Is British politics just ungovernable?

[MUSIC PLAYING] This is a global player, original podcast. Now, breaking news. Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham says that he has applied to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-lection. They left a potential challenge for the Labour leadership from Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham. I found he wants to return to Parliament. I'll try and make time between now and the by-lection. Go and look some doors for him. This situation with Andy Burnham, it looks like a car crash. Andy Burnham is incredibly popular in my part of the world. Why would Keir Starmer sign a piece of paper, which basically says, dear Keir Starmer, I would like your job, you're sincerely Andy Burnham. Breaking news, Andy Burnham has been blocked by the Labour Party's National Executive Committee from running in the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election. Andy Burnham's doing a great job as the Mayor of Manchester, but having an election for the Mayor of Manchester, when it's not necessary, would divert our resources away from the elections that we must have. It is simply untrue to say that I was told that I would be blocked. We've just seen a week where the Labour Party leadership has almost been litigated in plain sight. There was much written about the Burnham Starmer spectacle, much florid talk about Keir Starmer's refusal to accept Burnham as being a sign of strength, the flexing of prime ministerial muscle which left him stronger. In fact, in every sense, it was a sign of profound frailty. Had Starmer felt secure in his position, had his political project been going well, he would have been indifferent to Burnham's possible return to Parliament. He might have even been able to take a risk, dare him to bet his longstanding opponent's political capital, political career, that in any midterm by-election, Burnham might lose it, taking him out politically, forever. He might even have felt able had he won to invite him into his cabinet. As it stood, Starmer was afraid, rightly afraid. Not that Burnham would lose, but that he would win. Afraid of an opponent whose political cache, unlike his own, is real, a rare thing to say, about a Labour politician right now. Afraid that so weak has Starmer's political position become, that to allow Burnham into Parliament, would be to automatically sign his own political death warrant. But there is a wider story here too. How did this come to be? How could it be that a prime minister, elected with one of the biggest majorities in parliamentary history, only 18 months ago, could find himself so afraid of a man, not even in Parliament? How could his political position become so parless? There is of course a familiar role call of reasons for that. We've covered them as they happened on the show. We could walk through all the mishaps, the mistakes, the moments he's been syndrogates and sinning. But what if there is a deeper story here? A systemic problem where prime ministers, including Starmer, find themselves captive in their own job, unable to flex power, or rather, without the thing, they need to wield that power, political authority. The ability to make people and systems do what they want them to do. Someone who thinks about power, and what it means to wield power, is Professor David Runsman, politics professor at Cambridge, and the host of the Past Present Future podcast, a show about the history of political ideas. I've caught up with him to ask about Starmer's rapid political decline and get at a deeper question. Why do our prime ministers now seem so perpetually lost? Is it personal that they're all just bad politicians, bad politics, or is it the politics? That's the problem. Welcome to the news agents. The news agents. What David Runsman, Professor Runsman? I mean, I think the reason for doing this, or the reason I wanted to sort of talk to you about it, is because all year, something on news agents in the day job, we've just been talking about what feels to me basically gravitating around the same question, which is how can it be that Kierstammer, a prime minister who comes in with such a crushing majority, has any of that feeling as if his actual political authority has been so fragile and has just been sort of spent so quickly? And then that kind of got me thinking a little bit about the difference in politics between power and authority, and the fact that it feels to me that we haven't had prime minister with a sustained period of authority for a long time. Do you think that distinction between politics and a power and authority is a useful one? Yeah, it is, I mean, it's the kind of question the academics could spend a lot longer than you've got. Arguing about it, but yeah, it doesn't. I think Kierstammer's an interesting example of it. So this is still a representative democracy. So power and authority, they derive from their traditional sources, which is winning elections and winning votes. That's the currency that we deal in. But power and authority are not the same thing. So if you win an election, it puts you in power. So that means you get to be prime minister with all the power that comes with it, not maybe as much as it used to be, but still. The reason they all want to be prime minister is not just vanity, right? This is still a system that really revolves around the central power of Downing Street and the prime minister. So there's just a basic sense in which power derives from winning an election. But also it gives you authority, which is something different, which is like the right to be heard, taken seriously. People really follow what you believe, because they think you've claimed some kind of right. They do it, not just because they have to do it, which is power. They do it because they want to do it. Exactly. They feel they must do it. So if you're prime minister, you can hire and fire people. If you're fired, you have to leave the room. But if you want the person in the room to think, I want to follow this man through fire, that's not power, that's authority. What's interesting about Stammer is he won an election which on conventional measures gave him a lot of power in that he gave him a huge parliamentary majority. And there was a divided opposition. This looks like the field is clear, but didn't give him a lot of authority because it was a weak election win. And one of the features of it is I think it was a default win in the sense that you can tell me if you think I'm wrong here, but I think almost any Labour leader would have won that election. I think Rebecca Long-Bailey, his rival for the leadership back in the day. If she'd held her party together, the party might have split, but say she'd won in 2020 and hung around, she would be prime minister. The Corbin of what? Well, that's interesting. That's factual. Yeah, so that one's difficult because we sort of know what happened to him in 2019. And also he wouldn't have held his party together, but a shrewd Corbinite could have won that election. And Stammer's problem, I think, is that he wants to assert his authority by pointing to the fact he won this election and the kind of basics of his power. And it's not enough because there are odds with each other. The power and the authority feel like they're pulling in different directions. So when he, as we're told, he sits around the cabinet table and says to his cabinet colleagues, "You're only here because of me and Morgan." That's a certain authority not power. You owe it to us. You have to listen to us. You may not like us, but we're asserting who we are. It's just not true. And I think that's the difference between authority and power. He still has the power. He could fire all of them tomorrow. He still has that power. But the authority doesn't come from that power and for him that difference is really acute. And I suppose the other thing is, he doesn't have the kind of political authority, which is you say may have come with a sense that they're there. His MPs are there because of him, which most other landslide Prime Ministers have. Like Blair could say that, that you could say that Johnson could say that. In 2019, not the last of that lot, they could all say that. But likewise as well, he doesn't have intellectual authority. He doesn't have a kind of prospectus or a program or in sort of strong kind of ballast of ideas that he can then draw upon and say, "You're with me because you would agree with me about these things." And I think so. I thought this before he became Prime Minister, he and Rachel Rees both actually. As they laid out their vision. And one of the questions you have to ask with this kind of vision is when it goes wrong, which it will, I mean, it just will. It's a factor of politics. This is what you say when you're in opposition. But when things are falling apart, what's the thing that you're going to cling to in the wreckage? And I couldn't tell you what it was. I still don't think I could tell you what it was. And that's one of the things that the test of political authority. So you've got to get these people. It's really bad now for them. It's a bad time to be in government. You've got to hold these people together. So you have to have the thing that makes them want to stick with you. And I don't know what that thing is. I know someone who, it's kind of people I know this is what they do, who's just been watching video of Margaret Thatcher in 1980 and '81. When she was really in trouble, really unpopular, she didn't have anything like a majority that Starma had. Her party was really divided. There were people who wanted her out, no question. And in some ways, the circumstances were worse. Unemployment was rampant. There were riots in inner cities. And the person who watched these videos said, the thing that defined her political authority is that even in the midst of this, she was absolutely clear what the bedrock of what she stood for was. This is the non-negotiable bit. So if you ask me, what's the non-negotiable bit with Starma, the bit that he wouldn't throw out the window if he had to, I just couldn't tell you. And that's a failure of political authority. Do you think that, again, so Johnston's interesting counter-example is it, because he was a guy who, he did, at least for a period of time, have a great deal of authority, partly because of the circumstances which was governing around the pandemic partly because of the election win that he just had partly because he was associated with a clear kind of set of prospectus, even if it was one that he was a bit of a chameleon at that sort of around. But even he, that was exhausted quite quickly. And I suppose when he was the last Prime Minister to exert authority for a long period, like it feels to me that the answer is no, none of them really have since 2008, probably since the crash. And so then that makes me wonder whether is it just that we've had in this quite contingent way a series of Prime Minister's who have been below par and not like a Thatcher or Blau, whoever it happens to be, is there something structurally going on which makes it harder to exert authority or just a govern for a prolonged period? So I think it's too many of them for it just to be a coincidence that we happened to have had a run of six or seven who lack authority, rather than two. It's not stupid or, you know, they're, I mean, I can't say. So it's just that there 10 years are too short and the circumstances are too different. So we're talking about Prime Minister's who lack authority. So Theresa May lacked authority. She had a lot of authority for a short period, but after the 2017 election, because she was trying to cobble together a government with the DUP, but Johnson quickly came to lack authority with a big majority. I think Cameron had some authority during the coalition years, but actually, I more think we look back to Blair and Thatcher and we think, so that's how it's meant to be or how it used to be. They're the outliers. In British politics, if you take a 200 year perspective, the kind of politics we have now is more normal. It's more like it was in the first half of the 20th century. It's more like it was in the 19th century. Parties are hard to hold together. The party system is quite fragile. Politics of the 1920s is actually more similar to hours in some ways than the 1990s or the 1920s. The 1930s as well. It was more stable in some ways, but also a complete nightmare to me. You don't want to be Ramsay McDonald, right? That period, I mean, the post-second World War period, but particularly maybe the last third of the 20th century, that looks to me like an outlier. It's possible the kind of politics that we have now is more like the way this system has worked for most of its history. We've slightly been misled by the thought that a thatcher or a Blair is kind of how it's meant to be. I increasingly think that golden period for the kind of democracy that we have. It's much briefer than we realise. It coincided with all sorts of things. That worked in the age of thatcher and Blair. This is the age of mass circulation newspapers and broadcast technology, relative, even during the thatcher period, relative economic stability, a certain kind of international authority on the world's day. A Cold War or post-Cold War scenario, which the issues were clear. It's incredibly rare. Like you say, the 1920s, more chaotic world environment, more chaotic media environment, more chaotic party system, more different kinds of people in politics. The other thing about the thatcher Blair years, that was the sweet spot of the professionalisation of the system. The people in your party in Parliament, you could pretty much rely on them to think of this as a career and something in which they wanted advancement and you could control them in those ways. The problem that Stammer has, one of the many problems he has, is he's got a parliamentary majority made up of people who are nothing like him, many of whom know they're not in politics for a career, many of whom know they're going to lose at the next election anyway, many of whom have come into politics from another world, the NGO charity world. They see it more as a kind of certain kind of performance than a career thing. There are 100 different WhatsApp groups. I mean, someone, you're going to know this better than me, but the WhatsApp vacation of parliamentary government, it's more like the 19th century. In the 19th century, they were all in different clubs, like around London. They were all gossiping in different clubs and neither the Prime Minister nor the whips and everyone else knew what they were up to. And also you have, in a way, that does remind me a lot of the modern media environment, the fragmented media environment. You have newspapers specifically, not just for your party, but for your tribe of the party. And you have, particularly in the US, I mean, that was even more profoundly so. And it was vicious as well. And the period two or three times a day, all of that, it was, so that almost think of it as sort of burn and engum period where. Fetchers, press secretary. Yeah. A graph, Yorkshireman, could kind of browbeat certain people, even as the Campbell, could browbeat certain people had access to the levers of communication. That period is really rare. So I don't think we should just think we've had a succession of fairly useless Prime Ministers who weren't up to it, like the ones who were up to it when I was young. Actually, we've had a succession of Prime Ministers who found this system as hard to manage as people found it to manage in the 1920s or the 1890s or the 1870s or God, you know, the 1840s. You just try. It's impossible. I mean, that's, I think the idea of the return to kind of normality or normalcy is Americans would say, feels to me like one of the most kind of misleading concepts in contemporary politics, right? And it is one that I sort of understand it. People kind of yearn for, because we imagine, I think mainly they're thinking of the 1990s rather than 1980s because the 1980s are obviously just so much more divisive. But the 1990s and sort of early 2000s, you know, in the run up to the 2024 election, so many people would sort of say to me, particularly if you're talking at things and whatever, this is going to be, isn't it? This is going to be the moment we can all my side are kind of breath and return to something. And it feels to me in a way when we're talking about Starma, however unimpressive he might be in different ways, it was that expectation in some ways that I think weighed most problematically. And it is one that he slightly fed into as well because he talked about a politics which would intrude less or trade lightly on your lives. And it's something to say to you on this. He probably something he could never actually deliver. I mean, he'd live through the break for years, right? He knows what this politics is like. It's not going to get any lighter. But I think he and those around him almost also bought into that analysis as well that basically, you know, the fundamental problem with British politics was that the Tory party was, you know, driven and feckless and useless. And if you just take them out, then it's a sufficient condition to basically improve the whole system and something that they're realising is that's not true. And that is a fallacy. So if he believed that, that was just a mistake. I think it's a mistake for any politician to think the problem with our politics is that the people on the other side are not serious people. And we are serious people. I think I've found you believe that. So if he did believe that, the people around him should have disabused him of that unless they believed it too. And part of the problem that he finds himself in now is if he does believe it, he's got to unbelievable it pretty quickly. And he's struggling. I mean, you can almost see him physically struggling to unbelievable it because he comes across in many ways more and more serious. And it sounds flat, empty dead because actually what he's done is sort of hollow it out. I suppose the other way as well of sort of thinking about the bigger problems with that democratic politics, right? I suppose you could also argue that this, maybe collapse authorities too strong or whatever, the sort of lack of ability to wield authority in a significant way is, it's not confined to Britain, right? I mean, if you look at most other, you know, Western European democracies, whether it's Macron or, you know, Schultz had it and so on, even you're Biden, even Trump, I mean, Trump like felt hegemonic at the start of this. He was wielding both power, absolute power and complete authority. And yet now at the end of the year, even that started to collapse. So gravity of politics seems to be exerting itself on him. So is it more systemic? Is this something else going on? So it's quicker for sure. Political time is sped up. A little time is sped up. It's much quicker. It is systemic. It's not universal. There are, I think, Maloney in Italy still has power and authority. These politicians who've been hollowed out in this way can cling on for a long time. But yeah, it is. And yet you look at Trump and you feel like Trump, so there are, there are sort of fundamentals which aren't new to our time. If there's a cost of living crisis, inflation is the, is the great killer of political authority in the 1970s, every democratically elected government around the world fell during the period of the highest inflation in the early 70s. So it didn't matter whether you were charismatic, technocratic, big majority, small majority. It's kind of kryptonite. And Trump's problems at the moment, his promise that he shouldn't have made was that he would bring down the cost of living. So it's not like, you know, it's systemic, but we shouldn't think it's systemic in the sense that it's this sort of new media environment and there's a kind of culture that is eating political authority. It's almost reassuring that anyway. I find it in a sense that like when Trump's going on about the price of eggs, which again is something that he, you know, he highlighted. It's that is the price of eggs. And the price of eggs has been an issue in politics for a long, long, long time. But if you compare, say, Stammer to Trump with Trump, I don't think he knows how to sort out Medicare, Medicaid, rising health costs, the price of eggs. And so that could do for him. But the way he communicates the language he has his ability to use anti-political language as a politician gives him a kind of out in this environment. What do you mean by that? So, you know, one of the biggest problems that Stammer has is he tries to assert his authority, his seriousness, the grownups are back. He's sensible by sounding like a politician. And this is one of the differences is this is a very anti-political age. So the reason it has sped up in part, people's patience is shorter. They are willing to give politicians far less time than they used to give them. There are many more outlets for their anger. And I think if you're Stammer and Stammer's particular problem, I think is that he's chosen to fix himself and says he can't get rid of her to another politician, Rachel Reeves, who has exactly the same problem. So they both sound like when things get tough, our way out of it is to sound more and more like politicians. And they share. like, something I thought about quite a lot as well, is precisely that, which is they're actually, even in historical terms, are basically unusual Prime Minister Chancellor partnership in that they quite often, not always, but quite often, the Chancellor Prime Minister, they complement each other in some way, or they balance each other, you know, Blair and Brown, obviously most famous, the camera nods born to this, whereas actually, they're both almost versions of each other. - And they're both the straight man, they're both the stew, which is like a double act in which the thing that would give the double act life, which is the other one is missing, whereas Trump, you feel, I was sort of thinking about this, the Rob Reiner was murdered, and Trump comes out, and he, of a man who's just been murdered, it turns out, it seems like by his son, says he had it coming, you know, Trump derangement syndromics explains why, no one should mourn for this guy, and then when there's outrage, he doubles down on it, and he says this guy's bad for the country, and there's a little part to me always that thinks, oh my god, he's finally gone too far, but he's done the thing that he does, which is he hasn't just changed the narrative, I mean, he's totally happy, and Johnson had some of this too, he's totally happy to provoke that response. He really doesn't sound like a politician, or he said it, he sounds like a lunatic, and he sounds like a cruel man, I mean, a really malicious, malicious, there's something chilling about that, but he does not sound like a politician, and it's not just that that sort of cuts through, but it's like a sort of breaking out of this thing that Starmer and Reeves are trapped in, which is the circumstances are really hard for governing. It is systemic, and they're defaulted to kind of get deeper into the system, and it's sort of like Trump, he's sort of brushing it off, he's disdaining it. I don't think it's gonna save him, but it's different. I mean, I don't know if you saw Starmer was at the liaison committee, and I thought it was a very, very revealing moment where he talked about how difficult it was to enact change, and he said, I pull on these levers, and I pull on this other lever, and then different arms, lymph bodies, and different regulatory bodies come back, and they say, "You can't do that, Prime Minister, you can't do that." And I just thought, God, this really is profoundly problematic for him, in a sense that, if you're a technocrat, if you come in as a technocrat, and you ground your politics and your authority in basically making the system work, and then you basically sit there, and you sort of put your hands up, and you go, "God, I can't make the system work," then you really have nothing, and I just thought that sort of embodied his problems in so many ways. - And even that way of describing it sounds like a technocrat, a technocratic politician, slightly moaning about his lot, and that's also, I think, fatal for this kind of politics. This kind of politics needs something that sounds like it comes from another space, and Stammer has a, he's shrinking all the time, because the space he occupies feels like is getting narrow. - Does he remind you of anyone historically, could again, something that I thought about, in terms of other leaders, 'cause he's unusual, and he's unusual in the late within the Labour Party tradition, and haven't been that many Labour Prime Minister, so it's hard to sort of compare it, but is he, are there any sort of parallels? Does he, when you make it-- - So in some ways, sort of bits of him remind me, of lots of people, some of his tone deafness is actually a little bit like Teresa, I think, when he came in, my wife, in a noise hurl, when I remind her of this, but when people were really excited that the grownups were back in the room, people who'd voted Labour, and I said, his first week, reminded me to a tee of Gordon Brown's first week, if you remember, people were thrilled, even after Blair, they thought the grownups were back in the room, the government-- - Seriously, the government-- - The government of all the talents, Brown gave that speech on the steps of Downing Street, the sort of dignified speech. You're staking your colours to where the grownups must, doesn't work, the second you do something a bit childish, which in Brown's case was not called an election. And in Starmer's case, there's been a whole series of U-turns and turnaranzas for flailings about. So he's a bit of all of these things, he's not the first lawyer to be Prime Minister, Blair, was a lawyer, but to me, the odd thing about Starmer is that mismatch between, he's got sort of little bits of the faults of all of them. And I may be wrong about this, I don't know him at all, but it seems to me like he lacks self-knowledge, or at least a sense of his own, sort of unusual vulnerabilities. So the really big mismatch actually feels to me a bit like vanity. There's a kind of-- I don't think Gordon Brown had it. I think Theresa May had it. I don't think even weirdly Boris Johnson had it. I don't think Boris Johnson thought he was amazing. And my fear with Starmer is he kind of did believe that thing. I think when he says to his cabinet, "You're only here because of me." He does believe it. And that mismatch, I think, is fatal for him. I can't think of another politician where I felt the sort of gap. Well, I say there's a very big gap. There's a very big gap in, I think, and he's that unusual in that he doesn't seek when he's completely uninterested in and indifferent to. He's own sort of place historically, and his own-- You think? Yeah, well, no, I don't mean in terms of-- I'm sure he wants to be a successful Prime Minister. I meant more in terms of placing the lineage of politics and within the Labour Party. So you know, if you've asked him, and I've interviewed him, and I asked him sometimes, particularly early on, you're trying to get a sense of the guy, and you'll see, you know, which-- Do you have any political heroes, or which Labour Prime Minister's all leaders do you most identify with? And the sheer-- and most political leaders, you know, Labour Prime Minister's in particular, can talk to you about that all day long, and they're love to talk about it, and they're love and they'll stop before you know, where you talk about George Brown or something. But he rolls his eyes out. I don't want to talk about that. It's boring. Ironically, he says it in quite a boring way. If you actually turn around and said that in a kind of fun way, it'd be quite a moment. But I think he's very unusually indifferent. I don't think he has much in a historical life, I suppose. So what's interesting about that, because you can think of a way that that would come across as a kind of modesty. Yes. And yet I think it's not. I think actually the politician who thinks-- so the modest version of it is just, you know, I'm not comparing myself to these people, and I just want to do a good job. But the other way, I think-- but he sort of thinks he transcends it. I mean, he thinks-- he almost thinks he's above it. Because once you place yourself in that lineage, you are beholden to a whole set of ideas and traditions and people. And he wants to be someone who defines himself and defines his own politics. And that's-- it's so hard to pinpoint it, because you've interviewed him I have, and I haven't set across from him you have. So maybe he doesn't come across like this. But to me, there's just that whiff in the things that you read about him in the way he reacts, where he just seems to think that he's slightly above it. And maybe the public pick up on that. I think the question about British politics, I think, is not why is he unpopular? They're all unpopular at the moment. But why is he so quickly the most unpopular by far, almost by a factor or something? Partly because he and Reeves are dragging each other down. There's no question that's part of it. But I think the absence of political authority, like we talked about, people do pick up on it. Even before Johnson was about to be turfed out, he still had some of that. Even Theresa May had some of that. It's like he's got none of it left. So what are people picking up on? Because they haven't set across from him either. And you and I are interested in this stuff. We listen to the interviews that he gives. We read about him. We watch him. Most people aren't. But they're picking up on something. And I think-- so my feeling is it, they sense there's something fraudulent about the mismatch between his sense of his own authority, command of the situation, and the complete absence of it in reality. And yet someone like Farage, for example, who we get, he's probably going to overdo it. But he's someone again who-- maybe it's more charismatic authority with him, probably, is. But nonetheless, he's someone who isn't arrogant, man. I mean, he's a deeply thin skit against him. I was like, across from-- very unlike Stum, he's extremely aware of his own place in what he wants history to be and all of those sorts of things. He thinks about those things, I think, quite deeply. But he's not as unpopular as Stum, I'm obviously, Stum was Prime Minister. But he's the public don't seem to mind that arrogance. No, and it's partly because it's slightly more self-aware. Maybe it's just maybe I'm not saying anything more complicated than that people pick up on the fact that people who are really lacking in self-awareness are very off-putting and that he has that. Farage is pretty self-aware. I think Trump is pretty self-aware. Yeah, some people were surprised about that. Yeah, I think he has a much clearer sense of what he's doing. I mean, I think he's unhinged. I think you can be unhinged in self-aware. I mean, it's not even that hard. You just have to know that you're a bit unhinged and let yourself, off the least, Johnson was more self-aware. There's something tone deaf about Stum, but it is also-- it's some of the basic stuff. Like you say, it is charisma and language and the ability to communicate. Even when Farage is sounding arrogant, he sounds like himself. And what is the himself that Stum are sounding like, except as you said, the frustrated Tamicra? And sometimes, as you say, politics-- people are able to spend all the time thinking about these things. And sometimes politics can be as simple as that, right? And people do pick up, or at least it's maybe-- it's not quite as simple as that in its entirety, but it certainly is an underrated component of kind of why particular politicians fail. It's those small things about them that the public think about, or intuit, in a way that maybe we don't think much-- attach much importance. Yeah, and it's not like Stum are is the most boring, spectacularly boring, uncharismatic politician that anyone has ever seen, right? He's not. And people really liked him. The people who are on his side in the Brexit arguments really liked him. They actually-- they thought he was the grown up. I mean, I'm not sure he was, but they thought he was. And he came across as authentic. And he often sounded quite passionate about it. So it's not as if-- There's something about him that puts him off the charts. But he does not know how to compensate for his weaknesses. He somehow doesn't know how if you are this kind of politician, like we said, you need around you different kinds of politicians. You need to connect yourself with people who can tell a different kind of story. And it's as though he pulls it back to him. News you can trust and the conversations that matter. With award-winning journalist at the heart of the stories from the UK and around the world. Breaking news here in Edinburgh. I'm Simon Marx, my American week is next. Reporting from the heart of Cardiff. Discover how today's story affects your life. Listen on our free global player app or the new LBC app. LBC leading Britain's conversation. The news agents. We're talking about how much importance to attach in a way individual politicians, phoneings and the sort of systemic problems, which clearly are there. As you say, in some ways, he's aren't new problems. But in some ways, they do feel new. And certainly, obviously, the tech environment is new. I mean, you wrote your book about how democracies might end or die. And that was what sort of 10, 10, you know, 2018, so eight years ago or so. And that was partly anchored and centered around the role that tech would have. And whether democracies we've known, it's compatible with the way the big tech and social media operate. How do you feel about that book now? I mean, do you feel vindicated? Do you feel that you were right? Or do you think it's different? The sort of underlight is called how democracy ends. And it came out of an article I wrote, which had in it the line, Donald Trump is not how democracy ends. And come 2021, 2021, 2022, I thought, well, at least that bit is right. I'm not so sure now because I didn't think he would come back. But it was also trying to argue against the view that democracy is going to end with a bank. That is going to end with a whimper. And it's going to hollow out. It's not going to end with revolutions and coups. And the traditional way democracies do end, which is you wake up one morning and the generals are on TV and they're telling you not to leave your house if you don't want to be shot. That's not going to happen. And it's going to take decades. So do I feel vindicated? I may have feel we're still on that. Maybe happening slightly quicker. But I also, the thing that I increasingly feel is that sense that this version of democracy that we have with these kinds of political parties, communicating in these kinds of ways, traditional ways, uncomfortable most of them with this new media and a new media environment that does empower citizens. This is a more democratic world for sure. Even though tech companies are hoarding power, they're also distributing it to people to moan, complain, form networks, organize them. So on the ironies is that we talk all the time about and get ready to concern that democracy is on its last legs. And yet in so many ways, if you compare it to the 1980s or the 1990s, that what we can now consider a kind of healthy and period, our political discourse is so much more democratic. Yeah, so it is simultaneously the thing that people wanted to be is either the one thing or the other. It is simultaneously our world getting more democratic and less democratic every day. And the thing that's being squeezed by that is traditional representative parliamentary democracy. Now it's core to the media. The BBs to say the state's too big for the small problems and too small for the big problems. And in some ways, the politics we have is too democratic for the undemocratic stuff, where you have to be quick and nimble and compete with the Chinese and compete with the tech companies. But it's too undemocratic for the democratic stuff, where people want answers today and they want to be heard and they have a voice and they have a platform they feel empowered. And it's squeezed between those two things. And that's happening quite quickly. But it is a kind of squeezing and I think one of the ways I think it's hollowing out is not because the authority of these politicians is completely disappearing or their power is disappearing. But more and more stuff is just bypassing them. Or maybe the institutions authority of themselves declining. The sort of traditional. Yeah, but that's. So yes, and that's probably been true for a while. So people, when did we lose traditional deference for our politicians? I mean, that might have happened. Parliament is the core. In the 60s, exactly. And people are often saying we wish Parliament was more powerful. Well, actually at the moment it is quite powerful because Labour have got a bunch of MPs that they can't manage. But then people don't feel, oh, look, Parliament has asserted itself. They just think, well, that's not working either. So it's the institutions. That was one of the funny things, wasn't it? I always thought about the Brexit process, which is that everybody kept saying this is an institution which isn't working. And yet in so many ways, it was working exactly perfectly, right? I mean, yeah, it couldn't come to it. It was struggling to come to a conclusion. But given the arithmetic of the MPs that the public themselves had sent to Parliament, and Parliament was engaged in this scrutiny function and trying to sort of hammer out a compromise, it was kind of working exactly right. And yet, despite that, its own authority and its own respect among the country was declining every day. And likewise, the people who were in favour of Brexit wanted a Brexit so that Britain's Parliament would be fully sovereign again. But seeing how Parliament worked, they wanted a bipartisan. So too much of the politics kind of goes around these institutions and around these politicians. But I think this could go on for a long, long time. I mean, the thing that really strikes me about our politics was so disillusioned, polling shows that trust or confidence in these institutions is as low as it's ever been. We have the most unpopular Prime Minister and Chancellor in recorded history, I think. People are unhappy and often despairing of the future. And we spend all of our time wondering who's going to win the next election. I mean, everything signals it doesn't matter. And you could keep going like that for a long, long time. Partly, that feeling that the next one will somehow resolve this. That feeling is real. Like you say, people keep saying, is this the moment where we go back to this thing working? Or the people who are really frustrated with it? Is this the moment where we finally break free from the shackles and Nigel who is. And the media discourse as well has become even more anchored in the horse race who's going to win and who's going to. Partly because it is entertaining. In some ways, more entertaining than ever because we have more access. There are more outlets. There are more ways in which you can. And the outcomes are less predictable. The outcomes are less predictable. There's more churn and chaos around it. The horse race is more dramatic. People are falling off. And so that's another example of how, in a sense, democracy has become more successful or more appealing because more people are interested in the horse race, which is a sort of centr of. But it's not yielding anything. Yeah, it's a very thin definition of success. You turn out. Turn out turn out down doesn't prove much. Turn out was very high in the VMA Republic. That was not a successful democracy. High turnout is often a sign that people are scared. All of these things pull in different directions. So you can have a democracy that is dynamic and has a lot of engagement. Although the engagement we also have to be clear is patchy, in the sense some people are hyper-engaged and some people aren't engaged at all. So even that can give you a misleading impression. You could find places in the country where it would feel like politics was treading very lightly on people's lives because no one gives a monkey's. So all of this is going on at the same time and we want it to be one thing or the other thing. But the long-term trends, no question. The long-term trends are away from and around this version of politics. So the power of the tech companies, the rising power of China, the ways in which the world that we're living is probably going to face wars or other huge events coming up, which will make us feel small. And that makes our democracy feel inadequate. And at the same time, the kind of bubbling chaos of the underlying, democratizing forces that are at work. The starma version of politics, it just looks really thin and squeezed. And like not much can pass through it. If you sort of think of it, representative democracy is meant to be a sort of bridge or a filter. It takes public opinion, anger, hopes, fears. And it passes through something. And out of that, you get politics and policy and outcomes and decisions. And it just feels like the thing it has to pass through is so thin and strained and old. Relative to all of the stuff that's going on around it that's eventually it's just going to be thinned away. But I don't think it's going to snap in the sense. I don't think it's going to tell to imagine what that would even be. Yeah, collapse in America is not on the brink of a civil war. Britain is not on the brink of becoming ungovernable. London is not a sort of world-west wasteland. These are the binary visions of politics. If it's not working, again, we go back to our traditional visions of what the failure of democracy looks like. So the 1920s led to the 30s and the 30s led we know where. That's a hundred years ago. That is not our world at all. Our version of politics. It's got a lot of, you know, there's this phrase, a nation has a lot of ruin in it. Our politics has got a lot of ruin in it. Can keep going for a long time. But it is, it's shrinking before our eyes. And maybe the problem with Stamos, he is unfortunately for him, almost like a physical embodiment of that, of the incredible shrinking man. Do you think of someone who's thought about the nature of democracy itself a lot? And the history of democracy. And again, sometimes, you know, a very kind of short-term political discourse. We forget how young democracy still is, right? And it's not surprising that in its contemporary form, you know, we've only had everybody who's only had the vote on the equal basis since not even a century, yeah, right? So it's still really, really young. Do you think, I mean, you say it's called a lot of road left to go? I mean, do you think that it can be saved from itself? Because it seems to me that a lot of the things that you're describing are kind of consequences of the democratization of society itself. It feels as if there are a lot of these things are almost inexorable. Do you think that a group of politicians genuinely could reform the system if they were so minded to save it from itself? So really don't know the answer to that question in the sense that history teaches you that political systems get stuck a lot in the way that our one probably is. and it needs something from the outside to come and kind of jolt them out of it. The British democracy was really in trouble in 1912, 1913. It was really in trouble in the '20s and '30s. It was really in trouble. American democracy was really in trouble in the 1850s. It was really in trouble in the 1930s. So it's usually a war. It could be also a real financial shock to the system. The 1970s probably had that function. Although we had that in '08 and it feels as if everything that has flowed from that has been negative or it feels as if the system has not in any fundamental way managed to refashion itself, either economically or politically. So the crisis in 2008-9, at the time there was a thought, and we've had Covid as well, we shouldn't forget. And in Britain we've had Brexit, which is a constitutional crisis for the system. And with each of those, at the time there was a thought, including with Covid, this shows what we're capable of. The galvanising event, doom and gloom of act climate change, no more. Because look what we can do when the chips are really down. And it just fades away very quickly. And it's partly because all of those three events in a way, even Brexit, which came close to making Britain ungovernable, but in the end didn't. We just had an election and we sorted it out and we went on our merry way. All of them were not quite bad enough. And yet they were almost bad enough to make the system fail to work. What is the not worst, but worst case scenario in 2008-9, which would have actually required a change in the way that we do politics fundamentally? A barma couldn't have just patched it up. Gordon Brown couldn't have just patched it up. The thing that would have been worse feels like it might not have been manageable at all. What's the version of Covid that would have made us think we just can't carry on this way? Well, it wasn't great. It was pretty bad. And so it is quite hard under the conditions we live in to think of the thing. But it probably will come. There are crises to come in the next 10, 20 years, probably possibly including real military threats. Maybe even wars, technological failures. I think the thing that hasn't happened yet, the dog that hasn't barked, is the technology hasn't failed yet. At some point, this technology will fail in a way that impacts on all of our lives. The network will out in some way. And so banking will cease to work. Or airplanes will fall out of the sky. Or hospitals will stop functioning. It may only last 24 hours. But we haven't had that yet. When WhatsApp goes down for three hours, people behave like that's the thing. But just when they will know it, when they think nothing just carries on serenely without that crisis in the same way the global financial system had its moment. So think of the tech equivalent of 2008 and '9', the crisis for the companies, the ways in which we suddenly realise they're putting our lives at risk. That could do it, a war could do it. But there's a fatalism about our politics because it's like we're waiting for the external thing. So you ask me, could our group of politicians come along and decide to make this way of doing politics better suited to an age in which some things are more democratic and some things are less democratic and the challenges and the cycles are getting quicker? In the absence of that event, it's not going to be an election. The thing that it will not be is an election. The election of Nigel Farage or whoever it is. It's conceivable in Britain, the next general election will produce a parliament that can't govern. But we will guarantee we will not convene a constitutional convention and come up with a radical set of reforms for a new deliberative, more consulted. We will just have another election and then Farage will win that one because they'll say, I told you they were trying to stop me. So it's not that. I did think briefly that if Scotland had voted for independence, unlike Brexit actually, Brexit didn't force a constitutional reckoning because Brexit was, we want our traditional constitution to be established. It was a restoration. Scottish independence would have been a revolution and the system just wouldn't have made sense at that point. Almost nothing about it. Elite would have been forced to reckon with. They'd have been the concept. We've always creating a new state to reckon with it. I can't think of anything else recently that. And who knows? You just don't know. But that one came close, I think. Is there an equivalent to that coming up? I'm not sure that there is. So it feels passive, our politics as well. It's part of the problem. There's a kind of waiting for Godot or whoever it is element to it. So what we really need is a new war. No, we don't need a new war. For us today, with Ronsman. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. The news agents. Right, I will admit that I'm a big fan of Ronsman's and his thinking. If you enjoyed that, I can guarantee that you will love his podcast, Past Present Thinking, as I say, if you are interested in the history and philosophy of political ideas, I'll guarantee you will love it too. That is it from all of us for this week. One other thing we've covered on the show before. What is in my view anyway? One of the biggest policy scandals of our time. The student loans system or lack of system. But since then, in fact, just this week, the chancellor said this to my LBC colleague, Natasha Clark. It is important that you don't have to start paying back the student loan until you earn enough money. And that is the point of the student loan system. That you get the loan, you get that great university education. And you only pay it back if you afford, if you can afford to do so. And obviously, after a period of time, that gets written off entirely. So if you are able to get a job that pays a good wage, you'll pay that money back quicker. But if you're never able to repay that loan will eventually be written off. I think that is the fair system around half of people go to university today, but half don't. And it is not right that people who don't go to university are having to bear all the cost for others to do so. Fair, she says. I'm not so sure. So we're planning a special episode on the issue. We know so many of our listeners and viewers have had their own experiences of the system. So do us a favour. Send us your name, your age, the course you did, how much debt you left university with, how much that you now have. And whether you think you got value for money, send those voice notes to [email protected]. Thanks as ever to our production team on the news agent Shane Fennelly, Makayla Walters, Natalie Inja, Vimbadawell and Adjorjavitch, Jess Williamson, Mikey Bags, and Lizzie Ward. Our executive producer is Louis Dagenhart. Our editor is Tom Hughes. He's presented by Emily Maillie, John Sople, when he happens to be in the right hemisphere, which is pretty rare. And me, Louis Gudall, we'll see you on Monday. Have a lovely weekend. This has been a global player, original production.