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July 12, 2016 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
51:59
Adrian Davies on Post-Brexit Britain
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Welcome to this podcast of Renaissance Radio.
We have today a guest who is known to many of our listeners, Adrian Davies.
He is a professional British barrister.
He is an occasional speaker at American Renaissance conferences, a bon vivant and raconteur, and in my experience, one of the most perceptive observers of politics in Britain and on the continent, as well as a very keen observer of the United States as well.
And I've asked him to join us today to give us his impressions of the prospects and the possibilities for Brexit now that the dust has settled a little bit and the effect of the vote has had a chance to sink in.
Thank you very much for joining us, Mr.
Davies. Jared, thank you very much for inviting me.
It's my impression in the United States that the vote for Brexit was in effect a vote for sovereign control over immigration And a vote against creeping multiculturalism.
Is that in fact the case?
And if it is the case, will Britain's rulers actually pay attention to that sentiment in their future behavior?
I wouldn't agree with that analysis.
I think it's too simplistic.
There were a number of factors involved in this vote.
The first certainly is that there is a section, and evidently a substantial section of British opinion, including influential faction within the ruling Conservative Party, that attributes all the country's problems to British membership of the European Union, which I personally think is bunkum.
Secondly, I agree with you.
Immigration was an important factor.
I would say that in my view, it was an important factor in a far from entirely positive way for reasons I'll come to.
The third and perhaps the most important and Indeed, the decisive factor in how people voted is the referendum became in a sense a referendum on the status quo.
Very interesting analogies have been drawn in our press between what happened here and the prospects for Donald Trump in November in the United States.
Our press making the point that if Donald can turn the presidential election into a referendum on the status quo, all present auguries suggest that he will win by a landslide, and that rather is what happened here.
So I think, as I say, it was a combination of factors.
I would not pretend To be able to attribute in percentage terms the influence of each of those three factors.
Well, when it comes to a referendum on the status quo in Britain, which aspects of it do you think most motivated those who wanted to leave the Union?
I think there's a combination of factors.
And this was the undoing of the Remain, the establishment side.
First of all, there is A perception, I think, amongst many ordinary people that the European Union is in some way responsible for the failure of the British government to control mass immigration into the United Kingdom.
This is simply not true.
More than half of immigration in the United Kingdom comes from outside the European Union, and that is by far the more objectionable kind of immigration.
It's the immigration of people who have nothing in common with the people of the British Isles in ethnicity, in religion, in culture, in many cases in language.
That is entirely within the power of the British government to control.
It always has been, and it doesn't do so.
Now, it is certainly true that there has been a very, very large influx, much larger than predicted, of people coming to England from continental Europe, the principal reason for which is the appalling condition and economic condition of many European countries.
In Eastern Europe, average wages are very, very low.
So people have come to England because simply you can earn four, five, six times as much money for doing the same job.
Of course, you don't end up four, five, six times better off because you discover the cost of living in England is vastly higher than it is in Poland or Latvia or Lithuania or wherever people are coming from.
But on the face of it, it looks attractive.
It turns out to be rather less so when they get here and discover how much they're going to have to pay, particularly for accommodation.
But that is a huge pull factor.
It's actually also been a pull factor from some Western European countries.
The sclerotic condition of the French economy now means that there are hundreds of thousands of French people living in England.
People are coming here from Spain where youth unemployment is 45%.
Mainly as a result of the Euro, which has been a disaster for Southern European countries.
So yes, undoubtedly there has been substantial immigration from Europe.
And undoubtedly, free movement within the European Union contributes to the perception some people have that there has been a massive influx of Eastern Europeans.
And indeed, I say the perception that some people have is true.
It's a correct perception.
Some parts of the country have been very affected by it.
I, for my part, while understanding how people feel, particularly at increased pressure on schools and hospitals and some measure competition in the labour market, cannot pretend that That I regard the immigration of a pole into England as being something that gets me terribly excited.
Let me put it that way.
The arrival of other European people similar in ethnicity, culture and religion to the British people in England does not strike me as being a source of overwhelming concern.
Not at any rate, unless the numbers become so large as to face great pressure upon infrastructure.
It has to be said That in some parts of the country, particularly Eastern England, which had not been much affected by any kind of immigration until recently, the numbers of new arrivals from Eastern Europe have been so great that they have actually done that, even though the people are relatively, well, easily compatible culture and ethnicity.
Well, I must say that I would certainly trade our Haitians and Guatemalans for your Poles and Bulgarians.
Yes. And I'm curious, in fact, Why it is that there is so much resentment against Poles in particular?
Is it a sense that they are willing to work for less and they're driving wages down or that they're alien?
Or could you dissect a little bit this anti-Polish sentiment that seems to be common?
I find it entirely perplexing.
Although I have to say, it has all kinds of curious twists and turns.
I know a good many Polish people, what we call the Old Poles, that's to say, descendants of those who came over to England in 1939 with the remains of the Polish army after Germany invaded Poland.
And their attitude to the new arrivals is not friendly, you may be surprised to hear.
Often it's based upon class distinctions in Poland.
Where those who came over and settled in England a couple of generations ago come from a much higher social background in Poland than many of the new arrivals and they are distinctly snobbish towards their less economically fortunate brethren who've arrived more recently.
I've heard quite a bit of this from within the Polish community itself.
So it's rather a complex issue.
Most Poles who come to England strike me as a very decent, hard-working, law-abiding people.
There is undoubtedly a bad element And undoubtedly some of the bad element has come here, mainly because the pickings are richer if you're a petty criminal in London than they are in Katowice.
And again, I have also heard a deal about this from within the Polish community itself, the general drift being that unfortunately some of the less desirable elements in Polish society have found their way to England and have brought the good name of 90% of the Poles into disrepute.
To what extent are the Eastern Europeans who are showing up, in fact, gypsies rather than Eastern Europeans or Europeans?
A few are.
They're probably more than we're told because our government, of course, likes to pretend that the figures for net immigration in the United Kingdom are much lower than they really are.
But undoubtedly, a lot of the people who have arrived are what you might call real Romanians or real Bulgarians, not not gypsies.
Well, what worries me, and I suspect what would worry you as well, is as you were suggesting, Britain has had control to a large extent over its immigration policies, certainly in terms of controlling people from coming from outside the European Union, but has not exercised that control.
And the question that I would ask is whether or not Simply having exited the European Union means that your rulers will begin to exercise that control.
Do you have any sense of what the prospects are for that?
Well, I don't think that's going to happen until we change our rulers, although that may not be so remote a possibility now as it might have appeared just a few weeks ago.
My view on what has driven mass immigration into Great Britain in the post-war years really is quite simple.
It doesn't need to be explained by complex ethnic rules.
Conspiracy theories, I think you know what I mean.
It doesn't need to be explained in any other way, but by the insatiable demand of capitalism for cheap labour, which has been the single largest driving factor behind this phenomenon ever since the late 1940s when it began, and particularly the 1950s, it became a serious social problem.
The purpose of bringing in large numbers of people from the former British colonies was to drive down wages.
In industries that were heavily unionized and where the unions have had success in raising wages and therefore in raising the living standards of ordinary people far above the level at which their parents had lived a generation before.
And there is an insatiable demand amongst employers for people who will work for the proverbial cup full of rice.
There is no limit to how many corporised, desperate, destitute people big business would like to import into this country to drive down wages.
One of the ironies about this is that the only Powerful group of people in this country.
Too stupid. Too utterly cretinous.
To perceive this reality are, of course, the leaders of our trade unions, or labour unions as you'd call them.
They are so blinded by Marxist dogma, many of them are well left to the kind of people who lead labour unions in the United States.
They're often very committed to extreme left-wing political positions that are totally unrepresentative of their membership, let alone the broader British people.
These people are so high bound in Marxist dogma, they refuse to notice the obvious fact.
But one of the rules, one of the laws of supply and demand is that if you greatly increase the supply of labour, wages will fall.
But they are in denial about that simple reality.
They truly imagine You can have demonstrations to shout refugees welcome and no borders and so on.
And an endless influx of new arrivals will not drive down wages.
You have to be extremely stupid or willfully blind or a combination of the two not to notice that.
But that actually describes very well most of those leading British trade unions.
Well, we have a bit of that in the United States as well.
So many blacks who are very badly hurt by the influx of Low-wage immigrants from Latin America.
They seem to think that they're going to benefit from some kind of black-brown solidarity against the white man rather than suffer from the depressing effect on wages that all these new arrivals have.
It's a very, very strange phenomenon for us to try to understand.
But back to the question of Brexit.
For For this procedure to actually begin, this separation from the Union, requires that Britain exercise Article 50, I believe it is, of the European Union Treaty.
But for this to take place, does that not require a vote of Parliament?
And if so, is it possible that Parliament could simply refuse to vote to exercise this clause?
There are a number of interesting points rising out of that.
I'll look at the matter first theoretically and then practically.
Theoretically, the referendum is a merely advisory exercise which is in no sense binding upon the legislature.
is that the most strident, vocal and passionate advocates for Brexit are all great exponents of the sovereignty of Parliament.
They're just like people who have the United States who are obsessed with the constitution and the minutiae of its interpretation and pieces of paper from the 18th century.
Which, so long as those are maintained, the complete demographic transformation of the country into cultural transformation, etc.
So none of that will matter, as long as you have these pieces of paper.
They're the exact equivalents of such people.
Now, the great irony about it is that left to a free vote in the House of Commons, four-fifths of the members would vote to remain within the European Union.
So they want an institution that has diametrically opposed views to their own to be sovereign.
Paradoxically, that institution doesn't wish to be.
That's really rather funny.
There's a delicious irony there that is probably not appreciated by the more fanatical Brexiteers.
In political terms, there's a big debate going on at the moment, which I don't pretend to know the answer.
It's going to be litigated in front of our courts over the next few weeks about whether...
The invocation of Article 50 is something that can be done by the Prime Minister without an affirmative resolution of the House of Commons or an Act of Parliament or whatever, whether it can be done under the Royal Prerogative, which is always in practice exercised by the Prime Minister, or whether it does require an Act of Parliament.
In many ways, I think that this is another one of these exercises that gets people, both on the pro and the anti-Brexit side, Very, very excited.
He isn't actually terribly important.
The reality is that the Prime Minister himself, who incidentally I think has Come out of what was a catastrophic defeat for his policy on a personal level very well.
He conducts himself with great dignity in his resignation speech.
And he's also been very, very honorable in upholding the results of the referendum.
He's told people who want to pretend it didn't happen, call a second or whatever.
This is all nonsense. It was a once in a lifetime event and its result must be carried into effect, even though he doesn't like it himself.
But yeah, I think that if there were any attempt to fight a rearguard action against it in the House of Commons, it would simply precipitate in due course changes in the British political system.
I mean, the representation of the major parties in Parliament much, much more radical than
anything which would be contemplated even now.
And now we can contemplate change as much more radical than we could a few weeks ago.
I think, as I say, if the present House of Commons were to defy the popular will as expressed
in the referendum, it would lead, first of all, to a major split in the ruling party.
Which is bitterly divided internally about this issue.
And secondly, in fairly early course, I would imagine to a general election where the principal issue would be that the present House of Commons was defying the will of the people, the result of which would be that there would be electoral calamity for those members of Parliament who were perceived as defying the popular will.
So it's politically impossible.
It's legally, as I say.
Legally, the referendum has no particular status.
It's an interesting question, as I say, whether the Prime Minister, whoever the new Prime Minister is going to be, something that will be decided over the next few weeks by an internal vote of the Conservative Party membership, the result being in a country with a population of about 65 million.
The approximately 125,000 to 150,000 people who are members of the Conservative Party will decide who the next Prime Minister is going to be, an unusual process to say the least.
But it would just not be politically possible to ignore the results of this referendum.
I see. So you're convinced that no matter what kind of legal twists and turns may be in store for us, that this will lead to the exercise of Article 50 and Yes, and there are all kinds of factors working that way.
I've given you the domestic perspective.
It would be impossible to defy the will of the people without provoking major electoral consequences.
But also, something has happened which I don't think anybody on either side really expected.
The other member states of the European Union are now desperately anxious that we should leave as quickly as possible.
This is not something that anyone expected.
The reason why nobody expected it is that after Germany, we are the second biggest contributor to the finances of the European Union.
And it is not normally the case that you are anxious to boot out of the club the member whose subscriptions are second in the list, so to speak, of those keeping the club with its very, very large appetite for money going.
But interestingly, what has happened there is that the other member states, particularly France and Germany, I think Germany even more than France, perceive the European Union as a political rather than economic project.
And what they are anxious to do is to get rid of this difficult, awkward member who has never really signed up to the principles of the club.
Before contagion spreads and this awkward members' ideas infect other members of the club who think that maybe they're not getting very much for their subscriptions just at the moment.
So they have an interest in closing this situation down.
You will remember being a southerner, President Davis's famous words in 1861 that the Yankees should just let the Ehring sisters go, an approach that the monstrous tyrant Lincoln was unwilling to adopt.
But actually, in this case, the attitude of the European Union is exactly the opposite of that of Lincoln.
It is to ask those who are not satisfied to leave as quickly as possible, please, and take their bags and baggage with them.
I see. Of course, the process itself is going to be stretched out over quite a long period of time, and I would think certainly long enough for whatever poisonous influences from Britain to be conveyed to other dissident members.
And in fact, even after Britain is out, It seems to me if Britain is enjoying its freedom, then that is particularly likely to stimulate others to bolt.
Yes, that's a big if.
I am not so convinced that the process of transition is going to be easy or painless.
I, as I say, was, I voted Leave, but only after a great deal of thought without anything like the gung-ho enthusiasm that many people on the Leave side had for a great many reasons.
One of those reasons is that while I have never believed What's called an England Project Fear, the gif of which was, oh, the day we left the European Union, the sky would turn black, it would begin raining blood and locusts, the Third World War would break out, the pound would fall to parity, not with the United States, but with the Zimbabwe and dollar, etc, etc, etc.
While this was all palpably scaremongering nonsense designed to frighten the sheeple, Equally, the approach of the Brexit side, there would be no adverse economic consequences of any significance.
I always thought it was powerful nonsense.
We've been part of the European Union since 1973, and our economy is inevitably, in some considerable measure, interlinked with the economies of other European states.
Disentangling this process is not going to be easy, it's not going to be painless, and it is certainly not necessarily going to produce beneficial economic consequences in the short term.
In the medium to long term, it very well might, but not over the next couple of years it won't, that's for sure.
Is it your impression that the authorities in Brussels Will try to make an example out of Britain and therefore make Brexit as painful and as unpleasant as possible so as to be a lesson to any potential other bolters?
Or do you think they would wish to show themselves reasonable and thereby attracting their current members by being gracious about it?
Or maybe it'll be some sort of combination of the two.
It's going to be a very complex process.
First of all, what the authorities in Brussels think may matter less than what the other member states think.
Our relationship with Germany is as follows.
We are one of their biggest export markets because of the deficiencies.
In the way in which the British economy has been run over the past 40 or 50 years.
In other words, we import vastly more goods from Germany than we sell to Germany.
As a result, Germans, who are the paymasters of the European Union, its largest, richest and most influential state, have no desire to have a major quarrel with one of their customers, a point that Angela Merkel has made very, very forcefully.
The German business elite does not want a good customer antagonised.
So that is a big factor militating against an extremely acrimonious Brexit.
On the other hand, there are particular features about the British economy that are going to make getting out of the European difficult.
We are over-dependent as a nation Thank you very much.
But the total population of the United States is some five times that of England or the United Kingdom, and your economy is more than five times the size of ours.
In other words, if you imagine a country that has a financial sector the size of Wall Street, but only consisted of, say, the East Coast states, you would get the idea of how important the financial sector is to us, which very, very much wants continued access to the member states of the European Union, because while we export And not very much by way of manufactured goods to them, and still less by way of agricultural produce.
We've run a huge surplus in services.
Now, this has been one of the big factors upon which the Remain side were arguing in the campaign, that the financial sector would suffer badly.
If we leave the European Union, because it will no longer be allowed easy and ready access to the single European market.
And that's going to be a big problem.
One of the, let's say, the response you tend to get to this from patriotic and nationalistic elements is that they hate the financial sector, they hate the City of London, etc., etc.
Well, first of all, I think that that is a little simplistic.
Secondly, even supposing it were justified, It doesn't mean that you can suddenly rebalance an economy which has become excessively dependent upon financial services in the period since, say, 1945 overnight.
Manifestly, you can't.
It will take a long period of time if it were done at all.
To revive the manufacturing sector and to make England as a country less dependent upon selling financial and other professional services to the world.
So this process is going to be long, complicated, difficult and fraught with peril.
It is not likely to work out As a good bargain in the short term.
It may vary well to us, I say, in the longer term, but we're going to have to get through a difficult few years first.
I have to say, I do not think that the Leave side was ever honest about this.
Well, apparently they were advertising these huge sums that Britain has been paying into the European Union, which can now be diverted to the national health system or beefsteaks for the boys or whatever it is we want to spend it on.
And now that you're actually out, the people who are making those promises have clammed up rather tight on that question.
Yes, well, they have.
Well, there are various reasons for that.
The first is they gave our gross contributions to the European Union as the savings, whereas, in fact, we had a very large portion of them back as a rebate.
So that was inaccurate.
Secondly, while there will be huge savings, beyond a doubt, on our contributions to the European Union, these will be an enormous benefit To England, in purely economic terms, or Great Britain in purely economic terms, there will be some loss of trade when we exit the single market.
How big or how small it will be, we don't know.
We're in a region of known unknowns, if I can put it that way.
So the net saving is very, very difficult.
Well, nobody can predict it.
We'll find out, won't we? It's very exciting.
We're going on a ride with an uncertain destination.
Surely, theoretically, if Brussels were feeling benevolent and the British were behaving themselves, you could draw up a treaty such that economically at any rate, in terms of trade, in terms of financial services, everything could stay the same.
Your opinion is not going to allow that if we refuse to allow free movement of labour with Europe.
You're absolutely certain about that.
They've made it plain that freedom of trade is going to be connected with freedom of movement.
And there is not going to be a deal favorable to the British under which we get all the benefits and we don't have to suffer any of the detriment.
And frankly, why should they?
Well, but the Europeans benefit from that too.
I understand that the European Union has arrangements with Switzerland and I believe Norway, such that they have essentially access to the complete European Union market for goods and services without necessarily accepting the free flow of Europeans into their own countries.
They do.
The Swiss do. They accept the free flow.
What happens is you end up in a situation in which in return for access to the single market, Which would otherwise impose potentially quite substantial tariffs upon external suppliers.
You have to contribute to the community budget.
And you have to put up with free movement of labour.
So actually your last case is worse than your first because you are now contributing to budget in the same way as before and suffering free movement of labour in the same way as before.
What you don't have is any say in the councils of the European Union.
This is not a good outcome.
It's actually worse than the present state of affairs.
A total secession from the European Union.
And a decision simply to run our own trading policies I see.
I see. Well...
The tragedy of it strikes me that in an attempt for Britain to achieve a kind of sovereignty where the British people seem to think it matters most, they had to vote for something that was not a straight up and down question on, for example, immigration or multiculturalism.
Well, the government's never going to allow them to do that because they'd give the wrong answer.
They've just given the wrong answer in this referendum.
The only reason why this referendum was called was that the Prime Minister was absolutely confident that he'd get the answer that he wanted.
He would never have dreamt of offering it if he thought he might lose.
Yes, I'm sure that's the case, and I suppose that that's why it's very unlikely that a similar offer is going to be made to any other European population.
I know that there's a strong sentiment in Holland to leave, but I understand that according to the Dutch system of government, there's no provision for an in or out vote by the people.
I understand there's a fair amount of desire to leave on the part of the polls.
The French would probably vote to stay in, but there's certainly a noisy group that would like to have the opportunity to vote out if they could.
What is your sense of other countries?
How much of a desire do they seem to have to either stay or leave?
It's difficult to say.
I also think it may not matter very much.
The existential problem of the Euro, which is the great crisis of the European Union, the straitjacket of the single currency, which is essentially laying all the economies outside Germany and the Netherlands completely waste, And it's a total disaster.
It is likely to be self-resolving in the sense that it'll break up anyway at some point over the next few years and probably very acrimoniously.
At the moment, the latest crisis in the Eurozone is the crisis of the Italian banking system, which is massively insolvent and can't easily be recapitalised by the States because one of the problems about entering the Euro is that you lose control of your own currency.
You give up your own currency, adopt the Euro instead.
And the government therefore is no longer a free agent in terms of how it runs its own economy.
So all kinds of very, very bad economic crises are going to continue to afflict the Eurozone because the whole single currency was a crazy construct which is bound to fail in the end.
You think that having more or less survived the Greek crisis, That something like an Italian crisis or a Spanish crisis could torpedo the Euro?
Yes, Greece is a tiny peripheral economy.
Italy is a major European economy.
It's one of the big three, along with Germany and France.
And Italy has well over twice the population of Spain, for example.
It's a large country.
It's an important economic player.
A crisis within Italy would undoubtedly lead to the end of the single currency.
You could deal with a marginal state such as Greece by a combination of imposing horrific austerity and suffering on the Greek people and giving it more money with soft loans that will never be repaid.
So it's a combination of stick and carrot.
You can't do that with ITI because it just requires too much money.
I see.
It's rather like bailing out California instead of Rhode Island, to put it in the American perspective.
If Rhode Island goes bankrupt, the federal government could probably do something to help it in the way it has done for Puerto Rico.
If Texas or California go bankrupt, you're not going to be able to recapitalise them quite so easily.
In the case of California, I think that's quite a serious risk.
Well, yes, it could very well happen.
The finances for many American states are really very parlous.
But let's go back to this question of who it will fall upon to lead Britain out of the European Union.
I understand that this strange process you have whereby the members of the Conservative Party will then choose the leader of the party.
They have a choice between two candidates, both female.
Andrea Leadsom, is that her name is pronounced?
Leadsom? And Theresa May.
Now Theresa May is the Home Secretary Whose job it's been to keep the bad people out, but she seems to have failed at that.
But she seems to be a bit of a favorite insofar as this Leadsom person is something of an unknown and has riled people by talking about being a mother rather than Theresa May, who is childless, claiming that that somehow makes her a better prime ministerial material.
What is your view about this leadership fight?
Well, if you imagine Hillary Clinton without the charm, you have Theresa May.
She is, as you say, the Home Secretary.
We British, we love mealy-mouthed euphemisms.
We call our secret political police the special branch, and we call the Ministry of the Interior the Home Office.
She is the Minister of the Interior.
But she calls herself the Home Secretary because the British, as I say, like to give these innocuous sounding titles to people who hold offices of state that properly understood, have a distinctly authoritarian ring about them.
She has been extremely unsuccessful Getting any kind of grip upon immigration.
She's also an absolutely bizarre person.
One day she can come out with politically correct utterances, indeed denouncing the
members of her own party as nasty for not being sufficiently welcome to other cultures,
religions, sexual orientations, the usual stew of PC nonsense.
The next day she can be having the idea of sending vans round London with slogans telling
illegals they're going to be rounded up and deported.
It's just a whim with her.
What is her mood today or what does she think will play well with the electorate?
It is government by...
I don't know what to say.
Wim is probably the best word to describe it.
She's the establishment candidate.
She was a supporter, at least in name, of the Remain campaign.
Her principal distinction is that she was too dishonest and too cowardly to take a strong stance on either side in a highly divisive referendum.
But kept quiet, waiting to see which side would win, so that she could position herself best in a succession contest with the Conservative leadership, depending upon who won.
She absolutely does not deserve to become leader of the Conservative Party or Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
It doesn't mean she won't.
She is the choice of the party establishment, beyond a doubt.
So far as Mrs Lensen is concerned, no one had ever heard of her.
Until two or three weeks ago, when she took part on the Leave side in one of the debates on live television and performed extremely well.
She is, to all appearances, by far the better candidate of the two, and by the standards of establishment politicians, pretty good.
She needs to be a genuine Conservative.
And someone with some interesting ideas.
The concerns about her are that she has little or no experience of politics.
She only was elected as a member of parliament in the year 2010.
And to take on the most difficult and burdensome office in public life, With no previous experience of high office is a big call for anyone, it has to be said.
So, personally, if I was still a member of the Conservative Party, I let my membership lapse a long time ago, but if I was still a member of the Conservative Party, I'd undoubtedly vote for her.
She seems to be a good person, if I can put it that way, and someone with some interesting ideas, and somebody who prepared to think a little bit outside politically correct parameters, although not going anywhere near so far as you or I would wish.
My only, as I say, he's not a bad, he's not a criticism, he's an observation, is that it is difficult to imagine someone with no previous experience of senior political office taking on such a difficult and demanding role Within such a short period of time of entering the House of Commons, as you may know, in England, our constitution was a very different way from yours.
The executive is chosen from the ranks of the legislature.
It's very different from the way in which American administrations are formed.
Generally speaking, people will have many years, if not decades, of experience in office before they will put themselves forward to hold the highest office.
So, although she brags about her experience in finance, which might be useful under the circumstances, she's never held a cabinet position?
She's held junior ministerial office, but she's never held any significant office.
I see. Well, I would have expected that the selection of the Prime Minister be made, as it is in Japan, by the elected representatives of the party, if there's a change in Prime Minister.
And you seemed to be scoffing at the idea that these 150,000 or so registered members of the party be the ones who select the prime minister for the entire British people.
But that's rather more democratic than would have been done, than the method would have been chosen in many other different parliamentary systems.
Or indeed in our own until recently, the way it now works in the Conservative Party is a hybrid system.
The elected representatives in the House of Commons whittle down the list of candidates to two, and the names of the last two standing are then put to the national membership of the party.
And I agree with you, it's a far more democratic system than having the, I don't know, 300 or so Conservative members of Parliament choose amongst themselves who is to be the new Prime Minister.
Yes, well, a very interesting process.
Well, it will be fascinating to see what happens.
I certainly wish Britain well, and I hope that Britain's example will be one that inspires others to leave.
I have a profound suspicion of the European Union, similar to my profound suspicion of the federal government.
All of these overarching entities seem to invariably consolidate power and then exercise it In ways that would please the left.
And that seems to be something inevitable about the way white people seem to organize their federal institutions.
And so to that extent, given that I have no hope that the European Union could ever be put to use for the European people in a meaningful way, I'm all in favor of its being broken apart.
And I hope that others will follow you Other countries will follow you out.
But in the meantime, I certainly wish Britain a happy exit, even if it goes through some choppy waters.
I'm particularly worried about the finance sector.
As you say, it's something that's very important for the British economy.
And I'm sure that Frankfurt and Paris are absolutely clamoring to get those jobs for themselves.
Yeah, they are. Now, again, one of the problems that you get amongst, if you like, right-wingers, patriots, whatever in England, is they're all called out imprecations upon the parasitic financial elite, blah, blah, blah.
And you know all the slogans.
You've heard them all before. The top 1% of wage earners in England pay more than 29% of the income taxes.
To put that in perspective, 300,000 people in a country with a population of about 65
million pay 30% of the total income tax revenues.
It wouldn't take a very large number of those people to camping abroad to follow the jobs,
to create a great big hole in the government's already extremely rocky finances with very,
very bad consequences for everybody else.
So you should be careful what you vote for because you might get it.
Yes, yes. The situation is similar in the United States.
People are always prepared to punish the wealthy, but if the wealthy decide to just take all their marbles and go home, it could be a bit of a surprise for those who are expecting a windfall.
Well, is there any other aspect of this that you'd wish to comment on?
Well, the other thing I would comment on, coming back in a way to where you began, is the idea of the referendum as being implicitly a referendum on immigration.
I think it's certainly a very important factor.
What will be particularly interesting to see, and much may depend upon the outcome of the Conservative Party's leadership election, is what now becomes the United Kingdom Independence Party, now that it has achieved its goal.
It too needs to be very mindful of the old saying, be careful what you wish for, for you might get it.
That is going to be one of the many interesting Well, my guess, as an ignoramus from the other side of the Atlantic, is that UKIP has always struck me as essentially Nigel Farage personified.
And insofar as he decided to step down, if he in fact actually does this time, my guess is the party could just glimmer away.
Yes, well, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
I think that on this case, Nigel Farage's decision is genuine.
I work on the basis that unless I know someone to be a liar, or unless what they are saying is so wildly implausible as to invoke doubt, I take them at their word.
And I have no reason to disbelieve Nigel Farage when he says that he considers that his political mission has been an accomplished job done, as he put it.
I think he's absolutely sincere in that respect.
He's telling the truth. He has got what he has worked for 25 years to achieve and worked with enormous energy and passion and commitment.
And I have absolutely no doubt that he says he has paid a high personal price and his family have paid a high personal price for the commitment he has put into this campaign.
It will be interesting to see what happens next.
Incidentally, his deputy leader, who many had hoped might lead the transformation of the UKIP into a more broadly based populist anti-immigration party, has also resigned.
It is an extraordinary thing every day, and that's Paul Nuttall, who many had hoped would take on the mantle of leadership and would change the party into something much more, frankly, as I say, that would be an anti-immigration party.
It would be a populist party of a very interesting and potentially very exciting kind.
In fact, he too has said, well, he really only came into politics to bring about the withdrawal of the United Kingdom for the European Union.
Job done. He's now retiring.
So we're seeing an extraordinary clear out of the British political leadership.
The Labour Party is having a meltdown all of its own over the fact that Italy, Jeremy Corbyn, a man who...
It has absolutely extraordinary resemblance to Bernie Saunders in many ways.
It's possibly even more left-wing, although it would be difficult to choose between them, has lost the confidence of his parliamentary party.
So all the major political parties are undergoing huge crises.
And by the end of the summer, they're most certainly all of different leaderships and those that put them into the summer.
Quite a remarkable time.
Well, I'm glad you mentioned the United Kingdom Independence Party because As you say, it has been beavering away trying to get Britain out of the Union, but a part of its appeal has been at the same time it was, aside from such fringe groups as the BNP, the British political organization that was most vociferous about controlling immigration.
And if UKIP does fall apart because its leaders have disappeared, it would be a terrible pity that this potentially strong representative of a more nationalist Britain should glimmer away and leave a void that it doesn't seem to me that anything else is likely to fill.
Yes. Well, Ukip, of course, did not used to be strong on immigration at all.
Its first lead, a chap called Dr.
Alan Sked, admittedly a man who became Nigel Farage's bit noir and spent most of his time in newspaper columns, sniping at his successor.
But Alexei was a libertarian who more or less believed in open borders.
And UKIP historically was not a strongly anti-immigration party.
He was anxious to show how PC it was.
That changed. I think it changed because Nigel Farage, who was a cute political operator, a man with good insights, saw that there were a lot of votes in opposing immigration.
A lot more, actually, than there were banging on endlessly about the European Union, which had frankly limited electoral appeal.
So he capitalised well on two things.
The first, widespread sentiment against immigration.
Secondly, the failure of the British National Party to transform itself into a successful party on the model of, say, the Front National or Goethe Builder's party in the Netherlands.
He was really a beneficiary of the failures of the British National Party in many ways.
He acquired a large section of its electorate.
They will now find themselves potentially without any party that really represents them, though I really have to say I doubt that.
The political climate has changed greatly.
It's very interesting to see that UKIP's principal financial backer, a man called Aaron Banks, He is talking about forming a new right-wing populist party to make a clean start.
He takes the view there are too many eccentrics, wackos and oddballs in UKIP, and incidentally, he's absolutely right about that.
And what makes Aaron Banks interesting is that he's a man of very great personal wealth.
He's a very rich man indeed.
If he were to choose to launch such a party, he would back it with substantial funding, something that no one has seen in England, certainly since 1945.
Be a very interesting venture.
Whether that happens or not may very much depend upon who wins the Conservative Leadership Contest.
If Mrs May wins the Conservative Leadership Contest, there will undoubtedly be a large cap for a populist rightist party.
If Mrs. Ledson wins the Conservative leadership contest, I'm not so sure that would be so.
I think many people believe that she deserved a fair crack of a whip and a chance to make something of her leadership of the party in the country.
I wouldn't necessarily dissent from that proposition.
I think she would. And it might not be the opportune moment to attempt such a venture.
Has Mrs. Ledson said anything interesting on the subject of immigration?
I haven't particularly studied her past utterances very closely, but frankly, nobody has very much under that because they've never heard of her.
She certainly gives the impression of being less PC and more receptive to concerns of ordinary people than most British politicians are, let's put it that way.
It remains to be seen, first of all, whether she'll win, and she's very much the underdog in this campaign.
Secondly, if she does win, whether she becomes establishmentized in office, which is the common fate of such people as you will know only too well.
Yes. That is a depressingly frequent occurrence that people who go into party with instincts become the prisoners of the party machine and the party elite.
Yes. Well, whatever happens, let us hope.
That patriotic Britons who wish for Britain to remain British have some standard-bearer, some party that will actually act in their interests.
And thank you very much for all of your insights and all the light you have cast on the various doings of the various political parties and the prospects for Brexit.
Thank you very much, Adrian Davies, and I very much appreciate this conversation and I'm sure We'll have another chance to talk about developments in Britain and on the continent again.
Thank you, Jared. I look forward to speaking to you soon.
It's been a real pleasure.
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