Gavin Esler author of 'How Britain Ends' on Brexit, federalism and the House of Lords.

journalist author tv presenter who fronted bbc's news night for 11 years among many other news and current affairs programs also stood as a candidate for change uk the 2019 european parliament gavin i was reading um a review of your book in the new european it was an extremely good review i'm i'm sure you've seen it yourself and the guy who wrote it said the band may be playing but it's playing on the deck of the titanic we were holed below the waterline a long time ago it's just that the tipping point has now been reached welcome to world wide wednesday from the heart of liverpool city region uh gavin a place that some people here believe effectively decay declared udi from england many many moons ago um now you say while the uk can survive irish scottish welsh and maybe even scouse nationalism you argue it won't survive english nationalism why is this well it's first of all it's very good to be here and it was very good to listen to josh i think i i i learned a lot from from that um well my starting point was that something very remarkable happened in 2015 we know in 2014 scotland had a referendum on independence and it failed uh but in 2015 the four constituent parts of the united kingdom voted for different parties different big parties so the main party in scotland is the snp in 2015 and still is in northern ireland it was democratic unions party in wales it was the labour party in england it was the conservative party because england's 84 percent of the population formed the government and also 3.8 million people that year who voted ukip got one mp douglas carswell who then quit and i thought this is a funny country isn't it i mean at what sense what is my sense of this being a united kingdom how united are we when these four different parts have gone in slightly different ways and i started looking in particular english nationalism which was clearly growing and was pop partly behind the brexit vote and i've started to think what are the political consequences of this and not only that the united kingdom in various names and various guises has been going since 1603 and it was reinvented every hundred years since so in 1707 the union of parliaments 1801 when ireland joined 1921 when ireland left we're now in 2021 uh it's due if it's worth it another re-evaluation and reinvention because they come every hundred years usually as a result of crises and this one i think is a very slow-moving crisis but it is a crisis nevertheless and if you ask historians like linda cauley and the chap who wrote that book under that review of me is james hawes who who's written a great book on the history of england they see the history of england as being of britain rather as being countries brought together by three things originally protestantism then empire and then war and those three things have either faded or we hope with war receded completely so what is it that holds us together apart from sentiment and nostalgia for the past and i started to ask that question in in scotland uh where uh i started thinking about the book and really in 2019 where when i said you know uh boris johnson says he's a one nation conservative people said yeah and the one nation is england it's not it's not uk uh and they said other things as well which i won't repeat polite company in northern ireland uh i was there in october 2019 three three days at the imagine belfast festival and three days after uh boris johnson threw essentially a hundred years of irish unionism uh northern ireland unionism into the irish sea um and i i was with with a group of people there of different political views but a couple of those from a unionist background said to me you know mrs thatcher always said northern ireland is as british as finchley boris johnson's made it as british as france now you can agree or disagree with these sentiments but they were uh held very closely and then finally to to get to the point of your question i looked at how the conservative party had changed and i would say i don't use this word in his uh same sentence as boris johnson very often but his genius in co-opting the brexit stroke ukip vote to the conservative party but when he did so he speaks for england on that because scotland and northern ireland voted a different way and even some uh you know there's a cambridge um uh geographer called danny dorling who's done some research in wales and suggests that those people many of them who've gone to wales or retired in wales from england voted overwhelmingly to leave whereas those who were originally welsh or had been there for a longer time didn't so it's a mixed pattern but the tectonic plates of our union are moving apart and because england is the biggest player it's england that's the most important one to think about i think and um churchill himself you say in the book uh suggested in 1912 and 13 that england might turn into several great self-governing regions how likely you think that that idea will um be revived and brought forward you think well i know some people are thinking about it i've talked to a few people who have been in government and and are interested in it and just just look at it from from the perspective of england i live in england i love love living in england it is one of the most centralized countries in europe france is decentralized greatly uh other countries germany and so on have decentralized and they've changed their structure helped along by one or two events of the last century obviously um but they changed their structure to give more and more power to local areas scotland has happened in scotland they've got a local parliament it's happened in northern ireland this happened in wales these are i'm not saying they're all perfect but all three have a kind of proportional representation so if you get 43 of the vote you get 43 percent of the seats whereas in in the uk context you get 43 vote you get a landslide for for the current government uh and and the big cities liverpool is just one of the best examples where people feel a strong sense of identity where they're perfectly happy and competent to decide what's most important for liverpool or birmingham or andy burnham in manchester uh i'm not saying it's easy i'm not and i'm not suggesting you know let's have a wessex the kingdom of wessex and mercia and all that back but it's not beyond the wit of english people who've written constitutions for 70 different countries around the world but i haven't written one for ourselves to get together and think who should be in charge of what and why should it be so centralized in westminster and just just just one one final example on that do you remember when boris johnson got coveted and suddenly we woke up one morning and dominic robb was the prime minister at least he was doing the the powers that well why i mean in america when trump was sick we knew there was a vice president we knew what the constitution says if merkel had got sick we know what their basic law says but suddenly we found and i was listening to these very bright people on radio 4 in the today program in the morning being asked so um what are his paris well we don't exactly know i mean is he prime minister well he's not prime minister but i mean could he could he um declare a nuclear strike on somebody well he certainly wouldn't do that but could he do it so why have we never thought of that why have we never thought through as other countries have done and why do we remain politically in the kind of era of the horse and cart with all the social media that josh has been talking about changing our politics um and all i really wanted to do was a kind of wake-up call to say maybe we should think about this and is anybody thinking about it as far as you know among our our political establishment it's been a topic that's kind of been touched on a little bit over the past 40 50 years but it's it's not exactly a main vote winner is it no it's not and and the trouble is constitutional reform as we saw with pr mc in the past when you vote for it people weren't really that interested it's not a thing that immediately grabs people but what wouldn't immediately grab people is this if scotland does vote for independence at some point perhaps within the next decade where would that leave england um i mean just just to be brutal about it scotland's 32 of the landmass of the united kingdom and 60 of the the of the sea areas under the usual international law that would go the the the faslane nuclear weapons would be sailing sailing down and presumably parking off the mersey i mean i have no idea where they would go and now there's anybody else uh what would happen about the border because there would be a border and we we often see it as the scots would have a problem they couldn't afford it and all that all of which i get but it would be a real shock for england to find that a scotland leaving the uk joining the eu would have a a border somewhere between you know carlisle and glasgow i suppose what what would that look like so i just thought that both for nationalists scotland and elsewhere what what do you mean by being independent in an interdependent world but for those who would like the union to stay together just think about it it's not entirely in your hands and you know george osborne conservative former chancellor wrote a couple of months ago that boris johnson risks becoming the worst prime minister in history worse than lord north who lost the american colonies and the only way to stop scotland becoming independent is not letting them vote on it which sounds a bit like defeatism to me i mean it's not really a great case for for the union so that that's really what inspired the book we've got a couple of people who've sent in questions and i know we've got a number of people listening in wales and i'm also i'm particularly interested in where you think wales is going in all this will the welsh in inverted commerce stick with the english close inverted commas as it were or will nationalism grow there in a similar way to scotland well it already has uh you know yes comrade uh saying they've had much more interest i'm not quite sure of the figures so there's certainly that from those uh like plycomre and others who who would like to uh pushed for his independence i think that would have problems but any kind of breakup or change would would have problems i i was particularly interested in what mark drakeford the the first minister of wales said you know labour party guy in favor of the union he says the union as it's currently constructed is broken and he says and he puts it more articulately that i'm going to do you know that westminster only doesn't really consult us just doesn't treat us right and and that is unbalancing now if you're getting that from people of a unionist disposition in wales you can imagine what people for various reasons who are already in favor of welsh independence uh are stirred up by it and and boris johnson is probably the the worst prime minister possible for this time because he doesn't travel very well you know you know when he went when he when he was his government was elected he decided to have an away day in sunderland to show how together england really is and it was slightly spoiled by sargent jaber tweeting it's great to be here in north england what can i say what can you say oh yeah i mean if we do move towards a more federalist idea a more federalist structure john major was quoted in in one of the interviews i think ahead you give it and he said that if the answer is more politicians then you've got the question wrong that may be correct and so i'd be quite in favor of fewer politicians but the ones i'd be prepared to see go would be those in the house of lords all 800 and whatever it is of them in the you know the biggest debating chamber outside communist china uh i just think we could we could actually i mean look there's so many good things about this country we have got brilliant people more nobel prize winners attached to one university cambridge then all of china and japan put together we solve problems we invent things and yet we have got a really cock-handed ludicrous system uh where i think we're the only country in europe that has got an upper chamber we are the only country in europe that's got an upper chamber which is composed of people some of whom are appointed some of whom are hereditary uh and some of them are very good by the way but it's still a nutty system to have uh and and it it requires root and branch reform and the other thing i would say is that we've already federalized sort of by stealth you know there are four chief medical officers in the united kingdom one for northern ireland one for scotland one for wales and one for england um the nhs is quite locally devolved it's a bit more complicated in england because it was reformed i used the word loosely by andrew lansley a few years ago and their reforms weren't all that good so we we've we've got a structure that we could build on if we had the whit to kind of basically codify it and say who should do what i mean in terms of moving back towards the federalist idea do you think the likes of andy burnham and people like that who've got a high profile nationally not just regionally um would buy into some of the thoughts that you've been uh talking about today i i think so i mean i i really strongly believe that uh you know uh local as many decisions as possible should be taken by local people who who identify with liverpool or greater manchester or or whatever it just seems to work and it works in other other places i mean switzerland has got has got four different languages uh the the biggest ones german about 70 of the population so kind of like very different in many other ways but it's got a split kind of like the biggest part of our country is england with a scotland next wales next northern ireland smallest and they've just they just have a confederal system where they have a central government but most other things are devolved we could do that we're not we're not stupid and it would perhaps get round of some of these these problems now i'm not i don't think i've got all the answers but i think we probably can agree that the system as it is now is not really working very well you argue that britishness doesn't mean the same thing saying scotland as wales and wales as it does in england can you just expand a little bit on that for us well well you know i'm i'm scottish and british but i don't confuse the two there's a there's uh whereas quite often and for obvious reasons since i keep saying england's the biggest part uh in england it's confused one of my great favorite quotes is that great british imperialist cecil rhodes who said ask any man what he'd rather be and round the world 99 say they'd rather be english so he's a british imperialist but he's talking about england and and that's that's simply a confusion that people in people in in belfast who think they're british are very clear they're not the same things people in wales who think they're british again don't think of it as the same thing i don't it's not it's not something to get offended by but it's just something to be noted that that the the two are not quite the same and so therefore when we've got a british government in london which seems to speak only for england it starts to put a wedge between us unfortunately yes um just go into some of the comments now we've got uh judith which is kind of an observation really but i think she'd be interested to uh to hear your response with the city of london functions as an independent tory city-state as in medieval times and the rest of the country except the countries where they live are let me just scroll down a bit are of no significance at all that's her feeling from from from wherever she's based i'm not sure whether she's around here but it's it's it's certainly true that i mean london's a great city i think it's the greatest city in europe it's it's fantastic uh but it does have uh the economic power and it also has the political power and it's certainly true i don't think it's quite true of all londoners because you know sadiq khan the mayor of london is a member of the labour party there's a very strong labor vote uh in london but it is true that uh sometimes when and it's true of journalists as well when they get outside the m25 they get a bit lost and probably you know would be as familiar with uh well more familiar with washington than the world for example um and that that causes problems too because as one of the things is to understand what we mean by we because we mean we in different places we can mean that we are british or we can mean we're english or we can we mean we're from lancashire whatever it is uh we've got different different levels of identity one of the many problems with brexit is it's forced us to think slightly differently about that especially since scotland and northern ireland were taken out of of the eu against their will so it's never been northern ireland's another good example the great thing about the good friday agreement which is now in a degree of difficulty is that if you are of a unionist background in northern ireland you've still got the border it's on the map if you have a nationalist background in northern ireland yeah it's on the map but it doesn't actually matter it was a brilliant brilliant way of bringing people together and now that's in jeopardy because of carelessness uh or in incompetence actually from the johnson government we've had another comment here thanks for the answer though gavin from louise elman who's one of our former mps liverpool riverside mp for many years on regionalism she says the 1997 labor government moved forward on regionalism through regional development agencies but was not serious about devolving further powers more recently the various city deals bring devolution but fragmentation and that kind of granular information is important in all this isn't this we can't just have a vision we've got to get something that works properly i agree i agree with louise eltman and entirely there and and part of it is there is a delusion in our country that we've sort of muddled through you know that you don't take decisions you don't write write down on a one piece of paper who does what and call it the constitution we don't do that we just sort of muddle through we don't muddle through in 1921 ireland left the united kingdom as a result of a really horrific war and not just world war one but as a result of the irish war of independence we can't just muddle through it's not good enough and and louis almost is right labor came in with a number of ideas but i i was asking somebody who's a top civil servant why we never really got proportional representation for example which would help with some of these problems in my view and he said the number 179 and i said i don't know what you mean he said that was the size of the labor majority in 1997 and it was very difficult for tony blair to do something which to most people was quite boring which to many labour mps would be very annoying and say you know that ladder up which we've just ascended after all these years we're going to kick it away and do something else so that is a big problem yes we've had a number of comments about pr one from stephen hesketh and the mp saying lin barnes uh sorry um which is why we have to get pr as a top priority i would agree with that i would if you know rather than the two things that i would like to see which would i think help keep us together would be to get have pr so that people feel represented including parties that i don't particularly like i think that's fine i mean there may have to be a cut off i'm not saying any system is is brilliant but the systems for edinburgh belfast and wales and cardiff are better than the system for what for westminster and the other thing is i really think that the whole question of the house of lords is everybody knows it's a nonsense i mean there is no there is no uh there is no great support for it the only reason it's still there is inertia and also if the if the people in the house of lords wanted to this is this is not being nasty about any individuals because i know some really hard working peers but if they if they want a club in london well they should pay for it frankly i would i would sell um peerages just as long as it's open put them on the open market if somebody wants to call themselves lord just don't let them be involved in making laws for this country but people have been i mean i can remember when i was a kid in the 70s people saying that and it just seems to be one of these things that floats in and out of the political landscape without anyone you know kind of grab holes off doesn't it you know yeah i know i know but anyway there we are the the point the point is this that we are at a kind of turning point now what with brexit and also covid which should have in some senses has pulled us together in the sense that we're all pleased about vaccinations and so on most of us are anyway um but you have seen that not only the three scotland wales and northern ireland have gone slightly different ways at different speeds but andy burnham liverpool as well people are saying wait a minute what westminster was decided isn't quite right for us and i think that's a healthy thing to say but we should have more of it and that they should have a way of expressing it josh you want to join us back now we we we've got a couple of minutes left i know there are other matters that are of concern to many people in this virtual room um your response to anything particularly that gavin was saying um josh you're definitely speaking to something that i've i've realized there's quite a lot of like independent people talking about is that our system as it functions like very broadly doesn't really work anymore i mean i think that almost all of our institutions if not all of them have been shown basically since the brexit vote to be useless um they they have in my mind at least failed in their primary objective the press no longer holds the government to account the judiciary seems to be weirdly sometimes like willing to take some cases some not and doesn't really seem we don't really know what to do with it it's become very politicized uh parliament doesn't move quickly enough and doesn't address the issues of the day and doesn't really legislate in a way that benefits more than just the the donors of the ruling party and i think we're reaching a point where we need to have and i've been talking about it with people called the big review of britain where we just like literally just go through everything and be like right okay we the system we have has got us very far it's brought us to one of the most prosperous safest most diverse countries in the world that's really awesome we've done loads of amazing things with it but that doesn't mean it's it's wonderful and needs to sort of just be allowed to continue on and i think there's there's an increasing um yeah an increasing push for or there needs to be an increasing push for some sort of constitutional convention and i know you've sort of talked about this idea with a few people um but how do you think we get there because i i understand why that goes once we actually start it but i'm really i've been trying to figure out how we get to that point like when boris johnson turns around and says yeah sure go for it yeah well no we we have to have global britain first whatever that is as if we haven't been global for 400 years and as if i what what really amuses me is is uh that we're supposed to be global britain having irritated ireland most of the eu russia china the biden administration and every country that we don't give aid to as much as before um so i'm not suggesting it's go it's going to be easy but um equally i i think there is look that that one of the one of the things i quote in the book is there's a thing called the edelman a sort of pr and market research company at the united states every year does a trust survey about what do people trust in 28 oecd countries so the rich countries in the world the united kingdom which is you know as i said before and as you just said josh is such a great country in so many ways comes 27 out of 28 countries in terms of trust for government the media uh ngos and big business 27th 28th and thank goodness for putin's russia because he's at the bottom now that is not not the country that any of us want to live in we want a we want to live in a country where we do trust our institutions uh and and i i'm not sure what the road map is to get there but the fir what i suggest is one recognize the problem as everybody on this call does but i'm not sure it quite gets through to the government and then repair any of those institutions that we still think are valuable of course the nhs and others and then reconstruct some sense of why we should be together now that's kind of easy to say and very very difficult to do but it's not impossible and if we don't do it the alternative is just to continue to slide the way we're doing i mean i think that the problem that a lot of people don't maybe i don't know not don't realize but if if things keep getting worse like if if if wealth inequality keeps growing if more and more people feel disenfranchised and obviously we're not in a good place actually i've heard you quote that statistic before it's it's quite horrifying but i mean if we don't if we don't do something about this we risk opening ourselves up to one or both of the parties being just subsumed or our entire like political system being taken over by the extremists who will do something and that's the thing that concerns me most and it's it's like it's not that i'm more concerned about like the left or the right they're both terrifying to me in that i do not want the extremes of either one of those parties to get into par because the system collapsed and they went they can go well look the system has collapsed it's failed like let's just throw it all out and start again and that's like that that's that's my biggest concern is that either one of those extremes gets hold of par and and just kind of kind of goes crazy because people are like well how can it be worse than the alternative like we have to fix the problem now well we we've had a lot of people mentioning a progressive alliance a lot a lot of people that have basically the last six or seven messages uh i've been mentioning that so we'll see if that happens look it's time to write up to wrap up now uh josh is the author josh hamilton is the author of brexit the establishment civil war and gov is gavin how britain ends is published by head of zeus many thanks to both of you for joining us today thanks for all your interactions as well everybody it's really really appreciated fascinating discussion and great books and a big thank you to you josh and new gavin for joining us here today my name is mick ord great to meet you all today i've got a couple of podcasts out one is the baltic triangle podcast which is on business and culture and that's a livable based podcast and i've got another one in a couple of months in a couple of weeks time rather with ian prowse a local musician it's called misadventures in music and that'll be a lot ruder than the baltic triangle podcast but i hope you both listen to it gavin and josh thanks for joining us on world wide wednesday

Channel: WorldWide Wednesday

Views: 65,723

Rating: 4.8332262 out of 5

Keywords: English nationalism, Scouse independence, Scouse not English, Brexit and Liverpool, Brexit and Northern Ireland, Brexit Scottish independence, Abolish the House of Lords, Britain needs a constitution, four nations of the UK, federal Britain, against the peerage, Brexit chaos, criticism of Brexit, anti-Brexit discussion

Id: LrQn9JzQ-Ok

Length: 29min 17sec (1757 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021