Making Britain Great Again? Lessons for America from Brexit

good afternoon and welcome to this lecture I think the size of the audience is a sign of how anticipated how we anticipate listening to Professor Fergusson I am jak Citroen the director of the Institute of governmental studies and I am truly delighted to welcome Neil Ferguson to deliver the second or Kirk Underhill lecture this lecture is the signature event of the angular American Studies program which was established at the Institute of governmental studies to prove to promote scholarship and commentary on the enduring a changing relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States before introducing professor Ferguson I'd like to say a few words about Kirk Underhill and this the anglo-american Studies Program Robert Kirk undal Underhill graduated from Cal in 1928 with a degree in economics a lifelong angle file he founded the Robert Kirk clothing store in San Francisco the specializing in the important sale of British goods and with his success he founded the Anglo California Foundation and also was a generous funder of British studies both at Cal here on campus and at Stanford after his death thanks largely to Brad Barbour and Charles Stevenson trustees of the foundation and confirmed Anglo files themselves IGS received a generous bequest to establish this program at Berkeley my Barbara is here sitting in the front row and his vision and support continues to help the program thrive and I want to thank him I also want to recognize also sitting in the front here my colleague professor Terry crimes for planning not just this lecture but the ongoing series of conferences and book talks about anglo-american I'd also like to thank history professor Daniel Sargent also sitting in front he worked with Professor Ferguson when he was a doctoral student at Harvard and I know their friendship was instrumental in bringing Neal to campus so Thank You Daniel finding it co-sponsors of this event should be thanked Center for British studies the Institute of European studies the NC of International Studies in the center for rightly studies so now to turn to our speaker Neil Ferguson is really the ideal person to give this lecture he was born in Scotland received his MA and DPhil at Oxford and then it spent a great portion of his professional life in the United States holding tenured positions at New York University and at Harvard he now has moved to the west coast and is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University so welcome to the Bay Area but more than having lived studied and taught in both the United States and the United Kingdom is given deep and sustained thought to events in both these countries and particularly to the development and perhaps decline of these two empires in in his book Empire the rise and demise of the British World Order and the lessons for global power and then Colossus the rise and fall of the American Empire he explores how both of these nations must cope with the reality that they no longer are the global superpowers and they once were to review professors professor Ferguson's prodigious scholarship and commentary would leave no time for him to speak so he should follow up the brief bio on the program by going to Google and you will learn a lot more he has published 14 books on a wide range of topics he's received numerous prestigious awards for these books and several of them have been made into prize-winning television series which doubtless many of us have seen I do want to mention his latest book which is the first volume of an authorized biography of Henry Kissinger this volume one which extremely thick is called Kissinger 1923 to 1968 the idealist it is really superb and is receiving deservedly favorable reviews and he will be working on the second volume of kissinger's biography this year so I suspect will learn today not only about brexit and about its implication and yet but also a lot about its implications for the United States on a Berkeley note we on the Berkeley faculty often contemplate and sometimes yearn for our own exit from the University of California system and the office of the president so maybe and then going it on our own so maybe there's some local lessons as well we will learn after his lecture professor Fergusson will take questions from the floor and then we invite you to reception the atrium and without further ado it is my pleasure to turn things over to our speaker Neil first well thank you very much yes you took the words out of my mouth I'm trying to think what disturbing devices those might be I rather regret not having known until this morning that Bob Dylan was going to win and the Bell Prize I'm sure this must be one of those campuses where Dylan is still revered and it would have given me a much better title for my talk this afternoon named namely tangled up in red white and blue that's really the story that I want to tell and I'm going to focus on explaining as best I can what happens in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to give it its full title this year and I will leave you to draw some inferences from my analysis for the United States in this extraordinary annus mirabilis so is it annus horribilis that is 2016 up full disclosure I was actively engaged in the campaign against brexit I was a remainer I was involved with the campaign to the extent of advising then Prime Minister David Cameron on at least one of the speeches that he gave I wrote numerous articles on the subject in the Sunday Times in London and elsewhere and so I can't present my thoughts as the unbiased dispassionate observations of a scholar of of British history that would be a lie so everything that I have to say needs to be in some measure discounted because not only did I take a side but I took the losing side and there's something about defeat that leaves you scarred I hate losing the night of the 23rd 24th of June was an exceptionally unpleasant night for me and an even more unpleasant one for David Cameron so what I'm going to say is as far as I can achieve it a dispassionate but you should know which side I was on and I still are take the view but Britain has made a major mistake the full magnitude of which has not yet become clear from a story ins point of view this was our world historical event it recalled to mind some of the great schisms in modern British political history the schism over the Corn Laws that toppled Sir Robert Peel from power it brought to mind Munich 1938 it recalled the Suez Crisis of 1956 I said at the time to my old friend and Roberts an historian who took the other side who was an ardent brexit here that this might well leave the kind of enduring scars that those previous schisms in the Conservative Party had left he and I had been on the same side for much of the 1990s arguing against British membership of the single currency indeed Andrew wrote a novel the akan memorandum which amongst other things accurately predicted the result of the referendum of 2016 and in that he and I were members of an anti you repeal resistance that sprang up after a certain period of of European integration had taken place so not many people I think expected me to be on the side of remain my track record seemed to be that of a euro skeptic but I want to try and explain to you that there was a profound difference between opposing the creation of a single currency opposing other measures that were debated in the 1990s and early 2000s such as the removal of all barriers on migration within the EU the removal of even visa and passport checks under the Schengen Agreement and opposing exit from the European Union altogether to me there was a profound difference and there still is between resisting steps in the direction of federalism that seemed the bound to fail and opposing our the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU there was a difference however between the repeal of the Corn Laws Munich sewers and breads it and that difference is captured nicely by this a photograph of my Oxford near contemporary Boris Johnson the ruse of the the brexit campaign I want to argue was a profound frivolity indeed a responsibility that made it extremely hard for a serious debate to take place when politics becomes simply a brand or some set of entertainment then rational dialogue is at a discount this is the first of a number of analogies with the United States that I don't need to make explicit for historians the challenge is almost to remember that the past was not so determinate when it was the future up until about 3:00 in the morning on June the 24th the probability was that Britain would remain in the European Union on June the 10th just two weeks before that result the betting markets this is from the Betfair website had a remain on 73% and brags it on 27% and that was by no means an out lying prediction some of the leading safale gist specialists in British electoral behavior gave roughly similar odds at this time and indeed the opinion polls continued to show remain ahead I'll be it by narrowing margins right up until the day of the vote and I think part of our problem was that it was just so easy to mock the brexit campaign or perhaps I should put it differently it was so hard to take it seriously how could one take Boris Johnson seriously when his own position had been so open that on the day before he announced his decision to back brexit he wrote two separate op eds for his regular Telegraph column one arguing for remain and one arguing against it this seemed like such naked opportunism that it was hard to believe the wider public would be fooled the problem was and this problem persists that we who follow closely opinion polls or for that matter financial markets hadn't noticed the peculiarities of of 2016 2016 is the year of the improbable it was surely improbable that Leicester City would win the premiership some of you I am sure are Anglophile enough to follow soccer I wore my arsenal cufflinks especially for this occasion and if there's any crowd trouble from Liverpool fans or Manchester United fans remember we pay your benefits that is an actual song that they sing at the Emirates Stadium but the year of the improbable produced a Leicester City victory in the Premier League that nobody had predicted Iceland did better than England in the European soccer championships and of course Donald Trump became the Republican Party nominee for the presidency and in January of this year Nate Silver that guru of American elections attached a 12 percent probability to Donald Trump becoming the nominee this was and has been and may I hope it doesn't but it may continue to be the year of the improbable actually we should have known a little bit better but the polling and you can see here what had happened in the run-up to June 10th had shown that it was pretty close and indeed confusion reigned because the results of telephone polls and online polls were simply difficult to reconcile actually if you looked at the raw polling numbers which you can see in this slide here and you just have all the different individual polls plotted as blue dots it was extremely hard to be confident about indeed it would have been wildly foolish to be confident about the result on the day of the vote I had come to the conclusion it was 5050 my probabilities had gone from 0% a year before when I was asked in the summer of 2015 about Briggs that I said this is not going to happen you should never attach 0% or 100% to any political scenario as probability by January I thought 35% probability of brexit it was 40% in my view by the end of May and on the day I realized it was it was 50/50 interestingly George Osborne the Chancellor then who really had been the mastermind of the election victory of 2015 told me over the summer he knew that brexit had won the week before the vote on the basis of his sense of the mood in the country and you did have to travel around the country to get a sense of how close it was if you just stayed in London you were bound to get the wrong idea for reasons I'll come back to it was to the provinces you had to travel to get a sense of what was happening here's the result and for those of you who know this intimately forgive me but for those of you who perhaps only know who won this may be of real interest broken down by region it's a very striking result indeed not least because my country Scotland voted by very close to 2/3 to remain that was a profoundly different result from the one in England and also in Wales so when you look at these results the first thing that leaps out is the real difference between Scotland and England and Wales not notice the division in the Northern Ireland results that closely you are to the Republic border the more likely you are to favor leave to favor remain excuse me so what happened was that provincial England and Wales but not London not Scotland voted to leave and this of course can be explained in terms of the increasing polarization between Scotland and England that has been really since the 1980s in political terms that polarization had not been sufficient to lead Scotland to vote for independence in 2014 another referendum in which I played a part I'll be at a minor one another referendum but one that I was on the winning side off because I opposed Scotland's leaving the UK as vehemently as I opposed Britain's leaving the EU I'm happy to take questions on why if it's of interest but what's really striking to me is not so much Scottish at its users English ones if you look at remain voters and here I'll just draw your attention to these figures something very striking appears 79 percent of leave voters define themselves as English not British and that's important or and 66 percent as more English than British that's important because I think as my old friend Roger Scruton pointed out in a really thoughtful essay in Prospect magazine brexit is a misnomer because it's about the English not the British I also have to explain this to American audiences forgive me if it's something you already know but we're all British in fact the idea of calling it Great Britain was the idea of a Scotsman James the sixth of Scotland who inherited the English throne when Elizabeth the first died aware that the English might resent being ruled by a Scotsman he suggested that the merged Kingdom be referred to as Great Britain since Britain was one of those words that both English and and Scots could relate to so I'm British as well as Scottish I'm now a glich there's a great moment in one of those World War two prisoner of war films that you've all probably seen it's it's it's a British a black and white pierre WL and Stanley Baxter the great Scottish comedian played a a prisoner of the the Germans and there's a wonderful moment which sums it all up for me when the German guard shouts at Baxter silent English big Scottish pink but Scotland's a small country population less than five million and probably dwindling it can't really be said that it was Scotland that decided the outcome at least I think that would be misleading in fact Scotland failed to decide the outcome that's the real point it didn't matter that Scotland wanted to stay in the end the Scots were outvoted comprehensively the more important explanation for brexit has to do with differentials in turnout by age now a lot of erroneous data did the rounds in the immediate aftermath of the vote to the effect that are only thirty six percent of people aged between 18 and 24 had voted that was quite quite wrong more recent research by scholars at the London School of Economics shows that in fact it was just over 60 percent of people in that age group that turned out but notice as one goes up the age structure until one gets to the 65 and older turnout increases turnout for the 65 and older the old-age pensioners or seniors you as you would say here with 90 90% nobody foresaw this I remember heated debates about how turnout would affect the result we in the remain cam were confident that if turnout was north of 60% we would win and when the turnout number came in and it was above there we thought we were good that night I went to the Opera I liked to go to the Opera on historic night so I went to the Opera on the night the Briton crashed out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism and so I was at the English National Opera with sources close to Downing Street after the Opera we saw turnout numbers and we grew quite euphoric and began to decide on how exactly David Cameron should handle victory it's painful to reflect on history's contingencies not until results came in from the north of England particularly Sunderland the ghastly horrible reality dawn that the turnout was not really the key the key was the turnout according to age when you add percentages who voted remain to my chart you know all you really need to know about what happened so the young were indeed strongly in favor of remain by older British born children who voted voted remain and were even more shattered than I was by the result the problem was granny because the huge turnout of the older voters greatly benefited the brexit side and that chart really is the key to understanding what happened and although it seems likely to me but that Donald Trump will be defeated on November the 8th for reasons that I hardly need to dwell on do watch closely different differential in turnout by age in this election the generational conflict that is at the heart of public finance and economic policy in all developed countries in some less developed countries is the key to 21st century politics it's no longer about class or quintiles of income distribution politics is increasingly about generations and brexit revealed very clearly the inbuilt advantage that the elderly have in modern developed country democracies there are a lot of them and they don't have much else to do except politics if they choose to do it I want to try to explain now why so many older British voters voted for brexit there are other sociological dimensions to the story that I could go into there was certainly a differential by socioeconomic class the lower-class voters were more likely to vote for brexit than the upper class there was a differential by education too but I do think that age is crucial to understanding what happened and we need to understand why they voted the way they did it was not about the sovereignty of parliament that was an issue that mattered to a group of powerfully influential conservative members of parliament nobody else cared indeed the public's view of members of parliament is not that much better than the American public's view of members of Congress remember that house of cards was originally a British television series and before Frank there was Francis Urquhart no the public didn't care about this issue that matters so much to members of parliament like Bill cash economics was supposed to be the key it was central to the government's strategy indeed it was the be-all and end-all of the government strategy to argue that if Britain voted for hi Ron immerse Bosh like scenes would unfold as private-eye amusingly implied her Majesty's Treasury produced a report this is taken from that report which projected the impact of a vote to leave the EU on the UK over a two-year time frame in two scenarios a shock scenario brexit and a severe shock scenario is centrally hard brexit Britain leaves not just the EU but the single market neither of these scenarios was calculated to enthuse voters GDP would shrink by between four and six percent inflation go up unemployment would go up wages would go down house prices would go down the stock market would go down the index of sterling would go down all of these things were predicted by the Treasury and George Osborne sought to calculate on the basis of this report how much greg's it would cost each household in the country this backfired project fear as it was dubbed by the brexit campaign failed proving that it's not the economy stupid not anymore if it were the economy then surely with these projections the remain camp would have one I want to emphasize that while one can quibble about the numbers the the idea that brexit would cause an economic shock to the UK was completely correct how could it not when something between 50 and 55 percent of British trade is with the rest of the European Union as this chart shows but the interesting thing here is that the economic arguments didn't work why not well one reason is that so much of the economic recovery that had happened since the financial crisis had happened in London this chart here which is a Deutsche Bank chart shows jobs increases this is essentially a the job the new jobs added by region and as you can see whether you look at the periods of 2008 or 2010 overwhelmingly it has been in London that new jobs have been created but London voted to remain it was provincial England that voted to leave and one could hazard as Deutsche Bank's economists did the gas that brexit is explicable in these narrowly economic terms if the recovery had essentially been in London and the southeast this is a another way of calculating it looking at the contributions to gross value added then maybe the brexit votes explicable in tech in terms of median weekly earnings which is what you have here average weekly median wages plotted against the remain share of the vote that's the economic determinist line that the recovery had been so geographically concentrated that provincial England just didn't care and wasn't intimidated by project fear tempting though it is to subscribe to such economically elegant explanations I don't think that's right now it wasn't that project fear failed so much is that it didn't address the central concern of the electorate and that concern was immigration not job creation now this is a very very important story to understand and without it you can't possibly get Briggs it what I've got here are data on both immigration that's the dark line and immigration that's the light green line and then the bars give you net migration going back to the year I was born 1964 when I was born Britain was still an S exporter of people my mother's sister emigrated to Canada we very nearly stayed in Kenya where we went in 1966 and this continued to be true all the way through until the 1980s when for the first time immigration exceeded emigration in our time since the 1990s this gap has widened and notice from around the mid 2000s emigration has declined even as immigration has continued to increase you don't need to have a PhD in mathematics to understand what that means that net migration has risen to unprecedented heights in modern British history in the very recent past really since the beginning of this century now considering the centrality of migration to the brexit debate it's amazing how big the difference was and is between perception and reality to read the Daily Mail one would think that a tidal wave of poles and Lithuanians had arrived in the country rapaciously taking the jobs of honest hard-working provincial Englishmen but this is not at all the case in fact if you look at what's happened a really large proportion of the emigration that we've seen in the last decade or so is actually from outside the European Union altogether so if you exclude the small number of UK nationals who just came back more than half of immigrants in 2014 came from outside the European Union and of those non EU migrants it's very striking that a majority came from countries that had absolutely no historic connection to the UK they weren't former colonies 30% of all immigrants in 2014 came from non-european non Commonwealth countries asylum seekers who played a really large part in the YouTube part of the campaign are a trivial number of people coming into the UK in 2014 just over 25,000 people applied for asylum in the UK but those applications have very poor prospects of in fact being successful so students from abroad are far more numerous in these numbers that van then asylum seekers and notice the numbers on migration counts foreign students as if they intended to stay which of course relatively few of them do in the case of the UK the plot thickens as one drills down further into the data so of the EU immigrants and the numbers did increase after 2012 more than half were from the original core EU countries relatively fewer came from the newer East European states and if you add up the impact on population people from the East European countries who joined the EU only in 20 2004 come to only around 2% of the UK population these people are nearly all employed and there's no question that you workers in the United Kingdom pay their way and then some into public finance if you were a reader of the Daily Mail newspaper probably the most influential organ in the debate on brexit you would know none of what I have just said you wouldn't believe that opposite of what I've just said you would believe that most of the immigrants were from Eastern Europe and that they were a drain on public finances lies in politics have never been more powerful in modern times than in 2016 trying to explode these fictions was very difficult why because the official campaign for remain had opted out of this debate entirely the decision was taken not to engage on immigration but to engage only on the economy I believe this was a fundamental strategic mistake which allowed lies about immigration to become truths in the minds of voters restricting immigration to the UK makes no sense especially restricting it from the rest of the EU if you just look at the second chart here there is absolutely no evidence that the increase in the employment of people born outside the UK has affected employment of people born inside the UK in fact job creation has gone up in pretty much the same direction for both groups the recovery in Britain has been very good at creating jobs partly because productivity in Britain seems exceptionally low but maybe that's better than having a high unemployment rate arguably there would not have been a recovery without the migration that happened if you just look at the cumulation the accumulation in jobs growth going right back to 2010 you see just how important non UK workers had beaten especially in the recent past not letting these people in would have imposed a real constraint on the UK economy you start to see that it can't be about economics or if it is about economics it's about economics in Alice in Wonderland territory through the looking-glass in which everything is turned on its head and I haven't even got to the most important points about the economics that I could make it is impossible for Britain to restrict migration from the European Union without leaving the single market you can't have it both ways I don't know how many times European leaders have to say this before it will sink in to the heads of Daily Mail editors and leader writers Wolfgang Schauble made it explicitly clear in an interview with their Spiegel before referendum it was repeated by Wolfgang short by John clunker it's being said again by Angela Merkel and also along in recent weeks so the economic hit to brags it isn't just about the fact that the UK economy needs migrant workers the real problem is that if Britain does end up outside the single market at the end of what will be the longest divorce in modern political history although I suppose Brangelina might go even longer then the hit to the UK economy will be as large as projected by the UK Treasury those projections may even turn out to be underestimates if we end up with hard brexit but suppose I'm leading you down a cruller sack by emphasizing economics suppose we're missing something profound about reg Z namely that brexit is really about culture in a very nice new paper by my former colleagues at Harvard this is Englehart and Norrises new paper the argument is made that populism as a worldwide phenomenon in the US as well as in Europe it's not really about those old arguments that used to dominate politics between the economic left that believed in state management redistribution the welfare state etc and economic right that believed in free markets small state deregulation no taxation that's the old politics 1980s vintage the argument they make is that the new politics pits populism against cosmopolitan liberalism cosmopolitan liberals believe in puristic democracy tolerant multiculturalism multilateralism progressive values kale salad populism believes in anti-establishment strong leaders with the popular will nationalism traditional values and huge sodas that cultural dimension of populism it seems to me is of enormous importance in understanding why economic arguments got nowhere even when they were right if you're making an economic argument and the other side is essentially making a cultural one you are wasting your breath your projections don't matter in fact because projections are the kinds of things that people who are cosmopolitan liberals do by definition they have no traction so that the problem with the whole debate was that we weren't really on the same battleground as the proponents of brexit let me illustrate why lord Ashcroft's polling in the period after the result was extremely illuminating on this point if you dislike one of the following terms you can see how likely you were to vote for brexit multiculturalism social liberalism immigration environmentalism feminism even the internet globalization capitalism if you had a negative view of any of those things you were more likely and in the case of multiculturalism social liberalism immigration a lot more likely to vote for brexit these are the associations that I believe illuminate what happened in Britain in June and brexit here we get into very familiar territory to the United States viewer brexit had its racial and ethnic dimension look at the proportions of people of mixed race who are Asian or Muslim or Chinese Hindu back who voted for brexit down in the 30% range whereas you had substantial support for brexit amongst people identifying as Christians interesting as Jews interestingly white voters or one Sikh voters - were passed the 50% by so it's not enough to say Briggs it was a white phenomenon that wouldn't be quite true but it's certainly true to say that brexit polarized voters along ethnic and religious lines my favorite chart though is this one asked if they thought the result quote might make us a bit better off or worse off as a country but there probably isn't much in it either way no fewer then 69% of people who voted remain agreed some recent work by the LSC Research as I mentioned earlier showed that the losers on the remain side were extremely emotional in their responses to the result you may have seen some of the articles that were published about this research there was a good deal of weeping young people are prone to weep not having been brought up in the school of hard knocks like me but they cried a lot as they learnt that they were no longer going to be European citizens but that's to me less interesting than the fact that the people who voted for brexit didn't really think it would make much difference the great frivolity of this referendum seems to me to be captured in this chart they're more extremely for briggsie you were the less you fought it mattered let me tell you a story I did my homework on this I traveled around provincial Britain a lot in the weeks before the vote I was in Scotland and I could see that Scotland was going to vote to remain then I went to South Wales I expected it to be the same story after all wasn't labour Pro Europe and wasn't South Wales or labour hot lenders Central Scotland I'm sitting in a pub pub called the Prince of Wales near a town called Bridgend and I was having a pint and I was sitting next to the guy who owns the biggest liquor store in Bridgend do you know he said to me the most popular beers in my liquor store I said no I do not know the most popular beers in your liquor store Polish and Lithuanian beer by far the most popular beer flies out the store it does I said that is fascinating information you must be very strongly in favor of remain then as clearly your biggest customers the migrant workers from Eastern Europe oh no said he ain't voting for brexit I looked at him somewhat bemused he said because you see it just goes to show how much bloody money they're making off us it was at this moment that I realized that our economic arguments were not really cutting much ice this man was going to vote for brexit despite the fact that his best customers were EU migrant workers from Eastern Europe it's all about immigration said one of my friends on the way home from the pub that's what it's about that's all anybody talks about immigration South Wales as a cosmopolitan kind of place by the standards of provincial Britain Cardiff had one of the earliest mixed-race communities in the British Isles when I realized that South Wales was voting brexit I realized that we had a problem and it was after that that I revised my probabilities upwards I've just got time to offer a few concluding reflections and then we'll open it up for half an hour of discussion so the idea that brings it doesn't really matter one way or the other which is you just saw nearly 70% of brexit voters believed turns out to be wrong and if they were planning a Spanish vacation next year they should revise that to vacation in Scotland or perhaps in South Wales the impact on sterling which you can see here in this chart is approaching a 20 percent devaluation we're down from 160 to about 120 one may go further it's hard to say but that's a pretty significant devaluation by the standards of currency markets it's one of the biggest currency moves in the world this year only Argentina is bigger and you know if you're going to have a vote like this that fundamentally scares foreign investors I would wait until you didn't have a current account deficit of seven percentage points of GDP that is what you can see here the current account deficit on the eve of this vote was around 7 percent of gross domestic product a post-war record you do not need a nobel prize in economics though it would be nice to UM to realize that this is a very dangerous moment to scare foreign investors you really do need quite a lot of money to flow into the UK to fill a gap that large and we still don't know the terms of this divorce if you look at this diagram you can see the complexity of the position to leave the European Union is one thing but are you leaving the European Economic Area you're clearly outside the euro zone you're outside Shanon but what about the customs union the nature of this divorce is not yet clear in that sense brexit hasn't happened Britain is in the position of somebody who has filed for divorce but doesn't yet know the terms it's the Angelina Jolie to be in if anybody in this room has been through a divorce they'll know that at this stage you probably don't have entirely realistic ideas about how long it's going to take and how much it's going to cost it's going to cost way more than people think and it'll probably take way longer to divorce is like that and remember in this case you have more than one embitters former spouse to worry about you've got twenty seven these are the the options insofar as it's possible to compute them here's where we are fully you membership the question is where do we end up in order to simplify it let's just assume that the ability to restrict inward EU migration is politically imperative you have to have that so that's out that's out that's out you might get it here which is the so-called Continental partnership you might just get it here in the customs union and you can get it under a free trade agreement or WTO rules but you cannot get it you cannot get it inside the single market and every time a British politician claims that you can that person is lying I cannot see any state of affairs under which the EU negotiators will concede the possibility that he met that anybody could be a member of the European single market and not sign up for free movements of people what politics is a funny old game if you look at what's happened in opinion polls the Conservative Party is in an unassailable position since this Fiasco happened if there were to be a general election Theresa May would almost certainly win a landslide labour has suffered decline you Kip a suffered decline and there's not an awful lot going on further down from the vantage point of the conservative faithful as was clear the Conservative Party conference last week this has been a great success and those who complain like me were denounced by the Daily Mail as the bur Moniz and by Theresa May as rootless Cosmopolitan's citizens of the world I'm proud to be a citizen of the world and a rootless cosmopolitan and a burm owner of the Fiasco that we're witnessing but the consequences politically wonkin I think see is very attractive from the vantage point of mrs. May she now dominates British politics in a way that David Cameron never done did and is popular with the Tory provincial faithful in a way that he never was one last question will there be a domino effect will other European countries follow in Britain's way after the vote many people jump to the conclusion that other countries will be next noticing that favorable views of the European Union were hardly very resounding in France or in Greece in fact the European Union 2016 is less popular in these countries than it is in Britain but I think if you're expecting a domino effect and an unraveling of the European Union in the wake of brexit your infrared disappointment polling since June the 24th actually shows a reverse domino effect where other countries have increased their commitment to staying and decrease their commitment to leaving are according to polls in the countries that you see here post brexit votes for example in Denmark just to take one case show an increase post brexit in the percentage of people who want to stay and that I think is because continental Europeans look at what has happened in Britain and say to themselves we'd better not go there any time soon I'll leave you with a reflection about the lessons for the United States bad hair is a very good predictor of bad politics and when when populist leaders seek to exploit for their own ends that backlash against globalization cosmopolitanism that is I think the defining feature of politics in the northern hemisphere these days the skeptical voter should be very very suspicious indeed thank you very much indeed there is no time for questions half an hour to be precise and I will Lum I'll take them I don't think we have roving microphones or do we we do have a roving microphone roving mic hold would sounds like an Irish voter who's managed to so if you have a few wait for the roving mic as a gentleman right there who got his hand up pronto hmm no sorry son not you I was actually I was actually pointing just behind you did the man in the green t-shirt have a question no um there's somebody down here who who is eager to ask a question right down the front here comes the microphone sample hello thank you so much for your stimulating lecture I've got things to say that to a precise questions to ask if I may you're talking about the fact that was very difficult to take these back City is seriously intellectually speaking I generally agree with you but not all of them I may say we're as frivolous as folks our Brisbane Boris Johnson among them my own friend Lord David Owen who wrote a book called vote to leave restructuring the EU that's one point I want to make I want to ask a question about the role of ideology in brexit and you very they precisely very enlightening very stimulating nation' touched on the cultural underpinnings of this practices though but does you think generally there's an ideological factor that's it then you refer to the role of the press note of the daily men but it's not as if daily mayor has just started doing this the last two or three years it's been 20 years gotta knows how many yet everyday Europe is the responsible agent for doing this we europeans above for what's wrong in britain so there's a sort of europe pounding you're a bashing it's been a characteristic of the british press and it's reinforces an ideological view of britain as somehow different from these lowly europeans these lowly germans is the OD french types that's one fact the other thing is it's important to remember that the founder of the one the major architects the single market is a british conservative politician to him even in his own conservative party and i not a conservative i'm social democrat but the point being even though some conservative party members haven't paid much much tribute lord andrew field and he in a very interesting interview with the French researcher referred to the fact it's very difficult to talk with the British about Europe because they suffer from what they call the hunted tea syndrome they're worried about so uptight just wait to say this is a Humpty Dumpty syndrome the union is whatever they think Federation is whatever they think immigration is whatever they think thank you so much thanks to very excellent points the the consensus of the coalition let me say that formed against the European Union was made of made up of many odd bedfellows and it was certainly surprising to see David Owen in bed with Boris Johnson Nigel Lawson was in the same bed and Lawson had been the one who'd advocated Britain joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism and and I could go on them in the the problem about running the remain campaign was there were these defections of people and I include Boris Johnson illness who broadly speaking our cosmopolitan there in their Outlook who broadly speaking regard breaks it as a chance for greater openness not less but who for some reason shut their eyes to the fact that they were getting into a bed that was already being slept in by Nigel Farraj that was already being slept in by the most unpleasant elements on the political right in Britain and what did they expect to happen did they really think that they were getting the public to vote for a free-trade Britain that would have even more open borders than the Britain before the referendum this was a fantasy and they ended up taking a ride on the back of a populist beast that they had no way of controlling the second point you make about the press is completely right the direction that the populist beast went in was largely set by the Daily Mail and the mail had been moving in that direction that for at least twenty years certainly since the editorship of Paul Dacre began this was a kind of shift that occurred in the Conservative Party to away from the high factor right period when she was actually in power and when the single market was indeed a British project as you rightly say into the post 1990 Thatcher period when she grew increasingly you were skeptical and the male followed that lead the campaign against Europe waged by the tabloid press has been relentless and it's reinforced a view that ultimately only through exit could Britain redeem itself to me it's it's it's profoundly tragic because the people who think that it doesn't really matter one way or the other but who voted for brexit because they don't like immigrants will probably end up being the principal losers of the entire enterprise and that's why populism is toxic and anybody from Latin America knows this because Latin America's run this experiment more than most parts of the world but it's the people who vote for populist leaders who end up getting stiffed and that's I assure what's going to happen in the case of brexit the people who voted for Briggs it because like say Daniel Hannan they thought they could make Britain and even more open Britain than it was possible to have under Europe have already been betrayed and are realizing in the wake of Teresa Mays conference speech just how badly they've been duped Teresa Mae's done a superb but of bait-and-switch she was on the side of remain but in such a low-key way that you count in the fingers of one hand the number of speeches she made in defense of EU membership the speech at the conference last week was an extraordinary confection of you kept ideas on immigration and labor ideas and the economy betrayal ultimately of facture ISM more or less from beginning to end so yeah I think you've hit on a couple of key points defections by people who really should have known better and ultimately the malign role of the Daily Mail I keep hoping that Peter Thiel will do to the Daily Mail what he did to Gawker be the obvious next target for a massive devastating lawsuit other questions well I'll ask Daniel to take the next one since don't me here thank you very very much Neil for a terrific presentation I fear that one of the consequences of this is that Jack is going to ask me to organize our next event because you know that sets the standards to which we should aspire look I was born and raised in the United Kingdom and I'm now a US citizen and from that vantage I'm struck by the sort of legal and unconstitutional dimensions of this choice when you talk about these sort of frivolity of Britain's choice for the brexit little seems more frivolous from my vantage than the ambiguity of these of constitutional terms on which the referendum was contested it's not obviously clear how binding the referendum is and upon whom indeed those of constitutional procedures for reviewing or reconsidering the terms of the referendum are you know totally absent so I wonder whether you know what's what's going on has to do with the degeneration of Britain's unwritten sort of informal constitutional structure a circumstance that is just not replicated in any other advanced democracy I think future historians will struggle to understand why the referendum ever happened the the answers of the question is that it seemed like the only way to win the 2015 election and it was in that sense a piece of political tactical maneuvering if one talks to people like my former student Amy Gill who was a head of strategy in number 10 the key argument was if we don't do this we were going to lose and that that's how it seemed when the idea was first hatched in 2013 the prospect of an election in May 2015 was really quite alarming at that point you had people defecting to you kit from the right of the Conservative Party and you also had Labour me on the road back to power with with that Miliband so so I think one can see that the calculation that was made and then it worked because by committing to a referendum you headed off defections to you Kipp and you put dead Miliband in an impossible position was he for it was he against it he couldn't decide and it was easy to see why he couldn't decide later because of course Labour had our whole swath of voters who were in fact Pro brexit and here it turns out and this is I don't think well understood in the US that Labor's the real key to what happened it was the fact that Labour changed its leadership after its defeat to the trotskyist infiltrator Jeremy Corbyn and then embarked on a kind of laughably half-hearted campaign in support of remain that made all the difference Sunderland is not exactly a conservative safe seat it was the north it was Wales it was Labor heartlands that decided the outcome older labour voters voted brexit partly because Corbin made no effort to dissuade them partly because they probably would have even if he tried harder so I think that's a really critical and unforeseeable element in the in the story nobody at the time the referendum was devised imagined that victory in 2015 and victory that gave the Conservatives an absolute majority victory would lead to the collapse of labour and its takeover by to the trotskyists that's an amazing thing the day that Jeremy Coleman was elected in 2015 I I saw George Osborne in London and I said frivolously I wonder if there's any kind of cloud attached to this silver lining and he replied oh yes there is because our unity will now disintegrate in the absence of a credible opposition and he was right his expectations about how many people would affect who breaks it from the parliamentary party were wildly off as for cabinet defections they never thought Michael Gove would jump ship and that was really I think one of the least - easily foreseeable consequences of the labor the labor collapse but but your question was about that the constitutional aspect of the referendum and I think it's a very good one when referendums started to play a bigger part in British political life I was young I suppose a schoolboy at the time of the original referendum on EU membership which was to ratify the decision in 1975 and then again in 1979 in the referendum on Scottish devolution that was defeated a referent the referendums were drawn up very differently there was a rule for example in the Scottish 1979 referendum that insisted that a certain proportion of the electorate actually vote for the decision if that had been done if the same rubric had been applied in that the the brexit referendum it wouldn't have carried so what really will I think interest historians is the Canton is the casual way that the referendum was designed and that was based on an earlier and almost forgotten referendum our on changing the electoral system which was easily carried against any change and then the Scottish referendum Cameron having one in Scotland thought he could win again by the same methods project fear had worked in Scotland in 2014 the Scots proto's by the eve of that referendum had been persuaded to a substantial extent that the independence would cost them so that a majority of Scottish voters on the eve of the vote accepted that if they voted for independence it would cost them and it not happened in England in 2060 and it was when the polls showed that are really only a quite small minority of English voters thought it would make an economically negative impact when those polls came in that I really started to get worried as to the constitutional aftermath it's surreal this was partly supposed to be about parliamentary sovereignty then we were told the Parliament wouldn't have any say in the terms of the brexit settlement then they had to you turn when they discovered that they were they'd kind of forgotten us that with their tiny majority which they only still have they couldn't really ignore this rather ingenious move by the new star of the labor front bench Kearse Tama it's a fiasco referendums are a bad idea if anybody proposes having one here you should propose it I gather this has been occasionally suggested in California but don't go there I'm telling you what you already do this referendum in in Europe today has the quality of a game of Russian roulette with a two chamber gun because mr. Renzi in Italy is about to play this game in December so I think that the real lesson is don't do referendums unless you're Swiss and even their man in the green t-shirt now does have a question and he has the microphone yes sir thank you very much you talk professor Fergusson um I was wondering whether you foresee Scottish independence being a likely outcome of the bracket vote when Nicola Sturgeon has just announced that there will be consultation about another referendum to thunderous applause at the SNP Party conference so it's game on and at this point in time referendum fatigue and the polls that we have don't give her much encouragement to think she can win but if I'm right if the treasure is right about the costs of the divorce and if this turns out to be the big mess I think it will be then Nicola Sturgeon might pull it off it's all going to be about timing it's all going to be about how big a mess the situation looks like but I certainly don't rule it out and I'm very I feel very unbiblical to be honest having campaigned to keep Scotland in the UK in the UK in Europe if the English turn around provincial England turns around and says I feel more English than British I don't feel European at all it's suddenly a much less pleasant United Kingdom to be a part of and I certainly must confess to having felt a strong surge of Scottish nationalism after my initial disappointment at the brig's at result and I had to kind of calm myself to think about this think about us don't go on TV don't go don't do and I I still feel as if the breakup of the United Kingdom would be a worse thing than Britain's exit from the EU because then nobody would be there to control the English and that that's that's a scary thought so armed so if it comes up again I'll oppose it again no matter how big a mess breaks it is because in the end I think the more important referendum was the one in 2014 you know the EU is the thing of relatively recent invention and it has much wrong with it in fact I spent much more of my career criticizing the EU than praising it it was awkward to have to defend it as I had to this year but I ultimately felt that it was worth defending because the consequence of brexit would be so negative but I do feel more strongly about maintaining a union that dates back to 1603 and I think for that to go would signal a real unraveling of of Western civilization which Scotland after all invented let me take some other quotes I wanted the only Americans with questions cuz it's sick oh no right put your hands down if you're British you're going to be deported anyway sent back to England where you belong let me try and find an American question there well then I just have a very narrow question about one number you show that puzzled mating and it was the one on your chart that showed the breakdown of pro brexit votes of Christians Jews Sikhs yeah and then you had Hindus that are very low now I'm totally ignorant of the religious and ethnic distinctions in Indian so maybe this is a nonsense question but I just found that puzzling it was such a gap between Hindus and Sikhs residing in Britain had voted is there some reason for that's interesting or is this totally not interesting it's very interesting and surprising that these differentials emerged I think I had assumed that there would be a straightforward white and non-white split and it was it was surprising to me to find that the that the Sikh Hindu difference was so striking and I don't know whether one can explain this as a kind of a response to the increasingly organized Muslim community in Britain but that might be it and I think that if if one looks at London politics particularly you see how very well organized the Muslim communities have become in London have very importantly become in the neighbor party Sadiq Khan is a product of this world the new mayor of London and my sense is that one possible explanation for the differential differentiation between Muslim and and Hindu and Sikh voters lies there but that is a conjecture I cannot back that up with data relatively little of anything that I have seen has been written about this but it's a very interesting point further questions there's a lady with a blue shirt there right sort of in the heart yes you madam are very hard to reach by a roving mic but eager to have a female question at this stage thank you for a great lecture I've got two questions one is it possible to cancel the divorce proceedings and two when you looked at the elderly which I'm one of and you said it was that they have time I think a lot of it is about history and that um when people got the vote it was very difficult to get the vote for women and for african-americans so they appreciate the fact of going to vote and I'm from Australia and in Australia we are forced to vote compulsory voting they're the two questions just is it a possibility that it's the history of the elderly that are aware of the difficulty people have gone through to get a vote I think these are two very good questions can this divorce be called off or will they have one of those strange Hollywood remarriages that people go in for the Elizabeth Taylor option I find it hard to imagine because I think that the Teresa Mayes government is now committed to brexit to the extent that her political reputation cannot survive the divorce not happening precisely because she was in the wrong side but has been the winner of the house of cards sequence of events that you all debtless enjoyed you know the the stabbings of in the back I'm unlike anything I've seen since Oxford student politics and that's not surprising because they all wear Oxford student politicians I mean this was deja vu for me I couldn't believe it so wait a second so so Michael stabs Boris and then Theresa stabs Boris or Boris stabs himself and it's this was 1980s Oxford to come back to life but the net result is that Theresa May emerges triumphant but she has to be more Briggs's than the brexit he is precisely because she needs everyone forget that she was on the losing side so I don't think it gets called off on the British side I think the European position is hardening look divorces like this the possibility of reconciliation dwindle very rapidly as the process advances positions become more polarized in a regular divorce and in this kind of divorce - that you had Donald Tusk only today and he's supposed to be relatively conciliatory taking the no single market access if you limit free movement of people that position equals hard brexit on the other side it's a kind of game of chicken between those people who are committed to a hard brexit and those who have got very cold feet about it but I don't see a way in which this suddenly all goes away on the contrary I think we're now on a kind of an extra ball path to divorce the only question is how long it will take and how much it will cost it's the biggest divorce since Henry the 8th in terms of British history your second question about differentials in in turnout and the role of history is a really interesting one it's certainly the whole experience made me more sympathetic to the peculiar Australian institution of compulsory voting if we had compulsory voting in Britain the result might well have been different because you would have forced all those young people who didn't show up to vote and that might just have been enough normal certainly would have been enough if everybody had voted at the rates the 65s plan and older did then I think Briggs it would have been defeated if we had compulsory voting in the United States then Hillary Clinton wouldn't need to lose any sleep because she knows that people with a low turnout history the young African Americans are going to show up for her if they show up so if they're forced to show up she's home and dry without a doubt and yet some part of me rebels against the thought of compulsory participation because it seems to me that ultimately our participation in a freezer society should be voluntary should be of our own volition and that citizens should not be forced it on pain of penalty to vote so I'm kind of not quite there I will say one thing though and it struck me very forcibly on my last visit to Sydney where I was shortly before the referendum we talked about the hollowing out of the middle class a lot in this country in fact it's a recurrent light motif of debate when you get to Australia you find in the middle class has not been hollowed out in fact it seems to be almost a universal class to which everyone belongs sydney feels different from american cities in that respect and maybe may just maybe compulsory voting as part of the reason why that hollowing out has not been so far advanced so my mind on this at this point is in a state of self-confessed flux as somebody who keeps moving westward i've been i've been already tipped for a job in western australia by the time of my 60th birthday so let me take a question from that corner over there there's a gentleman who just raised his hand thank you and thank you again for a very good talk and I'm sorry to say yes another British person with the deserve of a dual Irish passport should things come to pass but my question really is the former director of the British Museum who's recently moved to Germany did a very good exhibition and a book on Germany and German culture which probably well aware on and he gave a talk at the opening of this exhibition in Germany recently and he said that I paraphrased him correctly that in Britain we tend to look on history as a celebration of our victories and one of the very warming things that he found about German culture was that the honesty about their history and their past was much stronger much better so coming back to your cultural question do you think that our history is filled us in the way we tell it this is a very good question perhaps a good one on which to conclude our discussion as the clock ticks towards half-past there's a crisis in history and it takes two distinct forms on both sides of the Atlantic on the one side there is the failure of mainstream history departments in universities to connect with the wider public in any meaningful way and the increasing antiquarianism of the historical profession seems to me to be a real problem the more that has advanced the more history in the sense of books that people buy has been left in the hands of public intellectuals of varying degrees of of competence we don't have anything in Britain quite as bad as O'Reilly killing Trump series I dare say that volume is in the pipeline for release next year but but we do certainly have a plethora of authors whose great preoccupation is is the world wars and the endless retelling of of world war ii as a national triumph is something that germans frequently complain about and i haven't yet read neil McGregor's lecture but i get the point he's he's making though it doesn't seem reasonable to meet to tell British newspaper readers that they should somehow replicate the German experience of of re-education when they didn't have a Nazi regime and didn't lose World War two that that would be that would be to ask too much but what's odd about world war two is that remarkably few people now living fought in it and when we talk about the 65 and / we're not really talking about people that opt and when you said you were an older voter you don't look like it and I hope I don't too much but but the truth is that the people aged 65 and older are not veterans of World War two with glorious memories of VE Day those people are mostly dead that the people old older than 65 were hippies in the 1970s there are baby boomers and they are the ones who seem to me to be most at fault for adhering to a romanticized notion of British history to which they contributed precisely nothing and when Britain joined the European community as it then was in 1973 it was after a period of protracted post-war stagnation indeed stagflation and indeed our membership of the european union's coincided with a remarkable recovery and guess who benefited from that recovery yes those people who voted for brexit the ungrateful baby boomers who rode the post 1973 recovery of the UK all the way and collected all the way and there's a very good article in this week's spectator shows they continue to collect because of the ways in which British pensions have constantly been operated by governments eager to buy the votes of the aging baby boomers if that sounds familiar to an American audience it should because that's the kind of generational politics playing out in the United States today congratulations sir on your dual Passport that could come in very handy as brexit when's its inexorable way through the divorce courts ladies and gentlemen thank you very much indeed

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Length: 85min 12sec (5112 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2016