Populism & Politics: Economics vs Culture with Matthew Goodwin

[00:00:03]Thank You Barry I'm now going to have to talk about brexit when I was trying to make sense of populism after 2016 I read a book called what happened by Hillary Clinton and I got to the end of the book and I realized that she still doesn't know what happened in that I use that as an example because our public debate about populism is utterly obsessed with short term factors should I have gone to Michigan should I've gone to Wisconsin what was written on the side of a bus during the brexit campaign what were Cambridge analytic are doing on social media what politicians said what during which debate and one of my frustrations with our discussion about populism which isn't visible today I think we're doing a great job of looking at the the real drivers but one of my frustrations with the along with the broader public debate about populism is that we're still only really looking at the surface and we're looking at the here and now and one of the arguments that Roger and I make is that populism is rooted in some very deep long-term currents within our societies and the populism is going to remain as a permanent political force on the landscape for many years to come and I'll explain a little bit why we think that but I wanted to start with a question that I'm often asked by people in financial services which is when you look at things like Donald Trump and brexit and populism in Europe to what extent to these sharks signal that we are leaving a period of volatility or do they instead signal that we are entering into a new period of churn and change and that's a bit of a bit of a simplistic way of framing the discussion but it does get us into some of the narratives that are visible all around us if you think that we are leaving a period of volatility then you buy into the arguments by Ronald Englehart and Pippa Norris that you've just heard that this is essentially about generational replacement that if you read the Economist or you read the Financial Times Martin wolf likes this argument Jan and Ganesh likes this argument the in essence this is about angry old white men who are about to be replaced by more liberal ethnically diverse populations it's a very seductive argument particularly for liberals because it means that we can reduce politics to simply being a conveyor belt of life and we don't need to think about the actual grievances that are driving people to leave the mainstream we can just assume that this is a waiting game another seductive narrative is that this is all about social media and we conveniently forget all of the populist parties that were successful during the 1980s in the 1990s I don't need to tell the Swiss about the popularity of ultra conservative politics and how conservativism and in some respects national populism were popular long before we all had Facebook and Twitter and obviously another narrative is this is just about the financial crisis the European sovereign-debt crisis and the legacy of 2008 2009 doesn't do a very good job of explaining why we had very successful national populace in Austria in the Netherlands two countries with very low unemployment levels very robust economies it doesn't explain why Nigel Farage first breakthrough in 2004 after 48 consecutive periods of economic growth during much of his support for middle-class conservative voters so I think there are lots of seductive things out there that the liberal left really wants to believe because it's it fits with our prize as David mentioned but the reality from the evidence base that we're now putting together and I think the reality from 30 years of research that we summarized in the book is that the drivers are much deeper and far more complex take the generational argument as one we have a very simplistic narrative emerging about brexit I don't think brexit was a populist revolt I think an element of brexit was populist but brexit if you really want to understand it you have to understand the mainstream tradition of Euro skepticism in British politics which came through both the conservative and the Labour Party's pretty much from the 1950s onwards brexit is fundamentally different from Donald Trump it is a phenomenon that was really massaged within the political mainstream and was anchored in the formation of British identity that is going back to the work of Linda Colley and others in the early 1990s has since the early 18th century been shaped by defining itself against continental Europe if you look at the leave out I wrote a previous book brexit why Britain voted to leave the European Union with Cambridge University Press the leave vote was much more diverse and we often hear today one in four graduates voted to leave the European Union one in three black and minority ethnic voters opted to leave the European Union 40 percent of London voted to leave the European Union a large ethnically diverse City like Birmingham voted to leave the European Union 40 percent of Scotland a majority in Wales voted for brexit the temptation to reduce that movement down to being a white working-class backlash among older voters is very tempting very tempting incredibly misleading and if you look at the generational argument and how that's playing out across Europe national populist parties typically from Sweden to Italy to France are not the most popular among the over 65s they are often most popular among the middle-aged or if you look at the latest work for example in France by nan Amaya marine lepen is now much more popular than her father among young women she did very well among 18 to 24 year-olds Matteo salvini has no significant generational slaw in his base of support and I would echo Barry's point that if you look at the lifecycle effect that is playing out across Europe good friend and colleague of mine at Oxford James Tilley has done a nice paper on there showing that typically all of us will become nought point nine six percent more conservative as every year of our life passes and that that will basically take you a long way to explaining the generational difference that we see for example between lis voters and romain voters so it's tempting to say let's just hold on for 30 40 years and all of this will disappear the reality is that there is much more gas in the tank for national populism because it is connecting with voters new generations of voters that in their own way are feeling both economically and culturally insecure the answer to the question is that there isn't economics without culture and it isn't culture without economics the answer I think as we as the majority in this room would share is it is about how they interplay how they combine and at what level and then if I summarize some some work we did on voting for leave at the 2016 referendum what we found there is and altogether we've had about 15 studies of the brexit vote of the last three years and they will tell a remarkably consistent story there were two key motives for lis voters the first was around sovereignty that if you ask an open or close question consistently the most popular response was I would like decisions that affect the United Kingdom to be taken in the United Kingdom whether you look at the British election study whether you look at lore - Crofts work whether you look at you gov the second most popular motive was around freedom of movement and immigration it was a desire to reform freedom of movement and lower the overall level of immigration in Britain and slow the pace of immigration we have a very misleading debate around populism which says it is about people who want open societies versus closed societies I think are much more useful framework is fast versus slow and when you look at leave voters a lot of lis voters accepted the positivity around migration but wanted to slow the pace of that migration and if you look at the ten years before the 2016 referendum as an aside Britain did see significant changes in net migration which reached around three hundred and thirty thousand per year by the time of that referendum but those two dominant factors I would argue for a specific chunk of the brexit electorate were underpinned by something else which was really neatly summarized in the talk this morning which is if voters felt that they had been left behind economically and socially they then became much less likely to see brexit as a risk and those cultural drivers then kicked in and they became much more powerful to explaining why people voted to leave the European Union so the way that I would describe it to my my students for example is I think I do believe that cultural insecurity is sitting in the driving seat when we want to explain populism but economic insecurity is sitting in the passenger seat it is a crucial foundation to laying the backdrop for how these cultural factors then kick in and the generational argument by the way just to pick up on something else that Barry mentioned I do think we need to also keep in mind the period effects that people are having the average age of a brexit ear was between 47 and 52 and if you think about what those voters saw when they were coming of age this was a generation that grew up with Margaret Thatcher it was a generation that grew up being told that Britain was signing an economic relationship not a political and social relationship and it was a generation that essentially came of age before the higher migration rates from 2004 and before the transformation of the British economy following the deregulation and privatisation under the fattier regime but now fast-forward to my first-year students who started at university two months ago my first year students were born in 2001 they have no memory of September 11th they have no memory of Tony Blair they don't really remember the financial crisis they've only known austerity they've never known the good times the first election they were eligible to vote in is about to arrive in December they weren't eligible to vote in a 2016 referendum they couldn't vote in the sequel which was a 2017 election because they weren't old enough to vote this is a generation that has been an observer of the culture war not an active participant and that's a really important point because for those students the dominant priority is climate change of that generation YouGov has shown us that only 49% want to see a second referendum on brexit about half this is a generation that is not climbing the walls for a second referendum if you go to a people's vote rally in London the group that wants a campaign for a second referendum you will be mainly surrounded by baby boomers you'll be surrounded by typically quite affluent middle-class baby boomers their children and Generation Z in general are much more animated by environmentalism and don't see party politics as being a solution to those problems and I think that's one of the fascinating dynamics about where we're headed in the future in that the cultural backlash thesis I think leads us to expect that in essence the young are going to save us from populism and I think it's important to remember that we now have generations coming into politics that are driven by a very different priority set and don't always look at traditional conventional party politics as being the answer to that I think if with to move the conversation on to how we respond meaningfully to populism I'll be provocative just for the sake of having a discussion and a debate later on the first thing I think we need to recognize is a populist have legitimate points that if you look at the four key drivers that's behind populism that if you look at distrust in politics working-class voters and non graduates have very good reason to feel that they're not represented in the corridors of power because largely they're not the reason that brexit was so attractive to working-class voters the reason national populism is attractive to working-class voters and non graduates is because they are now relatively speaking not in the corridors of power if you look at the houses of parliament only 4% of our MPs have any experience of manual work 18% have only ever worked in politics if you look at the US Congress we've got more millionaires than ever before more women more ethnic minorities but we've never had fewer people without university degrees or from a blue-collar background the first thing we can think about therefore I think is political reform I think we need to think about how we can increase a representativeness of groups that rightly feel they're being marginalized within our political systems to books I would recommend one is diploma democracy which is by some colleagues in the Netherlands that have shown how our European party systems have become much less representative and the second is white collar government by Nicolas cons which has shown how the way in which our political systems have become dominated by middle-class professionals has led to an exclusion bias in our policy process whereby working-class voters low-skilled service sector workers have been marginalized in the policy-making process there is a silver lining for those voters to populism which is that they're coming back into the national conversation and I think the second thing that we could think about is immigration reform and we have to think about it if you look at the response to brexit one obvious national conversation that we could have is what concession will we make with lis voters on migration how will we reform freedom of movement Boris Johnson wants to go to a skill-based policy the Labour Party has said it doesn't want to reform this issue at all and I suspect in December we'll find out the political implications of that decision and I think very lastly I'll leave you pondering a question which I always like to ask in these formats which is what are we willing to concede because somebody's going to have to make a concession if you're on the liberal left you're going to have to make some concessions around the economic situation which as the talk this morning showed quite powerfully has marginalized a large number of voters and also on the cultural dimension you're going to have to think much harder about reforming migration systems and if you're not willing to make that concession and we'll simply have further polarization and so what are you willing to concede and I think that's the question ah that we really need to think about during our discussion so thank you very much [Applause]