In Conversation with The Rt Hon Jacob Rees-Mogg

well welcome welcome welcome good evening everybody good evening thanks for joining us my name's mark littlewood i'm at the director general at the institute of economic affairs come in come in make yourself at home pull up a chair um wonderful to have you all with us thank you for joining us for the fifth in our series of in conversation webinars in these events i sit down with a politician a thought leader a newsmaker to discuss their philosophy their views of what's happening in the world and what they make of everything just at the moment and usually and certainly in this case it's someone who i think ticks the boxes of being a politician and a thought leader and a news maker but before i introduce our superb guest this evening let me first warn you there are divisions in the uh house of commons tonight so it's likely over the next hour that our guests will disappear for a couple of minutes um i will do my very best to entertain you in those interregnums but it shouldn't disrupt the flow of it too badly um on a few housekeeping points we are broadcasting this on two different platforms on the zoom side and on the youtube side if you're with us on the zoom side of the platform and you want to put a question to our speaker please put that in the q and a box not in the chat box i say this every time and there's always somebody who doesn't listen but your questions need to go in the q a box if you want to share links thoughts comments but not questions for our speaker by all means put those in the chat or you've got any technical difficulties put those in the chat box but put your questions in the queue and a box at the bottom of the zoom um screen and because we're a very democratic organization even if you haven't asked a question you can go to the q a box and you can give a thumbs up you can tick you can click on the ones you like and give them a thumbs up and the ones with the most thumbs up rise to the top of the list and those are most likely the ones that i will put to our uh our guest this evening so now that's out of the way it's time for me to introduce tonight's fantastic guest and the dear friend of the ias jacob rees-mogg jacob is the conservative mp for northeast somerset where he was first elected in the 2010 general election of course he currently serves as the leader of the house of commons and lord president of the council a position he has held since july 2019 he was one of the most prominent eurosceptic voices in the run-up to the 2016 eu referendum uh in january 2018 as a backbencher he was of course the chairman of the european research group of mps and he's also worked in the finance industry having co-founded somerset capital management he's one of the most popular politicians in the country so much so that he has a grassroots online conservative campaign who call themselves morgue mentum supporting him hoping one day that he rises to be the leader of the conservative party and prime minister the campaign's garnered a huge amount of support online and one fan even went so far as to get the words the word momentum tattooed on his chest i understand i'm afraid i although i admire jacob a great deal i haven't quite gone that far but i would describe him as a national treasure he helped the ia in 2018 through the launch of the richard kosch breakthrough prize but looked at free market solutions to our housing crisis and then in july 2019 he had iea fellow vladimir toroko co-authored the ia publication raising the roof and we'll make sure there's a link to that in both the youtube and the zoom chat that's all from me before welcoming jacob good evening good evening jacob thank you for joining us good evening what a pleasure to join the iaea which as you know is an organization i hold in the highest regard well thank you thank you um we're going to have a few questions from me which may be interrupted a bit by the divisions um and brexit was the first thing jacob that i wanted to talk with you about uh this is something that's taken up thousands if not uh have you already got a division already it's it's coming that they're just announcing the results of the last one ah okay okay but far away i'll just far away begin answering so uh brexit finally achieved not just after the referendum two subsequent general elections has now finally happened the deal's gone through the bells there you go you're out already oh you i reckon he is the leader of the house got the division failed to go just to avoid the question that's mine it's like being interviewed by piers morgan very similar very similar so i'm going to ask jacob about whether brexit has uh actually delivered anything well i guess you couldn't have expected it to have delivered anything uh enormous just yet but i'm going to put to him that i think we need a plan to actually unwind a good number of the european union laws that we've inherited and at the moment i haven't seen a great deal of that if you've got questions about what you would like to see the uk government do with the newfound powers now we have taken back control please put them in the chat and i will put them to jacob as well i'm hoping i've got time before he returns for a short commercial break as well if you follow the ia london youtube channel you will you may have noticed that this week we've put up a whole new series of videos called econ 101 presented by our fantastic head of education steve davis introducing people to the basic concepts in economics it starts with scarcity it covers the concepts of trade-offs the concept of opportunity costs if you want a crash course that could certainly get you a decent grade at economics a level and probably get you a good way through an undergraduate degree i highly highly recommend that you check those out uh on our youtube channel there'll be a whole series more coming out soon that's by no means the end of these short explainer videos if you're uh homeschooling your kids for god knows how much longer and they've got an interest in economics even if it isn't strictly on the curriculum i think these are pretty accessible um uh videos for you to uh for you to share with them but also if you want your own crash course in basic economic concepts well it's there it's free to view it's been general generously sponsored by the monterey trust that's enabled us to put them all together get them out there and we'll be publicizing them across a whole range of social media sites uh over the coming weeks um while i'm in advertising mode before jacob gets back from the parliamentary uh division he's voting in he told me his previous vote was to vote against a caroline lucas amendment so i didn't want to stand in his way for that um but before he gets back a few other advertisements in terms of our upcoming events and broadcast i'll be back at this time uh tomorrow night with our weekly uh live with littlewood show i've got another great range of guests we'll be considering the government's response to coronavirus we'll be looking at intergenerational inequity and we'll be considering oxfam's intervention in the debate about equality inequality and the state of the world look at that one of the most efficient voters known to man fortunately his office is very very close to the division as well welcome back jacob i hope you've um managed to collect your thoughts what i was going to ask you about was uh brexit was a constitutional decision uh the refrain of the campaign at the the at the time was take back control well we have now taken back control but what are we actually going to do with this control that we have taken back my hope was that we would liberalize or at least get rid of some of the rules in the european union that we didn't like the smell of or didn't think quite fit the british economy um certainly those on the euro skeptic side have been arguing for years that there's a regulatory and legal environment that been imposed upon us from brussels was not optimal for the uk so whilst i appreciate that the government's been going through the handling of a national crisis for recent months and has had its mind occupied on other things can you give me any reasons to be cheerful about brexit i mean i understand that we've reduced the taxation on women's sanitary products but i was hoping for rather more than this for the freedom that i was going to get back from the eu put my mind to rest jake well i'll do my best um first of all i think you're wrong to be disappointed by the removal of vat on women's sanctuary products because the advantage of leaving the eu is not that there is one big regulation affecting all of our lives that we want to get rid of but thousands of thousands of regulations that make people's lives a little bit more difficult there many of them at the margin of what governments can do they are a burden on people's backs and getting rid of them will take time because partly they've got to be found and then they've got to be legislated for to remove them but it's where the iaea can really contribute that indeed we all can contribute businesses can contribute by saying look this regulation i i've had one businessman got in touch with him say he has to keep a uh a ladder uh in his place of work and he has to check once a month that the ladder is still working and tick a box to say that he has tested the ladder which is all of two rungs or something to get books from a high shelf it's these sorts of petty fogging annoying details that we need to work through but more importantly than that there are the big things we can do that are going to make us competitive over the next generation and what am i talking about well things like gene editing and this isn't um genetic modification it's a sort of sister of that and it means that we can have a more efficient agricultural sector without bringing up phantoms of um frankenstein foods and things like that and that's a bill that's going to come through we can look at how we manage data indeed the government is looking at how it manages data and the regulations around data which are currently extraordinarily onerous and detailed we have at the moment going through parliament a financial services bill which is going to go back to principle based regulation rather than the detailed line-by-line approach regulation the eu has had and i think that what our medicines agency has done with the vaccine is symbolically important as to the new approach to regulating it's not that we're going to be the wild west it's not that we're going to have no protections for people that we're going to put lead back in the paint on children's toys or any of those sorts of things and so we're going to be intelligent about our regulation and we're going to recognize the point of regulation is to lead to a good outcome not the regulation in itself it's a means to an end rather than end in itself whereas the eu the regulations are very much an end in themselves and if you tick the boxes that's fine but if you haven't however sensible it is to speed things up you're not allowed to do it so it's intelligent regulation it's detailed regulation and i'd say to every member of the iea and everybody listening to this call if there is one regulation that you know about that you think is unbelievably minor but is a general inconvenience write in let me know let somebody know so that it can feed into the machine okay jacob you've cheered me up a bit but i want to i want to press you a little harder on this because i'm sure and also put in the put in the chat or in the q a if there's a particular regulation that you can think of um i had no doubt that you would be uh eagle-eyed looking for such opportunities i wanted you to reassure me though that the government is highly attuned to this does the government have a means of tackling the entire acqui which the the european body of law that we've transcribed into uk law i was entirely in favor of that happening just to provide business certainty you didn't want there to be a regulatory twilight zone on on the day we left but i've got a suggestion for you why doesn't the government say um we will begin by pulling up the records on everything that we voted against but that was imposed upon us by qualified majority voting uh the british government didn't want these rules the eu enforced them upon us surely to god that list would be the first things to scrap so i've got one for you the agency and part-time workers directed prime minister cameron did everything he could to try and stop it his efforts unfortunately were in vain and the united kingdom had imposed upon it a law that its government didn't want i'm not aware that the position of the conservative party has changed since then wouldn't that be a sensible at least starting point to look through all of the stuff that was imposed upon us against the wishes of the uk government um it's a good idea but it's a limited idea because we were remarkably poor about voting against things on qualified majority voting i'm afraid to say and you you know this that um there was a great deal of horse trading that went on whilst we were members of the european union and voting against something was seen as being slightly bad manners and we always behaved in my mind rather in too gentlemanly of fashion and didn't necessarily always um put our cases firmly in as robustly as we should have done indeed more cynical people than uh i am suggest that we made a lot of song and dance for our domestic audience against a regulation that secretly in brussels we weren't entirely opposed to so there aren't many qualified majority negative votes to work off but what i really encourage you with is we're already doing it i mean the financial services bill was introduced into parliament in november and is getting us back to principle-based regulation that's really important because the competitiveness of the city of london is fundamental but we need to have a financial services system that the us and singapore and so on recognize as being robust we don't want to be a center of criminality or anything of that kind we want good intelligent regulation that is pro-competitive and that's what the financial services bill is is doing and we couldn't have done had we still be members of the eu so it's already happening it's underway but there's a great deal more to do i was very strong years ago it's about to be an elevate so i'll tell you this now okay um that i was visiting india as an investment manager and the regulations on companies that had just been reformed in india were from the uk companies act of the 1930s it took about 60 years to update it this process of disengagement is a very long one because in denning's phrase the eu came up the estuary into the river you know and on it went and we're now pumping that out with the flood water but it takes time there goes the belly i will be back to your next question excellent excellent jacob has to go that i mean the the wheels of parliamentary democracy never cease um take up his challenge there if you have i'm i'm very interested in collating examples of petty regulations that we could scrap that we're no longer bound by uh and i'm sure jacob's right that there's a um a minimal effect often the ladder regulation is not going to supercharge the british economy if we scrap it but if there are hundreds of thousands of such ladder regulations perhaps we could get rid of them i think i'm right in saying that um building in the uk is often held up because mutes are a protected species because in the eu as a whole they're relatively rare even though they're basically a pest in large parts of england um so if you've got any ideas for regulations that you think we could easily scrap now we're out of the eu please put those in the in the q a or if you're on the youtube side um on the uh uh on the chat and i'll try and collate those together and put some of those to jacob i'm also interested in if anybody's got an idea about how we could systematically approach this challenge this opportunity uh this particular problem and um uh you know should we go through and look at the qmv things jacob says there aren't very many of them should we which i'll put to him um when he comes back sunset claws the entire echoey community so to actually say all of the regulations will fall on the 1st of january 2030 for sake of argument unless we have specifically renewed them and it might be we want to renew a good percentage of them that's absolutely fine no problem with renewing them but perhaps we should change the assumption to a default that we actually um at the moment the default is we'll keep the lot perhaps the default should be that we would get rid of the lot if you've got um questions or suggestions uh along those lines then um please put them in the chat or if you want me to put them specifically to jacob put them in the q a section on zoom i'll try and keep my eye on the youtube chat as well i was doing a few adverts earlier for econ 101 and live with littlewood which is at six o'clock tomorrow night so make sure you follow those if you're watching us on the um youtube side and you're not yet a subscriber please hit subscribe and hit the notification bell that way you'll be informed when more video that comment comes in the wheels of democracy turn so swiftly jacob i see you're back but you're on mute at the moment i i think you need to unmute your great so i've asked our uh i've asked our guests to come up with these um suggestions for deregulation or even are there any sort of systematic ways we could go about it okay maybe my qmv thing doesn't bring that many to the surface might there be a case for sunset closing the aqui we put it back onto the civil service and you politicians that will assume these regulations fall unless you specifically renew them rather than the default being that they stay unless somebody specifically repeals them a bit of that's been done a bit of the legislation last year was done with sunset clauses either in things that allowed for the transition or in new directives that were coming from the eu in the transition period to allow them to to lapse i think sunsetting is not a bad parliamentary practice my only concern about it is that you often find that when the sunset is reached people decide that some reason the regulation is essential nonetheless but at least it makes people think about it and the issue with excess regulation is thinking about whether you really need it and you do have a phase one complication and that is that lobbyists who lobby very hard against a regulation before it comes in then not be very hard to keep it uh when it suggested it should be removed so if you take the chemical industry and the reach regulations you will recall that when reach was proposed the chemical industry made a great song and dance about it it says very expensive et cetera et cetera once it was in they said well now we spent a lot of money adopting it um and we quite like that we've got a protected position and we don't want new competitors so now we've got to keep it so the political imperative changes once a regulation is in which means we need the counter lobbying we need the ia saying you have to deregulate to make your economy more effective you have to deregulate intelligently so i get back to the medicines agencies activity because that was using regulation effectively and swiftly for a good outcome rather than being high bound by process that we don't want to get into the business of throwing up deregulatory scare stories that will play into the hands of our political opponents well i agree with that i mean it's a real challenge here and i uh i will do my very best to make sure that the ia rises to that challenge because in effect i mean you're quite right that where a business might be against a particular regulation but when the law has obliged them to i don't know install uh uh install an elevator or change the way their front door is or build a new fire escape it's almost a matter of indifference whether the regulations uh repealed and you're right it might be a barrier to entry so the the technique is really that the deregulatory argument has to represent if you like the unborn it's the it's the unborn businesses who are potentially held back and who don't get a say around the table by definition because they're not yet in business it's the unseen cost of it and those who've already complied or found a way around it or know how to operate gdpr or whatever it might be well you know they're more relaxed about it yeah that's absolutely right and um certain types of regulation are definitely anti-competitive if you take the insurance issue and the regulatory capital for insurers there are two ways of calculating the regulatory capital that you need one is the default way and the other is a company specific way well if you're a new business you have to do it the default way because you haven't got any evidence to show why you can do the company specific way but no company that is established and is able to do it the company's specific way would ever come up with higher capital requirements than the default way obviously and so they only use it if it's lower which gives incumbents an inbuilt advantage over a new entrant and that is fundamentally anti-competitive and is one of the things that we really need to be tackling is um and financial services as you mentioned in your introduction is where i worked before and i set up with my colleagues somerset health management in 2007. with the regulations as they were by the time i got into government in 2019 i simply don't think we would have been able to afford to set it up that the the deadweight cost of regulation would have benefited incumbents against new challengers and that's where we've got to have intelligent regulation um let me before i come to our our guest in the chat there's a little slave of questions already about brexit let me ask you a little about lockdown and covid and the pandemic and and how the government's uh dealing with it uh i think it was just an hour or two ago we we reached the grim milestone that a hundred thousand brits have now died having tested positive for uh covid uh obviously the death rate is still very very high um but the vaccination rate does give us some considerable cause for hope right we're rolling this out where uh i wouldn't go as far as they were the fastest in the world at it but we're pretty much in the champions league places in terms of rolling it out can you give me some hope jacob that that the end is in sight i know you can't the government can't give us an exact date but i've been yearning and hoping at least for a signpost that you know once we've got the most vulnerable groups one to four vaccinated we'd expect the the death rate to fall dramatically we think we could start opening up clubs and clubs and restaurants and businesses again and associated to that when we have finally got through this what i'm most worried about and hayek always warned about this the state grabs a lot of controls at the time of crisis quite possibly necessarily so at a time of war or a pandemic but it is not very good at handing them back when that emergency recedes so we still have national identity cards for six years after the second world war for sake of argument will the entire series of measures that we brought in to uh institute lockdown and fight this ghastly virus be annulled completely repealed when we're out of the other side well i think the last wartime emergency regulations didn't go until the end of the 1960s you're absolutely right governments want they get part liked hang on to it the good news is the structure of the emergency powers is such that they all have sunset clauses and they have to be repeated by parliament every six months and so we will have to have another vote by the 31st of march to extend them um all the individual regulations have their own sunset clauses as well or renewal timelines but it's the whole law expires once every six months unless renewed so yes it's absolutely essential that we give the um freedoms back to british people that the powers the state has taken are quite extraordinary and if you and i had discussed this 18 months ago the idea that you weren't allowed to visit somebody else's home that you were effectively going to be held in house arrest for 18 months with limited periods for exercise and work only if it could be deemed essential wouldn't have occurred to any of us so nobody thought the state would take that power yet it had to i think the really good news here is that the prime minister wants to give us our freedoms back as much as if not more than anybody i'm completely convinced that anyone in his position would have made the same decisions um however freedom loving you are and he certainly is and i certainly am faced with the massive evidence again it's what you were doing or in favor of what you were doing and the likelihood that lockdowns um lower the peak of any uh infection and then with the vaccine coming which i think legitimized further lockdowns very strongly i think anybody would have done the same as to the hope well once the top four tears have been vaccinated that covers um the age groups and the categories that have been responsible for 88 of the deaths so logic tells you that as that begins to click in the argument for locking down becomes less strong there are some caveats to that that the vaccine takes a fortnight to click in so you're not saying well we've done all of these and now we can let everybody go immediately because the last people who vaccinated haven't got any uh defense at that point there's then the argument about the 60 year olds who don't die but fill up the hospitals and do you need to do them but it's a complete change in the tone of the argument isn't it you're saying can we open up today or tomorrow rather than we clearly can't cope and open up because a thousand people are dying every day so i can't give you a specific date i can't even indicate a date but i can say that the tone of the argument changes and changes fundamentally jacob you were mentioning to me uh just before we went live on air about how this has very much changed parliament's workings unfortunately and i think you'll take the view that it's changed from for the worse uh let me begin though with a criticism that you sometimes hear mattered uh by those who sit in the conservative interest but on the back benches uh about parliamentary scrutiny of the of the government's actions here you've mentioned that there will be this renewal every six months uh i think i'm right in saying though that the the renewal is kind of take it or leave it basis you couldn't say well let's uh mps couldn't vote to keep restrictions a b and c but to scrap or amend restrictions d e and f um i appreciate the parliament has not been able to meet in its normal fashion but as the leader of the house of commons do you think that really has been satisfactory scrutiny and uh parliamentary oversight and department of power over this or has it perhaps by necessity being a matter of executive fiat um well all the powers that are exercised exercised under acts department um uh either under the 84 public health act or under the more recent covet act so parliament either this one or its predecessor voted for these powers to be available to government and then they come through as statutory instruments but all stat instruments are on a take it or leave it basis they're very difficult to amend um because they're setting out the use of powers and there are some occasions when you think you might be able to amend them but mostly if you change one bit you render the stats to instrument ineffective and therefore to say this is your choices is rational um however scrutiny is so much less good with a remote chamber with people zooming in and speaking for a couple of minutes um first of all it's more long-winded and as you will know the best parliamentary questions are the shortest questions but it seems that when people are sitting at home their questions become quite lengthy debates are no longer debates there are a succession of speeches because you can't have interventions when you're remote you haven't necessarily heard the opening of the debate or the speaker before you you're just clicking in for your own speech um the pressure on ministers is much reduced the pressure on ministers is the spontaneous question that you weren't expecting when you've got a call list you know who's standing up you have pretty good idea of what the questions will be and the other pressure on ministers is in a debate getting interventions and you you see how ministers rise or not to the occasion when they are presenting a new bill or an important piece of policy all that's gone and that makes scrutiny much less effective and currently we've got whispers hall shut and we haven't got sitting fridays so um i think this is a real loss and it's tremendously important that we get all this back partly because i'm a pompous constitutionalist but partly because i actually think scrutiny makes for better government that sometimes ministers sit there and think good heavens he's got a point and we want to do something about it and presumably it's also eroded the more informal interactions a back bench mp bending the air of a relevant minister as you go through the division lobbies or bumping into each other in port culley's house or whatever it may be that informal dialogue um uh a member of the house of lords was saying to me how the how he hadn't realized until now how important and what it meant to detect the mood of the hat you know that's now completely impossible people are just clicking emotes on a zoom call all of that's gone as well hasn't it yes and the mood of the house is fundamental actually to understanding how to speak in the house and you're absolutely right i mean i i am one of pretty patel's greatest admirers because when i was back venture and she was um in the dwp responsible for disability benefits i had a constituent who had been caught up by some ridiculous mistake a lady who had no legs and was told that she wasn't uh entitled disability living alliance and pretty i spoke to her for two minutes in the division lobby and she sorted it out within 24 hours and that's the bit that you just didn't get at all you're back to correspondence which is much slower um doesn't necessarily get the encapsulate the argument so crisply you know it's it's a real loss for our constituents that those informal um elements don't don't take place and so tell me this should we should we worry at all because i'm i probably do bow to you in terms of my pomposity about the constitution but i'm fairly pompous about the the constitution should we worry at all that there'll be a body of opinion who uh uh on either side of the house of commons it would actually quite like this to continue you know why can't we have electronic voting um you know we actually it's a lot easier i'd like to spend more time in my constituency rather than in london uh why can't i just vote by hitting a button on my keyboard right you know let's not go back and might not even be exacerbated um when you actually finally have to move out of the palace of westminster for repairs at some point might a lot of these important um constitutional processes or informal uh communications on behalf of constituents start to fall by the wayside are they under threat or when lockdown ends is it going to snap back to how it was well i think there's more of an issue in the house of lords than in the house of commons because the house of lords doesn't have any time limit on the changes that it's made and its age demographic is such that being able to stay at home and contribute is perhaps more helpful for peers than it is for members of commons we put a time limit on all our changes and so they have to be renewed and there will come a point at which they won't be renewed and i um made a commitment to backbenchers when they accepted these limitations that if people wanted things to continue later on the house would have to adopt them specifically but what i'd never wanted to do was sort of cheat people into modernization that they didn't want because all we've done has been done by consensus pretty much everyone has accepted it all the way along there have been some arguments on the sidelines of course but most of it's been accepted and the reason for that was the promise that it would end and go back to normal if after that people want to bring back bits of it well i may not be in favor of it but the house would be entitled to do that but we won't allow it to stay by default okay that's reassuring story uh we've got questions absolutely piling up and to uh remind people on the zoom side of the chat put your questions in the q a box and whether you've asked a question or not you can vote up the questions that you wish me to ask and um so this is going to be a bit of a machine gun of questions i think jacob i might try and batch them together if it's within my competence but i'm pretty much going to take them um in in order they may be a mix of brexit lockdown parliamentary protocol but the one at the top of the list is from our good friend uh tim condon um and he says brexit has already delivered and delivered big is it not true that the uk is far ahead of the rest of europe on the vaccination front only because the government is independent and sovereign and can act quickly and efficiently to order the vaccines and so to protect our national interests you touched on this jacob but i must admit i'm unclear about um whether it was precisely a legal matter of being out of the european union that allowed us to do this or whether and it might be this is equally important it was more of a cultural matter that we wouldn't have been utterly hide bound had we been in the eu but the nature of being in the eu would have been that medical professionals would have been comparing notes and all agreeing we should move at the same pace was it actually a matter of pure legal sovereignty or is it more of a kind of culture shift but we just sort of now realize that there are things that we can do which perhaps technically we could have done as a member of the eu well first of all tonight i'm very fast to have a um question from tim condon who knows more about everything than i know about anything and is one of the wisest people in the united kingdom um but i think you put your nail finger on the nail or hit the nail on the head that it was because we were out the culturally we felt strong enough not to go with it rather than a legal obligation that other countries could have gone on their own but not a single one of them did we were the only one that decided to do it and you may remember um the ramonas shrieks with horror when we said we weren't going to join the european scheme said we were lunatics that we were putting uh ideology ahead of good sense and being a part of the bigger club and so on and so forth and it turned out to be unquestionably the right decision to have made because we were able to be swifter fleet of foot and our own regulators who um had been the mainstay of the european medicines agency were able to act for the uk exclusively and so i think that worked extremely well but i think you're right to point out that it was cultural rather than specifically legal but i think it's interesting to note that we're the only country that did it and we're the only country that's leaving and it seems unlikely that that is purely coincidence there's another one here a bit a bit about not so much about the eu but i guess about uh global institutions this is from an anonymous attendee you can be anonymous in the questions if you wish to be uh this anonymous attendee asked jacob what are mr rees-mogg's views and thoughts on the united nations and how should free marketeers view these large global governance institutions i think i'm right i didn't look in detail that the i believe it was the un that um that gave a platform to north korea criticizing australia's human rights record and you know and which i picked up because andrew neal said it was quite beyond parody uh was it the in in terms of where the uk sits in uh geopolitics jacob is it just the eu that you had a particular problem with or do you think there are a range of other global institutions perhaps the un perhaps the world health organization part of the un that you are similarly dissatisfied with for the same sort of reasons that you were dissatisfied with our membership of the eu well i don't believe in world government i don't think it's practical or beneficial on the other hand i think having a forum where all the nations of the world can discuss things is something that we need to have um but it doesn't enforce rules upon us that anything we do in relation to the un is voluntary we don't have to take any notice of their reports we don't have to follow um decisions by the general assembly there is a developing body of international law around the authority of the security council but even that is unclear and uncertain as to whether that is authoritative international law or is merely advisory so i'm i'm quite happy with international organizations that don't insist on telling us what to do and don't have a court that insists that it's a superior court and doesn't really want to create a single state so within that context recognizing that the un is inevitably an imperfect organization it was nonetheless quite useful during the cold war to have somewhere where the russians and the americans could have a conversation and had a structure to have that conversation it's probably quite useful that that structure remains for countries like north korea and iran to have somewhere where they can have conversations that don't attract attention because they're part of the routine of life okay um sticking on the sort of global governance and brexit theme of course one of the the heralded benefits of leaving the eu was our ability to strike our own trade deals and uh your colleague and another good friend of the institute of economic affairs elizabeth trust has been working at great speed to so do but of course the the real the biggie the real one that we want having got the trade deal with the uh you with the european union itself out of the way is the united states of america recently seen a change of president of course blair fortner asks what can the united kingdom do to encourage a rapid trade deal with the united states given the anti-trade signals coming out of our new administration i'm assuming blair is an american rather than still referring to our conservative government as the new administration i'm sure he means the biden administration uh what more can we do here this was one of the the great benefits again i think a good number on the remain side a certain faction on the remain side were highly skeptical that any of this would happen a good amount of that has happened but much much more to do right and the the us uk trade deal really would be the keystone in the arch well um first of all you're right praise liz trust who's done absolutely fantastic work to get 63 trade deals um in in a few months covering i think 64 of our total trade her target is 80 uh within three years so she's very close to that um i think the um a trade deal oddly will be easier with president biden than it would have been with donald trump um why do i say that well first of all president biden acts more normally in terms of an international context so that you slightly know who and what you're negotiating with secondly um joe biden's chlorinated chicken tastes delicious whereas donald trump's chlorinated chicken is fatal and what i mean by that is that the political um temperature at home was not exactly enthusiastic about a deal with donald trump in a way that it will be much more sympathetic to a deal with um with president biden and president biden is a good international uh operator and that's what he's interested in very interesting interview he gave to david frost that his son wilfred broadcast recently which he gave in 1987 when he first traveled presidency saying that he thought as president his main responsibility was foreign affairs and i think we will find that president biden is somebody who wants to improve relations globally and trade will be part of that on the other hand i'm not sure it is the biggest prize the biggest prize may be the trans-pacific partnership and the um opportunities there look really positive yeah that's very interesting i just want to come out with it but actually potentially i i've put this to some of the people at the department for international trade you you might almost render a u.s uk trade deal moot if both the us and the uk joined the trans-pacific partnership you might have a deal on top that cleared up a few things but most of the heavy lifting would be done if the us rejoined and we joined right that's absolutely right i'm not sure that the new administration has made its policy on the trans-pacific partnership clear yet but obviously the obama administration was very positive about it when it was trump who pulled out of it but in terms of the you mentioned the change in kind of political temperature perhaps um because uh donald trump was such a controversial president uh divided opinion in a way that perhaps joe biden doesn't divide opinion quite so much um but what obligations do you think there are domestically here in britain to um fight back about some of the the bad science you might say there was a brilliant article in the times on monday i highly recommend people to read it about uh scientific um unscientific gobbledygook getting in the way of a u.s trade deal i should confess i was the author of the article in the times on monday so i do have a vested interest in promoting it but chlorinated chicken okay i'm not that bothered if american chicken doesn't hit our markets but oftentimes i think that arguments are put forward whether it's chlorinated chicken hormone treated uh jeremy corbyn as leader of the labour party uh was saying that there were potentially maggots in american orange juice uh these scare stories at home make liz trust his ability to strike a trade deal extremely difficult if we've already erected 101 impossible barriers to uh producers abroad especially if those barriers seem to be based on the flimsiest or even completely inaccurate science it was a brilliant article in the times and should be compulsory reading for everybody on this call um i think it being president biden makes these things much less hysterical that somehow donald trump's chlorinated chicken was really particularly orange and dangerous and people feel that president biden is a more of unclear figure and safer in some sense but i think you say something really important and it was something rotten about the european union or membership european union was that the eu used spurious science as a protectionist measure and we need to move away from that we we need to recognize that countries like united states like australia are extremely careful about the standards of food production they have for their own populations that you think how litigious the united states is food producers in the us have a really strong incentive to ensure that their standards are the highest in the world and i i think we must be really cautious about using spurious science to advance protectionism protectionism is not in the interest of either the protected or the person the protection is directed against and just to underscore that uh you were mentioning earlier um uh jacob that we shouldn't obsess about the process of regulations we should be focused on the outcome that those regulations bring about if you were to look at food um safety and quality the usa according to the economists intelligence unit which i should assume is a fairly objective measure comes out fourth in the world uh the uk 17th so i mean american food seems to be pretty safe at least on that metric and i'm not aware of endless cases of um people who visit america and in a normal year about five million brits visit america in a given year i've never come across any who said i won't eat a steak or any of your poultry while i'm here um or trigger or orange juice so i i hope that the government will try and dispel some of these myths which i often think of put around for protectionist reasons um on another constitutional point this is nearer to home and you and i may have a different view on this well i certainly have a different view to that of the government roberto white says uh hi jacob thank you for joining us tonight given the increasing persistence at which nicolas sturgeon and the snp are pushing for a referendum on scottish independence in the near future what argument can you give that presents the strongest case for the union well um let's start with the response to the coronavirus the um 8.6 billion pounds of uk taxpayers money the nearly 800 000 jobs in scotland that have been supported because of the strength of the united kingdom let's start with that let's then um go on to the vaccine roll out the supply vaccines to scotland is very significantly higher than the supply of vaccines to the republic of ireland why is that because one is a member of the united kingdom and the other isn't um then look at our shared history that we are one country one people that we are all interrelated we have done great things as a nation together and scotland has been an instrumental part of that i think that the united kingdom as an entity as a world player in the way that scotland on its own or even england on its own simply wouldn't be i think the opportunities for people living in scotland employment business opportunities are much greater than they would otherwise be um that it is a really powerful union that has worked to the interests of both sides not really just since 1707 but since um james the first um was translated from being james vi if you see what i mean and that that that has worked and it's hugely beneficial and perhaps it's most beneficial in time of crisis i also add that leaving the eu is fundamental because actually as long as we were in the eu and increasingly important decisions were taken in brussels rather than london it was very frustrating for scottish ministers to have to come to westminster to say will you ask at the fisheries council for us to have a few more fish happy fish i expect they wanted but um to get more fish they needed to lobby london to lobby brussels and they thought well on earth then we go directly now that's gone now it's under our control and trade likewise trade will be determined by by the uk as a whole and scotland's influence will increase accordingly so i think brexit is very good for the union uh but very interesting this but let me um until you mentioned uh james the first the terminology you were speaking in was not enormously different although it was applied to a different union to the terminology used by remainers you know this block and the common market we've all been stronger together there's you know great mutual benefit in all being part of the same club and my real question though is the at the moment that the government is steadfastly against there being a second referendum what would you say to people in scotland let's imagine a hypothetical voter who voted who was a passionate eu remainer and last time round the only way that they could have been sure of keeping scotland in the european union would have been to have voted to keep scotland in the united kingdom if you like the that's been flipped now there's no guarantee at all an independent scotland would be admitted into the eu but if your overarching constitutional objective as a scot was to be a member of the european union you now face an incredibly uh totally different constitutional picture isn't that exactly the sort of thing that should trigger a second referendum the constitutional uh backdrop has changed markedly since 2014 and then you and boris johnson and unionists can go and put that augment to the scottish people and nicolas sturgeon can put her argument but the circumstances have changed such that a a re-run surely is now justified is it not i don't think that's right but bear in mind that dave cameron already made his promise of a referendum and so it was already on the cards that there would be a referendum on our membership the scottish people knew that and they knew that uh if we voted to leave that is what would happen and if you are this mythical scotsman who wishes more than anything else more than an independent scotland to um rejoin the eu you can't be certain that an independent scotland would be allowed to so you can't get what you can't get what you want necessarily even by a second referendum so you're asking for something that doesn't answer your problem and a very good number of snp voters have the logic behind them to realize that leaving one union to join a less democratic more authoritarian more direct one doesn't make any sense at all there's a fantastic cartoon in the telegraph today which everybody should see um on nicola sturgeon's version of freedom and it's like napoleon's version of democracy okay let me move on to um a coronavirus question if i might uh jacob rather than all of the constitutional and global governance and trade matters gerald gourier i hope i pronounced your surname correctly gerald my apologies if i've strangled it makes a point uh well i guess this is sort of still in the rule of law context jacobios the latest virus guidance issued by the government says quote you should follow this guidance immediately this is the law unquote gerald goes on to say it isn't the law the guidance is materially different from and more restrictive than the regulations it reports to explain this has been the case since march of last year and in spite of repeated criticisms from lord sampson and many others as well as confusion among the public and the police the cabinet office continues to publish unenforceable guidance masquerading as enforceable law why um well first of all can i say hello to joel gourier whose brother is i think the most distinguished rupert gorier who is an old friend of mine uh from my school days and i hope you will say hello to your brother for me and send him my very best wishes um the law is the law and guidance is guidance that's absolutely clear what the cabinet office tries to do is to set up the law in straightforward terms that people will understand but we all have the right if we're fine for doing something we shouldn't uh to get caught over it and to find out whether the ticket issued by the policeman is fair and just so i think the the cabinet office is in its way trying to be helpful rather than to make the law up is setting out what it understands the law to be on the other hand if you disagree with it and you say well this is only guidance and actually the law says i'm allowed to do something else but you know you can go to court in the end and decide it and we do notice that when the police have issued fines that have then been reported in the daily mail and seem to be um quite difficult uh they've been rescinded and that i think is encouraging i think it shows that most of what's going on in this country is by consent run by coercion and you would accept that there is um there is a substantial distinction that people uh could act foolishly but still legally or foolishly with regard to their own risks that they're taking and i mean i've got some sympathy for the government here i i wouldn't have imposed i think quite as strict to lockdown as the government has but uh also when you impose a lockdown with restrictions essentially trying to stop human intermingling you're bound to get gray areas i mean i think there was one cake you could you could walk around a golf course but you couldn't play golf on a golf course because sports were bad but it's almost inevitable that you get those sort of anomalies isn't it when you're trying to influence all human interaction in the country that's absolutely right the easiest point of the lockdown was the first lockdown when the government basically said go home stay at home and don't meet anybody ever as soon as any relaxation came in you came up with anomalies as to what could or couldn't be done and this has been a sort of sport for um crossword puzzle solvers to try and work out um if i like going on a pogo stick along the high street and i meet a fellow pogo stick player who drops a ball he's carrying and i catch it am i playing an illegal sport or is it permitted and there are endless wonderful things of this kind that you can think of but frankly most people have a pretty good idea of what allowed what isn't when they're pushing the rules a bit and when they think well i know what the law is but i'll go along with the letter of it but not the spirit i think people know what they're doing i think i have rather more faith in british people than um some newspapers do you seem to think every possible scenario should be spelled out to them in glorious technicolor great well i'm gonna i'm going to write on the clock i'm going to jacob if i might finish by taking three questions together which in a rather contorted way i'm going to say are all linked they're only slightly linked but they're all i guess about our economic recovery post covid and lockdown let's hope the vaccination program is rolled out very quickly lockdown can come to an end sooner rather than later at some point i don't know the spring uh we're we're approaching something back to normal uh but there will be a number of areas that won't be anything like normal even if we get our liberties back uh namely the state of the public finances right i mean we're going to run a budget deficit this year of around about terms 400 billion pounds possibly worse if tax receipts don't recover this is on top of what's already been a sizable national debt i've made the observation that it seems now we've got into the pattern by which governments run small deficits in the good times and colossal deficits in the bad times and that's not sustainable over the long run um so we're gonna have to find some way of bouncing back i'm not a hawk about the 400 billion over spend this year it should probably be amortized like a war debt over a generation but it does have to be dealt with if we want to pay it back over 20 years that's 20 billion a year assuming zero interest rates so let me take a few cases here that sort of world together about how we bounce back not just how we get the economy back to where it was in february 2020 that's the starting point but how in brexit britain we keep zooming forward so john may ask the very simple question in the long term how do we fund the cost of covit um and uh some of us at the iaea you'd be unsurprised to know are a bit worried that we're going to impose too we'll see rishi sunak impose taxes on one thing or another that might actually jeopardize an economic recovery andy meyer who uh for full disclosure is the ceo at the institute of economic affairs he asks this goes a bit to the regulation point but could be the sort of thing that could suit the charge economy will the government introduce the innovation principle i don't know if you've come across this jacob this is an idea of matt ridley who sits in the house of lords but um having left the european union whilst we should retain the precautionary principle and ask ourselves whether new things coming on are dangerous we should complement it in our regulatory mindset with an innovation principle and ask whether the new laws or regulations that we might bring in are liable to stifle innovation and if they are liable to stifle innovation that would be a very very good reason for not proceeding with the legislation it would balance off against the precautionary principle would you favor that approach and last i guess most open-endedly so certainly and certainly by no means least david landsman asks how do you make the case for free markets to those of your constituents or others who aren't convinced um well okay some very interesting questions this has to be funded the 400 million i agree with your suggestion that it should be treated as very long-term debt um has to be funded by economic growth and we need to make sure that we take decisions that allow the economy to grow rather than putting great burdens on it and that has a taxation implication and it also has a regulatory implication um i i'm always very i'm very often reminded of the party political broadcast the conservatives had in 1979 where there was a group of runners and one had a union jack on him and gradually more and more weights were put on the british runner who went from being first to being last and the conservatives were there to take the weights off so that we could compete in this global race and that's really how we we fund all this it's by economic efficiency it's by economic growth it is indeed by innovating and do you put an innovation principle into law or does that just add a bureaucracy that stops anything happening and allows the courts to decide whether it's innovative or not i don't know but do you make sure that you have government policy that favors innovation yes of course you do it's absolutely essential and it's in terms of regulation it's doing things like free ports which are government policy it's the reform of planning law which is government policy um it's allowing people to keep the fruits of their labor and the manifesto committed to not increasing income tax national insurance or vat these are really important commitments that we made in the 2019 election and free markets well when you go to supermarket who do you want to buy your goods for you do you want to do it yourself or do you want jeremy corbyn to decide what goes into your supermarket basket that's the best i can do off the cuff you or jeremy corbyn very very good uh so i think that's a very very persuasive argument jacob but you need to compare free markets to political control political control isn't neutral it's somebody else exercising control over your life and not particularly successfully with uh slightly overrun my time i see leanne maiden in the chat has got a question for me my question for mark is what do you think the score will be tonight between southampton and arsenal um a very very difficult question that one but having beaten them one nil at the weekend in the cup maybe we can get three points in the league as well jacob it's always a pleasure to speak to you thank you for being so eredi honest uh across a whole range of different topics um thanks for being such a good friend to the ia we will rise to your challenge of continuing to uh bombard you and your fellow cabinet ministers and conservative mps and mps of all strike with ideas for how we can bounce back make the most of brexit and hopefully before too long uh put this coronavirus pandemic behind us and actually start to build the global free trading prosperous britain that we all seek and desire jacob thank you so much for your time especially as you had to vote twice uh throughout the uh throughout it really appreciate you being with us and i hope it's not too long before we can catch up in person soon jacob thank you very much uh thank you to all of you who have joined us on zoom and on uh youtube uh please as i mentioned at the start if you're watching us on youtube click the subscribe button and the notification bell that will mean that you keep up uh to speed with all of the upcoming ia content just a few that you might be interested in as i've already mentioned live with littlewood is back at 6pm tomorrow to consider the week's events and what free marketeers should make of them we have an iea book club webinar on the topic of sin taxes on tuesday the 2nd of february and the next in our series of in conversations will be with jacob's parliamentary colleague david davis mp on tuesday the 9th of february so i hope to see you at some of those events then thank you very much for joining us this evening come on southampton later on this evening enjoy the rest of your night over and out you

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Keywords: jrm, jacob rees-mogg, rees, mogg, house of commons, conservative party, north east somerset, lord president of the council, mp, member of parliament, who is jacob rees mogg, moggmentum, cant clogg the mogg, Brexit, Trump, Chlorinated chicken, Biden, CANZUK, Free trade, Liz Truss, Trade Agreement, Boris, Piers Morgan, House of Commons, Leader of the house

Id: dGOzTGUwqQ8

Length: 64min 0sec (3840 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021