Britain Votes (Again)

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This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

On this show and throughout the Atlantic's coverage, we've spent a lot of time talking about President Trump's election and what it means for American politics.

Well, the U.S., of course, isn't the only country still grappling with a 2016 vote that didn't go as expected.

A few months before Trump's election, the UK voted to leave the European Union.

Ever since, Brexit has dominated British politics, much as Trump has dominated American politics.

But while the US has almost another year to wait before that name is back on the ballot, the Brits will vote in a general election next week.

So on today's show, we're going across the Atlantic, figuratively and literally, to our London office.

My guest is staff writer Helen Lewis.

I follow British politics the way I expect a lot of Americans have, generally aware of Brexit and Boris Johnson and some of the other characters, but without anywhere near the attention I give our own politics.

So Helen's here to preview next week's election and its stakes both inside the UK and out.

But she'll also help me understand British politics going into that vote.

Besides Brexit, we have the terror attack on the London Bridge the day after Thanksgiving, accusations of bigotry against both major party leaders, and a scandal that's raised new questions for the royal family.

We spoke Wednesday afternoon.

I learned a lot and really enjoyed our conversation.

Take a listen.

Helen, thanks for being here through the magic of the internet and across the ocean on Radio Atlantic.

It's very nice to be here.

Thank you for having me.

So you are in London and I'm in Washington, but this week President Trump has been in your neck of the woods for the NATO meeting.

And I'm curious, given all of it and the focus that we have sometimes in the States about how President Trump is perceived overseas, what it looks like from your vantage point.

Right, the most ambitious crossover event in history.

I think the thing that's fascinating is that obviously Trump is...

I'm going to say it's slightly too harsh to say that he's a joke to other world leaders, but actually, literally, we've had evidence this week that he is.

You know, there was camera footage of Emmanuel Macron Macron of France, Justin Trudeau of Canada, and Boris Johnson of Britain sort of sharing a joke together about the length of the press conferences that Donald Trump has been doing off the back of his bilateral meetings with a kind of sense of from all of them this like world-weary like, yeah, the schedule's behind time because, you know, the Donald's off on one again.

So I think there is a general acceptance that they do have to kind of share the room with this kind of huge elephant, basically.

And also that to some extent Donald Trump is uncontrollable.

What he says behind closed doors is only one part of it.

Not only is he doing these press conferences, which is already breaking protocol, but also you just never quite know what he's going to say on Twitter.

And it's interesting that the, you know, we're in the middle of a general election campaign at the moment, in which Labour's leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has essentially been baiting Donald Trump about this idea that the NHS, Britain's National Health Service, is going to be up for sale because of Brexit.

It's going to have American privatised companies kind of wanting into it.

It's going to have American drug companies into it.

He's been basically trying to get a rise out of him all week because there is a feeling that if Donald Trump intervenes in the election campaign, then whoever he's against, more people in Britain will like.

He is a very unpopular leader over here, and he's not somebody who is seen as the endorsement that you want if you're Boris Johnson and you're going for re-election as Prime Minister.

Aaron Powell, so let's talk about the British election.

It is possible that by the time that the 2020 election is done, Britain will be on its third prime minister over the course of the time that it took to have the election.

What does that do to the way that the elections play out to have things on such a short order?

This election in itself was called just a few weeks ago, and it's a short period.

I think from the American perspective, it seems in some ways bizarre, but also some ways refreshing to think about elections taking just that little amount of time.

Aaron Powell, right.

Is it possible that we might have another general election and maybe a referendum or two before you even crawl towards polling day in the U.S.?

I mean, I think there's loads of differences between the U.S.

and the UK electoral system, but the things that probably stand out most to Americans that yes, six weeks is the duration of the campaign and the spending limits are you know in the the low millions.

I mean we're talking about people you know candidates having funding to put out some leaflets and buy a couple of Facebook adverts.

You know there certainly isn't these kind of millions hundreds of millions of dollars put into s things like T V adverts.

All the parties get allocated party political broadcasts on the on the state broadcaster.

But apart from that it's a lot more kind of scrappy in terms of them having to kind of force their way onto TV and into the kind of evening news bulletins that everybody watches.

So those are kind of some of the obvious differences.

But, you know, the problem with it is that

we've basically been in sort of semi-election mode since the 2016 referendum because it delivered such an unexpected result to the Tory Party and the Tory leader David Cameron that he didn't know what to do with it.

He felt he couldn't drive through a policy he didn't believe in and kind of left.

And then nothing else has really kind of got done in British politics.

The you know, Parliament was pretty much logjammed us with Brexit legislation to the extent that things that there was quite a lot of cross-party consensus on didn't really kind of get anywhere.

So we haven't had quite the kind of mad dramatic month after month of the you know the the American presidential election, but what we have had is this sense that British politics has kind of got stuck.

And there have been various attempts to kind of reboot it, like switch it off and switch it on again in an attempt to get past the logjam of Brexit.

And this is the latest one, but

the polls have narrowed considerably in the last couple of weeks.

And the irony of it is, you know, nobody really knows.

It could be anything from a decent-sized Tory majority through to a hung parliament again.

And at that point, you begin to think there might be another EU referendum.

Is it so this election basically is about Brexit?

There are no other issues that can be at stake because that just has consumed everything sort of blob-like in British politics, right?

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Well, the weird thing is that actually it hasn't ended up,

Brexit hasn't been discussed as much as you would think.

The polling guru, John Curtis, who is something kind of close to our version of Yoda, because he is the only one who can kind of seems to be, you know, you've got Nate Silver and we've got a kind of really elderly guy with kind of crazy Albert Einstein hair, who is nonetheless a genius.

So, you know, this is a binary election, really, because either the Conservatives win it and win a majority, in which case their Brexit deal goes goes through or basically any other eventuality by that the only way that any other party can get into power Labour can lead a government is by promising another referendum they're a second referendum party themselves the Lib Dems are you know are very strongly pro-European the Scottish nationalists want another EU referendum so that is the binary choice at this election is you know break this Brexit deal really or or reset and and another EU referendum but it weirdly so the Tories haven't really put massive amounts of stuff in their manifesto it's an incredibly boring you know,

non-hostage to fortune-based manifesto, very steady as she goes.

Whereas Labour has gone, you know, Tonto crazy and is offering everything but the kitchen sink.

A much more expansive offer that is about the fact that you now have a very radical left-wing Labour.

I mean, in American terms, they are so left.

I mean, if you think Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders are left-wing, then kind of have I got news for you.

You know, they want to partially nationalise broadband provision, for example.

They want to take the railways back into public ownership, cut rail fares by a third.

You know, they want to put taxes up on anyone earning over 80,000.

It is a properly old-fashioned socialist manifesto.

So they really want to talk about that.

They don't want to talk about Brexit at all.

They want to talk about their big offer, their big retail politics offer, and also their sort of scare story, which is the idea that Donald Trump and the US are going to come and take apart the National Health Service.

And I think a British politician once said that, you know, the NHS is the closest thing that England has to a religion.

And I think looking at, and to us, the American healthcare system is a kind of rolling nightmare.

So that's Labour's big kind of

big scare story for this election is don't let the Americans into the NHS.

Do you think this election would resolve Brexit though?

It seems like if the Conservatives win the majority, then

they will

have what would seem to be a mandate to actually go through with leaving the EU, but it doesn't seem like there has been an ability, at least from my vantage, to figure out what exactly that would look like in a way that people can agree on.

It seems almost like you guys are caught in a time warp in British politics that you will continually

just be talking about whether to leave the EU, but never actually leaving the EU

and

everybody just being angry about it all the time and not other things being resolved over the course of that time.

Aaron Powell, I mean, that's both a very pessimistic and I would say a very realistic assessment of the next five to ten to twenty years of British politics.

I mean,

that's our job as journalists, right?

To be pessimistic and realist.

I used to have a colleague back at the New Statesman who would say immediately after the 2016 referendum, you know, this is our national project.

No, like this is it.

This is this is what we, this is, we've signed up to do this for the next couple of decades.

And I think that's very true.

You know, it's unpicking an enormous,

legal structures, financial structures, customs and import structures,

immigration structures, policing, security.

It's an incredibly deep integration.

And classically, when you make trade deals as well, you're removing barriers to trade.

This is a very unusual in that we want more barriers to

trade, but then we're going to kind of hopefully then negotiate it away again.

But the difference is that once we've left the EU technically, once that, you know, we're into the standstill transition period, as they call it, the power is even more than it was already in the EU's hands because we're then being treated as a third party.

You know, we're not, we haven't got the option of going, well, you know, stuff this, throw it all in, we're going to stay in.

So we're, you know, we are in a much more supplicant position.

I think that's going to be a very hard lesson for people to learn.

I mean, already a lot of the triumphalist rhetoric that you heard in 2016 about, you know, we're just going to go over there and tell them what we want and, you know, Johnny Foreigner is going to do what we told them, which was the tenor of some of some of the rhetoric on the on the right has that's already seeped away as it's become obvious that it's incredibly complicated and difficult.

The sad thing is that the logic We're going to, I think, going to go through a multi-year process of reminding ourselves why we joined the EU and why we stayed in the EU.

And despite the fact that there were lots of things about it that we didn't like, there were some very compelling practical reasons for doing it.

For example, you know, the National Health Service relies on pretty high levels of immigration in in order to staff itself.

The British economy generally has been boosted by net immigration from young, healthy workers coming in from Eastern Europe, for example, in order to support our ageing population.

So that's the problem.

When we talk about an Australian-style point system, which has become this mantra on the Brexit-loving right, you know, we should have an Australian-style point system.

They say it because it sounds incredibly tough, but per head, Australia has higher net immigration than we do.

And talk about, you know, immigration, restricting immigration to sort of highly skilled migrants is very popular, but in the short term, what we need to make our economy function is people working as, for example, hospital porters.

So there's going to be a huge distinction about all the logic economically that points to high maintaining the current levels of immigration and the political logic of saying, well, you've got control of it back now.

So, you know, by God, you ought to be bringing it down.

And previous prime ministers were able to go, well, we'd love to, obviously, we'd love to, but the beastly EU won't let us and that blame game will no longer be available so I was talking to somebody who's very well connected and writes a lot about Europe and he said you know I think the logic is back towards Theresa May's much closer deal than you know even if we go out with something that looks like Boris Johnson's much you know some more severe break because at every step of the process

You know, Europe is right on our doorstep.

It's a huge market.

We want to be as close to it as possible for the thriving of the British economy.

If you ask people, do you want to leave Europe?

The answer might be yes.

But when it starts to become a case of, and how much, you know, how much damage are you willing to take to your personal finances?

Are you willing for your pension to not go up anymore, you know,

then that becomes a very different question.

So the false prospectus of a lot of Brexit rhetoric is going to get found out over the next couple of years.

Politics and abstract thinking don't always go together.

All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back with more with Helen Lewis in a moment.

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Okay, we're back with Helen Lewis, staff writer at The Atlantic.

So, Helen, we've talked through Brexit, but that's not the only issue playing out in the election.

You've got the two leaders, Jerry McCorbin, Labour, and Boris Johnson, of course, currently the prime minister of the Tories.

And one of the things that has become a major issue is whether Corbyn is anti-Semitic, but also whether Johnson is an Islamophobe.

And those are kind of running up against each other in this campaign.

What does that look like as it's playing out?

Yeah, I've been writing about this for The Atlantic, and it's been a very depressing thing to cover because, as you say, it's become a kind of partisan back and forth, right?

Where you raise one issue, and the answer is yes, but Jeremy Corbyn, and on the other side, it's yes, but Boris Johnson.

And that means that neither of them really can be taken quite as seriously as they could be because it's, you know, it's been sucked into

the more of a kind of, you know, partisan slanging match.

But look, the thing about Boris Johnson is that there are many people, even on the right, even in the Conservative Party, some of them now left, the Conservative Party, who have said explicitly he is unfit to be Prime Minister.

His old boss, Max Hastings, said, you know, you wouldn't trust him with your cheque book or with your wife, which is a kind of classic Conservative thing to say about someone.

You know, he got sacked from the Times for lying.

He made up a quote that he attributed to his godfather.

He got sacked from the shadow cabinet by the Tory leader Michael Howard, not for having an affair, but for lying about having an affair, for saying that it was an inverted pyramid of piffle.

There's been a recurrent theme throughout the world.

That is as British an expression as I think an American ear could hear.

Right, okay.

There's been a persistent question during this election campaign because we don't know how many children he has.

I mean, who knows?

He may not know how many children that he has.

So his personal character,

you know, has been a subject of intense scrutiny.

And then you come to his career as a kind of newspaper columnist.

He was editor of the Spectator magazine and then a columnist for the Daily Telegraph.

And in that capacity, he wrote lots of deliberately provocative articles.

And the one that comes up a lot is he wrote a defense, as he says it, of liberalism about people should be allowed to do stupid things.

And one of his citations for this was, you know, I don't like women wearing the burqa,

but, you know, they look like letterboxes, but nonetheless, they shouldn't be banned from doing it.

So he sort of says it's always taken out of context, that remark, because actually I was defending their right to do it.

And then the other side says, well, look, you're still encouraging and otherising this whole group of women who are, we know, at higher risk of being attacked for the way that they dress.

So that's that side.

Equally depressing, although in a different ways, is Jeremy Corbyn's history because he was on the back benches for 30 years.

He comes from the

hard left of the party for whom Palestinian rights are one of the great foreign policy causes and he is personally much more passionate about foreign policy than absolutely anything else.

He's a passionate anti-imperialist.

He's very hostile towards America.

And unfortunately, where that tips over is into repeated suggestions that Zionism Zionism is inherently illegitimate, that Israel doesn't really have a right to exist, that there's something different about.

He said a couple of years ago that Zionists, British Zionists, quotes, don't understand English irony, which touched a lot of Jewish people I know because it prods at that idea of divided loyalties, or you'll never really be assimilated, you'll never really be accepted.

So there's this consistent thread running through where anti-colonialist politics tips into anti-not just Israeli, any particular Israeli government, but the kind of concept of Israel itself and then one of the worst incidents was there was a mural on a wall in East London that had hook-nosed bankers on a table that was on the back of black Africans and it was a kind of absolutely stone-cold classic anti-Semitic trope about you know Rothschild bankers and shadowy world governments and cabals and he left a comment on it saying you know basically like why is this why you know why is this even being taken down and now says well I didn't look at it very carefully well the problem is you don't have to look at it very carefully you have to look at it very fleetingly to go, oh my god, what is that?

And it, unfortunately, anti-Jewish racism plays into a lot of things that are very topical right now, particularly conspiracy theories on things like social media about the 1%,

about the idea that the world's run by elites.

And there are perfectly innocent ways of phrasing that, but there are also ways that do seem extremely dog whistly.

And that has not been a line that he's walked very successfully at all.

So, is Britain at a breaking point here?

I feel like Britain's been at a breaking point for three years.

So my colleague Tom McTake wrote a piece saying, you know, Britain's constitution is being stretched to the limits, and that's a good sign, which is why I like having Tom around because he's a relentless optimist about these things.

You know, but it is the same thing as what's revealed by perhaps the impeachment inquiry in America, right?

Which is that the people who built democracies and the way that they've grown up have there are checks and balances built into them.

So the idea that

it all seems to be slightly chaotic is kind of a function of trying to sort out something really, really messy through a series of overlapping sets of mandates and prerogatives and rules.

So

I'm going to go along with Tom's assessment that that means that everything is ultimately okay because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Aaron Ross Powell,

there was the attack

on London Bridge last week that

caught a lot of attention,

people trying to sort out what exactly was going on on and whether that would be something that played into the British election.

It's been a week now since that happened.

Obviously, the attacker was subdued.

Does that seem like it is shaping where things are?

Did it put people just more on edge with everybody pretty much as far out on edge as they could be already?

The funny thing was about it that after the initial kind of horror of it, everybody got quite patriotic because it turned out that, you know, this man had been at a conference in London Bridge and had started attacking people with a knife.

At which point lots and lots of people had started to fight him off, including one man with a fire extinguisher, another with a narwhal tusk that

he'd snatched off the wall.

But the interesting thing is there was a much higher death toll from a terror attack in 2017 in the same area.

And Jeremy Corbyn, who was still Labour leader then, running against Theresa May, did something very unusual, which is everyone thought he was going to be really in trouble about it because of his, you know, his kind of perceived dubbishness on national security issues.

But he said, you know, first of all, I think that Islamist terrorists are attacking Britain because of our foreign policy, our invasion of Iraq, you know, our legacy of interfering in the Middle East.

And the Iraq war, although a majority of Britain supported it at the time, has now become very unpopular, particularly on the left.

So that was reasonably well received.

And the second thing he said was an anti-austerity message, which was that the Conservatives in their time in office have cut police numbers.

And it is unfair to expect our police to defend us from such serious threats to this when

they're understaffed and overstretched.

And so, what looked on the surface like it was going to be a big problem for him actually was neutral, if not positive, in terms of his reaction to it.

And I sort of think that the similar thing has happened here, it hasn't really played enormously in one favour of one politician or the other.

Boris Johnson already had quite a draconian, populist, authoritarian approach to criminal justice issues, you know, very much of the kind of lock'em-up school.

And he's used the opportunity to reiterate that, which has been in itself quite controversial because the conference that the knife man started was about prisoner education and rehabilitation.

And the two people that he killed both worked in prison rehabilitation.

And the father of the man who died said, Well, look, don't politicise my son's death to say, you know, no one can ever change because that's not the experience that, you know, that my son Jack had.

So it hasn't, you know, it hasn't played to the kind kind of law and order thing in the way that you might have straightforwardly expected that it would.

Aaron Powell, so through all of this, the

constant rock of stability in British politics and British life is supposed to be the royal family.

And these days,

that is not so stable.

There's a lot of infighting.

There's what happened with Prince Andrew and his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and that interview that he gave to the BBC at Buckingham Palace in which he confused almost everybody by how he thought what he was saying was a good idea or okay to say your piece on that interview is worth reading for anybody who hasn't read it yet and pull it up, Helen Lewis and Prince Andrew.

But

where we are is the queen is 93 years old.

She has been queen a very long time.

I was thinking the third season of The Crown is out and it's got her doing things.

It's three seasons in and it's still 50 years ago.

Yeah, there's a lot more seasons to come.

And look, she may live for another 10 years.

Her mother did, right?

But

it

presents the royal family at a juncture point at a moment when Britain overall is.

And it seems like that inevitably will end up influencing what the future of the monarchy and the royal family looks like.

Aaron Ross Powell, the story of the crown

is an interesting one because the kind of meta-story behind it is how do you take an institution that is essentially medieval, right?

It's like magic blood passes down from parent to child, and that's why these people should be in charge.

And how does that work in an era of, you know, first televisions, you know, and then an aggressive tabloid newspapers, and and then now social media and times when everybody's got a camera on them all the time.

You know, it's something that relies on a certain amount of mystique to make it work.

And there isn't, this is not a world in which mystique is in huge supply.

But, you know, it comes down to that the younger roars are quite popular, but again, chafing at these restrictions that are placed on them.

I also wrote about Megan Markle and her vogue issue.

You know, how do you try and be both a social justice activist and a duchess?

It doesn't, it's not two things that naturally, you know, champion of the underdog and person who spends a lot of their time in castles.

It's not two things that naturally fit together quite well.

So the royals are definitely constantly trying to fit this very old template onto modern life.

Would you guess then in 20 years, and I do think it's fair to say in 20 years, Queen Elizabeth won't be alive and queen anymore.

She'd have to be 113.

That the royal family will be a major institution in British life?

Aaron Ross Powell, I think that they will endure because a bit like the, you know, they say the Conservative Party is the most successful political force ever, the British Conservative Party, because it constantly renews itself and it is quite ruthless about trimming its sails to fit the time.

And the same thing is true of the Royal Family.

It does change and adapt.

I can't really see the mechanism by which, I mean, for a start, the idea of having referendums on more things is fairly alienating to anybody in Britain at the moment.

So I don't, and I certainly don't think we're at the, you know, going to take the French option and send them to the guillotine.

So I don't really see the the mechanism by which that ends.

I think it's more likely that we'll do the very British thing of complaining endlessly about them while not changing them.

Aaron Powell, let's close with this, Helen.

In the states, we talk constantly, have been talking constantly since 2016 about what does Trump's election mean?

What does it mean about our politics and what the country actually is?

But

it is part of a connected pattern, a connected movement and politics politics all over the world that in some ways was sparked at first by Brexit.

And when the Brexit vote happened, Trump promised that he was going to be Brexit plus plus.

And certainly that's what happened.

He did end up winning.

Nobody thought the referendum would end with leave, and nobody thought the 2016 election would end with Trump winning.

When I say nobody, I say almost nobody.

And sure enough, that's what happened.

And we see that in other places around the world.

Ann Applebaum, our new colleague, was on the podcast a couple weeks ago, and she had written

ahead of the Brexit vote something that I called her out on, which she said that she felt like we were maybe two or three elections away from the collapse of democracy.

And I said, so

then there was the Brexit vote, and then there was Trump's election.

Was that what you were talking about?

And she said, well,

the French presidential election, if Marine Le Pen had won, then

that would have been what pushed it over the edge.

What do you think

where do you think we are in this?

Are we

really on the brink?

Or

is this just an adjustment process, maybe

figuring out something new about democracy or

sort of rebooting it into its next stage that maybe will include some of this populism and nativism in ways that we had not expected or maybe move beyond it.

There's a book that's really influenced my thinking, which is by a political historian here called David Runciman

at Cambridge University, which is called How Democracy Ends, in which he says we might well end up with hollowed-out democracies, things that look like entirely like democracies but aren't really functioning as them.

And he says within that he thinks that Mark Zuckerberg is more dangerous than Donald Trump.

And I think it's a point that's worth taking apart because for me one of the big themes of modern politics and the scary thing is is not just the emergence of the far right or the you know populism, but it's polarization.

It's the fact that Obama was out there warning about the Democratic primary, right, to say that you know it the votes of thousands of thousands of for example you know, relatively centre left and maybe even slightly cons socially conservative black Democratic voters in the primary in somewhere like South Carolina uh worrying them that they they count less than one very high

extremely left-wing Twitter account held by a white college graduate.

And I think that is a real worry I see when I look at American politics: is that the candidates in the primary have to go so far out that can they tack back to the centre?

And actually, what happened here with the Labour leadership election is that

the furthest left candidate won.

And then, you know, Boris Johnson has now essentially crushed Nigel Farage's Brexit party because there's no space to the right of him on this kind of authoritarian approach to policing and things like that or on the Brexit deal, you know, the hardness of the Brexit deal.

Unless you walk out and sever absolutely every relationship, there's no harder Brexit deal available.

So that's my worry is that particularly driven by social media, the politics that becomes popular is the one that is incredibly emotional.

It's about values, it's about identity, it's about tribalism and the fact that, you know, you don't just think that people who disagree with you have another opinion.

You think that they're wrong, that maybe they're bad people.

So that is what really worries me because if you end up with very polarised parties, you know, they're very entrenched, then actually that licenses a lot more bad behaviour from politicians.

And I think that's what you've seen with both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, actually, is that they've kind of got away with scandals that might have tanked a leader who, you know, if they were more worried about swing voters, but their memberships are kind of clinging on to them because, you know, if you if you cede an inch of ground to the other side, then the bad people win, not just people you disagree with, but bad people.

So that's what kind of worries me, as well as the rise of, you know, illiberalism in Eastern Europe.

But there's not time to go into that now because that's a whole.

I've got enough to worry about covering my own country without intelligence.

You've got a week left from these British elections until probably the next British elections, as you say, could happen

several times over by the time that we or it might be five years.

It could be five years.

We could get a gap, or we could get another, you know, there have been years, 1974, there were two elections in a single year.

So, you know, we could get another two elections next year.

Well, I mean, the good news by comparison maybe is that no matter what happens in the 2020 election, I have a feeling that the speculation about the 2024 election will begin early in the morning after, and I think it's November 4th, would be the morning after the election.

So we will

beat you to at least the punditry part of it.

Okay, that makes me feel vaguely better, I suppose.

All right, Helen Lewis, thank you for being here on Radio Atlantic.

It's been a pleasure.

And to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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Catch next week.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

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When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

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They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

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