The Left has right on its side

how lovely I can tell you're a lovely audience already very warm welcome to you all thank you very much Hanna we are going to be debating a motion tonight hoping it's going to be very lively even without our two MPs but they are going to come the motion is the left has right on its side politics there's an awful lot of it's about isn't there now what side you're on on the political spectrum tells us a great deal about your vision for society how you think society ought to be but are you willing to have your mind changed let's see if that happens today you've already voted on the motion as you came in shortly we're going to be hearing the opening speeches of our speakers and then I'm going to announce the results of that first vote we'll be taking questions from you and encouraging some lively debate I hope between the speakers the speakers will then close their debate with a short summing up and then we'll have the final vote and you will have one of those and how you vote there'll be ushers running around at the point at which you are going to be voting and just tear the slip on that you want to vote with and put it into the box and if you still haven't made up your mind don't tear anything and put the whole slip in now if you're on the left do you believe that people who share your worldview are the ones who have society's best interests at heart that your perspective your compassion for those who are weaker less robust members of society are better protected by your vision and your view of the world is it the left the only that will fight for sexual racial equality for the rights of workers is it you on the Left who think that your view of the world will ultimately make it a better place for the largest numbers possible but if you identify yourself as a person on the right do you feel that at the heart of the view that I've just outlined very briefly there is hypocrisy that just because you say that you care that you have more compassion that it makes you right because you display your compassion the left according to some on the right many on the right feel that in fact that view is damaging to the state that expanding the state and intervening to help those people who are less robust can in fact be counterproductive and therefore allowing those people who might be instinctively individual and want to use their entrepreneurial spirit to better themselves are actually being stifled in some way I'm going to introduce our opening speaker George mom Bo columnist for The Guardian known of course for his political and environmental activism he has several best-selling books to his name captive states the corporate takeover of Britain and most recently out of the wreckage a new politics for an age of crisis George is going to be speaking for demotion thank you all thanks very much rezian um I have to confess before I begin that the left sometimes drive me round the bend the meetings the factions the endless splitting it's true to say unfortunately that the old adage often holds up that the right seeks converts and the left seeks traitors and there will be a public guillotine of opposing factions at the end of this debate but for all that I am on the Left I belong to the left and I will remain on the left because the left is the only solution to a predicament that faces every generation and this predicament is the escalating concentration of wealth and power this happens not because people are wicked though there are one or two it is an innate and intrinsic characteristic of all complex societies going all the way back to the first cities in Mesopotamia 6,000 or more years ago and it happens well perhaps a good way of explaining how and why this happens is through the concept that Thomas Piketty has popularized of patrimonial capital what he shows very convincingly in my view is that when the rate of return to capital exceeds the rate of growth of economic output then necessarily inevitably inequality spirals social mobility stalls and an enterprise society gives way to a runty a society now to put this in more comprehensible terms if you have a lot of money and property you can use that money on property to extract more money and property from the rest of society in the form of economic rent now I define economic rent as being the excessive charges that you can impose on people for the use of non reproducible resources over which you have exclusive control a good example is the ridiculous cost of rail tickets which we have to pay because the rail companies have us over a barrel so they can charge us way above what the rate ought to be because we have no choice but to use their service if we want to travel from one place to another that's an example of economic rent now the accumulation of this wealth and power that arises from those returns to capital this this is something with no natural limit there's no point at which it stops itself except sometimes through economic collapse but if there is no political or position to that accumulation it grows and grows until as we've seen in several periods of history a very small number of people managed to capture just about all the production of society and sometimes the result of that is that the destitution and debt and unemployment that that tremendous capture of social wealth causes will then lead to that economic implosion of the kind that we saw for instance with the Great Depression now it doesn't end there because once you've managed to capture a great deal of economic power you can use their economic power to capture political power and everywhere where we see that sort of unalloyed growth of tremendous economic concentration we see a concentration of political power going alongside it democracy becomes more or less a dead-letter the whole concept of a popular government is undermined and we end up with government of the elite by the elite for the elite does this sound at all familiar to anyone it's it's a sort of inexorable development of not having sufficient opposition to that vicious cycle of growing concentration of wealth and power let me give you an example of how this operates if we look back to the second half of the 19th century and we can take the example of one form of economic rent which is the excessive fees that you must pay to rent a place to live and an extreme example was the old nickel which was a slum developed in the second half of the nineteenth century around Bethnal Green there were people living in that slum who occupied a single room a whole family occupying a single room in a cellar five foot high with no natural light there are hundreds of people living in those conditions and thousands living in conditions which was scarcely better the rate of infant mortality was roughly twice that of society as a whole because most of those families could only afford one bed and the whole family slept in one bed and one of the causes of that mortality was that people would roll over in the night and suffocate the babies the rooms were infested with damp with rats with lice with fleas with rotting walls with collapsing ceilings because the people who owned these buildings invested nothing at all in repairing them they didn't need to people had no choice but to live there and to pay and yet despite those conditions people in the old nickel were paying per cubic foot four times as much as tenants of the poshest houses in the West End why were they paying this extraordinary fees for these disgusting conditions well because they had no power whereas the landlord's power over them was almost absolute in order to try to raise that money those people in the old Nicolle worked every hour that they could every waking hour basically they were working in their own rooms in often appalling conditions doing piecework being paid very little for it such that for the inhabitants of the old called the name they gave it was the sweaters hell but the people who harvested this money these extraordinary rents that the people were paying they didn't have to work at all these people included MPs peers of the realm senior churchmen some of them became among some richest people in the country they didn't even have to collect the rents they sent their agents to do that often with great brutality and that process basically inexorably led to the accumulation and accumulation of wealth until we saw its explosion there the explosion of the whole system later in in the early 20th century with the Great Depression so who's going to stop that from happening well not the right because the right basically exists to protect patrimonial capital that is what it's there for where's the left when it remembers what it's for exists to try to break the power of patrimonial capital and to break that vicious cycle of accumulation on the one side and deprivation on the other now I know that the days of the old nickel have for the time being passed but let's see roughly where we're placed on this index I wonder if you could help me with this um could anyone who rents please put their hands up thank you could you keep your hand I'm sorry to keep your hands up for now but could you put your hands down if you pay less than 25% of your income in rent so in other words if you pay 25% or more keep your hands up 40% or more anyone here pay 50% 1 or 2 now in 1885 in response to the old nickel scandal and others the Royal Commission on the housing of the working classes reported that there were several well quite a few almost half the people in the working class were paying 25 percent or more of their income in rent today we find ourselves back in a similar position we haven't yet descended to the conditions of the old nickel principally I believe because we're still enjoying the legacy of the Social Democratic era a period when the Left managed to get a foothold in British politics that's a legacy which is gradually fading it's sort of more or less came to an end that here are about 40 years ago but we still I believe benefit from it and at times the left was highly effective at breaking the vicious cycle that I'm talking about so for example in the 1940s when the left was perhaps at the height of its power in the United States the top rates of income tax rose to 94 percent in the United Kingdom to 98 percent an economist look back to that period and say well that was completely irrational because the Laffer curve shows that beyond about seventy percent you get no greater revenue back from your income tax but they're missing the point of it because those very high rates of tax were not just to raise revenue they were to break the power of patrimonial capital and they did so with great effect such that for the first time in history working-class people in this country had decent housing often in the form of housing provided by the state council housing we got the NHS we got very high employment with a widespread distribution of prosperity and well-being we got a robust social safety net which prevented anyone from falling to the condition of people in the old nickel in the previous century these were astonishing achievements but they could only be brought about through breaking that vicious cycle and redistributing wealth unfortunately when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came to power they began to reverse a lot of that they brought the top rates of tax right down and they laid waste to public protections to regulations intended to defend people from predatory behavior in amongst those regulations were rent controls and so the vicious circle began to turn again and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown there were 13 years of labor politics here but they didn't really grasp the importance of that power of patrimonial capital and the importance of trying to contain it so even through those years that inequality and that escalation of the concentration of wealth and power continued to develop and have continued since so who is going to break this who's going to break the circle who's going to ensure that we don't end up with a tiny number of people taking the majority of social wealth into their own hands I mean it's happening already Piketty and Saez showed that in the first term of Obama's Obama's first term in office the 1% took 94 percent of all the economic growth in those first four years 94 percent of it went into the hands of the 1% this is very this is very close to approaching the point at which a tiny faction manages to capture the whole production of society and that's a very dangerous point indeed not just for people on the losing end of that but for the whole social and economic structure which then is pushed gradually towards collapse we've seen rumbles of that with the 2008 financial crisis but I suggest we've seen nothing at that we've seen we've seen nothing so far by comparison to what it could become so who is going to break this history to may going to break the vicious cycle I don't think so is the conservative party going to break the British the vicious cycle I don't think so it exists effectively to sustain it to protect and insulate the winners of that process from challenge only the left can do it only the left has ever done it only the left for all its manifest and manifold faults many of which I will probably have to admit tonight will will continue to do it and only when we have a real left which really recognizes its role as breaking that cycle will we see this very dangerous trend going into reverse so my friends I urge you please to support the motion that though it's not always right no one ever is by and large broadly speaking the left has right on its side thank you Thank You George Monbiot our first speaker for the motion our first speaker against the motion is Roger Scruton he has published more than 40 books on philosophy aesthetics and politics including how to be a conservative and fools frauds and firebrands thinkers of the new left he is Britain's leading philosopher of conservative thought but by his own admission he says there isn't much competition Roger Scruton please against the motion thank you very much for that kind introduction and thank you George for that very powerful and rhetorical presentation of the left-wing case as it was in 1865 or there abouts but my own feeling about this is that of course we all in the end depend upon some story of our history in order to bolster up present attitudes and the left has been very good at creating a kind of mythopoeic history of our country which leaves out of consideration all the things that particularly appeal to me my father's family rose from the slums in Manchester not through the help of the socialist state but because my grandmother had a mortgage with the Building Society the local friendly Society which was founded in fact a hundred years before by the working-class people of Manchester in order to offer each other mutual aid that was one of the ways in which people advanced in that in our society in those times they had difficulties with health but they already enjoyed before the National Health Service the kind of treatment that made it possible to survive the epidemics of tuberculosis and so on that existed inevitably because of the sanitary conditions of the new newly built cities and that was played possible by the British Medical Association which was a voluntary Association of doctors beginning in 1834 and the network of hospitals that they founded that network of course made it possible for the National Health to exist but it existed long before the states took charge of it and I think we should remember that that our country has enjoyed a great deal of charitable work which has alleviated much of the oppression that George rightly refers to the question really in my mind is to what extent do we go along with this myth that capital that that the right exists to protect capital and if the left exists to break it down and redistribute it among those who who deserve it I think that this vision is not exactly paranoid but but that history has moved on since the time when that vision was plausible it is true as he says that Thomas Piketty has argued that always there'll be more and more concentration of capital in the hands of the few but the real question that I would propose is whether that means that there is none in the hands of the many it all depends upon the quantity of it and the institutions which permit the expenditure of it and its distribution at a certain time in my life I used to travel around Eastern Europe which was a then a socialist and clav under the control of the Soviet Union and at the same time being an academic I would travel to America too so I had the opportunity to compare two very different systems one calling itself socialist the other called by those who opposed it capitalist luckily Americans don't use these nineteenth-century terms but the thing that was most visible to me at least was not that just that there was much less wealth in Eastern Europe than in America but also that it was not widely distributed and that the distinctions between those who who had control of it and those who didn't were largely political depended whether you were a member of the party or not whether you were part of the Socialist machine and if you are not part of a socialist machine not only were you deprived of property you certainly do weren't able to buy a house or sell things like property in an open market but you are also deprived of elementary freedoms such as the freedom to say the kind of things I'm saying now one of the things that I feel that we should we on the right should emphasize is that politics is not just about the distribution of wealth it's not just about the what George has just been telling us about even though that is terribly important there are other things that matter too and these other things were visible then in America the freedom of people to get a go about their daily life the social mobility that enabled you to change class or the kind of the social mobility that that George has enjoyed in falling to the state that he is in and that I have enjoyed in race rising to mine and these these things these features were not present in the socialist countries in those days when socialism really had something going for it and I feel that we ought to look at the the rest of politics to see exactly what it is therefore the right should be defending if you're on the Left you tend to have a cause George is very good with causes the environmental cause which he's been about which I agree with him entirely he has a causes such as his present one about the distribution of property and the abolition of the ranty a class about which I'm net less enthusiastic but having causes is very consoling sort of thing you can say forward you've got this clenched fist salute is always there ready to go and people will gather behind you for me conservatism can't be concentrated into a slogan in that way it is it isn't a matter of gathering behind the clenched fist salute or if it did the slogan will be something like hesitate you know which of course doesn't naturally recruit a following and I what I would want to say that and having said that it's let's look around at the actual world the world that we have and see what we can love in it and what we are attached to and surely we should be defending those things and seeing how it precious they have been to us and out of that vision or comes another kind of politics one which is not just obsessed with wealth in its distribution but which recognizes the great benefits that we've inherited in particular the benefit of freedom under law which is something which I think in many parts of the world just does not exist the freedom to have a debate like this the freedom to start up an enterprise of one's own to think of one's whole life anew and begin again the autonomy of the individual the right to own something and to exchange that thing okay people have had difficulties in owning property in this country but I'm sure most people in this room those who did not put up their hand about to confess that they were renting something are quite proud to own something and regard it as a freedom because they can exchange it for something else we should remember that we belong to a civil society defined by a shared royalty and this makes it possible for us to live under a political process I'm because of the loyalty that binds us all together as citizens of this country we can accept to be governed by people whom we hate I can accept to be governed by Jorge for instance I don't hate Jorge but but worthy to be there in Parliament and maybe Prime Minister one day I would be deeply upset but nevertheless my view the matter would be that I'm it that I'm under an obligation to obey the law and to and to live peaceably in this in that jurisdiction we have a culture that that affirms these institutions and affirms that the importance of civil society over the state and we have the freedom to build new institutions from private private institutions of our own and this is terribly important in education when George spoke about the ranty a state the rent he was a class he forgot that there is also the rent a state there is a there are institutions in our society which are more or less absorbed into the state the education system being one of them and of course the National Health Service another and these aren't necessarily the kind of things which I think the people of this country are well served by if you look at the universities today these are centers of privilege in which people are protected largely from the surrounding economic order and from the any opposition to their own particular standing and they are dominated by people like George luckily he is not part of a university just as I am NOT but it is the case that in my case I'm not part of a university because I could never now go back into one I have the wrong point of view and this the dominance of the left in those state controlled institutions is now an immovable part of our society and I think it's one of the things that people on the right object to it's a natural tendency on the left to think that your opponent is not wrong but evil and therefore you're justified in excluding him from any office and I think this is something that we've seen growing in recent years but however many people on the Left share my kind of aspirations to aspirations towards a free society of creative institutions and and I think that that's the kind of left that I would like to see emerging but he will only emerge if we forget this obsession with property and its distribution and look back at our inheritance and the great gift that it is to us that we can enjoy it and stand side-by-side even in our disagreements and recognize that we have a shared loyalty much of the left today has been flow focused on attacking that loyalty attacking the nation-state in favor of some kind of cosmopolitan government attacking our national culture including its religious roots in favor of multiculturalism attacking independent initiatives in education and healthcare and the rest in favor of state supervised initiatives which lead to the perpetuation of the of the status quo and there has been this mass hostility on the left to something called neoliberalism the habit of marketing everything and now if there is such a thing as neoliberalism and that's what it is I'm against it too but my own view is that that's not what the right is all about the right is about the maintenance of an old fashioned civil patriotism and the bourgeois way of life that goes with it and that's the kind of thing that I think we that I would like to defend in opposing this motion and saying that indeed the left might think itself to be on the right about everything but it is just as much in the wrong now as it's always been Roger Scruton thank you very much indeed and as you've all just noticed quasi Quarton Conservative MP for Spelthorne has just joined us welcome thank you very much for being with us I just before since we don't have Selleck Ricci and she would have been the next person to speak for the motion I'm I'm just going to I wonder whether we yeah I think we should probably just go to you quazy and even though it's not the right way round of doing it I think that's what we're going to do so if you've caught your breath good would you like to go to the podium and I will just introduce you again MP for Spelthorne of course has worked as a financial analyst and journalist and historian and he also has books to add to his success ghosts of empire Britain's legacies in the modern world and Thatcher's trial six months that defined a leader quasi is also going to speak against the motion thank you very much for your introduction I've just I would just like to say and apologize obviously for being late we've had to vote in the House of Commons against lay the Labour Party against socialists or some of them were socialists anyway and I have to apologize for not hearing George's speech in its entirety I've read his columns for 20 years so I probably imagine I've got a good idea what he said but I won't try and recapture his spirit or try and marshal my arguments against theses that I didn't hear his arguments that I haven't heard but what I will do in my short allotted time is recapitulate on some of the things that Roger said I didn't agree actually with everything that Roger said but the great thing about being on the right is that we don't have to have a universal agreement on everything there is no ten commandments or holy text which we have to subscribe to on pain of death and I know that hasn't quite the Labour Party and the Corbyn hasn't quite reached that point yet but but Roger did allude to a uniformity of view a climate of fear almost that many people on the Left feel particularly today I mean you only have to go to universities as I have done to see this notion of no platforming now I don't consider myself very old but I don't remember at university in the 1990s ever hearing of such a phrase as no platforming and that's the kind of culture that we have today and I think it's deeply worrying and I think it's actually just strangles free speech it inhibits creative discourse it frustrates debate and it's not the way I think a modern society should be evolving now in terms of socialism I am going to have two arguments one I think is based on theory and if you look at what people like Karl Marx who is the probably the most widely read thinker of the left probably certainly the most influential historically and I think even today one of one of certainly the most influential left-wing thinkers and look at history look at examples and you're not even looking at it looking at the present across the world you see socialism failing miserably to to deliver now people say we love the left what is the left I think the left is very much something which as we know came out of the French Revolution but it's our type of thinker was Karl Marx and the problem that Karl Marx had was that all the prophecies that he made about kaif ISM were wrong he was a great analytical thinker and if you read his work in 1867 I think when capital the first volume of capital came out you would be forgiven for thinking that he'd solved the problem of modernity had solved the problem of industrial society and that capitalism indeed would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and that the capitalist class would drive the poor drive the proletariat to such a pitch of misery that they would rebel and overthrow their their exploiters now that in 1867 I would say was not a bad prognosis not it not it not a senseless prediction but what happened what happened was that over the last hundred and fifty years capitalism and here I do slightly differ with Roger and he might call it near liberalism but capitalism has liberated millions upon millions of people even in the last twenty years it has lifted something like a billion people out of poverty it is a complete fallacy for the left to say that more people are miserable and poor today than has ever been the case that's the opposite of the truth and Karl Marx could never have dreamt of the successes of of capitalism broadly speaking I would say liberalism at anything is anything new about it I think liberalism is a perfectly adequate way of describing the kind of order that are I seek to describe and he was completely wrong now if your central thinker and the central premise of your ideology has got predictions completely wrong I think you have to question the drift and nature of the ideology he is espoused so in terms of theory I think his theories have been more broadly disproved by modern practice and now you look at the actual instances the examples of socialist left-wing government you have an appalling twentieth century I am NOT going to mention what I could mention Stalin I have mentioned Stalin there but that was a cheap shot I accept that was a cheap jaaye but you know Stalin was a disciple of Karl Marx he was someone who described himself as being on the left and one of the favorites of the modern Conservative Party is to go on about Venezuela and the electorate frankly is not interested in Venezuela like totally understand why they're not interested in Venezuela it's a long way away and most of us have never been there but it's still an appalling situation in Venezuela it's got a horrible plate it's a horrible place to live the murder rate is probably the highest bar Honduras in the world it is a society which was the richest country in Latin America in South America and it is now a country where people are being killed in order to get some flour or in order to get a bit of petrol there is a palling lawlessness and the reason why that country collapsed into the decay that it did was because of socialism now people will say well it wasn't proper socialism and it wasn't properly interpreted but it's a ghastly price for a country to pay and North Korea is another example and these are people who ostensibly preach socialism they're on the Left they're people who subscribe to Marxist ideology and these are palling instances and not something which I think should be lightly brushed aside one person who's not very funny but it we made an interesting observation he said that a socialist government in the Sahara would result in the government trying to import sound within three years and that's the kind of paradox that socialism can often lead to and I'm not going to wax as eloquently as Roger did about freedom ordered freedom the rule of law tradition and all those things we know where the left stands on these things and we know that an extreme left-wing government would destroy much of the world the country that we know now I think that I understand the appeal of socialism I understand in what is a seemingly a chaotic world people wanting certainty and wanting a degree of clarity but I don't think that socialism I don't think the left has any answers to provide on that subject I think the left is an old-fashioned ideology I'm struck by the fact that many of the people who are its supporters now prominent politicians are people who first went into politics in the 1970s and it seems striking to me when I listen to some of these I would mention them but we know who they are I feel that I've gone back 40 years to the age of two years old not that I understood socialism when I was two but I could imagine that people watching television in 1977 would see many of the same ideas that have been trotted out now expounded then forcefully I would say even more eloquently by people like Tony Benn Michael Mitra and Michael foot we've heard the arguments before and I think today those arguments are just as invalid and wrong as they were 40 years ago so the conclusion is the left was never right that's my conclusion Kwasi Quarton thank you very much indeed still no sign of Stella Creasy as soon as she does arrive we will give her the opportunity to speak for the motion before I open up the questions to the floor I can I can now bring you the pre vote so you all voted when you came in before you'd even heard any of the speakers and we have 37% voting against the motion thirty two four and thirty one undecided it's quite a lot of undecideds that's interesting so keep those figures in your head and we're going to open up the questions to the floor there are people walking around with microphones and I'm going to take two or three questions at a time so uh sure number one if you could take the my friend microphone to the first speaker if you can confine yourself to short questions and not long statements that would be brilliant thank you thank you I teach and as a teacher I have to recognize the worth of of all my students and I have to let go of my baggage and one of the things that both parties have going for them is a lot of baggage so I'd ask both Georgia and more specifically Roger when will the left let go of its baggage around anti-semitism and on Roger when will the right let go of its homophobia and when will either party show the moral courage to welcome child refugees into this country thank you let's have another question before we we put those points to there's a woman here at the front if we could okay so uh sure number three lovely I just like to ask Roger you mentioned that the motto of the Conservatives should be hesitate does the right therefore exists only to mitigate the left thank you very much and question down here I think you got the microphone yes how would you argue the case of Germany pre the Berlin Wall falling that surely if your proposition is correct it would have been the other way everyone would been fleeing across the water East Germany and we would see it as a great social democracy now rather than the well generally successful possibly not this week state thank thank you very much Roger would you like to take some some of those on so we've got when will the left when will the right allow for her mistake the existence of homosexuality let's deal with that one first and then does the right only exists to mitigate the left yeah well I'm one of the those people who was brought up in the 60s I went to Cambridge where my my principal faults were being lower class right-wing and heterosexual I had real trouble on those three grounds there was no way of getting on in Cambridge society without hiding those defects so I did so I got used to the whole culture that there prevailed and the whole idea that somehow people like me were homophobic came as an enormous shock where when this ridiculous word got invented you know I said well you know what on earth have I done and what what have conservatives like me like me done and particularly all the right wing friends that I had at Cambridge were you know straightforwardly gay or queer I mean in all the meanings of that word and the queerest thing about them was that they were right wing so I would say that they may be that some people on the right have to reject this to drop this baggage but I've never picked it up it's an interesting personal response but I wonder if you would take on the issue of of the party politics of it because clearly the right does present itself as quite moralistic it does present itself as as the ideology of the you know of the the family and so on so I'm a believer in the family I also think we believe in the normality of the heterosexual Union and the need to the sexes to make sacrifices for each other I do recognize that the legitimizing legitimation of homosexuality has come about as a necessary historical development and of course people rightfully you feel that this is a huge change to their family values I prefer the family values it's absolutely true but I don't go in around in public making a fuss about it on the thing about whether the right exists only to mitigate the left this is a very good observation that's absolutely true we are non-political people who happen to love our political inheritance nevertheless and we're confronted with all these urgent activists telling us that there's something immoral about that that inheritance and something that we should be ashamed of so we're forced to defend what actually we would prefer people simply not to notice just like in the family you know if you're forced to defend the love that binds you to your wife and children you will find that your the whole family Order has been upset it should just exist George would you like to respond first to the questions in the audience and then react to what Roger has said so let's do the only issue of anti-semitism in live in a very simple world that Rogers I have to existing all the one that anyone actually lives in at all anyway yeah anti-semitism look I've got no truck with this at all it's absolutely outrageous I think Ken Livingston should be booted as far as he can be booted it's absolutely disgraceful and as far as I'm concerned anyone who claims to be on the left and is an anti-semite has got no place on a left that I recognized now I should say that I'm not a member of the Labor Party I'm you know I believe there are many different left side belonged to what I would call the sort of green democratic rather Wooley left it's still recognizably left but you know you don't have to toe any particular party line to call yourself a call yourself a left winger obviously Stella does but you know the idea that there should be any such intolerance in a party that calls itself left-wing you know it's been blowing up a bit out of proportion but when it's not blown up when it exists for real there should be no tolerance whatsoever of anti-semitism or anything similar to that on the idea of German Germany pre pre war I mean obviously you're right no I understand it so you're pre pre pre the collapse of the wall oh you're quite right of course and I've got no truck at all with those communist regimes and no truck with Stalinism again you don't have to to be on the left you can be on the left and think that Stalin was one of the worst people ever to blot the face of this planet and to think that those regimes in Eastern Europe were at a fright and a terror and a horror to the people who lived under them but you know we don't have to be like that the left which we create in this country can be entirely different to that and Rogers conceit that it was a right who invented freedom and the left to try to take it away I thought he I was the one who's supposed to know nothing about history has he forgotten the diggers and the Levellers and the Chartists and the suffragettes how many of those would you place on the right freedom is something which has been absolutely fundamental to left-wing politics and it's had to be extracted painfully out of the cold dead hands those who denied freedom to the great majority because Democratic freedom role would lead to economic freedom and this is something that they didn't want to give up at all and so the whole idea that the Conservative Party exists only or rather conservative politics right-wing politics exists only to to contain the left and have no politics of its own that's it's innocent victim this lamb to the slaughter which simply has to try to keep the Wolves of socialism at bay not that I think there's anything right about right about sheep or wrong about wolves this is just pure mythology is up there with his tea and sympathy and his monarchy and mystification which is the great sort of mist which the Conservatives try to throw around politics so that we don't actually penetrate to the heart of it and see what's really going on this whole notion that it's the left trying to rip down the nation-state while the light is trying to preserve it sorry who are the ones talking about rolling back the state who are the ones talking about shrinking the state who are the ones like can Liam Fox for example doing under the table deals with the with the US corporations in order to undermine parliamentary sovereignty and the legitimacy of the state these people are not on the Left sure the left are some bad stuff low every stupid to deny it but the idea that the right is this passive mass just quietly trying to keep things nice and to hold those vicious left wingers at bay and not do anything on its own account in terms of developing its own politics is pure mythology I'm keen to take more questions but as Stella has arrived I think we should give her the opportunity to speak for the motion welcome Stella Creasy labour MP for Walthamstow recently one backbencher of the Year award at the 2017 spectator parliamentarian of the area it can only go downhill from here Thank You comrades it's worth a shot I know it can be hard right now to feel any excitement any confidence in politics truth is people have never trusted people in my job or or kwazii's job I'm sure quasi both are crazy I were elected in 2010 after the election expenses but I'm pretty sure that both of us we go into a pub someone will say is that on my tab or my tab to you but now they fear that even if they could trust you could you actually do anything at all it's not just are you all the same but is there really any point three words to make people feel pessimistic about the future of the world president Donald Trump four words to make you fearful for what role Britain is playing foreign secretary Boris Johnson eight words as to why am I believe you should commit to the left we achieve more together than we do alone that is why I got involved in the labor movement now for avoidance of doubts in this current environment I agree there are many challenges both within my political party we do have a problem with anti-semitism we do have a problem with misogyny there are also many problems around the world with organizations and countries that claim to be left-wing and are totalitarian there is nothing left wing about locking up your opponents there is nothing left wing about promoting equality at home and ignoring oppression abroad but there is also nothing left-wing about going on a protest and having a hashtag it's what you do that embodies your valleys and for me I became a Labour MP because I believe somewhere in my community and Walthamstow or God's own country as I like to call it there are there is a young person who could cure cancer if only they had the right opportunities to be able to realize their potential and how that would change all of our lives and frankly I'm not being just optimistic I mean it's not just that Walthamstow gave you the musical genius of Brian Harvey or the footballing prowess of Harry Kane we gave you to play a role in Walthamstow as invented and rexrode as son Andrews in Wilson Stowe we also and I can see there are some children here but I hope you forgive me we gave you Jurek's and rubber gloves with a London rubber company and we trained a young man called Johnny Ives which if you have an iPad or an iPhone you'll know he invented both with Apple so I know when you leave here this evening something made or invented in Walthamstow may well continue to entertain you but that's the point not everybody in this country has that opportunity not everybody in your country has the pathway to realize their potential and then we all miss out and left-wing politics for me is about that simple but powerful principle that we work together to get the best out of each of us for the benefit of us all and when I look at the balance sheet of what left-wing and right-wing governments have done in this country I see that case is compelling I see the contrast between section 28 and the equalities act between the internal markets in health care and the NHS between the Dobbs amendment and closing our borders to children living in mud in Calais who have the rights to be in this country at every turn it has been when the left and left-wing people not necessary left-wing parties have stood up for that principle that progress has been made in this country and crucially we have all benefited from it there is a cold hard economic arguments at the heart of this equality is good for everyone countries that are more equal are more prosperous more diverse more resilient and when we look at the world facing us never more have we needed the left a world in which Google Apple and Facebook have a combined wealth of the same of this country major corporations who have more power to change your lives and show your options than the people you elect I am here I am left wing because I do not believe that people should be a subset of markets as the right do I believe that people should be masters of their own future and that that true freedom that Kwazii and Roger I'm no doubt have told you they want doesn't come from facing these challenges on your own but facing them together but individually no matter how wealthy you may become you will only ever make limited choices but if we pool our resources if we share our values if we commit to that principle of equality then we can transform everyone's life and that to me is truly what being right is as nie Bevan once said never doubt the power of decent folk to want to do the right thing if there isn't a better example of what being left-wing is I don't know it thank you sella crazy thank you very much indeed let's return to questions from the floor okay so we've got the the usher up there number four thank you well much of georgia's analysis of history is demonstrably false there was one particular point that he made that is absolutely relevant and remained unanswered by Roger and that is the point about wealth inequality and history does show that wealth inequality as it increases it does destabilize society sometimes catastrophic Lee and this is a point that the right have not really adequately addressed and I'd really appreciate it if Roger and quasi could address that point thank you a couple more let's go down number two if you're just the lady there just to your right who's got her hand up there perfect hi I would like to address the whole panel I have a son in a comp he's 16 and he is doing the thing that 16 year olds do and it's challenging they accepted mode of thought and because he is right-wing he is being excluded by his friends he's being judged I I don't see the tolerance that you talk about being accepted in just a North London schools it's not just universities and that's what I used to do at 16 only I was going the opposite way because that's what you did thank you very much and one more perhaps there in the middle lady with the blonde hairs got her yep Stella you talked about equality but I think those on the right believe in equality of opportunity we can't all be equal but if we all have the opportunity to achieve our potential isn't isn't that the right way to go about things rather than think we're all equal and bring everyone down to that lower lowest common denominator thank you very much ok let's sir let's turn to the panel now then Roger do you want to take that first one on on board the the the destabilizing to society that wealth inequality does I think this is a very powerful point I can't and George expressed it very well the argument put forward by Thomas Piketty he has had huge influence because in fact it's just common sense you know you only yeah you only invest if the rate of return on capital exceeds them you know the level of economic growth so there is some there is a kind of April right truth about this my own view is that it's not the this inequality does not matter as long as institutions are in place which control how that wealth is used prevent it from being used to set up private sovereignty over the rest of us and ensure that it eventually is spent and passed on and in fact Piketty took the statistics of all the top people in Forbes list of super super rich people one year and said you know the the wealth is concentrated in their hands and Anders in the next year there's even more wealth concentrated in their hands at the top 10% or whatever it was but they were completely different people and this suggests that after all the wealth ISM is going around and round as it should be creating whatever wealth creates wealth in itself of course is a static thing what it what we want is that well to be spent and have you spent on others I it's interesting that you say that it's a strong point I wonder why then you you are unable to move on to the next stage which is to say well let's try redistribution let's try higher taxes accreditor in order to yes you're speaking on behalf of this gentleman in the audience here I would say yes of course it's no part of being the kind of conservative I am that you should just allow these things to to go on especially if their destabilizing you've got to find a policy to rectify it I don't think that the massive taxation that Piketty recommends will rectify it indeed he just has led to the to the transfer of the wealth of France to London well I think that first of all you've got to have very strong insistence that this wealth cannot be used simply to set up systems of sovereignty when we're seeing that emerging with Facebook a kind of sovereignty over ordinary people a control of what of opinion what I would say that you you have to have regulations about about enforcing free freedom of speech on the on the how does that deal with inequality well isn't I'm not saying that inequalities in itself is bad I would want to say this isn't written on circulation the non circulation of capital is bad but you just admitted that it is I mean you just said wealth inequality is destabilizing there is a problem with it the only solution you can come up with is freedom of speech no I don't see that as being a very effective solution to wealth and equality while marvelous as it is an important it is it doesn't actually address the problem but it is not wealth inequality which i think is destabilizing it's the accumulation in in a small class of people from whom it doesn't move on if that class is itself mobile as it is then then I don't see why it is disabled it's all your evidence here you cite the Forbes top ten well yes sometimes Carlos Slim is below Bill Gates and sometimes Bill Gates is above Scotland is below that Carlos Slim that does not reflect the redistribution of wealth across the size of course so how would you redistribute it I think the the issue that people have certainly in my constituency and I imagine in Stellar's as well is not so much with inequality they don't like inequality but the issue they have and they're more obsessed with its fairness and I think the problem that we've had since the financial crisis of 2008 is this idea that people were getting away with it that they were wrecking and destabilizing a system and they simply haven't paid for their recklessness I mean it's striking in Britain and I'm speaking off piste I'm not speaking as a Conservative MP but it's striking that nobody has actually gone to jail throughout this whole process and people were hugely bailed out they their recklessness was was kind of rewarded and I think the public generally feel that there's a real issue about fairness and people actually being responsible and being held to account for amassing wealth in in sometimes nefarious ways and I think this issue of fairness this issue of criminal liability this issue of crony capitalism which hasn't featured in this debate I think that's a very live issue and I think people on the right people who broadly support a liberal economy as I would describe it need to focus on crony capitalism we need to not bail out every financial institution at the drop of a hat we need to look and tighten up a criminal law when people are defrauding the system we need to actually look at tax evasion and I think the government I sound like a government MP but the government actually has done quite a bit on the issues regarding tax evasion so I think that's definitely a point about fairness and and about the idea of people getting away with it but what I don't like and I think Stella put the case very well but she came up with this phrase equality is good for everyone I honestly thought that was from an animal farm or something I mean it literally I mean it sounds like it's come straight out of an Orwellian novel and and and I think one of the people in the panel in the in the audience made the very good point we want equality of opportunity but you're never going to get absolute equality of outcome and I suggest the world in which you did get that would be a pretty grave oaring and intolerant place and I think that you know we've got to consider that as part of your as part of your response Stella sake it's fun being lectured by quasi say when we've been in the chamber today debating exactly these issues me in the PFI companies who are bleeding dry our schools and hospitals and quasi and his government defending the 190 million pounds in windfall profits that they've made from your schools and hospitals me standing up for the importance of gender impact assessments so that we can understand the impact of government policy in tackling discrimination in our society government MPs saying that that's all to do with experts and academics and we don't want them involved in our political process I think what we need here is better definitions what we mean by equality and what it represents so madam for me at what the case for equality represents is about lost potential so actually the reason why it matters to have data the reason why it matters to have a definition of what a more equal society looks like is then you can test whether you're reaching it I have to say Roger if you lived in my part of the world if you saw some of the challenges that some of the poorest people in our society are dealing with you wouldn't say that inequality doesn't matter it absolutely matters [Applause] the reason that it matters for all of us and the reason why we do benefit when we strive for a more equal society and therefore strive not just for a general sense of equality of opportunity but actually look at the outcomes and ask are we reaching it is because when I talk about the talent in my community it's still the exception rather than the rule that it will be realized so we are still missing out on those future cancer surgeons those feature inventors those future musicians that could come from areas of our country where inequality is ingrained the flipside to that is what Raj is talking about in terms of people with high levels of wealth and for me that's a question of accountability and it's accountability for the fact that we all benefit when we make progress so it is right that all of us make a contribution to making forward making that happen and what we see with the PFI companies with crony capitalism is organizations not pulling their weight and then asking people in the poorest communities of our society to do a double shift that is why the right will always fail you because it will ask the market to figure that question out rather than asking people and asking whether people have the power to achieve their potential madam you talked about tolerance your apps that you write it is not left-wing to deny debate the best policy is the best answers the best solutions come from debate and discourse whenever I hear quasi and his friends talking in Parliament I know the ideas are better on the left but hang on just one second silly you didn't really respond to what the the lady with the 16 year old was saying she's talking very much about the culture in which case then that totalitarian isn't that idea that debate is somehow a bad thing that yes if you disagree with somebody you are either a red Tory or a Corbin Easter or goodness god forbid a Tory MP is wrong i I want to win arguments by the power of the ideas that I stand for by the values that have driven me in politics I don't want to win them by intimidating people or excluding people so I'm genuinely sorry that's happening to your son if you live in Walthamstow I would be happy to follow that up with the school because it is wrong because actually for your son to be able to debate ideas just as you did that's why diversity matters you don't get that if you look for general equality of opportunity you don't understand diversity improves everybody's lives because you don't get the cut and flow of the debate I guess I wonder if I can just put the same question to George then because it came up when Roger was talking about the dominance of the left in institutions and how in at university level and and the the woman they're talking about her son at school saying that you know we're talking about a cultural issue where the the left is showing itself to be intolerant I wonder if you can just address that again I've got no truck with intolerance at all and I think it's absolutely essential that we have debate everywhere and as wide as possible but actually I wrote down what Roger said about universities as the students there they said people in the university are protected from economic forces try telling that to students with 40,000 pounds of debt what we see happening at universities and indeed at schools is the penetration of this whole market business ethos neoliberalism the word they don't like to use and don't like to hear but the penetration of that ethos into these institutions which then actually greatly inhibits people's freedom it inhibits your freedom to play to explore to develop ideas because you've got this debt ticking away in the background all the time clocking up clocking up so you have to keep your head down make sure you get a job which is going to pay a lot of money when you get out otherwise that debts just going to be looming behind you all the time now this I would say is a great inhibitor of freedom it's a great inhibitor of that experimental nature that should be at the heart of all education because you're just being processed into the Machine by this crazy policy of lumbering young people with these hideous levels of debt now that's a right-wing policy that's not a left-wing policy and that's something which if young people have to have any chance of a decent life and bright prospects we have to get rid of and straight away thank you very much Rick we're gonna have to we're gonna have to just pause for a moment because we would like the vote to take place again now if you could use your slips to make a decision so I'm going to invite the speakers up now to sum up their speeches two minutes each and I'm not sure which order we go in now because we we start with well we start we start with stellar we've talked a bit this evening and I apologize for being late about equality equality needs to be broken down into what do we actually mean so yes it means unequal say it means democracy but it also means equal access and in one of the things that we know is dividing our country right now is the difference between access to the bank of mum and dad that isn't about going to university that's about some very basic things about children being able to eat have a roof above their head to be able to deal with the differences that happen in life one of the things that being an egalitarian being left-wing is about is recognizing how we will solve those challenges we are Lund likely to be able to solve them on our own and therefore we will always end up paying the price for that failure what the right would call market failure for the people who do not achieve their potential who are not able to contribute to society who are not able to be in a room with you and inspire you on to achieve great things to genuinely we achieve more together than we do alone and whether that is a slogan that you might put on a March or a hashtag it's certainly a way of life that I have found and seen in my lifetime to have changed this country for the better I'm yet to see the same force for good on the right the left is not perfect the left has many challenges but that's one of my predecessors Clement Lee used to say the left is what its members make it so I hope tonight you will join the call to make Britain a better place Stella Creasy thank you very much cause e-tank to start my concluding remarks by telling an anecdote a friend of mine who is about to have a baby and is a momentum activist asked me what I was up to this week and I said I would be having a debate about the left and the right and she said who were the other speakers and I said she's a momentum activist she spent the whole of the last summer trying to get labor and momentum going in the election and I said Stella Creasy is my opponent said Stella Creasy she's not left wing and and listening to her listening to her I agreed with lots of what she said of course I want people in her constituency just as I want people in Spelthorne to have the massive opportunities I completely agree with her when she says that there are too many people in this country who have the talent but are not being allowed to develop that talent through lack of opportunities and that's exactly why I went into politics and I think that the right rather than the left has a much more robust approach about trying to unlock talent than the left I mean take one example in terms of selective education Stella I know benefited from a highly selective School in colchester as many as as many and and might my guilty secret is that I was at college with your brother I was a college with your brother at university and he went to the boys equivalent and that's a great school and yet people on the left and maybe not Stella for people on the left who've benefited from selective education have consistently denied it to lots and lots of people who would have benefited from it who would have benefited from and and so that was just one example that is just one example of the way I think the left actually deny and frustrate talent in a way that I think that people on the right can can actually try and solve those sort of problems I'm not saying the right is perfect I think Stella's absolutely right there are lots of blame there's lots of inadequacy on both sides but I think the general broad approach is much better on the right on these issues and I'm delighted actually that that Stella Stella came tonight the other thing I would say just in my closing remarks and she said so who's the other Chad who she assumed it was a man I don't know why but she maybe she had pre knowledge and and she said and I said Oh George Monbiot and she said ah he's one of us he's a real lefty so that was so that was the and and I think I didn't hear what George said I've heard is intermittent remarks and I think her assessment was probably right so I'll leave it there Roger Scruton to you yes what stairs said something quite important when she said that the left is what its members make it and this is her message of hope and kind of triumphalist message I think the same is true of the right the right is what its members make it and they make his in a different way what I was trying to say was that we don't actually make it through these movements like momentum and so on we're not though fists clenching type we do nevertheless make it through civil Association through our belief in and love for the the country that is ours and I desire to protect the freedoms that have grown in it and of course there are all kinds of things wrong with it human beings are imperfect but what we most of all need as the institutions that enable us to correct our faults that's what we're talking about now how do we correct those faults as they arise we don't do it by imposing some uniform egalitarian socialist system from on high we do it by creating the opportunities for people to come out and express their talents and also to associate with each other in a legal and a law-abiding and peaceable way and that's what we've enjoyed in this country and not everybody in fact very few countries in the world have enjoyed it certainly not in previous centuries Estela is quite right in emphasizing the idea of equality is fundamental to the left-wing vision but I think there's a tendency to confuse equality and the pursuit of equality with the pursuit of wealth that's to say to the elimination of poverty I live in a very poor community a community of small farmers who have 40 or 50 acres each who are essentially in a subsistence level and they are all equal in the sense that they haven't their assets are very small but nevertheless thanks to country and the people around them all kinds of opportunities are constantly arising and many people take them younger people take them take them by moving away from the farm by by turning their farm into something like a semi legal haulage business and so on those are the kind of things that we we actually that is the way that the rural economy works the right so it's a black economy because of course the government has always stepped on it and I think this is something that we have to remember I'm a grammar school boy like Stella I didn't have the those I didn't have those privileges well I'm taking the offer quality is my authority for this but I was lucky I escaped I escaped from a poor background was given all the opportunities that enabled me to get to Cambridge and become a university professor later to go around his posh public schools giving lectures to boys like Kwazii who emerged to act when I first met him emerge from the throng with the coffee of my book on Kant and asked me to sign it I thought this man's going to go somewhere you know and he did the fact is we've what in this country have enjoyed many of these equalities opportunities and we've all all of us left and right have wanted an equality of opportunity it's just that we disagree about the means to obtaining it we on the right think you obtain it through the the long process of civilized association whereby people accommodate to each other and overcome their problems in their local communities and their little platoons those on the left think you've got to have a statewide system in order to rectify they're embedded in justices that we've inherited which George gave us such a poetic account of at the beginning so I think that by and large I would say the rights like the left is what its members make it and we've made it something durable and good Roger Scruton thank you very much and the last speaker George Monbiot please just to sum up for the motion sure I should point out instead of behalf that she's know the grammar school Nora boy just to clarify that that's slightly inaccurate summary there I think the key to this whole debate is the term social mobility because I think it's the one thing we all agree on we all agree that social mobility is a good thing in fact Roger and quasi have talked about hardly anything else fine we all agree that it's a good thing which causes a real problem for them because all the data shows that in conditions of high inequality you have very low social mobility and the more the concentration of wealth by the rich people in society the lower social mobility becomes when you have a distributive economy when you have high taxation on wealth when you have high spending on public services high spending by the state in other words social mobility soars the data is rock solid on this so if you want social mobility which we all want you should be on the left and I welcome these two new converts and I think for me you know that the crucial moment was you know when Roger admitted that inequality was a bad thing because of its destabilizing nature but then the only solution he could propose to that from the right was freedom of speech and much as we all agree that freedom of speech is a wonderful and necessary an essential thing and can and should be supported by all sides of the political debate let me explain the it is not going to solve inequality not by itself you need government actions you need taxation you need public spending you need social mobility and this ladies and gentlemen is what the Left offers and why it has right on its side thank you George thank you very much indeed so we have the result of the vote just to remind you before the debate you all voted as you came in a reminder that the motion tonight was the left has right on its side before the debate 37 percent voted against 32 percent voted for and 31 percent were undecided and you've just voted again after having heard all four speakers 57 percent voted against 36 percent voted for 6 percent undecided and it was an 8 percent swing vote it only remains now for me to say thank you to all the speakers Stella Creasy George mom Bo Kwasi parting and Roger Scruton I'd also like to thank intelligence squared and all of you for taking part and being here tonight thanks very much for coming [Applause]

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 24,613

Rating: 3.3065133 out of 5

Keywords: The Left, The Right, Labour, Conservatives, Tories, Jeremy Corbyn, Theresa May, Politics, worker's rights, socialism, equality, inequality, the state, the poor, poverty, tax, the rich, free markets, free choice, social cohesion

Id: JojH0xVmHC8

Length: 84min 27sec (5067 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 23 2018