Liberty and Leadership
TFAS has reached 53,000 students and professionals through their academic programs, fellowships and seminars. Representing more than 140 countries, TFAS alumni are courageous leaders throughout the world – forging careers in politics, government, public policy, business, philanthropy, law and the media. Join TFAS President, Roger Ream, as he reconnects with these outstanding alumni to share experiences, swap career stories, and find out what makes their leadership journey unique. The Liberty and Leadership podcast is produced at Podville Media in Washington, D.C. If you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcast@TFAS.org.
Liberty and Leadership
The Hidden Costs of Executive Power with Lord Daniel Hannan
Roger welcomes Lord Daniel Hannan, a British writer, historian and member of the UK House of Lords, for a wide-ranging conversation on executive overreach, constitutional principles and the ideas that preserve liberty.
They explore how power has steadily concentrated in the hands of presidents and prime ministers, weakening the roles of legislatures and citizens alike. They also reflect on what America borrowed and improved on from British political traditions through its written Constitution, and consider how both nations risk forgetting the foundations of their freedom. Other topics include the aftermath of Brexit, the future of free trade and why humility and historical awareness are essential for effective governance in the 21st century.
Lord Daniel Hannan serves as international secretary of the Conservative Party, is the founding president of the Institute for Free Trade, a New York Times bestselling author and a former Conservative member of the European Parliament. He was also the keynote speaker this year at TFAS’s annual Neal B. Freeman Lecture, which discusses the principles of a free society, free markets, personal responsibility and virtue.
The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by Podville Media. If you have a comment or question for the show, please email us at podcast@TFAS.org. To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.
Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty and friends who are making an impact. Today. I'm your host, roger Ream. My guest today on the Liberty and Leadership Podcast is Lord Daniel Hannon of Kingsclare. Lord Hannon has been a member of the House of Lords since 2021. Previously, he served for 21 years in the European Parliament. Daniel is a acclaimed author of nine books. He writes regular columns in the press both in the UK and the United States, in the Washington Examiner, our annual conference at Monticello in 2013, and we're pleased that he's here this trip to speak to all of the students attending our summer programs in Washington DC. He'll be before 300 students tonight talking about America 250 and what it means to the world. Daniel, thank you for being with me. Thank you very much, roger. Let me begin by asking if you could just enlighten us on what your duties are as a member of the House of Lords. You know you've been there for four years and what is their role and what do you accomplish while there?
Speaker 2:The first point to make and I would make this point to all parliamentarians in every country is do not think of yourself as a legislator or a lawmaker. That may be an incidental part of your function, but you mustn't come to see that as what defines you, because that really is a misunderstanding of how things work. I was lucky enough to have you visit me in the House of Lords not long ago, roger, and you'll remember that in the chamber, as you look around towards the ceiling, there are these figures of rather hunky medieval figures in chain mail, and those represent the barons who made King John agree to the Magna Carta in 1215. And the House of Lords really takes its origin from that event. That was the beginning of a kind of conciliar form of government that was a constraint on the king, and I think that that's a really important reminder of what our primary function is. It's not to participate in debates, it's not to represent constituents. It's not to participate in debates. It's not to represent constituents. It's not to serve on committees and it is certainly not to pass laws.
Speaker 2:Our primary function is to constrain the executive, to ensure that the people in power who have the potential to abuse that power are not able to exceed the boundaries laid down in law. Everything else we do is secondary to that goal, right? I'm not saying you shouldn't pass laws Sometimes that is necessary but never lose sight of what we're primarily there for Now. We're a fairly weak second chamber. We are a revising chamber. We're not elected, so under the British understanding, the House of Commons ultimately always gets its way. We can improve and tweak and delay things. We can't block them in the long run. But I think that makes it all the more important to remember why we're there. We are there, as I see it, primarily to stop bad things happening. That's not a bad way of defining your role as a politician.
Speaker 1:Well, there seems to be a lesson in there for the US Congress in terms of the importance of their role in checking executive power and abiding by their duties as outlined in Article 1, Section 8 of our Constitution, I mean first of all, I think your founders knew exactly what they were doing when they put Congress in Article 1 of the Constitution and the presidency in Article 2.
Speaker 2:The way in which successive Congresses have let their powers slip reflects little credit on them. One of the things that I really admire about the constitutional makeup in this country is the way in which the constitution itself is foregrounded and the institutions of government are created to maintain the constitution, not the other way around. It's not that the constitution is there to maintain the government, but the government is there to maintain this idea. That hasn't always happened. I talk myself hoarse, reminding my friends in Congress that commerce is very clearly a congressional jurisdiction, that there is no question about that in the original documentation. But the willingness of congressional assemblies the world over to hand power to the executive on a supposedly contingent basis because they happen to agree with it on one issue, and then they've lost that power forever and they never get it back, that is a real problem, and we can see the impact of it now. I always think that P Joe put this beautifully. He said look, the US Constitution is a flawed document, but it's way better than what we're doing now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know the great constitutional scholar Randy Barnett. I've heard him say that the Constitution is the document that governs those who govern us, and he points out that American citizens don't take an oath to uphold the Constitution. It's people who go into government or military service, the president. They take an oath to uphold the Constitution because it's the constraint on them, it's what should be governing them. I'm sure that's quite a contrast to your many years experience 21, I think in the European Parliament.
Speaker 2:It's interesting to contrast. So now I have to take an oath, and the oath I take now is to the Crown. That, of course, is an exact equivalent of the oath to the Constitution. It's a way of saying I'm going to uphold the rules. The rules matter more than who wins If my side loses. I've taken this oath to accept the constitutional legitimacy of the whole system.
Speaker 2:In the European Parliament there was always this tension between the people who saw it in the way it was intended originally, which was a way of providing some check on the European Commission, some legitimacy, some guarantee that public opinion would be involved in the decision-making process, and those who always wanted it to be a federal legislature. In the eyes of the Euro-Federalists, they see the European Commission becoming a kind of cabinet. They see the Council of Ministers, which at the moment is the supreme body, becoming like a senate or a bundesrat, a chamber representing the regions, ie the nations, and they see the European Parliament becoming the primary unit. The problem with that and you really run into what's wrong with the whole European project is almost nobody feels European in the same sense that somebody might feel Swedish or Hungarian. Very few people have that connection.
Speaker 2:Democracy for me doesn't just mean that you get to vote every couple of years. It means there's got to be a relationship between government and government. There's got to be a willingness on behalf of the population to accept government from each other's hands because they feel that they've got enough in common Same language, the same culture, the same religion, the same history, whatever it is. They have enough in common to accept what my friend Roger Scruton always used to call the politics of the first person plural. You have that as an American or as a Swede or Hungarian or whatever.
Speaker 2:You don't have it as a European, and creating the institutions of statehood when there is no nation strikes me as a very dangerous thing and ultimately, that was why I was a Brexiteer.
Speaker 1:Speaking about that, how has it worked out? Where would you assess it? Today?
Speaker 2:We have been disappointingly slow to take up the opportunities of Brexit. I underestimated the immobilism and the lingering Euro fanaticism of our administrative state, absolute foot dragging over any divergence from EU standards, and I also, I think, overestimated the ambition of our politicians. They have been very change-averse. But with all of that, it's not to say that we've done nothing. For example, we are the only country that has any kind of trade deal post-liberation day with the US. That's just kind of a stopgap deal, but I'm hoping that there will be a much more ambitious one soon. I don't see any prospect of a similar deal between the US and the EU, not for a very long time. The two sides are too far apart. We've begun to deregulate things like AI, things like gene editing, and in a way, the proof of the success is this Our current Labour government is filled and led by people who not only campaign to stay in the EU, but who initially refused to accept the outcome, who spent the next three years arguing for a second referendum so that they could reverse the result, having, of course, previously promised that this was a once-in-a-generation thing.
Speaker 2:They then said oh, we had our fingers crossed behind our back when we said that Now, having come into office and seen the costs that would be involved in terms of losing jurisdiction and accepting an inappropriate commercial and regulatory framework, as well as the loss of democracy. Even they have now lost any interest in trying to take Britain back in. It's true that they're still emotionally very European and therefore they're more willing to kind of agree to things because Brussels wants, and to unilaterally harmonise, but even they are not proposing that we again accept the supremacy of EU law, and so, if you like, that's the ultimate success that nobody now wants to reverse it.
Speaker 1:Well, let's shift a minute to your book Inventing Freedom. It was a New York Times bestseller. Why do you think the response was so strong to it? Is it because you've covered ground that really others haven't covered?
Speaker 2:We're coming up to the 250th anniversary and I think that's a really big deal. But I'm interested as a British conservative in how the US Declaration of Independence is kind of part of my heritage as well. The authors of it were not acting in a vacuum. They were drawing on ideas that were centuries old. It's important to remember that when the conflict began no one saw it as a national conflict. When you go to Concord and Lexington now you get the tour guide saying well, the British were here and the Americans? You'd have sounded like a lunatic if you'd said that in 1775. Everyone was British right, paul.
Speaker 2:Revere riding through saying the British are coming would have been a bizarre thing to shout at a Massachusetts population that had only ever considered itself British. It was only much later, after the French got involved, that people started thinking of it as a war rather than a civil war. I wanted to explore the extent to which the founders were, in some senses, conservatives rather than radicals. They were, in their own minds, restoring the privileges that they believed they had been born with as Englishmen, and they were under threat from the innovations of a German king. You see that very, very clearly in not just in what they were saying and writing in their letters, but in the conclusions of the First Continental Congress and all the rest of it. It was very clear that these were people who were embittered by the betrayal of their birthright. They probably exaggerated that, but they were not wrong to see that there was a betrayal at least of the idea of a comprehensive representative system where taxes should reflect the right to representation.
Speaker 2:There was a line that Jefferson wrote that was eventually excised from the Declaration. It was a rather haunting and beautiful line where he said we might have been a great and free people together. I wanted to talk about. What does the Declaration of Independence mean to the rest of the world, particularly to the rest of the English-speaking world, because we share this tradition coming from Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights and so on, but actually to everybody? I believe that the US, by succeeding as it has, has elevated and ennobled the idea of individual freedom and autonomy. When the US diverges from those principles, because human beings are flawed and nothing in this world is perfect, all of us lose something. It's not just your problem.
Speaker 1:In your book. You quote Roger Scruton in there, who wrote that English law existed not to control the really expected.
Speaker 2:We're used to it in the US and in Britain we're used to the idea of this inherited, evolved legal inheritance, this folk right, but actually it's an incredibly weird thing if you think about it. The normal thing, if you were designing a legal system from first principles, is that you would write the law down and then you would apply it to a particular case. Common law does the opposite. It says every judgment is the starting point for the next one. And so we have this accumulated, this accreted precedent, and it grows like a coral, case by case. Nobody would invent that. And yet the beauty of it is again and again, it has preserved the freedom of the individual because it's a legal system that belongs to the country, not to the government. It's not an instrument of state control.
Speaker 2:Even during the English Civil War, the courts functioned all the way through the one time we really did have a monarchical dictatorship, under Charles I. He ruled without parliament for 11 years, the 11 years personal rule, as the monarchists called it, the 11 years tyranny, as the Whigs called it. There was no parliament. The opposition was from the bench. Even the judges, who were monarchists, were fundamentally loyal to the legal principles, and people fall short. Right, there are judges who fall short in my country and in yours now.
Speaker 2:But just getting them to read that story will make them better judges, and it didn't end well for Charles I. It did not end well for Charles I. He was beheaded in 1649 and actually died incredibly bravely. He exhibited a virtue in death that he'd never exhibited in life and this is really what made the restoration happen. One of his sort of chief counsellors, a man called the Earl of Clarendon, who then wrote the Great Rebellion, as he called it, said there was no one who was a better husband, a better father, a better friend, a better Christian. It's just he wasn't a very good king.
Speaker 1:You told me the story about his trial and him questioning the authority upon which he was being tried.
Speaker 2:Yes, it became clear to the victorious parliamentarians after they'd had to fight a second civil war against him that there would be no peace while this man was still on the throne. He was constitutionally incapable, ideologically incapable, if you like, of accepting defeat. In his view, he was still a monarch dealing with subjects in open revolt and therefore he could do whatever he wanted. Anything he did was justified by ending the rebellion. Of course, that meant that there could be no peace In the end, rather like actually after 1775,. The logic of the position of the anti-monarchists in both cases was a position that none of them had really started with, which is you can't treat the king as our of the court. He said I would know by what authority I am brought hither. I mean by what legal authority. He said there'd be illegal authorities, there'd be footpads by the highway. But by what legal authority am I brought here? Of course, very difficult question to answer. He was on trial by a group of MPs, not even judges. They'd long since exhausted their mandates. They'd kicked out all the MPs who didn't agree with them. So they had a very shaky claim and they said well, you've broken all the deal, you've broken your coronation oath, you've inflicted this war on us, taken people's property, killed people without due process all of which was true, none of which was an answer to his question by what authority was he being tried? And so, in desperation, to get themselves out of that difficult situation and answer the question, they turned to what had until then been this very fringe doctrine, above all associated with a radical democratic group called the Levellers, and they said our authority comes from the fact that we are the elected parliament.
Speaker 2:Sovereignty is vested in the people of England, and we articulate it as their elected representatives. To you and me, that doesn't sound at all radical. That is the basis of England, and we articulate it as their elected representatives. To you and me, that doesn't sound at all radical. That is the basis of pretty much every modern democracy. We all start from the proposition that sovereignty is vested in the people, an almost unthinkable thing to have said in 1649. I've always felt that this deserves more attention. From this happy accident of a judge needing to find an answer to a tricky question, we get what John Locke then turned into the preponderant theory of modern government. Yeah, sovereignty comes from the people. Sovereignty comes from the people. Up until then, it was always seen as sovereignty comes from God to the king, and he can then do what he likes 2010,.
Speaker 1:You wrote the New Road to Serfdom and you subtitled A Letter of Warning to America. Why do you think we needed this letter of warning and where are we today?
Speaker 2:Well, this was during Barack Obama's first term and I could see a certain Europeanization in his policy, most obviously in terms of what he was trying to do with health care, but actually in terms of human rights, in terms of foreign policy, in terms of levels of taxation, we were living in your future, hence the letter of warning. Looking back 15 years on now, I'm not very cheerful because a lot of the executive overreach that Barack Obama indulged in has now just become standard for both sides. There seems to be a real sense now that if your guy is in office or your party has a majority, this is your chance to mobilize the full force of state power against the people that you don't like and to say you know how do they like them apples. That is really incompatible with the constitution. So if I just take a current example, like plucking one of hundreds, there's a bunch of battles at the moment political and jurisdictional conflicts between the Trump administration and Democratic-run California on lots of things.
Speaker 2:I mean most obviously on the sanctuary policy and the treatment of immigrants, but actually on a whole bunch of other things. Trump doesn't like the way they're promoting electric vehicles, he doesn't like the LGBT stuff. I mean there's a whole bunch of areas where they disagree. On almost all of those issues, I would incline more to his side than to that of California. That does not mean that he should unconstitutionally usurp states' rights and impose his policies and that the difficulty that people have with this is becoming a real problem, that people don't seem to care about process when they want an outcome. Badly enough, that was what I identified under the Obama years, and I'm afraid both sides are now at it.
Speaker 1:I read recently that one issue you face in the UK is that a lot of wealthy people are leaving the country. They're exiting because of, I guess, the high tax burden there. Is that actually taking place and why is that? What are the taxes like?
Speaker 2:Taxes are high, but Milton Friedman always used to say look at the spending rate. That's your real tax rate, because the taxes are either now or they're deferred, but one way or another, it's the spending rate that counts, and that's the thing that has really shaken a lot of taxpayers in the UK, In common with most of Western Europe actually, we've gone from the state accounting for maybe a third of GDP at the beginning of the century to much closer to half. The first of those is sustainable. It's not great, I mean, I still think that the idea of the government taking $1 in three is bad enough, but at least it's sustainable. It's the difference between, if you like, two people carrying a third and one carrying one. Two men can drag another one. One puts his hands under his elbows, the other one grabs his ankles. You can manage One holding the other in a five-minute lift. That's only conceivable for a short distance. It's not sustainable.
Speaker 2:So that, I think, is why people are beginning to leave, of course, leaving the rest of us to pick up their share of the tax bill. This is the point that people so often struggle with On the left, including among a lot of Labour MPs, when you present them with this evidence of an emigration of the wealthy. Their instinct is to say good riddance, if they're that unpatriotic, we're better off without them. But of course that invites the answer well, so who is going to make up the shortfall? And the worst of it is that it's not just the millionaires who are emigrating. It's the young entrepreneurs who are not yet asset rich, but who are energetic and ambitious and think well, I can earn more and pay less tax in Dubai or Sydney or wherever. You are then in real danger of a spiral where the people who generate the tax revenue are leaving.
Speaker 1:I think Friedman made a very valid point about the total cost of government, total spending being the real impact of government on the economy, not just the tax burden. At the same time, our issue in this country since before COVID really, but certainly accelerated under COVID is the tremendous amount of borrowing we're doing, and so, even though all spending is higher and higher, this borrowing has led to a national debt that's draining the federal budget every year in interest payments and isn't sustainable long term.
Speaker 2:I've thought for a long time that this is the single biggest security risk to the US, actually, that a country that is spending that much on debt servicing rather than on its military is not going to be able to hold its position in the world rankings, if you like. What can be done about that? Well, I mean, I'd love to be able to say that there's going to be such huge cuts that the budget is going to come back into balance. Realistically, I don't think that's going to happen. I remember all of our free market friends wearily predicting that Doge wasn't going to work because it wasn't going to be as easy as people thought, and sure enough, that seems to be the case. I mean, yes, it's done some good things and it's got rid of some really egregiously annoying stuff, but really, I think the only way that you reduce in proportionate terms a debt of this kind is by making the economy grow faster than the government. I think that is feasible.
Speaker 2:I think that this administration is making a vast and unforced error on trade policy and is making a lot of people worse off with absolutely no compensating gains whatever to Americans. However, that can be offset in other areas. This is the largest economy in the world, and so, because the US has a very big GDP, trade is a relatively small share of its GDP. Trade matters much less if you're a big country than if you're a small one, and therefore a really good competitive, pro-growth set of regulations on AI and related tech and digital currencies, on AI and related tech and digital currencies, that can offset a bad trade policy, a very strong pro-energy policy, energy abundance policy, that can offset a bad trade policy. Now I mean, obviously it'd be way better to have a good trade policy as well. Right Then the country really would be booming as far as damage limitation and bringing the debt down goes.
Speaker 1:Free marketeers should be willing to acknowledge that some of the people in this administration Free marketeers should be willing to acknowledge that some of the people in this administration not the ones you always see on TV, not the loudmouths there are some really thoughtful, good, patriotic people doing very that. But it seems that despite the overwhelming evidence, the historical record of why free trade enriches people, protectionists still seem to have winning arguments with political officials population, because what they say is intuitive, even though it's false.
Speaker 2:What I mean by that is a lot of the arguments for protectionism and mercantilism sound like common sense. They appeal to ancient pre-agrarian heuristics that are buried deep in our genome, so they are literally intuitive. If I say, for example, that a country can't carry on with a big deficit, or if I say that it needs to be able to grow its own food, or if I say that it can't compete with slave wage economies in the rest of the world, or that it needs to protect its strategic industries, all of those things sound like common sense. All of them, actually, when translated into policy, make a country needlessly poorer. But it takes a little bit of basic economics to understand why that is.
Speaker 2:In a screen-addled and impatient age, when the average amount of time spent on a TikTok video is seven seconds, most people are not giving it that time. So that's why, if you like, free trade is always unpopular and why its exponents have always had to show, not tell. They've had to make it work. But the way you asked the question, roger, was you said why has it got this grip over political officials? Let me ask you what leading conservatives in this country were in favor of protectionism before Donald Trump altered their career incentives? Very few, if any.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe some that represented particular industries dominated their district.
Speaker 2:It was a really minority position until five minutes ago. What we're really seeing is the obsession of one politician, but because his devotees have this intimidating and cult-like loyalty, that has brought a lot of other people into the fold brought a lot of other people into the fold. The reason that we've had free trade and that it's worked we had six or seven good decades after the Second World War is because, although it's a counterintuitive doctrine, whenever people try protectionism the results are palpably dreadful. You can see it in the countries that are doing it still in the world today. The most protectionist country on earth is North Korea. Who would you like to live there? But you could also see it when countries suddenly lurch into it, and that, of course, last happened here in 1930 with the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, and that, I think, just like people burned their fingers and they understood that maybe we don't get why this is the case, but what all of those economists were saying, it must have been true.
Speaker 2:When we did this intuitive thing and tried to protect all the industries, it turned the Wall Street crash into the Great Depression. That led to a global effort starting at Breslin Woods in 1944, of people to come together and say let's not do that again, and that has lasted until now. Maybe people have forgotten the lesson. There's nobody around anymore, or maybe it's just that Donald Trump has had this impact. But one way or another, as Kipling said, the burnt fool's bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the fire, and I have a horrible feeling. We're going to have to learn the lesson in real, practical terms again.
Speaker 1:There are some small countries with very little in the way of natural resources that have been tremendously successful because not only free trade, but they've committed to free markets. I'm thinking Hong Kong and Singapore, even the Netherlands. The UK has been pretty well committed to free trade over the years, hasn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean until we joined the EU. Yeah, and now we can be again. You're absolutely right. I mean, think of Singapore as an example. Singapore has zero natural resources. It doesn't sit on diamonds, it doesn't sit on oil, it doesn't sit on timber or rubber or anything else. It doesn't produce one edible ounce. It is utterly dependent on the rest of the world for its most basic needs for food, for drinking water, for electricity. So, from a protectionist point of view, all the most terrifying things. It's the most exposed, it's the most vulnerable, and yet Singapore has the cheapest and most reliable food supplies in the world. Why is this? Well, let's challenge one of those caveman heuristics.
Speaker 2:Let's explain the difference between self-sufficiency and security. Britain imports about 42% of its food. When I tell somebody that, if they're not a politician or an economist, the first reaction is immediately that makes them feel nervous. Oh, we're so exposed. What if somebody turned off the tap? We've actually been a net food importer since about the 1720s and we've done pretty well since the 1720s because we kind of moved up the production chain. We learned that to have security, whether of food or of anything else, means being able to source what you want from the widest possible range of suppliers so that you're not vulnerable to a localized shock or disruption, which may as easily happen on your own territory as anywhere else.
Speaker 2:Difference between security and self-sufficiency you look at a country that really does produce its own stuff. Well, again, north Korea is the anti-Singapore. They try and grow everything themselves, the last place on the planet where you still have famines, because you are hugely vulnerable. When you do that, something goes wrong at home, if you like. The ultimate stress test of all of this was the pandemic and the associated lockdowns, when the whole world was subjected to this simultaneous disruption, and yet the food markets worked beautifully. Nobody starved, nobody had to grow potatoes in their gardens for want of imports. It was a supreme vindication of having security by having a dispersed network of suppliers. But again, that is a counterintuitive argument. It's always going to be unpopular.
Speaker 1:What's the path ahead for the Conservative Party in England? I saw some polls show them ranking in fourth place. I think behind the Labour and Reform and Social Democrats Is there a path forward.
Speaker 2:Look, we have the same voting system that you guys do and that tends towards broadly a two-party dispensation and it punishes a split on either side of the spectrum. The problem we have is we have two competing right-wing parties. The difference between them isn't really to do with their policies. If I were to lay the two election manifestos next to each other, you'd struggle to tell which was which. The differences are much more tonal and cultural.
Speaker 2:The Conservatives were in office for a long time, had to make all sorts of compromises and trade-offs and made a lot of unforced errors as well. The result of this is that they are sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly blamed for everything that went wrong. They brought a bit of it on themselves, but some of it was to do with the lockdown or other things which the whole country was demanding Reform, has never been in office and therefore has the luxury of being able to say we're going to be different and better. For example, they say we're going to deport every single illegal immigrant. I don't think any country in the world has ever managed that or even come close to it. But because they've never been in office, they can say that without being measured against the practical reality of the inability of a government to do that.
Speaker 2:There shouldn't, on paper, really be this division. The two electorates are complementary. They're different. I mean the policies are the same but the kinds of people that they appeal to are different and the geographies are different. Reform, in very broad terms, is strong in the north of England and in Wales, and the Conservatives are strong in the south of England. I think if the two parties were just to have a non-aggression pact I'm not suggesting that they merge or that they coalesce just that they say look, here are some districts where it would be crazy for us both to run, because we know that if we did that, the left would win. If they just did that, I think they would have a majority between them and then, you know, eventually down the line they may get together. It may be that, as in Canada, the leader of the merged party comes from reform, but that's a good problem to have. The issue is avoiding yet more left of center government with a tiny vote share because we have split the vote.
Speaker 1:Now are you still finding time, among all the other duties you have and responsibilities, to do some teaching? I know you've taught at University of Buckingham.
Speaker 2:Yes, actually, my favorite thing is to be in the classroom, and one of the lovely things about the way I've been able to arrange it is I can usually manage just to do the teaching without all the admin, which is the dream of every teacher, right? It's like for any teachers watching this. I don't need to tell you this. You did not go into it for the money, right, right. The pleasure of discussing interesting ideas with bright young people is what it's all about. I would love there to be a world where which I think is very feasible and in touching distance where ai takes the dull stuff off the plates of the pedagogues and allows them just to spend time teaching what do you think is the most important thing that you try to inst think all young people are prone to.
Speaker 2:This is to say here is an imperfection, let's change everything, and not to ask but what were the alternatives? How do we compare with other countries? How do we compare with other eras? Imperfections are always part of life in this world. You don't smash everything up because there's one thing that's going wrong. Look at the stuff that's going well.
Speaker 2:I was talking to a student, a very left-wing student, a few weeks ago who was saying this country's, meaning Britain, this country's done all these terrible things. It's racist and it's imperialist and it's colonialist and it's oppressed black people, oppressed women and so on. So I said, okay, well, look, perfection is not for this life, but I want you to come back and don't answer right away, but come back and tell me where down the centuries would you rather have been female or poor or from a religious minority? Seriously, where? Russia, japan, abyssinia? Come back to me when you come up with somewhere where, taking everything in the round, you've got a better record of standing up for oppressed groups than in this country. There may be one or two, but there won't be many.
Speaker 2:Similarly, if you want to say we are the cruel imperial oppressor that did these terrible things to this or that country, you've got to look in fairness at what was there before and what was there afterwards. Don't compare us to some platonic ideal. Compare us to what was the practical reality when we had our anti-slavery movements in West Africa that ended up with these protectors. What were we replacing? And then, if you'd ask people five years after decolonisation, how do things compare? All I'm asking for is perspective, and I think the single most valuable thing that we can encourage and inculcate in people is that sense of what is, in an imperfect and flawed and sublunary world, what is the adequate, reasonable, imperfect but comfortable solution that we can all live?
Speaker 1:with Thank you for joining me on the Liberty and Leadership podcast. I especially want to thank you, daniel, for coming across the pond to speak to our students tonight. I know you'll be sharing your knowledge and experience with them and inspiring them about the documents that we're talking about now, as we celebrate America 250, which starts, I think, on July 4th yeah, so for those, Kick off that year celebration.
Speaker 2:Right, so happy Independence Day. Remember that you Americans, who are watching you, are heirs to a sublime tradition and that you should keep it intact and pass it on to those who come after. Hear, hear.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership podcast. If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfasorg, and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review. Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media. I'm your host, roger Ream, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.
