Dan Hannan and The Case for Capitalism

- Lord Dan Hannan is the newly appointed director of the Institute of Economic Affairs and a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. Dan, we don't usually have scoops on this, on this podcast, but I think we've got our first scoop, which is that you are about to be, or you have been appointed the new director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, founded in 1955, the great free Market Think tank, one of the first think tanks in this country. My sense is that a bit like Winston Churchill becoming Prime Minister, all your past life has been, but a preparation for this hour and for this trial. How do you feel about this new?

- I I hardly think it's comparable to defeating Hitler, but I do think that it's a hell of a trial. When the IEA was founded by Ralph Harris and Arthur Selden in 1955, we were so far from free markets, the second World War had permanently altered the relationship between state and citizen. People expected the government to do all sorts of things, run healthcare, run education, run economic planning. There was this view that the gentleman in Whitehall really knew best what Hayek called the fatal conceit. That planning was necessary, that if you had wise disinterested people, they could make a much better job of economic policy than just leaving things to arrange themselves. Higgledy Pty and the IEA turned that around conversation by conversation, pamphlet by pamphlet, engaging, particularly with newly elected mps, and within a generation, they'd, they'd paved the way for Thatcher. Now, when I first came across the IEA and you, I was a, a teenager when I met Ralph Harris, the founder, he was one of those men who had a great, a great gift for talking to young people. By then, we'd sort of won the arguments, and when I turned up to IEA meetings in the nineties, you know, we could assume that people got the argument for limited government, and we could talk in detail about pension reform or housing policy or whatever. I think where we are now is much closer to the 1950s than to the 1990s. I think that free marketeers have allowed the case to go almost by default. And although it is true that some young people are drifting to the right, it is a much more authoritarian right than it used to be. So the trend of young people towards conservatism is much more status protectionist, nativist, maga in some cases openly authoritarian and sort of integrist. So in that situation, I think there is a really urgent need to go back and reeducate people, or no, actually not even reeducate, just to open people's eyes to some difficult, counterintuitive, but important truths like the fact that you can cut the tax rate and get more revenue, or like the fact that if you have rent controls, you get fewer properties and higher rents, or like the fact that free trade works for the weaker and less competitive economy, as well as for the stronger and more competitive one. All of these things require a little bit of explanation, and I think that when you and I were growing up, Andrew, we'd, we'd won those arguments, but of course, because they're counterintuitive, we've got to make them all over again,

- And you are also in favor of limited government and supporting the idea of markets and competitive pricing and and so on. So what, what will the IAEA be doing under your directorship?

- Yes, so we're, for all of those things, we, we believe that the only route to prosperity is through deregulation, sound, money, lower, flatter, and simpler taxes and open competition. And the, I mean, you, you'll remember being in the house of laws when everyone was clamoring in all parties for the nationalization of steel. I mean, how unthinkable would've would that have been in the eighties and nineties? We, we've really lost a lot of ground. So, you know, the, the easy thing, the facile thing indeed, is to say, we have a politician problem. You know, we're, we're, we're governed by a bunch of self-interested crooks. They're a bunch of idiots, they're cowards, blah, blah, blah. Small people, I think that's a cop out to quote the old chestnut democracies generally get the leaders they deserve. And the reason that we are getting bad government is because people are voting for high spending policies without understanding what the consequence of that is. I think first the bank bailouts and then the lockdowns serve to convince huge sways of the electorate that there really was a magic money tree, and that the only reason not to spend lots of money on whatever they personally favored was some kind of meanness or sadism on the behalf of, on behalf of their rulers. So we don't have a politician problem, or rather, we have a politician problem only as a symptom of our real problem, which is an electorate problem. We've, we've stopped teaching the fundamental truths, what Kipling calls the gods of the copy book headings, that you have to live within your means that, that you have to benefit from competition, that that doesn't stop being true when you cross national boundaries. And that means engaging at every level, yes, convincing mps in all parties, we're gonna be engaging with labor and liberal as well as conservative and reform, but it also means massively increasing our work at secondary education level. I think by the time kids get to university, it's too late. In most cases, their cultural assumptions are formed. They may not have highly developed political and economic views, but they're broad cultural outlines that, you know, the rich get rich by impoverishing the poor and so on. Those things are set both by how they're taught in school and by the accompanying media environment in which they've grown up. And unless we are breaking in at, you know, the age of sort of 15, 16 and engaging with those kids and putting in front of them ideas that they won't hear in the classroom, consciously remedying the deficits of the state education system, then I think we've, we've lost that generation

- And we seem to have lost the argument, or at least not lost the argument. We never lost the argument. People seem to have forgotten the argument with regard to free trade, especially obviously with the tariffs that that Donald Trump has brought in over the recent years. What, how do we make that argument all over again?

- Free trade is a very good example of something that is true but counterintuitive, counterintuitive in the literal sense that it runs up against intuitions that are buried deep in our genome. So we're evolved for a much tougher life than this. We, we we're designed for life on the savannas of Lycine Africa, and we're programmed to listen to the protectionist case as hunter-gatherers. Of course, you've gotta have a stash of food there. The idea of buying it from foreigners is terrifying, right? And so the, the arguments that the protectionists or the mechanicals make on the left or the right are always gonna have a, a, a ready audience. So we can't trade with slave wage economies, we need to protect our strategic industries. We can't carry on with a big trade deficit. We've got to grow our own food. All of those things sound like common sense. All of them win votes, all of them are disastrous when implemented, or maybe not disastrous, but they all serve to make a country needlessly poorer. So we need to, to make those counterintuitive arguments, and we need to make them not just to our politicians, but across the entire electorate. So, you know, the easy thing, the thing that everybody says is, oh, we've got a politician problem. We're run by a bunch of self-serving crooks. Yeah, maybe, but whose fault is that? In a democracy, in a, in a democracy, we get the leaders we deserve. And if we have a politician problem, that's because we have an electorate problem in the sense that people have stopped teaching these counterintuitive truths and therefore people are voting in the expectation of unlimited resources, unlimited money, unlimited state direction, and unlimited benefits. And the only way I think that we're gonna turn that around is by engaging at every level, starting in high schools. It's too late by the time kids have got to college, starting in high schools, teaching them these really basic truths that you have to live within your means that a planned economy doesn't work as well as a randomly a, you know, laissez fair one, that if you, you you can cut tax rates and get more revenue, et cetera. These things need constant engagement. And you know, we, we, we need to, no one else other than the IA is doing this. We need to do this with animated videos and tiktoks and, and teaching materials for the classroom and programs directly to get to kids and all of that as well as what we're doing with the politicians.

- Are you expecting big pushback from the educationalists, from the teachers because they have historically, since the 1960s been very left wing? How are they going to feel about you propagandizing truth and, and all these wonderful messages to their children?

- Yeah, well, I, I think we're propagating rather than propagandizing truth, and I think they will see that, right? I mean, the, the counterintuitive point applies as much to the product of a teacher trading academy as to the kid in the, in the classroom. As far as I understand it, the IEA has actually been quite successful at running seminars for a-levels A-level economics teachers and presenting them with teaching aids effectively. And yeah, mo most teachers are motivated by wanting to infect their pupils with enthusiasm and, and, and encourage them to see things. There are all sorts of techniques that, you know, a left winger might call free market economics, but that really are just economics. There's a, there's a lovely thing that is used, can be used at a level or even younger and is often used in universities where you teach the value of trade by giving people bags full of goodies. You, you give every student a bag. I mean, if they're older, it could be the kind of stuff you get at conferences, lanyards, caps, pencil sharpeners, you know, whatever. If they're younger, you give them candy, you get them to value the contents of their bag on a scale of one to 10, and then you allow them to trade first just with their neighbor, then a, a general market, and then you get them to value it at the end. And we, we see when if children do that, when they're young enough, then they understand that wealth is not the product of exploitation and theft, that it's the product of generating value. You know, they, they can see that the value increases even though no one's got any more than there was in the room to start with. And there are things like that that i, I, I think you'd have to be a very, very hard line teacher not to see the value of, of those exercises. And what I really want to do is, is to try and get this to some of the kids who are not for, for whom economics is, is not part of their world, that they're, you know, they, they might have immigrant parents who aspire for them to be engineers or doctors, but to explain that, look, okay, maybe they're gonna become engineers or doctors, but they will still make much better life decisions if they understand some basic economics, if they understand about opportunity costs, if they, you know, and I, I, I mean, I I'm, I'm very hopeful that we might be able to find some philanthropists out there who will see the value of doing this, because it will, it will bring benefit directly to the, the, the kids who, who get the education, who, for whom this is life changing. They will not get this anywhere else, but it will also make them better voters, it'll make them more responsible citizens, and it will improve the outlook of the country as a whole.

- Well, we have lots of philanthropists listening to, to the show, so, so anyone who's out there back me, i a a, it's an extremely good organization. Amen. Amen. You, I dunno how much time you're going to have considering you are taking on this new directorship, but you were writing the entire history of tourism. So Dan, tell us about that. First of all, where it's, where, where you think tourism started toryism, explain what Toryism is as well to our non British listeners and, and, and, and how on earth you get the history of it into a single volume.

- Yes, that's a very, very good question, and I'm conscious of whom I'm talking to about squeezing a lot of history into one volume. So the conservative party under that name is generally thought to have been founded in 1834. So Robert Peele rips his Tamworth manifesto, but the conservative party did not appear in a vacuum. And in fact, when you look at that cutoff at, at that date, you see it's artificial. There were, there were Tory candidates running as conservatives before 1834. There were conservatives calling themselves Tories after 1834. The, the conservative party plainly grew out of the Tory party that was there in the earlier 19th century. And it's any question of how far back can you trace that Tory party? And by the way, this here is a point that will be important for our American listeners. If we take only 1834 as the starting date, then the oldest party in the world becomes the US Democratic Party. And I think we can all agree that that is a, an outcome to be avoided if we possibly can. So it's quite important to establish the apostolic succession between the old Torry party and the existing current conservative party. Now, I think you can do that, and I think you can can push it right back to the years following the English Civil War in the late 17th century. Nobody's ever tried to do this before because there is a little lacuna, there's a, there's a canyon, if you will, in the 1760s and seventies when there is no Tory party as such, the Tory party at that point, more or less dissolves in parliament. However, there are plenty of Tories, including Dr. Johnson, the most eloquent Tory of the lot, and including all the American loyalists who used that word as a self descriptor, quite unselfconsciously. So toryism as a creed of order, patriotism and church and king never stopped existing. And I think I have found just enough mps who were Tories in that who to bridge that canyon, right? It's not very long. If you, I mean, if you, if you look around parliament now, Andrew, and you say how many of these guys were active 20, 25 years ago? Quite a few, right? Yeah. It's a, A-A-A-A-A 20 or 22 year canyon to when pit takes over is not unbridgeable. So I think, I think I can establish that, that connection which pushes it right back. Well, the word Tori comes into vogue in 1680, but the Tory party of 1680 again doesn't appear in a vacuum. It, it's growing outta the court party that was associated with Danby and before that, with Clarendon. So look, you've gotta, you've gotta pick a lane on these things, right? You say, what date does it start? How far do you say the liberal party? You can point to a specific meeting, the Labor Party, you can point to a specific meeting and say it began on this day in 1902. Alright, how about this, the 22nd of November, 1641, which is the vote on the grand rem monstrance. I think that is the beginning of our two party system. You had to pick aside, there was a series of grievances put forward against Charles. The first, almost every MP would've agreed with some of them, but not with others. But you had to choose whether to vote for or against the whole package and which way you jumped pretty much determined which side your family was gonna be on for the next a hundred years. So I, I would date it from there. And I just, I just want us to pause for a second and think about just how extraordinary that is, right? That, I mean, okay, even if you don't count the, the, the, the Civil War Cavaliers, even if you start from when the word Tory is in use in the 1680s and nineties, how extraordinary that, you know, at that ancient distant three and a half centuries ago, there was a modern recognizable two party system where people would wear differently colored roset, raise money for candidates in marginal seats, read parties and newspapers for qut, different clubs, even drink different wine. I mean, there was a wonderful thing. Claret was the Tory tipple. It was considered by wigs to be unpatriotic. They preferred port, you know, all of these things just like now, these little markers of, of what words you use and how you dress. Very, very modern thing. I mean, I think that that the fact that that was happening three and a half centuries ago is a mind blowing fact in itself, even before we come to the utterly astonishing reality that one of those two parties is still in business today. Right. I just think that's, that's a really under-explored and fascinating story.

- And what, and what you mentioned church and king, is there anything else that we have in common? Yes. Re conservatives today, Tories today having common with those men of November the 22nd, 1641.

- Yes. I, so church and king probably is, is the least of the things we have in common because we, we we're no longer the Anglican society. We were, and the question of the role of the monarchy is now a consensual one. But yes, there's still the church and king, I would say patriotism, and particularly in the kind of scruton sense of eco flia, those civil war royalists, when they were defeated, they went into exile all over Europe. Some of them followed Charles of the future, Charles of second, first to, to France, and then to the low countries. Others lived in little exiled communities in, in Spain or in Germany. And these were men who had been dispossessed. They'd lost their estates, they'd had their property sequestered, their families were under surveillance, and they were longing for home. And when you read their letters, although they were, they were dominated by the daily need to how can I afford firewood or how can I afford a new shirt? I mean, they, they, they had great titles. They were styled the Lord privy seal or whatever, but they were ragged exiles. What you really get is this painful homesickness, you know, they, they're longing. They want to see the countryside again. They want to eat their familiar food again. That, you know, and so from the beginning you have this scruton sense of the motherland as a, something that you probably know on some level is slightly idealized, but that doesn't make it any less important to you. So there's that, there is the looking backward, the the idealized past, you know, how are we fallen? That's very, very strong all the way through, I think, I think you'd pick that at any moment in the Tory party, and you'd see it, there is the suspicion of excessive social change that, that people want to slow down what they see as abandoning the ways of their fathers. And there's the, there's the concern for property rights, which by the way was a huge thing for the American Tories, for the American loyalists, right? We, we tend to see them now, in that case, at least history was written by the winners. We tend to see them as kind of in Jeffersonian terms, right? As these, these slightly frightened creatures who were clinging to royal authority outta some sort of Wim nest. Not a bit of it. They, they, I mean, some of them may have been like that, but the, they did have a, a view of the world in which the revolution would mean that property rights were no longer secure and the democracy would lead to mob rule and, and, and confiscation. So the, the, I think, I think all of these things are, you know, if you, if you put a pin in any moment and you say, what did the Tories believe they'd have, they'd have recognized that package. The, the very beginning of the party, there was a pair of men who I regard as the real founders, the second Vicom, Falkland and Edward Hyde, who became the earl of Clarendon Royalists who founded a, a political party. They were, they were fo demure royalists. These were not people who said the king is right, whatever he does, because he's the king. They were people who were well aware of Charles the first flaws, but who feared that the alternative was worse. Clarendon repeatedly in the 1640s is saying, if the other side wins, then there'll be no property, no law, no order, and it will end in dictatorship, which indeed it did. Falkland came out in, in a debate in 1640 with what I think is as good a Tory sentiment as you'll ever hear when you said, if it is ne if it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change. And he was talking about bishops in the church, but he could have been talking about anything. And I think any Tory, so I, if, if, if Forland and Hyde were somehow transported forward in time to, you know, the 1840s or the 1950s or the 2020s and placed in the Spectators gallery in the House of Commons, how long would it take them to work out which side their party was on? 10 minutes.

- I was in the House of Commons yesterday at Prime Minister's question time, watching Starer squirming in front of the questioning with regard to the, to the Mandelson scandal. Let's, let's talk about him with the caveat of course, that by the time this show goes out, there's, there is a chance that he might have fallen as Prime Minister. I don't personally think he'll have exactly, I'm, I don't necessarily think he will have, but nonetheless, we can, we can factor that in. Why do you think it is that he came to power with a massive majority, 160 seat majority, which is, which is sort of very unusual in British politics, and having known for at least three years that he was definitely going to win and definitely be Prime Minister. And for the last 14 years before that, there was a, there was a very good chance from 2010 to 2024 that they were gonna win the next election. Why on earth did they not have a plan? Did they not have oven ready bills? What was the, what, what on earth do you think was going on in the Labor Party that it didn't bother to prepare to for office, even though it had years to do so?

- That's such a good question. They got in and they set up, was it 21 or 22 commissions to ask what to do next? Yeah, yeah. It, it, it's, it's quite extraordinary. And I think the answer is that Kirstan told his biographer, Tom Baldwin, there is no version of my life that doesn't revolve around being a human rights lawyer. I think Kiir Starer understands the role of Prime Minister as being almost ceremonial. I think in his worldview, he is there like some sort of Japanese emperor to give effect to the decisions of a bunch of courts of, of international and national tribunals and of a few civil servant proce processes. And so, so he really is what he looks like a, a slightly pge man who rather fancied becoming Prime Minister as a late career change, arrived in Downing Street, expecting there to be someone sitting there to tell him what to do. And that fish on the slab expression he is had ever since, has been a response to the discovery that there is no such person and the, the, the horrifying realization that he has to take responsibility. And of course, he's, he's completely unprepared to do anything that might be unpopular in the short term, which paradoxically makes him extremely unpopular in, in the short, medium, and long term. So it's very hard to think of somebody who could be worse on a technical level, nevermind his, his beliefs, but just who could be could be worse at the job. The, the only recent competitor I can think of who was that hopeless on a day-to-day basis is Theresa May. And, and one has to ask how the, the system is thrown up to such people in a short time.

- And as a human rights lawyer, do you think that that's underlying what we've seen with regard to, for example, the Chagos Islands, Diego Garcia as the, as the, the large islands known in America, and the way in which we were supposed to hand them over to the, even though we've had sovereignty for 200 years to Mauritius, which never had sovereignty over them, and pay 35 billion pounds for the privilege. Is that essentially because the Prime Minister and his closest advisors are human rights lawyers?

- Yes. Only, only a human rights lawyer could have come up with that deal. I, I think even under a different leadership, no other labor government would've done that, let alone a, a a different party. It, it, it's what you see is the fundamentally political nature of the human rights industry. It's not really about human rights. It's ended up with legal moves to deport the actual indigenous chagossians from the islands, right? There's, there's nothing about their human rights here. And it has led, bizarrely, the Labor Party to be in favor of dispossessing a second time. This, this poor black population that has already been very badly treated, which can't be why most of them went into politics, as well as handing away this, this pristine maritime conservation zone to a country with a terrible record on biodiversity. Amazing what the left will do in the name of this international ju judicial system, you know, at, at the behest of a, a court, which included Chinese and, and Russian judges. I mean, absolutely incredible. I think that labor came at this not really understanding what was involved and just seeing it as an anti-colonial dispute. You know, it's a browner population against a whiter one. It's an ex colony against an ex colonizer. It's a poorer country against a richer one. So we must side with a victim. These are the imperatives of our identity. Politics, as the realization has dawned that what you say is true. That Mauritius had never owned these islands. That the people who lived there did not want to be mauritians. That there'd never been any claim, and that any hope of a return for the Port gossan would be ended if the Mauritians took over. Once those things sunk in, I think the, the mood began to shift radically, and it began to be seen for what it was, which is just starer hates flags with little union jacks in the corner, you know, just bothers him on some deep emotional level. But as far as our American allies are concerned, the whole thing I think looked utterly bewildering. It was striking that when Donald Trump mentioned it and said, why are you doing the, it is an act of Greek stupidity, right? When he said it was an act of Greek stupidity, he assumed we were selling them. It was literally beyond his mental horizons that we could be paying to give them away. Because that's, that's Stan for you. I think we're now in a slightly better place, and a lot of people in the US have been extremely active and meritorious in defense of the Western Alliance on this. A lot of people in the State Department, a lot of people in the White House, and we've, we've, we've for now prevented the abandonment of this key strategic territory. And its, its sovereignty by a, you know, the, the, the transfer of its sovereignty to a Chinese ally. However, you know, there are plenty of people lifers in the, in the State Department, I would, did Nixon call them the, the, the foggy bottom stripy pants. There's plenty of them who are just as woke as they're British counterparts who see the whole thing in decolonized terms. And I think there is a mood in Britain to wait until the Democrats win an election and then see if they can bring the deal back. So we have a short window of time in which to come up with a, an active plan B. And I think that that plan B is, is resettlement. I think it's, it's allowing the genuinely injured party here to go home. It then becomes an inhabited territory, has the righteous self-determination, and that's the end of it.

- How about Iran and the refusal to allow the Americans to use their bases for the initial, was that also a, a sort of international law human rights thing that whereby he essentially put, put it also fitted in hugely, obviously with his domestic political agenda, but put essentially party before country?

- Yes. And, and again, put these international tribunals that no one else cares about above both. You know, Britain is gonna be the last country in the world when everyone else has given up on international law, still tearing around trying to find some last court to surrender to. 'cause if, if you remember what he said was, we will allow our facilities to be used to defend neutral countries that Iran is now attacking the Gulf States or whatever, but not for attacking Iran. I mean, come on, what's, you're supposed to, you know, a a a missile is somewhere over Jordan, and you're supposed to think, Hmm, is that attacking Israel, which would be a legitimate act because Israel started the war? Or, or might it land on Jordan? In which case it would be an unpro. I mean, come on, right? I mean, imagine any other country being that hampered by an imagined form of international law. You know, what's, what's really sad about this is there are elements of international laws that would've been understood, you know, 50 or a hundred years ago, which I think all of us can agree are important basic things like the sanctity of diplomatic litigations and you know, how to operate on the high seas without piracy and fair treatment of, of, of, of diplomats and, and how to deal with prisoners of war and this kind of thing, right? So the the really basic things that that governed relations between states, I think are now in danger of being lost because of this backlash against the whole thing because of the overreach of people like Stama.

- We've had Nigel bigger on this show recently, and he's been talking about the British empire and reparations and reparations for slavery in particular. Where do you think we are on this whole thing? Do you believe that woke has, well, that we've reached peak woke or, and that things are, things are much better now? Or do you think that there are still some, some sort of horrors to come?

- I think woke has peaked in the United States, which is where it originated, and I'm hoping that the UK will follow the same trajectory. It's striking how British woke is really an attempt to shoehorn an American narrative into very different circumstances here. And by the way, I think this is true in all anglosphere countries, right? So when the madness of the BLM summer of 2020 was at its height, every other English speaking democracy tried to adopt a version. It in Canada, it took the form of this absolute falsehood about a, an imagined indigenous genocide in boarding schools, which has now been utterly debunked. But the debunking got 1% of the coverage of the original false charge in Australia. It took the form of the indigenous voice to parliament, a referendum on trying to give aboriginal Australians additional representation in New Zealand. It took the form of reopening the Treaty of Waitangi in Britain. We just all pretended we were from Alabama. And for me it culminated in the ludicrous site of a white British BLM crowd outside Downing street, chanting hands up, don't shoot at unarmed metropolitan police. You know, the whole, you'll remember it, Andrew, the whole iconography became American. If you're a white conservative, they called you a Klansman. If you're a black conservative, they called you an Uncle Tom. I mean, it's like of quite apart from being terrifically rude, what's any of this got to do with us Selma and segregation was not our story. In fact, black people are not really our, our minorities, south Asian people are, but you wouldn't believe that because we're all so America brained about this. So what I hope is that the, the beginning of a, of a pushback in the us of the, of the post-Trump vibe shift that people are talking about will also just as the original infection spread from liberal higher education campuses in North America. So the, the vaccine will spread from there or the, the the resistance, the, the, the, the acquired resistance. But yeah, I mean the anti the the reparations thing is completely American argument that's being forced into a very different British situation. No country invested more in stamping out slavery than the United Kingdom. You know, even when we were at the height of our life and death struggle with Napoleon, we were still diverting ships to hunt down the slaves. Did you see, by the way the other day, it was a glorious thing that the, the Green Party has a, a reparations officer who is demanding, you know, reparations from the British state and it turns out that she's from a slave trading Nigerian family. So the British government, you know, we, the her family resisted violently resisted abolitionism by Britain. The reason we ended up having to take responsibility for large Swedes of West Africa was to stop the slaving operations by, by kings. And yet everyone somehow thinks it's normal for her now to turn around and say, you owe us money. He's like, come on, you know, you really, you couldn't make this stuff up

- With regard to the greens. Zach Polanski, the leader of the Greens, has just made a speech recently saying that we should just carry on borrowing that we shouldn't be worried about debt. That debt will take care of itself. That our jet to DDP ratio is not something that's going to worry him. And yet, despite this and, and all the economic problems we've got at the moment, his parties seems to be looking that it's likely to sweep to many victories in the local elections at the beginning of next month. What's going on here? Do, isn't it terrify? Is there a, is there a, is there a, is there a large proportion of the British electorate, and this is before we give the 16 and 17 year olds the vote, of course, who simply either can't add up or just don't care about the concept of debt. Yes, yes.

- And it's, it's not their fault. They have had their attention spans shriveled and their brains fried by a lifetime on screens. And it's what, what the times writer James Marriott calls the post literate age, the post literate generation people who are, who think in sound bites because that's all they ever see, who, who who politics is, is a succession of, of 280 characters. Zach Polanski is the perfect politician for that generation because he speaks like a random generator of left-wing tweets. And it's particularly striking when you see him debating someone else or even being interviewed by a competent interviewer because there's no, they come out at random there, there's no coherence. He doesn't go from one thought to another. He spews out the prepared lines pretty much regardless of what the question is or what the topic is. And if you point out that there is some contradiction or that he was saying the opposite thing a couple of seconds ago, you know, the line he always uses, you'll, you'll have heard him say it. He always does the same thing, is what the Corbin used to do. He goes, ah, you see, I've got the billionaires rattled and that I'm afraid is enough for about a fifth of the electorate. That's all they want to hear. Yeah. They are convinced that, you know, if the world is not the way they want it, it's because of evil people. It's, it is not because of limited resources or trade-offs or difficult choices, it's because of evil people. And here's where it gets slightly scary. Polanski last week said, there's gonna be no space for these people When we build uto. He actually used the word when we u when we build utopia, and I'm totally there for it. He said, right, always a scary thing. Think of all the people who've tried to build utopia before when we build Utopia said, what are we gonna do with the people who call themselves right wing and who are gonna carry on pushing their toxicity, right? The same dilemma faced by Paul Pot and Chairman Mao and Lenin, right? What do we do with the people who refuse to join our utopia? And of course we, we know what happened to those people. The people who were thought to be objectively counter-revolutionary. You might say, this is a real reach, Hanan, I mean, how can you say this about the Green Party with its record of caring about cuddly animals and acid rain, you know, it's, it's candidates have names like Aurora and Bliss and Rainbow, and those are genuine candidate names by the way. You know, could Aurora and, and Bliss and Pineapple and Rainbow and so on, could they actually be revolutionary cadres in a, in a, a kind of authoritarian cream state? Absolutely they could. Yes, absolutely they could. It's what happens in every revolutionary state and it's how, it's why they go so quickly from gushing over pictures of cute kitchens to joining pylons against evil hateful right wingers because they're convinced that only bad people stand between them and utopia.

- Yeah. And they might well be a lot of those ones, especially the people whose, whose first names you just mentioned might well be the, the, the chevi, the first lot who, who carry on the revolution, who then themselves, who then end up beaten Yes. By the revolution. I suspect that that's when the, when the really hard people come afterwards, the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins, then they will, will wipe out the rainbows and the, and the auras. But nonetheless, you are quite right. They're, they're still extremely dangerous people in and of themselves. So you mentioned TikTok and, and this generation, I dunno if you saw the recent new Statesman article about the, about the dangers of women aged 18 to 30 who skew so far to the left, now that they're 20% more likely to be hard left than the, than than males. What of the same age? And one of the things that drives them is Gaza. This has been a, a massive radicalization moment for them. And we in this country obviously have an issue with regard to antisemitism, especially the antisemitism that is driven by, by TikTok and, and other and other parts of the social media world versus free speech. At what point does free speech stop and, and the the essentially the, the duty to silence antisemitism come in

- Only when it crosses the line into harassment or incitement. I I, I, I've never had much patience for the, I'm all for free speech, but argument, you know, this is the country of Milton and Mill, the country of Lilburn and Locke that know, that's just the Johns. I mean, we, we, we are, I I I would much rather not open that door,

- But, but Incitement is in, in some of these hate marches that we getting every Saturday in London. It's, and obviously with regard to some of the attacks that have been taking place in in Britain over the last couple of months, incitement seems to be the inevitable next step for

- A lot of

- These. Well,

- In that case, I mean, if you are also in favor of having jailed Lucy Connolly and the chap in North Wales who sensibly took the jury trial and was, was acquitted, then that would be a consistent position. I would much rather take the American position on incitement that was established in the, in the Brandenburg case, which is that for you to prove incitement, somebody has to have been realistically incited to do some actual crime. The Brandenburg case was a Klansman who said, let's go. And you know, that there's something like, you know, we're, we're being destroyed by the Jews and the, the Jews are using the blacks and all this. And the, he was initially convicted and then it was overturned by the Supreme Court on appeal on grounds that he had said this to a bunch of losers on some farm in Ohio. And that there was no realistic prospect that they were gonna act on his words and go and attack a synagogue. And I think we are, I think that is correct. I think we should have a very high threshold for incitement, because otherwise you put a, a powerful weapon into the hands of government. I also think it's avoiding the real issue, which is why do we suddenly have this problem of antisemitism? And it is sudden, our country has a very long history of Emm and of Zionism. You know, the, the Alfa declaration didn't come out of nowhere. It, it, it drew on a Zionist tradition that went back at least as far as Palmist and on the liberal side and Israeli on the conservative side. And I think that was based on lots of things. Paul Johnson, in his monumental history of the Jews, argues very persuasively that prior to the settlement of North America, England was the best place in the world to be Jewish, legally and culturally, you, you suffered only the very mild penalties that other non Anglicans did up until 1830. And after that, there was complete equality, which was unu, you know, the Spanish Inquisition was still on until 1834. And it was unusual in the world at that time. And I think that's because we have the same set of enemies. I mean, you know, show me a continental authoritarian of right or left who rails against degenerate Anglo-Saxon liberalism, you know, the debased decadent bourgeois, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the British with their soulless materialism. Show me one of those people. And 99 times out of a hundred I will show you an anti-Semite. It's the same thing, right? So we always had this understanding that it was, it was part of our, of who we were, that that, that this was a, a, a good and safe place to be Jewish. And that was not just a, like an intellectual exercise, right? Prior to that attack on the synagogue in Manchester last year, there had not been an attack of that kind in this country. It just didn't happen. Compare that to what happens in Belgium or the Netherlands or Germany or France or Sweden or Denmark, where anti-Semitic incidents are a regular and commonplace, a tragically common daily occurrence, desecrations of graveyards, stoning of buses with school children. Every synagogue and every Jewish school now seems to have to need a security guard permanently stationed there. That had not been part of our story until very, very recently. And I don't think that that is something that you address with cracking down on, on how people talk about the, the Gaza War. I think there is a much deeper cultural problem, which is about people understanding what it means to be British. And part of understanding what it means to be British is that you are a, a welcoming country for religious minorities and that we're all individuals. And that if, you know, whatever was going on in the mind of the guy who attacked the, the synagogue, you know, whatever he had seen about what was happening in Gaza that bothered him so much, it wasn't the fault of the people in that synagogue. Right? And that, that recapturing, that basic individualism that we're not defined by caste, we're not defined by creed, we're not defined by tribe, that we're all individuals responsible for our own behavior. That the individual is elevated above the collective. That to me is an essential part of being in the anglosphere. And that's what a bunch of children of settlers have have lost. But also children of families who have been here forever have lost.

- You've mentioned the Anglosphere. I was going to come on to it. You and I are supporters of the K of Kanza. Will you explain it to our, to our listeners?

- So Kazaki is the idea of a closer trading and defense and diplomatic relationship between Canada, Australian, New Zealand, and the UK buttress also by a measure of free movement of labor that, that a single visa would allow you to take a job in any of the others subject to not having a criminal record and so on. And I think it's an idea whose time is coming. It's very difficult to argue against the, one of the arguments against it might be, well why Canuck? Why not the five i, why not the us? Well, I think the US would not join. I think the US under its current administration would plainly exclude itself from any such arrangement. But I think it would be in the interests of the US to have that kind of buttress around it, of friendly countries who are working more closely together,

- Which have the advantage of speaking the same language, having much the same legal system, having the same literature, having the same monarch, all four

- Of them, all of those things. The same parliamentary system, but also it more kind of in a more utilitarian and, and you know, reductionist way, having interoperable regulatory systems. If you are trained as a doctor, a lawyer, an architect, whatever, in any of these countries, you didn't just follow the same curriculum as the people in the others you probably learnt from the same place, you know, and, and got the, the, the same qualifications. So, so you can work with a, with, with automatic ease in the others, in, in a way that is extraordinary among sovereign countries. I mean, and you used to be able to, as a matter of legal right, until Britain joined the EEC, which meant that we had to start putting up these barriers. So I think, I think all of those things will boost economic growth and, and boost security. We we're, we're able to do things in common because it is unthinkable that we'd ever be on different sides in a major dispute. And that allows you a lot of economies of scale.

- You mentioned the European economic community. We are coming up for the 10th anniversary of Brexit, and you've also mentioned regulations. And in the 10 years since Brexit, the EU has imposed no fewer than 13,000 regulations on European businesses. Obviously there's going to be a, a, a huge debate on the 10th anniversary in, in June. What do you think have been the advantages and disadvantages of, of Brexit?

- The advantages have almost all been negative in the sense that we've avoided those regulations and some of those regulations are huge. We have avoided the massive regulation of AI that the EU has decreed. They really do not like the idea of an independent internet. We've avoided some really Luddite rules on gene editing and, and biotech, and we've avoided this massive boondoggle of the post COVID recovery fund, which they've all had to pay into. So, so there, there are a lot of things that w would have been worse. I'm afraid that it's always quite difficult to make a positive case out of those things, but that doesn't stop it being any, any less true. Having said that, I will not hide from you, Andrew, that I am disappointed by our slowness in seizing the opportunities, both in terms of domestic deregulation and in terms of foreign trade and engagement. Domestic de I mean, one of the things we could have done outside the EU is we could have got outta some of these ridiculous petty fogging green rules instead of which we left and then did more interventionist and expensive things ourselves than we had to do as an a EU member. We've been very, very slow to sign the kinds of trade deals that we could have done if we had been a little bit more ambitious. It's, it's amazing how we've allowed ourselves to be governed by, you know, the agricultural sector that employs I think North 0.2% of our workforce. I mean, it's, it is quite extraordinary food importing country with a relatively efficient farming sector. We should not have made that the block to, to all of these lucrative deals that we could have had in services and so on. But we did, we, it is partly because we have a, a civil service, what our American friends would call an administrative state that is anti Brexit and wants to hold the door open to some kind of reentry and Stama is offering them that. But let's be honest, it's also a, a safest culture at home. Our muscles atrophied during those 50 years of membership and a lot of the powers that we took back, we passed them immediately to our own regulators who are enormously risk averse, often quite woke and not particularly interested in enterprise or growth. So the day, for example, that we opted out of the eus banking and financial services re regulations, which was a huge opportunity, the very first use of, of the powers that we had when we'd opted out on the very first day was to increase the statutory minimum reserves that a bank had to hold more than they, than, than it had been when we were in the eu. So thi this is what I mean by by disappointment and some of that happened under the conservatives, but it's become a lot worse under labor.

- What history book or biography are you reading at the moment, Dan?

- I am reading a biography of Edward Gray by a man called Ott

- Otta, which Thomas Otter. Yeah. Yes. He's a very, very, very good historian. I'm so pleased you're reading that writer. Yeah, he's a brilliant writer and a really story. Really good. Yeah, it's an excellent, also

- Such a, so many, I mean, one thinks of gray just as the chap who you know on, who's watched the First World War broke up, but I mean, fascinating life No good at, at, at school, no, good at, at Baal. Then suddenly discovers he's really good at politics in his early twenties, you know, has this Unconsummated mar I mean, just all sorts of fascinating things and a great glimpse into the last, the last sunlit moment of the liberal party before they began their century long decline.

- Yeah, he he really was, he was a giant, wasn't he? I just went past his house, funny enough in Queen Anne's gate earlier today. Oh, I'm glad that you enjoying that book. I, I loved it too. I think, I think I reviewed it for The Spectator or something. That's a very good book to have chosen. And what about your, what if your counterfactual,

- Well this is an interesting one. So last time we spoke I gave you a couple of really big ones. You know, what, what if we, we'd passed the home rule Bill and Ireland had evolved peacefully towards kind of dominion status or what, what if, if Pitt had managed to get his redress of American grievances in and there'd been no revolution. Here's a really wonkish one, but it really is, it really was on a, on a knife edge in 1694, there was an attempt by the country opposition to pass what they call the place bill, which would have prevented crown officers from sitting in parliament. Extraordinary to think that 80 years before the American Revolution, we almost adopted a full separation of power. It was defeated by two votes in the house of laws having sail through the House of comics. And what would've been the implications if we had done that? Well, our government would've developed extremely differently. There would've been a a, a US style executive, but it would've been a hereditary monarchy. And it's, it's very interesting to speculate about whether that means we might have become a republic. Would the, would there have been agitation or, you know, might the, might we have followed the general European trend towards, you know, enlightened despotism or would it have been that we'd have had actually, we'd have moved much more quickly to a modern system of, of a very symbolic and powerless monarch and, you know, an executive kind of created separately. I, I don't know, but I I I think the, the reason I mention it is what would've been the impact on the debating in North America, right. If the, I mean question for you is the, is the biographer of George iii, Andrew, I mean, if, if, if the king by then had been essentially symbolic and it had been impossible to mask the reality, which is that this was really a quarrel with Parliament, would the revolution have played out differently? I think it's a fascinating question. It

- Really is, isn't it? And it's also 1694, did you say? Mm, that's the, that's the year I think that the Bank of England was set up correct. And that, that that move under Queen Anne, that, that towards the tiptoeing towards the concept of the constitutional monarchy. I mean, she was the last person in 1708 to veto a bill passed by the Commons and Lords. So yes, you are on the, i i

- It is a fascinating, and by, by the way, another, I'm sure other people have said it. 'cause the other book I've, I've enjoyed very much is, is George Hours' Rage of Party, which covers all of this period. But, but I'm be unoriginal to say that 'cause everyone's praising it at the moment. So I but it, I mean, it it is, it is a fascinating time as you see, you know, parliament becoming more powerful. And the, the reason I think it's of interest, you know, this being Stanford and Hoover and, and, and, and to, to our American friends who are listening, can we now admit that the US revolution, which I think I would've supported, I I would've been on the Wiggin patriot side as, as I think probably most people in England were maybe not in the British Isles as a whole, but in, in England, can we nonetheless admit that it was based on a qan level conspiracy theory? I mean, something so absurd when we look at it in retrospect, namely the idea that that that dim and dutiful monarch George III was somehow scheming to share a medieval type autocracy, I mean,

- And a Catholic one, a Catholic one as well, that's,

- This was widely believed on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1760s and seventies. It was one of the most extraordinary things. And of course it didn't happen, right? The, the, the, the, the, the trend in, in Great Britain as in the US was towards more freedom, more rule of law, more democracy. I mean, of course it was 'cause they were starting from the same place. Interesting to me now that actually the more unconstrained monarchy is in the White House, right? The, the, the, the, the more powerful executive, I mean yeah, George II could not have started a war without parliamentary approval in the way that Donald Trump does.

- Well, he certainly couldn't have imposed tariffs without the support of, of Parliament any more than the, than the Constitution allows him to in the United States. Fascinating. Yes, I like that one. I know that was a very good what if, thank you Dan. Dan Hannon, the new director, as our scoop points out the new director of the Institute for Economic Affairs. Good luck in your new job, and thank you so much for coming on. Secrets of Statecraft.

- Thank you very much, Andrew. Always a pleasure.

- My next guest on Secrets of Statecraft is Catherine Osler, the author of The Renoir Girls, A Hidden History of Art War Under a Betrayal.

- This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we generate and promote ideas advancing freedom. For more information about our work, to hear more of our podcasts or view our video content, please visit hoover.org.