswerable to any real people. There was definitely
a sense of frustration with the bureaucracy, which was partly
whipped up by the media and by the Brexit campaign.
But having actually worked in Brussels myself at an early
point in my career as a journalist, ironically at the
same time as Boris Johnson, I can absolutely understand why
people are disgusted and furious with the Brussels bureaucracy, because
(13:23):
the reality is the European Union is very bureaucratic, and
it is very faceless, and the biggest problem of all
about the European Union is that it was dreamt up
by a group of unknown officials who people don't feel
much identity with. And it's very interesting because if you
turn over a euro note, the currency note, which of
(13:45):
course the UK doesn't have, but it's very symbolic of
what's happening. The Euro is the only currency in the world,
major currency which has no faces on the side of
the note. It's just got imaginary buildings and they literally
imagine new buildings because the commit couldn't decide which buildings
to put onto the urinoes, and they couldn't agree on
a face, because there is no one individual who acts
(14:07):
as a founding father or is central to the founding
mythology of Europe in the same way as America. And
you might say, well, that's just an accident of history.
Who cares, But the reality is that Europe's never had
a central pole around which the popular voters could coalesce
or shared mythology, and the UK certainly doesn't have any
(14:28):
sense of shared mythology or founding father sentiment for the
European Union, and so in the end it end up
literally being a sort of a bunch of faces bureaucrats
in the eyes of most British voters. Isn't that so interesting?
Because there's a modern anonymity to that that seems clean
and potentially empowering, and that it's not tied to a
(14:49):
person and yet it's the very facelessness I've been rereading
Joseph Campbell as well, in the lack of myth around
it that is also potentially incredibly dangerous, because these myths
in the founding they or a mother narrative is incredibly
important to us as people. Well, I'm trained as a
cultural anthropologist and I have a PhD in it, and
every single society in the world, as anthropologists, know a
(15:10):
some kind of founding myth or some kind of shared
mythology les source of the identity. And I remember being
very struck when I first started coming to America just
over a decade ago, that I'd go into bookstores and
to see shelf off the shelf off the shelf of
books on the founding fathers in America and someone's coming
(15:30):
from the UK. That was kind of weird. Yeah, And
I realized that that was a glue which defines so
much of the intellectual shared experience in America. I want
to come back to your point about the arrogance of
not recognizing fragility, because I think there's yet another link
between Brexit and the financial crisis involving that. But before
we go there, let's go back to the people you
(15:50):
mentioned working with Boris Dance and I always have a
fascination with the personalities that the hearts of stories. And
maybe I'm wrong to fixate on Boris dancing, or maybe
I'm not. You're not wrong to fixate on Bross Johnson.
I mean, you know, when he began to rise and
became Mayor of London, many of us were pretty stunned
and who a journalist who worked with him? And we
(16:11):
rolled our eyes and went, goodness me, but you know,
he kind of pulled it off as Mayor of London.
He didn't do a bad job. Why were you stunned?
Paused on that. There was a great line I read
about him about where some of his work as a
journalist that he had made his name. I think this
was from a Guardian piece that he made his name
by almost single handedly developing a compelling narrative that everything
emanating from the EO was either a lunar or a sinister.
(16:32):
Toward the end of his time in Brussels, his distorted
stories had damaged his credibility among his peers in Europe,
but back home he was becoming a household name. Does
that sound about right? I think that's entirely accurate every sense.
Does he stand for anything himself? I think, which is
very modern in a way. Yep, himself Johnny Japes. You know,
he's an entertaining performer. He makes people laugh, he gets
(16:53):
away with a lot. I mean to give him credit.
He did pretty good job when he was Mayor of
London because Mayor of London is partly at showmanship and
about promoting a city, and he had a team of
people beneath him who were actually running the place. So
you're partly acting as a cheerleader, come lightning rod for
popular sentiment about a city, and he did pretty well
that way. Being Prime Minister is very different. When you
(17:16):
said at the start of this conversation that the politicians
didn't necessarily understand what they were unleashing with unleashing with Brexit,
would you put Johnson in that category. Well. Johnson famously
wrote two op eds in the last few days, one
pro Brexit, one Andy Brexit, and he couldn't decide which
one to adopt, so he could have flipped either way.
He chose to go with the Brexit side, as much
(17:37):
to do with his positioning inside the Tory Party, it seems,
and having gone down that path. He then basically pinned
his color to that mast with more and more further
part definitional exercise. Do I think he always believed passionately
and campaigning against Brussels? No? Was it very convenient for him? Absolutely? Yes,
(17:58):
so very post Madern in a sense of defining yourself
according to momentary whims rather than having some deep foundational
notion of self. Perhaps a little bit similar to the
lack of a founding myth in an odd way, right,
I think that he knew how to tap into voters
and things, and I think that what does probably does
define him as a generalized belief in the UK as
(18:20):
a jolly, plucky little country that can stand up on
the world stage. And he likes the idea of englishness
in general and championing that. So I do think that's
probably his guiding instinct. What about the other politicians involved?
Are there any who you look back and say this
was admirable or did it feel like the proverbial cluster?
(18:42):
Among all politicians? There are characters who have stood up
and tried to champion reason within British political spectrum. I
am one of those who have dealt with someone like
Ken Clark for many many years. Who's a Tory, a
centrist Toy, a very pragmatic, sensible Tory, who has fought
to try and maintain some reason inside the Tory Party
(19:04):
very long time. He of course one of the people
who got kicked out recently, but I'd say Philip Hammond
was always the rather boring Treasury minister finance minister under
Trees and May, who actually did quite a good job
of trying to keep the ship steady. And again he
got kicked out as part of the recent bloodletting and
purge of people who defined the no deal Brexit. So
(19:26):
there are people like that who've tried to stand up
inside the Labor Party, which in many ways is even
more tragic given what should be happening there. You know,
the Labor Party should be seizing on the madness of
politics and actually formulating a proper opposition, and in fact
they've veered wildly off to the left and become in
many ways so alienating they're almost unelectable. Now. Tragically, they're
(19:49):
again people there who've tried very hard to keep the
party tethered to some kind of viable strategy. But it's
been very tough. British politics a day is deeply, deeply tragic.
So is it more a tale of dysfunction than a
tale of functioning? And what I mean is looking at
it from the outside, when you see Parliament pushing back
against Johnson's plans for a no deal Brexit, it looks
(20:11):
like dysfunction. But then I wondered, is it function within
dysfunction is a way of trying to put a check
on a fairly someone who strikes me as having the
potential to be a fairly autocratic ruler. And is it
a form of functioning or is it simply dysfunction. What
what's happened is essentially the democratic structures are being stress
tested to the limit. And you know the fact that
(20:32):
the Parliament pushed back against no deal Brexit is in
my view, just common sense in saying it would be
absolute madness just to drive this country off a cliff
for the sake of making a point. Problem, of course,
is they pushed back against no deal Brexit. They've tried
to block it. Johnson then tried to essentially close down Parliament.
He got overruled by the law courts. And now your
(20:52):
face with the fundamental problem, which is or three problems.
One is that no one really knows today what the
ultimate source of democratic will is. In the UK, it
used to be parliamentary structures and people delegate their votes.
Then a long term the referendum and people had a
direct vote. The consequences of that is that the two
parliamentary democratic structures are now pitted against each other because
(21:16):
the results of a popular vote have gone against the
parliamentary vote. Not clear what rules. And of course the
old problem is that when the vote was put to
the British people in the original Brexit referendum, they were
only really given two options, which was to stay in
the union or out of the union. And of course
now on the table there are three options. Says to
(21:36):
stay in the union, there's to exit with a deal,
and there's to do a hert brexit and exit without
a deal. And no one actually knows where the population
stands if they're faced with those three choices, apart from
the two which they had initially. What do you think
do you have a sense of anecdotally of where the
population would stand, or maybe the better question is do
you have a sense of where at the right place
(21:56):
to stand would be? Personally speaking? If it's up to me,
I'd say we should basically revoke our Article fifty and
stay within the europeanion. And that's my own personal view.
I also recognize that many people in the UK are
just absolutely fed up to the back of their teeth
with the whole thing. And I also recognize there is
a chunk of people who generally do you want to leave?
(22:18):
So my best guess is if you give the population
those three options today, you'd probably get a majority, slight majority,
who'd say let's leave with a deal just to get
it over and done with. But they don't want to
have a complete hard break because of the economic consequences.
But it's not clear and why is it in Johnson's
interest his self interest to push for foreign no deal brexit.
(22:40):
Johnson's pushing for a no deal brexit partly for internal
political reasons to keep control of the Tory Party, because
the majority of the Tory membership, not the parliamentarians, but
the membership are strongly in favor of Brexit and in
favor of a no deal, so he's trying to tap
into the bigger political party. He's also doing that because
(23:01):
he wants to distance himself from the opposition parties for again,
for political reasons, and I think there's also a sense
of him just being absolutely frustrated that he can't get
what he wants from the European Union because they're refusing
to do anything. And of course if he does try
and can keep negotiating with the European Union to get
a deal, there's a very well danger that the thing
will just get delayed and delayed and delayed indefinitely. So
(23:23):
do you understand where the European Union is coming from. Oh,
they are absolutely fed up with the UK and cannot
face having to renegotiate anymore. I mean, the awful thing
about the Breakxit story is that you mentioned earlier it's
like a divorce in that it's complicated trying to separate
a married couple, and that's true. But there's something else
(23:45):
about the Brexitt story makes it like a divorce, which
is that anyone who's been to a divorce or had
close friends who've gone through a divorce knows that, you know,
the fighting goes on and on and on, and people
obsess about ridiculous things that they care about and no
one else does, and they get a point where, no
matter how polite their best friends are, they just can't
bear to hear about it again anymore. It feels like,
(24:05):
you know, you're trapped in groundhog Day. And I think
that's what's happened with Brexit, is it. On the continent,
everyone's kind of moved on. They're like, oh my god,
you're still arguing about this stuff. It's like, we're not
going to go back and talk about this anymore. We
just don't want to hear these prop stories anymore. Even
in the UK, there's this really bizarre mentality whenever I
go back now, which is that no matter how bad
(24:25):
things keep getting, and they keep getting worse and worse,
at the moment, everyone's almost a new to it and
they almost don't want to think about it or talk
about it. It's like this willful mass, you know, blindness
and sickness. They just can't even bear thinking about it anymore,
exactly like a couple who's in the middle of the
most horrific divorce you can imagine. That's really interesting. It
(24:46):
makes me think about that tragedy and life when the
fading becomes about the fading rather than about the substance
underlying it, And that seems to be one element of
what you're saying that the fading has become about the fading.
I think for the Tory Party, the fighting has in
deep come about the fighting, and for the European Union
they just think we're just not going to open that
can of worms again. We can't bear it. And then
(25:07):
the other similarity, oddly enough, that lapped in my mind
when you were talking about that, is this idea of
big problems being so big that it's easier to ignore
them than it is to confront them. And it's a
little bit analogous perhaps to the pension problem in the US,
big frightening thorny, and it becomes almost unbearably tiresome to
look at it, and so you just rather ignore it,
(25:28):
even though this is something that arguably is going to
affect everyone's lives, their children's lives, their grandchildren's lives, but
it's somehow easier to look away. Why is that, Well,
it's partly a question of tragedy of the horizons. We
as human beings are not very good at dealing with
what I call boshomless problems. Problems are just need to
go on and on, none which have no resolution, which
(25:48):
abstract we're not very good at dealing with problems that
don't develop instep changes dramatic births, but slow moving elliptical
problems are build slowly over long period of time. And
in the case of engines crisis, we're very bad at
thinking about problems that are abstract and we shown't have
people that we can coalesce around as we try and
imagine a narrative. Going back to what you said at
(26:09):
the beginning, that there's this very modern component to what
happened with Brexit, which is this such shiny object fascination
in this people empowerment. But yet there's also this very
long term, sort of universal human truth to it in
the bottomless problem issue, and it's really these things colliding,
which is really interesting. I was also thinking about your
(26:30):
comment about this putting democratic process in the UK under
incredible stress, and it's putting it under an incredible stress
in a time when everything is in flux. Right, is
there an understanding of the magnitude of the instability this
could review. I spent the early part of my life
in parts of Asia which had been scarred by horrific
(26:52):
upheavals or in the case of China, cultural revolution, and
then I did a PhD in based called Tajikistan on
the Afghan border when it was in the Soviet Union,
and then when the Soviet Union broke up, I watched
that society, which I knew pretty well by then, completely
implode into killing and utter chaos. So I've seen society's
implode with my own eyes, and having had that experience,
(27:15):
I was always very struck that going to the UK
in the nineteen nineties and naughties it was like going
into a warm bath where everything kind of seemed fine
and soothing and gentle, and there were different political parties
but you could really not see that much difference between them.
And I think people have become incredibly complacent about maybe
how precious and arrogant, how precious democracy is, and how
(27:38):
precious stability is, and how you don't actually want to
gamble with it too dramatically. People take it for granted.
My parents' generation, my grandbrand's generation, were shaped by World
War Two and a sense of shared sacrifice and unity.
But people younger than that have grown up in seeming endless,
if not prosperity, then stability, the tragedy of people in
(28:00):
so many ways, right that the very thing that you
crave so desperately. You begin to take it for granted
when you've had it for a long time, and in
so doing you begin to put it at risk. That
is absolutely the truth. And if there are some good
things that have come out of this mess of Brexit,
one is a fact that you've actually got a generation
(28:21):
of people who are newly engagement politics. One of the
reasons why the Brexit vote went through was because the
vast majority of millennials and students just didn't bother to vote.
They took over granted and then they saw what happened.
What happened, and all the surveys show, every single polit
survey shows that if they had bothered to vote, the
Brexit vote would have been resoundly defeated. So you do
(28:41):
have younger patrol now who are getting more engaged in politics.
That's good. You do have people who are beginning to
think about the constitution for the first time ever, and
their decision by the Supreme Court to insist that Boris
Johnson did not have the right to dissolve Parliament has
really taken the first step to creating some kind of
constitutional structure in the UK, and heavens knows we need
(29:04):
that because the third point is that this crazy, crazy
situation has at least made some people think about the
dangers of instability and what is at stake. And I
would say the level of complacency is certainly ebbing today
and that's a good thing for sure. That of course
makes me think about the United States, because it's so
(29:26):
interesting that our two countries are running in parallel in
some ways. Would you say the parallel is between the
character of Boris Johnson and the character of Donald Trump,
or as the right analogy between Brexit and the election
of Donald Trump, or is it both. I think it's
both in the sense of their characters are indeed similar,
and their postsonas that they play and the role they
(29:48):
occupy in politics is very similar. It's two brands of
celebrity politics or celebrity politicians. But at the same time,
I also think that the vote for Donald Trump with
a squeal of rage against the elite and a desire
for change something different, and that certainly was one factor
driving Brexit too. It's very striking that both Boris Johnson
(30:11):
and Trump in a sense have become bigger than their
own parties, or rather they're redefining their parties around a
nationalist agenda rather than just economics, because it's very hard
to say whether Donald Trump is a right wing or
left wing, or Democrat or Republican in economic terms, and
ditto Bris Johnson. But it's also very striking that the
only politician in Europe who've managed to campaign and win
(30:34):
on a centrist technocratic platform recently has done so by
essentially jettisoning the old parties in creating his own shiny party,
and that was Macro in France. And he did it
by literally kicking out all the old parties in creating
his own party from scratch. That's kind of pick a
mixed politics taken to a new level. Nowhere else is
a technocratic center actually won over. And so in that sense,
(30:57):
both Boris Johnson and Trump are very much part of
the same phenomenon. And what do you make of the
fact that this is happening in tandem in our two
countries in the UK and the US. Is there a
broader lesson in that? I think what's happening right now
as we're seeing today, just as we saw in the
financial crisis, that we are living in an era or
(31:18):
great contagion and globalization have delivered the ability of contagion
to enlabel ideas and panics to spread very fast. And
the great irony is that nationalism and antiglobalization have been
fueled by the channels and platform the globalization. That's actually
(31:40):
a fascinating comparison if you think about the channels through
which the financial crisis spread, these subterranean aspects of the
financial markets, very wonky financial markets, and then the channels
through which this political uproar has spread, which are very
human channels, and it's interesting to think about them existing
in tandem. But you can't, of course ignore the that
(32:00):
also there's been deliberate attempts to spread negative ideas and
anger and polarizing concepts by the Russians and others. It's
fascinating those parallels. So back to this notion of it
being in France where a technocratic centers candidate did emerge.
Do you see the potential for that coming out of
this in the UK? Well, I think almost every Western
(32:24):
country right now wants to know how to clone Macron
and get them to speak their local language. Unfortunately, the
kind of conditions and the political constitution that allowed France
to create a new party quickly, which Macron did don't
exist really in the UK or the US. It's very
hard to create another party in the US, we know,
(32:44):
and it's pretty tough in the UK as well. So
will there be a shiny new party with a shiny
new leader. Not easily, but it's not impossible in the UK.
I mean, if there is a big political realignment and rupture,
then you know, never say never. If we do end
up with even more of a crisis, never say never.
There are people who could come back into the fray,
(33:06):
you know. I mean, David Miliban is a name that's
often mentioned as somebody who's a former labor leader who's charismatic,
and it's somebody who people could rally around. Who's current
city in America? So who knows. I suppose it's just
another interesting parallel that unpredictability is part of the ban
of mader and existence, and yet it might be the
(33:27):
salvation as well, just as unpredictability as part of the
ban of moder and financial markets, but in some ways
the source of progress as well. If you want to
be optimistic, one way to understand what's going on is
to say, okay, so we're seeing an explosion in populism,
but in many ways. It chafed in politics. It's really
recognizing that twenty century political structures look as outdated today
(33:51):
as twenty century shops on the high Street. People are
expecting something new because that's what they experienced in the
rest of their lives, So they're looking something new from politics,
and you could say, actually, what you're seeing is a
rise of a newly empowered political generation who are used
to voting on issues that they care about passionately. And
(34:11):
it can be used for good hashtag me too, the
green movements, these kinds of popular howls of outrage could
be channeled for a much more positive outcome and rating
social movements that we can all approve of. But I
think back to where we started. It's the idea of
long term thinking that has to be associated with that
(34:32):
something other than this concept of instant gratification and lurching
for the new shiny object. There has to be a
sense of something other than instant gratification at work if
we're going to be optimistic about this right, well, the
question is how you tap into the fact the millennials
appear at the moment to be more idealistic in some
ways in the sense of believing in community and having
(34:54):
less attachment due to materialist things than their parents. Many
of them do care abo sustainability issues, and they often
have a more egalitarian sense than their parents in terms
of in America and the UK, how do you tap
into those trends and sentiments while also creating a government
that can work, right, It's actually interesting how you get
(35:16):
millennials to take their concern about sustainability, which is a
narrow concern about environmental sustainability, and how you get that
to expand into a broader question of economic stability and
economic sustainability. Right, How you take a narrow focus on
sustainability and make it a big focus on sustainability for
all aspects of human life and human processes. But in
(35:38):
many ways, the whole climate change debate has been the
trigger that sparked a lot of interest and sustainability. But
it's going well beyond that now, yes, it really already Okay, yeah,
if you look at how these issues are rolling together
in terms of income, inequality, gender, things like that, it's
unclear where it's going to go. But you know, anyone
who thinks that's sustainability or the kind of ESG and
(36:00):
run metal social governance issues are just a short term
flash in the pan. Should have a look at what's
happening inside companies or even financial markets, where increasingly executive
of feely under pressure to do things. And again, if
you like, that's a sign of populism with a different face,
but perhaps a less scary face than the way we
normally associate the world with nationalism, perhaps a positive one.
(36:22):
I want to go back to the EU. If Brexit
does happen, does this have broader implications for the EU?
And I think back to the whole just the mammoth
effort to keep Greece in deside the EU for fear
that it would spread to Italy and for fear that
there's some kind of contagion in this world of contagion.
If there's Brexit, does the whole EU file apart well.
(36:43):
The good news from the point of the Union needs
is that the sheer horrors that Britain's going through in
a political sense and the pain it could suffer economically
has been the perfect way to inoculate the rest of
the European Union against the danger of European Union fever spreading.
Don't try this at home exactly, and so all the
(37:04):
surveys suggest that actually support for the European unions go
up sharply when people look at what's happened to the UK.
So I don't expect to see the European Union fall
apart in the short term. If the UK does leave,
there will be an economic below. The bigger question, though,
is that the economy is seem to be slowing down
at the moment, we're heading back into deflation. There's a
(37:27):
fight around the European Central Bank about how much more
it could or should actually provide monetary policy stimulus. And
there's even a bigger fight about whether it's time for
the European governments to create a pool budget and some
shared fiscal policy, as say the US has. Mario Draggie
gave a bigger interview to The Financial Times recently where
he said it's really down to fiscal policy now, i e.
(37:48):
Governments in Europe have to act together to create tax
and spending plans, and so the big question for the
medium to long term future of the European Union, which
surely has enough thing to do with the UK. But
if will the European governments agree to do that, or
if they don't, can they survive the next economic or
global recession. What do you think is that something they
(38:11):
must do or is that something that will exacerbate the
nationalist tendencies that are already at work in the UK
by asserting yet more outside bureaucratic perceived bureaucratic control over
people's lives. Well, that indeed is a big, big question,
because my best guess is that they will have to
do at some point to stave off a nasty downturn.
(38:32):
But as you say, the question is can they do
it in a way that actually ensures a buying of
the population rather than further alienation insofar as shared fiscal
support or budgets are used to try and keep more
vulnerable populations who feel angry about sort of being dispossessed.
If you can use it to actually keep them on board,
(38:53):
then it will actually increase support for the European Union.
But it's going to be tough. Well, I guess I
like the idea that they're no easy answers to this,
because the easy answers are not very appealing in this case.
So I think I'm glad that there's some potential for optimism. Well,
I think there definitely is potential for optimism. And if
you want to feel optimistic, take note of the fact
(39:14):
that grease is still in the European Union and it's
actually turned a corner eventually and doing slightly better. Take
notice the fact that Ireland has really been a remarkable
success story in terms of adapting to economic dislocation and
is now not only very strongly pro EU but also
dealing thus far with tremendous grace about the horrific problems
(39:37):
being quoted by the Brexit saga for Ireland. So amid
all this horror show of British politics, there are reasons
for optimism. And as I say, if nothing else, when
all is said and done with Brexit, it will at
least teach all the new voters in the UK to
not take democracy likely, to not take their systems and
(39:57):
structures for granted, and above full else to think, Okay,
maybe we do need a constitution, and if we do
want a constitution, what kind of country do we really
want to be and how do we actually want to
have a proper national debate about it in a way
that frankly we fail to do so for the last
few decades. So well said, and on that note, thank
(40:18):
you so much. For coming. Thank you. I expected my
conversation with Jillian to be wide ranging, but wow, It's
not often we get to discuss mythmaking and Joseph Campbell
on a business podcast. But in truth, this all makes
me think about how obviously entwined the worlds of business, economics, politics,
(40:39):
and yes, philosophy are. Right now, we're accustomed to thinking
of all of these as separate worlds, but as with
Donald Trump's election in the US, both the vote for
Brexit and the implications of it are deeply economic. Indeed,
there may be no place where the connection between these
worlds is as obvious as it is with Brexit. But
(41:00):
if Jillian is right, the silver lining is that it's
making us all care and think, and that has to
lead to a better world, doesn't it. Makia Killing is
a co production of Pushkin Industries and Chalkin Blade. It's
produced by Ruth Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive producers
(41:21):
are Alison mcclein No Relation and Making Casey. The executive
producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell. Engineering by Jason Rastkowski.
Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob
Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany McLain.
Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at
(41:41):
Bethany mac twelve and let me know which episodes you've
most enjoyed.
I'm Bethany McClain, and this is making a killing interviews,
exploring the headlines you thought you understood, and finding the
long term lessons we can all learn from today's business stories.
So Brexit. I'm a longtime business reporter, but I have
to admit that Brexit seems a bit to me like
tax policy or healthcare reform, A big, thorny, multifaceted issue
(00:25):
that you know you should understand because it's affecting our world.
But where to start? So let's start with a quick
recent history lesson. On June twenty third, twenty sixteen, Britain
held a public vote to decide whether the UK should
exit the European Union or remain. The vote was for
Britain to exit or brexit, but just to highlight the obvious,
(00:46):
that was more than three years ago. Since then, the
world has watched as the actual Brexit date has been
delayed twice. It turns out divorce negotiations are just as
dramatic for political unions as they are from marital ones.
As of this episode recording, current Prime Minister Boris Johnson
has said that the UK must leave the EU on
(01:07):
October thirty first, twenty nineteen perhaps it's not a coincidence
that that's Halloween. Johnson says this must happen with or
without a deal. The latter is called no deal Brexit.
Johnson has actually used the phrase do or die, and
while most economists believe that no deal Brexit wouldn't lead
to death, they do predict serious economic harm. I'm deeply
(01:30):
curious about what the impact of Brexit would be, as
well as the conditions and personalities that have contributed to
this whole affair as the Financial Times. As Jillian Tete,
today's guest on the podcast, has said, Americans used to
think that British politics is all like Downton Abbey, but
now it's turning into Monty Python. At the risk of
(01:50):
analogy overload, you can also think Game of Thrones. Today's
Brexit politicians are famous for their last minute, desperate moves,
playground politics, and for having no long term strategy. Chaos
and unpredictability are the order of the day. As this
episode goes into production, time was running out to secure
(02:11):
a deal or an extension, and Bloomberg reported that the
Bank of England was dusting off its financial crisis playbook.
While the practicalities of Brexit remain in flux. It's critical
to understand how we got here, as the fallout from
Brexit will impact well everything. I'm honored to sit down
today with Jillian Tete, a British author and the chairman
(02:33):
of the Financial Times editorial Board in the US. Among
many other things. Jillian has a way of looking at
the big picture questions and implications of Brexit. In the
US as in the UK, We're watching the political norms
and processes that we've all been used to for the
last few decades breaking down, which leads to the biggest
question of all is there a right level of dysfunction
(02:56):
in modern democracy? So Jillian, let's start with this. Who
are what is to blame for the chaos that is erupted?
Is this, in the end a story of personalities and egos?
Is it a story of this larger trend of nationalism?
Or is it a story of basic economics. I think
what you can see when you look at the data
is a populism right across the Western world has increased
(03:18):
dramatically since twenty ten. There's a very powerful chart which
Bridgewater the Hedge Funds put together looking at what proportion
of the vote goes to populist candidates, and it peaked
at about forty in nineteen twenty nine, having been a
lot lower earlier than the century, and then it fell
back very sharply after World War Two, and from about
(03:41):
twenty ten onwards it exploded again from a level of
around five percent to about forty percent. Now, it would
be very easy to assume that's about economics, and certainly
the two thousand and eight crisis had a very big
impact on the political system in that many people felt
very angry. But unlike the nineteen thirties when populism was
(04:03):
last is high. The overall economy has not been shrinking
in the last decade. On the contrary, America has just
had ten years of growth, and even Europe, including the UK,
has actually done quite well economically in the last few years.
Now you can say, well, in that case it's down
to income inequality, and that's certainly part of the issue.
(04:24):
But in my view, one of the bigger problems is
that our political systems are increasingly out of tune with
our consumer culture and the way that technology has reshaped
our ideas of what's normal in terms of expressing ourselves
and getting what we want. So how does that specifically
impact Brexit or how did that impact the original referendum?
(04:47):
But what's happened in the UK it's essentially we've had
a system based around two key political pillars. Parliamentary democracy,
which means essentially you delegate your chance to have a
say to a politician on important issues. And then secondly,
a three party political system which was dominated by the
Conservatives who were basically sort of free market and Labor
(05:11):
who were sort of blessed free market, but actually the
ideological differences between them ten years ago was not very significant. Ithash,
it's a mishmash. Yes, what's happened is that the referendum
essentially gave power to the people, not to parliament, and
in many ways that actually chimes better with modern consumer
(05:32):
culture because you know, in the UK, like the US,
people are constantly voting on their phones, whether it's just
liking or not liking someone's picture on social media, or
voting for a reality TV show or something like that,
and so having been given a taste of people power,
people seems to have really liked it. At the same time,
(05:52):
the political parties which were based on being pro market
or anti market have begun to fracture because the issues
has become increasingly important. It's not based around free or
unfree markets. It's actually based around the idea of what
the British nation should be and how it should dovetail
with Europe or not dovetail. So let's do the political
(06:13):
parties first before we get to consumer culture. Is it
right to think then, that the political parties are trapped
in an old paradigm of free markets versus not free markets,
where the issues of the day have shifted under them.
I think it's absolutely the case that the issue that
divided the political spectrum really during most of the twentieth century,
which was pro free market or anti free market, is
(06:33):
no longer the only axis on which political parties are based.
And that's true in many ways of America as well
as Europe. These days, question of whether you're a nationalist
or globalist is increasingly the key question that divides and
defines people. At the same time, though, there's also a
bigger problem, which is that the explosion of technology in
(06:55):
twenty first century has created a sense that people have
a god given right to customize everything that you the consumer,
have your iPhone and you can choose to shape the
world exactly as you want. You can order food as
you want, you can choose your friends as you want.
You shape your identity, you shape your news as you want.
(07:16):
And the idea of traditional twentieth century political parties is
a bit like vinyl records in the age of the playlist,
because people today assume that they choose their playlist exactly
as they like, and no one's playlist is going to
be the same as anyone else's. And the idea of
just accepting preset music packages just it isn't in tune
(07:38):
with consumer culture. So would you argue that increases unpredictability.
I think people are increasingly going for what I call
pick and mix politics, like pick and mix consumer culture.
They're going for shiny brands, shiny ideas, shiny people. So,
whether it's nationalism or Brexit or Green New Deal or
(07:59):
Trump the ebody politician, that's been the trend. And it's very,
very volatile and very hard to predict what's going to
happen because what you're seeing are these constant explosions of
what I call cyber flash mobs, people getting very angry
or very excited about an issue online, seemingly out of nowhere.
So is the shininess, the shiny object phenomenon, the cyber
(08:22):
flash mob. This seems to me to be synonymous with
a certain kind of short term thinking that is ruling
our world, is at the expense of a longer term,
more strategic thinking, or is it every bit is honest
and strategic in its way. Well, the good news about
what I call this new era of pic and mixed
politics and people power of you like, is that it
(08:43):
does create a sense of being empowered, and often it's empowered,
and it can sometimes be used for good because if
you think how environmental issues come out of nowhere and
suddenly coalesced around figures like Greta Tumberg, that's an example,
if you like a populism for good or even hashtag
met the gender battles. But the problem, of course, is
(09:05):
that you can't ever have a situation of long term
planning and you can't talk about trade offs very easily
when you're dealing with one dimensional, single issue political movements. Yes,
instant gratification and trade offs are kind of two different
modes of thinking, right absolutely, And if you look at
what's happened in Britain turned up to Brexit, you know,
why did Brexit happen? I do think the cultural politics
(09:26):
has changed significantly. I do think that two thousand and
eight left a group of people in England feeling quite
rightly angry about the way the economic structures had been formulated.
And there's certainly a sense that people were getting fed
up with the bureaucratic remoteness of Brusthels and European Commission
(09:47):
because it didn't in any way, shape or form seemed
to be democratic as far as people were concerned in
their everyday lives. So that all contributed this general direction.
But the way that the Brexit issue was aid amongst
the public was that people seized on it as a
reason for their discontent and tragically voted for it without
(10:07):
really having much idea what it actually was going to
be or what it was. And what's become very clear
in the intervening period of time is that even the
leaders who were championing Brexit had no idea what it
was going to be. So is it fair to say
that Brexit in a way masqueraded as empowerment. In other words,
it was empowerment in the guise of or it was
(10:28):
chaos and the guise of empowerment in the sense that
people ultimately made a choice that may not be in
their best interests. People votive of a Brexit for many reasons.
Some people had sat down and really clearly thought, yes,
I want to be free of the European Union and
recreate Britain in a different image. And those people who
had that feeling tended to split into two camps. Some
(10:51):
wanted to recreate a very free market Britain and make
it turn it into a Hong Kong or Singapore off
the edge of Europe. Others were just filled with nostalgia
year and what I call the Daily Mail party, who
wanted to go back to village greens and cricket and
all those kind of things, and that was very backward
looking and ironically quite anti free market. So you had
(11:12):
two very different visions of how to run the country
in a Brexited scenario for those people who wanted out.
But what's really tragic because I think that lots of
people just voted Brexit because they wanted to kick the elite,
or they were angry, or it seemed like something which
just expressed how they felt at the time in terms
of we just want to shake it up. A bit.
(11:33):
One of the tragedies of the UK, both a blessing
and the tragedy, is it's kind of been quite a
secure place for many, many, if not decades and centuries,
so people in the UK don't really know how systems
can crumble and how fragile countries can be, and I
think they're probably a bit complacent and careless. I want
to come back to that. But something you said it
(11:55):
is super interesting because it seems to me that it's
an odd clash of the nostalgia for an old world
combined with the embrace of the shiny new object. And
so it's this odd combination of these two factors that
helped create Brexit, at least in part. There's definitely a
sense of nostalgia amongst many people in the UK, particularly
(12:16):
the older generation. In many many families, including my own,
the older generation voted for Brexit on some general sense
of frustration with how the world had become and a
sense of nostalgia too, and the younger generation didn't. So
that was definitely part of it, and you can see
that in the polling data. In an overwhelmingly Brexit was
(12:39):
something that older people voted for and overwhelmingly the younger
people did not, but there was also a sense of
just well, you know, stick it to them. We're fed
up with these remote, facist bureaucrats in Brussels, who are
you know, shaping our destiny in ways that we don't
don't like and don't have a saying. How much of
it was this sense that the European Union us bureaucracy
(13:01):
that was unanswerable to any real people. There was definitely
a sense of frustration with the bureaucracy, which was partly
whipped up by the media and by the Brexit campaign.
But having actually worked in Brussels myself at an early
point in my career as a journalist, ironically at the
same time as Boris Johnson, I can absolutely understand why
people are disgusted and furious with the Brussels bureaucracy, because
(13:23):
the reality is the European Union is very bureaucratic, and
it is very faceless, and the biggest problem of all
about the European Union is that it was dreamt up
by a group of unknown officials who people don't feel
much identity with. And it's very interesting because if you
turn over a euro note, the currency note, which of
(13:45):
course the UK doesn't have, but it's very symbolic of
what's happening. The Euro is the only currency in the world,
major currency which has no faces on the side of
the note. It's just got imaginary buildings and they literally
imagine new buildings because the commit couldn't decide which buildings
to put onto the urinoes, and they couldn't agree on
a face, because there is no one individual who acts
(14:07):
as a founding father or is central to the founding
mythology of Europe in the same way as America. And
you might say, well, that's just an accident of history.
Who cares, But the reality is that Europe's never had
a central pole around which the popular voters could coalesce
or shared mythology, and the UK certainly doesn't have any
(14:28):
sense of shared mythology or founding father sentiment for the
European Union, and so in the end it end up
literally being a sort of a bunch of faces bureaucrats
in the eyes of most British voters. Isn't that so interesting?
Because there's a modern anonymity to that that seems clean
and potentially empowering, and that it's not tied to a
(14:49):
person and yet it's the very facelessness I've been rereading
Joseph Campbell as well, in the lack of myth around
it that is also potentially incredibly dangerous, because these myths
in the founding they or a mother narrative is incredibly
important to us as people. Well, I'm trained as a
cultural anthropologist and I have a PhD in it, and
every single society in the world, as anthropologists, know a
(15:10):
some kind of founding myth or some kind of shared
mythology les source of the identity. And I remember being
very struck when I first started coming to America just
over a decade ago, that I'd go into bookstores and
to see shelf off the shelf off the shelf of
books on the founding fathers in America and someone's coming
(15:30):
from the UK. That was kind of weird. Yeah, And
I realized that that was a glue which defines so
much of the intellectual shared experience in America. I want
to come back to your point about the arrogance of
not recognizing fragility, because I think there's yet another link
between Brexit and the financial crisis involving that. But before
we go there, let's go back to the people you
(15:50):
mentioned working with Boris Dance and I always have a
fascination with the personalities that the hearts of stories. And
maybe I'm wrong to fixate on Boris dancing, or maybe
I'm not. You're not wrong to fixate on Bross Johnson.
I mean, you know, when he began to rise and
became Mayor of London, many of us were pretty stunned
and who a journalist who worked with him? And we
(16:11):
rolled our eyes and went, goodness me, but you know,
he kind of pulled it off as Mayor of London.
He didn't do a bad job. Why were you stunned?
Paused on that. There was a great line I read
about him about where some of his work as a
journalist that he had made his name. I think this
was from a Guardian piece that he made his name
by almost single handedly developing a compelling narrative that everything
emanating from the EO was either a lunar or a sinister.
(16:32):
Toward the end of his time in Brussels, his distorted
stories had damaged his credibility among his peers in Europe,
but back home he was becoming a household name. Does
that sound about right? I think that's entirely accurate every sense.
Does he stand for anything himself? I think, which is
very modern in a way. Yep, himself Johnny Japes. You know,
he's an entertaining performer. He makes people laugh, he gets
(16:53):
away with a lot. I mean to give him credit.
He did pretty good job when he was Mayor of
London because Mayor of London is partly at showmanship and
about promoting a city, and he had a team of
people beneath him who were actually running the place. So
you're partly acting as a cheerleader, come lightning rod for
popular sentiment about a city, and he did pretty well
that way. Being Prime Minister is very different. When you
(17:16):
said at the start of this conversation that the politicians
didn't necessarily understand what they were unleashing with unleashing with Brexit,
would you put Johnson in that category. Well. Johnson famously
wrote two op eds in the last few days, one
pro Brexit, one Andy Brexit, and he couldn't decide which
one to adopt, so he could have flipped either way.
He chose to go with the Brexit side, as much
(17:37):
to do with his positioning inside the Tory Party, it seems,
and having gone down that path. He then basically pinned
his color to that mast with more and more further
part definitional exercise. Do I think he always believed passionately
and campaigning against Brussels? No? Was it very convenient for him? Absolutely? Yes,
(17:58):
so very post Madern in a sense of defining yourself
according to momentary whims rather than having some deep foundational
notion of self. Perhaps a little bit similar to the
lack of a founding myth in an odd way, right,
I think that he knew how to tap into voters
and things, and I think that what does probably does
define him as a generalized belief in the UK as
(18:20):
a jolly, plucky little country that can stand up on
the world stage. And he likes the idea of englishness
in general and championing that. So I do think that's
probably his guiding instinct. What about the other politicians involved?
Are there any who you look back and say this
was admirable or did it feel like the proverbial cluster?
(18:42):
Among all politicians? There are characters who have stood up
and tried to champion reason within British political spectrum. I
am one of those who have dealt with someone like
Ken Clark for many many years. Who's a Tory, a
centrist Toy, a very pragmatic, sensible Tory, who has fought
to try and maintain some reason inside the Tory Party
(19:04):
very long time. He of course one of the people
who got kicked out recently, but I'd say Philip Hammond
was always the rather boring Treasury minister finance minister under
Trees and May, who actually did quite a good job
of trying to keep the ship steady. And again he
got kicked out as part of the recent bloodletting and
purge of people who defined the no deal Brexit. So
(19:26):
there are people like that who've tried to stand up
inside the Labor Party, which in many ways is even
more tragic given what should be happening there. You know,
the Labor Party should be seizing on the madness of
politics and actually formulating a proper opposition, and in fact
they've veered wildly off to the left and become in
many ways so alienating they're almost unelectable. Now. Tragically, they're
(19:49):
again people there who've tried very hard to keep the
party tethered to some kind of viable strategy. But it's
been very tough. British politics a day is deeply, deeply tragic.
So is it more a tale of dysfunction than a
tale of functioning? And what I mean is looking at
it from the outside, when you see Parliament pushing back
against Johnson's plans for a no deal Brexit, it looks
(20:11):
like dysfunction. But then I wondered, is it function within
dysfunction is a way of trying to put a check
on a fairly someone who strikes me as having the
potential to be a fairly autocratic ruler. And is it
a form of functioning or is it simply dysfunction. What
what's happened is essentially the democratic structures are being stress
tested to the limit. And you know the fact that
(20:32):
the Parliament pushed back against no deal Brexit is in
my view, just common sense in saying it would be
absolute madness just to drive this country off a cliff
for the sake of making a point. Problem, of course,
is they pushed back against no deal Brexit. They've tried
to block it. Johnson then tried to essentially close down Parliament.
He got overruled by the law courts. And now your
(20:52):
face with the fundamental problem, which is or three problems.
One is that no one really knows today what the
ultimate source of democratic will is. In the UK, it
used to be parliamentary structures and people delegate their votes.
Then a long term the referendum and people had a
direct vote. The consequences of that is that the two
parliamentary democratic structures are now pitted against each other because
(21:16):
the results of a popular vote have gone against the
parliamentary vote. Not clear what rules. And of course the
old problem is that when the vote was put to
the British people in the original Brexit referendum, they were
only really given two options, which was to stay in
the union or out of the union. And of course
now on the table there are three options. Says to
(21:36):
stay in the union, there's to exit with a deal,
and there's to do a hert brexit and exit without
a deal. And no one actually knows where the population
stands if they're faced with those three choices, apart from
the two which they had initially. What do you think
do you have a sense of anecdotally of where the
population would stand, or maybe the better question is do
you have a sense of where at the right place
(21:56):
to stand would be? Personally speaking? If it's up to me,
I'd say we should basically revoke our Article fifty and
stay within the europeanion. And that's my own personal view.
I also recognize that many people in the UK are
just absolutely fed up to the back of their teeth
with the whole thing. And I also recognize there is
a chunk of people who generally do you want to leave?
(22:18):
So my best guess is if you give the population
those three options today, you'd probably get a majority, slight majority,
who'd say let's leave with a deal just to get
it over and done with. But they don't want to
have a complete hard break because of the economic consequences.
But it's not clear and why is it in Johnson's
interest his self interest to push for foreign no deal brexit.
(22:40):
Johnson's pushing for a no deal brexit partly for internal
political reasons to keep control of the Tory Party, because
the majority of the Tory membership, not the parliamentarians, but
the membership are strongly in favor of Brexit and in
favor of a no deal, so he's trying to tap
into the bigger political party. He's also doing that because
(23:01):
he wants to distance himself from the opposition parties for again,
for political reasons, and I think there's also a sense
of him just being absolutely frustrated that he can't get
what he wants from the European Union because they're refusing
to do anything. And of course if he does try
and can keep negotiating with the European Union to get
a deal, there's a very well danger that the thing
will just get delayed and delayed and delayed indefinitely. So
(23:23):
do you understand where the European Union is coming from. Oh,
they are absolutely fed up with the UK and cannot
face having to renegotiate anymore. I mean, the awful thing
about the Breakxit story is that you mentioned earlier it's
like a divorce in that it's complicated trying to separate
a married couple, and that's true. But there's something else
(23:45):
about the Brexitt story makes it like a divorce, which
is that anyone who's been to a divorce or had
close friends who've gone through a divorce knows that, you know,
the fighting goes on and on and on, and people
obsess about ridiculous things that they care about and no
one else does, and they get a point where, no
matter how polite their best friends are, they just can't
bear to hear about it again anymore. It feels like,
(24:05):
you know, you're trapped in groundhog Day. And I think
that's what's happened with Brexit, is it. On the continent,
everyone's kind of moved on. They're like, oh my god,
you're still arguing about this stuff. It's like, we're not
going to go back and talk about this anymore. We
just don't want to hear these prop stories anymore. Even
in the UK, there's this really bizarre mentality whenever I
go back now, which is that no matter how bad
(24:25):
things keep getting, and they keep getting worse and worse,
at the moment, everyone's almost a new to it and
they almost don't want to think about it or talk
about it. It's like this willful mass, you know, blindness
and sickness. They just can't even bear thinking about it anymore,
exactly like a couple who's in the middle of the
most horrific divorce you can imagine. That's really interesting. It
(24:46):
makes me think about that tragedy and life when the
fading becomes about the fading rather than about the substance
underlying it, And that seems to be one element of
what you're saying that the fading has become about the fading.
I think for the Tory Party, the fighting has in
deep come about the fighting, and for the European Union
they just think we're just not going to open that
can of worms again. We can't bear it. And then
(25:07):
the other similarity, oddly enough, that lapped in my mind
when you were talking about that, is this idea of
big problems being so big that it's easier to ignore
them than it is to confront them. And it's a
little bit analogous perhaps to the pension problem in the US,
big frightening thorny, and it becomes almost unbearably tiresome to
look at it, and so you just rather ignore it,
(25:28):
even though this is something that arguably is going to
affect everyone's lives, their children's lives, their grandchildren's lives, but
it's somehow easier to look away. Why is that, Well,
it's partly a question of tragedy of the horizons. We
as human beings are not very good at dealing with
what I call boshomless problems. Problems are just need to
go on and on, none which have no resolution, which
(25:48):
abstract we're not very good at dealing with problems that
don't develop instep changes dramatic births, but slow moving elliptical
problems are build slowly over long period of time. And
in the case of engines crisis, we're very bad at
thinking about problems that are abstract and we shown't have
people that we can coalesce around as we try and
imagine a narrative. Going back to what you said at
(26:09):
the beginning, that there's this very modern component to what
happened with Brexit, which is this such shiny object fascination
in this people empowerment. But yet there's also this very
long term, sort of universal human truth to it in
the bottomless problem issue, and it's really these things colliding,
which is really interesting. I was also thinking about your
(26:30):
comment about this putting democratic process in the UK under
incredible stress, and it's putting it under an incredible stress
in a time when everything is in flux. Right, is
there an understanding of the magnitude of the instability this
could review. I spent the early part of my life
in parts of Asia which had been scarred by horrific
(26:52):
upheavals or in the case of China, cultural revolution, and
then I did a PhD in based called Tajikistan on
the Afghan border when it was in the Soviet Union,
and then when the Soviet Union broke up, I watched
that society, which I knew pretty well by then, completely
implode into killing and utter chaos. So I've seen society's
implode with my own eyes, and having had that experience,
(27:15):
I was always very struck that going to the UK
in the nineteen nineties and naughties it was like going
into a warm bath where everything kind of seemed fine
and soothing and gentle, and there were different political parties
but you could really not see that much difference between them.
And I think people have become incredibly complacent about maybe
how precious and arrogant, how precious democracy is, and how
(27:38):
precious stability is, and how you don't actually want to
gamble with it too dramatically. People take it for granted.
My parents' generation, my grandbrand's generation, were shaped by World
War Two and a sense of shared sacrifice and unity.
But people younger than that have grown up in seeming endless,
if not prosperity, then stability, the tragedy of people in
(28:00):
so many ways, right that the very thing that you
crave so desperately. You begin to take it for granted
when you've had it for a long time, and in
so doing you begin to put it at risk. That
is absolutely the truth. And if there are some good
things that have come out of this mess of Brexit,
one is a fact that you've actually got a generation
(28:21):
of people who are newly engagement politics. One of the
reasons why the Brexit vote went through was because the
vast majority of millennials and students just didn't bother to vote.
They took over granted and then they saw what happened.
What happened, and all the surveys show, every single polit
survey shows that if they had bothered to vote, the
Brexit vote would have been resoundly defeated. So you do
(28:41):
have younger patrol now who are getting more engaged in politics.
That's good. You do have people who are beginning to
think about the constitution for the first time ever, and
their decision by the Supreme Court to insist that Boris
Johnson did not have the right to dissolve Parliament has
really taken the first step to creating some kind of
constitutional structure in the UK, and heavens knows we need
(29:04):
that because the third point is that this crazy, crazy
situation has at least made some people think about the
dangers of instability and what is at stake. And I
would say the level of complacency is certainly ebbing today
and that's a good thing for sure. That of course
makes me think about the United States, because it's so
(29:26):
interesting that our two countries are running in parallel in
some ways. Would you say the parallel is between the
character of Boris Johnson and the character of Donald Trump,
or as the right analogy between Brexit and the election
of Donald Trump, or is it both. I think it's
both in the sense of their characters are indeed similar,
and their postsonas that they play and the role they
(29:48):
occupy in politics is very similar. It's two brands of
celebrity politics or celebrity politicians. But at the same time,
I also think that the vote for Donald Trump with
a squeal of rage against the elite and a desire
for change something different, and that certainly was one factor
driving Brexit too. It's very striking that both Boris Johnson
(30:11):
and Trump in a sense have become bigger than their
own parties, or rather they're redefining their parties around a
nationalist agenda rather than just economics, because it's very hard
to say whether Donald Trump is a right wing or
left wing, or Democrat or Republican in economic terms, and
ditto Bris Johnson. But it's also very striking that the
only politician in Europe who've managed to campaign and win
(30:34):
on a centrist technocratic platform recently has done so by
essentially jettisoning the old parties in creating his own shiny party,
and that was Macro in France. And he did it
by literally kicking out all the old parties in creating
his own party from scratch. That's kind of pick a
mixed politics taken to a new level. Nowhere else is
a technocratic center actually won over. And so in that sense,
(30:57):
both Boris Johnson and Trump are very much part of
the same phenomenon. And what do you make of the
fact that this is happening in tandem in our two
countries in the UK and the US. Is there a
broader lesson in that? I think what's happening right now
as we're seeing today, just as we saw in the
financial crisis, that we are living in an era or
(31:18):
great contagion and globalization have delivered the ability of contagion
to enlabel ideas and panics to spread very fast. And
the great irony is that nationalism and antiglobalization have been
fueled by the channels and platform the globalization. That's actually
(31:40):
a fascinating comparison if you think about the channels through
which the financial crisis spread, these subterranean aspects of the
financial markets, very wonky financial markets, and then the channels
through which this political uproar has spread, which are very
human channels, and it's interesting to think about them existing
in tandem. But you can't, of course ignore the that
(32:00):
also there's been deliberate attempts to spread negative ideas and
anger and polarizing concepts by the Russians and others. It's
fascinating those parallels. So back to this notion of it
being in France where a technocratic centers candidate did emerge.
Do you see the potential for that coming out of
this in the UK? Well, I think almost every Western
(32:24):
country right now wants to know how to clone Macron
and get them to speak their local language. Unfortunately, the
kind of conditions and the political constitution that allowed France
to create a new party quickly, which Macron did don't
exist really in the UK or the US. It's very
hard to create another party in the US, we know,
(32:44):
and it's pretty tough in the UK as well. So
will there be a shiny new party with a shiny
new leader. Not easily, but it's not impossible in the UK.
I mean, if there is a big political realignment and rupture,
then you know, never say never. If we do end
up with even more of a crisis, never say never.
There are people who could come back into the fray,
(33:06):
you know. I mean, David Miliban is a name that's
often mentioned as somebody who's a former labor leader who's charismatic,
and it's somebody who people could rally around. Who's current
city in America? So who knows. I suppose it's just
another interesting parallel that unpredictability is part of the ban
of mader and existence, and yet it might be the
(33:27):
salvation as well, just as unpredictability as part of the
ban of moder and financial markets, but in some ways
the source of progress as well. If you want to
be optimistic, one way to understand what's going on is
to say, okay, so we're seeing an explosion in populism,
but in many ways. It chafed in politics. It's really
recognizing that twenty century political structures look as outdated today
(33:51):
as twenty century shops on the high Street. People are
expecting something new because that's what they experienced in the
rest of their lives, So they're looking something new from politics,
and you could say, actually, what you're seeing is a
rise of a newly empowered political generation who are used
to voting on issues that they care about passionately. And
(34:11):
it can be used for good hashtag me too, the
green movements, these kinds of popular howls of outrage could
be channeled for a much more positive outcome and rating
social movements that we can all approve of. But I
think back to where we started. It's the idea of
long term thinking that has to be associated with that
(34:32):
something other than this concept of instant gratification and lurching
for the new shiny object. There has to be a
sense of something other than instant gratification at work if
we're going to be optimistic about this right, well, the
question is how you tap into the fact the millennials
appear at the moment to be more idealistic in some
ways in the sense of believing in community and having
(34:54):
less attachment due to materialist things than their parents. Many
of them do care abo sustainability issues, and they often
have a more egalitarian sense than their parents in terms
of in America and the UK, how do you tap
into those trends and sentiments while also creating a government
that can work, right, It's actually interesting how you get
(35:16):
millennials to take their concern about sustainability, which is a
narrow concern about environmental sustainability, and how you get that
to expand into a broader question of economic stability and
economic sustainability. Right, How you take a narrow focus on
sustainability and make it a big focus on sustainability for
all aspects of human life and human processes. But in
(35:38):
many ways, the whole climate change debate has been the
trigger that sparked a lot of interest and sustainability. But
it's going well beyond that now, yes, it really already Okay, yeah,
if you look at how these issues are rolling together
in terms of income, inequality, gender, things like that, it's
unclear where it's going to go. But you know, anyone
who thinks that's sustainability or the kind of ESG and
(36:00):
run metal social governance issues are just a short term
flash in the pan. Should have a look at what's
happening inside companies or even financial markets, where increasingly executive
of feely under pressure to do things. And again, if
you like, that's a sign of populism with a different face,
but perhaps a less scary face than the way we
normally associate the world with nationalism, perhaps a positive one.
(36:22):
I want to go back to the EU. If Brexit
does happen, does this have broader implications for the EU?
And I think back to the whole just the mammoth
effort to keep Greece in deside the EU for fear
that it would spread to Italy and for fear that
there's some kind of contagion in this world of contagion.
If there's Brexit, does the whole EU file apart well.
(36:43):
The good news from the point of the Union needs
is that the sheer horrors that Britain's going through in
a political sense and the pain it could suffer economically
has been the perfect way to inoculate the rest of
the European Union against the danger of European Union fever spreading.
Don't try this at home exactly, and so all the
(37:04):
surveys suggest that actually support for the European unions go
up sharply when people look at what's happened to the UK.
So I don't expect to see the European Union fall
apart in the short term. If the UK does leave,
there will be an economic below. The bigger question, though,
is that the economy is seem to be slowing down
at the moment, we're heading back into deflation. There's a
(37:27):
fight around the European Central Bank about how much more
it could or should actually provide monetary policy stimulus. And
there's even a bigger fight about whether it's time for
the European governments to create a pool budget and some
shared fiscal policy, as say the US has. Mario Draggie
gave a bigger interview to The Financial Times recently where
he said it's really down to fiscal policy now, i e.
(37:48):
Governments in Europe have to act together to create tax
and spending plans, and so the big question for the
medium to long term future of the European Union, which
surely has enough thing to do with the UK. But
if will the European governments agree to do that, or
if they don't, can they survive the next economic or
global recession. What do you think is that something they
(38:11):
must do or is that something that will exacerbate the
nationalist tendencies that are already at work in the UK
by asserting yet more outside bureaucratic perceived bureaucratic control over
people's lives. Well, that indeed is a big, big question,
because my best guess is that they will have to
do at some point to stave off a nasty downturn.
(38:32):
But as you say, the question is can they do
it in a way that actually ensures a buying of
the population rather than further alienation insofar as shared fiscal
support or budgets are used to try and keep more
vulnerable populations who feel angry about sort of being dispossessed.
If you can use it to actually keep them on board,
(38:53):
then it will actually increase support for the European Union.
But it's going to be tough. Well, I guess I
like the idea that they're no easy answers to this,
because the easy answers are not very appealing in this case.
So I think I'm glad that there's some potential for optimism. Well,
I think there definitely is potential for optimism. And if
you want to feel optimistic, take note of the fact
(39:14):
that grease is still in the European Union and it's
actually turned a corner eventually and doing slightly better. Take
notice the fact that Ireland has really been a remarkable
success story in terms of adapting to economic dislocation and
is now not only very strongly pro EU but also
dealing thus far with tremendous grace about the horrific problems
(39:37):
being quoted by the Brexit saga for Ireland. So amid
all this horror show of British politics, there are reasons
for optimism. And as I say, if nothing else, when
all is said and done with Brexit, it will at
least teach all the new voters in the UK to
not take democracy likely, to not take their systems and
(39:57):
structures for granted, and above full else to think, Okay,
maybe we do need a constitution, and if we do
want a constitution, what kind of country do we really
want to be and how do we actually want to
have a proper national debate about it in a way
that frankly we fail to do so for the last
few decades. So well said, and on that note, thank
(40:18):
you so much. For coming. Thank you. I expected my
conversation with Jillian to be wide ranging, but wow, It's
not often we get to discuss mythmaking and Joseph Campbell
on a business podcast. But in truth, this all makes
me think about how obviously entwined the worlds of business, economics, politics,
(40:39):
and yes, philosophy are. Right now, we're accustomed to thinking
of all of these as separate worlds, but as with
Donald Trump's election in the US, both the vote for
Brexit and the implications of it are deeply economic. Indeed,
there may be no place where the connection between these
worlds is as obvious as it is with Brexit. But
(41:00):
if Jillian is right, the silver lining is that it's
making us all care and think, and that has to
lead to a better world, doesn't it. Makia Killing is
a co production of Pushkin Industries and Chalkin Blade. It's
produced by Ruth Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive producers
(41:21):
are Alison mcclein No Relation and Making Casey. The executive
producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell. Engineering by Jason Rastkowski.
Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob
Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany McLain.
Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at
(41:41):
Bethany mac twelve and let me know which episodes you've
most enjoyed.
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.