YouSaid · the spoken record

Will Davies

lines on the record: 34
first: 2021-01-08
most recent: 2021-01-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Whether many of the people who have now found themselves on the wrong side of political change, much like the people who voted for Brexit, found themselves on the wrong side of social and economic change for the last 30, 40 years, whether they will find themselves willing to compromise and to contribute to the rebuilding and to that reset moment. And that sounds somewhat clich ⁇, but Remainers in general, as we know, are also some of the most highly educated, connected and dynamic people in the country. So I would very much like us to get to a point where actually we all collectively think about how we can make global Britain a success. And that also, by the way, includes holding the government to account on issues like most people who voted for Brexit don't want a Singapore on Thames.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you have one of the largest economies in the world that was just forecast by 2050 will still have one of the top 10 economies in the world? We've got large growing population that's highly skilled, that is largely, despite what we might fear, is civic-minded. We are generally polite. We are generally courteous and we do generally respect one another. We've just gone through the Brexit wars with some absolute tragedies on the way that we shouldn't underplay on any level but we've not seen mass violence in the way that some had feared and some had talked about and I do think that overall as a country looking forward we do actually have a lot of things to be optimistic about the question that I want to leave hanging Jenny is”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'll be the optimists in the room. I think obviously let's just put COVID and vaccine rollout aside. But look, I mean, I came from a somewhat different place from many of my colleagues in that, you know, I did come from a family in a community that didn't really was on the wrong side of social and economic change for the last 30 years. And so I'm much more instinctively sympathetic to those who say that actually what we needed in this country was a broader reset. And if the Brexit rebellion, which again, I didn't support, but then later came to accept, is the way in which we get toward that reset button, then to be frank, I'm all for it. I think there is a lot going for the United Kingdom that we often forget and was amplified by the fact that we were one of the first countries to develop a vaccine to license it, to roll it out, that we”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How Nicola Surgeon goes from big SMP week 21 to getting that referendum, not only in a way that delivers what she wants to see, but also in a way that doesn't inflame Englishness. Because as we get to the next general election, I think probably what we're going to see is a rerun of 2015, which will be a conservative prime minister saying to the English essentially, if you do not want Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP in charge with Keir Starmer and the Labour Party, then you will have to rally around the Conservative Party. And guess what? 70% of levers typically would say they rather associate with their English identity than their British identity. And so in some senses, 10 years on, we'll be back to that Cameron Linton Crosby playbook, which I suspect will be highly effective because it's proven to be effective before. I'll keep it brief.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From what we can see in England. And I think the story of the SM and the rise of the SMP primarily is a story around what we in political science will call leadership cues that Nicolas Sturgeon and the SNP are queuing a population in a way to reframe their national sentiment around a more progressive sort of socially liberal modernist sort of way of seeing the world, which is very different from the sort of Boris Johnson strategy. But it's not entirely clear where we go from here because let's assume 2021, one of the big elections will be the Scottish Parliament elections. Let's assume the S&P, as a poll, suggests, doing incredibly well, and let's assume that, as the polls also suggest, that public support in Scotland for a second referendum remains very strong, well above 50% and public support for independence remains strong. I'm not entirely sure.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's a great question because it reminds us that actually political leadership makes a difference. And one of the interesting comparison points that we have within the UK is that we have somewhat of a similar population in Scotland that being led in a very”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beat that, well, there is very simply one thing they need to do. They need to win back England. The Labour Party has not won the popular vote in England since 2001. There is no path back to power for the Labour Party that does not run through the Midlands and the North. And all of those voters in those areas are cross-pressured voters. They lean to the left on the economy and they lean to the right on Brexit and on immigration. So if you're Keir Starmer, you're advising the Labour Party, you've got to have something to say to those voters that isn't just about how you don't like Brexit or how you think Boris Johnson is Donald Trump and all of this kind of stuff because those voters aren't really that interested in that. Of course they could do a coalition with the SNP, but we all know what the price of that is going to be, which would be probably the breakup of the United Kingdom. So England is actually the big puzzle now that the Labour Party has to solve.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it comes down to the realignment that I referred to earlier, even if you look at the polls today, the conservatives are leading among the working class. The Conservative Party at the election last year was more popular among low-income voters and high-income voters, and the Labour Party was more popular among high-income voters and low-income voters. So what we've seen are the two parties invert their base of support, which is remarkable. I haven't seen that before in British botics. We haven't seen class in general be reduced to having almost no serious effect on our statistical models, which is what we see now because values have kicked in. That was David Cameron's high point. David Cameron was doing good if he got 38%. So the power of Johnson's electorate is coming from this border realignment. Now, what does the Labour Party and the left need to do?”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will be leveling up. I actually think that's a really good thing for a country and for us conversation because until now we've just sort of ignored it.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you live in Bolsover, Bishop Auckland, Doncaster, people are talking about you. And nobody has kind of answered this question to me. Why weren't we talking about these areas in these communities before? Because now they've got 100 billion of capital spending. They've got a new immigration points-based system. They've got a $4 billion levelling up fund. They've got an infrastructure bank going into the north. They've got 32,000 civil servants moving out of London to northern regions by 2030. And they've also got £9 billion back a year, which was our net contribution to the European Union, above and beyond what we got from the European Union in return. So the idea that there are no benefits from Brexit, I mean, I just don't agree with that. And if you are from those areas, and basically for the last 30 years, nobody has really cared about you or your community, you're now at the center of the national conversation. And once COVID disappears, and let's all hope it does, the only conversation we'll be having in the UK.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually feel it may be the optimist in the room when it comes to Brexit. I wasn't a Brexiteer. I accepted Brexit. I was one of 10% of academics after the referendum. 90% opposed Brexit or wanted to overturn it. 10% either supported it from the beginning or they then accepted it. But I am somebody who thinks let's make the most of it. So what could that mean? We could maximize the autonomy that we have versus the European Union. We can do a significant amount around quantitative easing, fiscal stimulus, free ports. We can do a load of stuff that we couldn't do while we were in the European Union. And I don't think it will happen. But what we could do and where maybe Will and I would agree is let's say we have a different political leadership 10 years from now. We could do much more in the way of a redistributive economic policy around tax, things like that, that we haven't had until now. And for the first time in a long time,”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just knew what they were voting for, which is a bit of a shocking suggestion, but maybe they just felt that over the last 40, gradually, they've been hollowed out, that power had been sent up to distant and insufficiently accountable institutions in the Europe.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of it is to do with sovereignty. I disagree with almost everything Will said, which is good. Look, I think all of the evidence on the Brexit vote is entirely clear. We've had 20 plus studies over the last four years. They suggest that there are two key motives. One is for whether you disagree with them or disagree with them, but the evidence also says the same, that people wanted decisions that affect the United Kingdom to be taken in the United Kingdom, and they also wanted greater control over freedom of movement and overall migration into the country. And those two motives come out in the British election study and the Lord Ashkoff work, UGOV, my stuff, a lot of other people's. And I think as a consequence, we then say, well, maybe all of that stuff isn't real. Like maybe it's just imaginary or maybe people were duped into false consciousness by Aaron Banks and Paul Daker, which is a very narrative.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Race largely by those fragmented that we have, because why would Americans think of themselves as white Americans when every other group is being encouraged to think of itself as an ethnic racial group? So we have a real big problem here in the narratives that we have, ironically, are taking us all the way back to narratives of race and ethnicity that the civil rights struggle was all about eradicating. So I think those underlying problems are going to have to be dealt with before we can even begin to think about moving towards some sense of unity.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Will's point earlier on that this is not the time for pointing to both sides. Well, personally, I think we're in the heat of the moment. It's very easy to say we've got a theory that explains everything. But as we stand back weeks and months from now, I think the sober objective heads that emerge will say, actually, this is a broader systemic problem facing the United States. And it is not just simply a Trump problem. It is a systemic problem. And at the heart of that, I would suggest is not just economic innovation. It's the fact that America has no unifying narrative anymore. The left, I think, has a very fragmented narrative, which is group-based for obvious reasons given the legacy of slavery and so on, is focused very much on minorities. And identity politics, too, is mobilizing a more racially aware white base within a Republican party that has been encouraged to think about its ethnicity.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we've seen things similar to that. Canada's an example, the Reform Party essentially replacing the progressive conservative party in the early 1990s. We've, of course, had our own realignments in the British party system. I'm not saying that I think it will happen, but when I look at the opinion poll numbers yesterday and today, we are talking about 10% of the country that sort of use this as an acceptable behavior. We're talking about 30, 40, 45 percent of the Republican base that somehow views this as an acceptable action. low-level violence in America. I think we can already see that and I think we can already sense that. And the deeper problem facing the US is that there are no unifying narratives for America anymore, that essentially the big stories of what America is have been hollowed out, been frankly”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there were really only three options actually. I think the first is you essentially have the status quo, which is somehow, I think it's the least likely option, but Trump manages to remain a force within a Republican Party. I just don't think that will happen. I think they will close ranks around the sort of unacceptability of Trump. I think secondly he just simply goes rogue and starts an independent movement that tries to campaign from the outside, that tries to channel the frustration into his business empire. And I think thirdly, potentially we see some kind of realignment of the US party system that actually the Republicans decide that they're going to close Trump out and somehow that movement, whether it's through Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz or that sort of orbit that has clearly been positioning to inherit the Trump mantle tries to drag the right away.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that's going to heal anytime soon. I think the next five years will all be about US, China and Biden trying to stop the inevitable, which is China becoming the dominant superpower. And that will be incredibly interesting to watch. I don't think he'll be able to get the big reforms through that he wants, given the very, very slender majority that he has. He'll get more, certainly he'll get more through than he would have got through a week ago, but I don't think he's going to get the massive big tech regulation and the tax reforms and all of the rest of it that he put the electorate at the election. But I agree with Will, actually. I don't think for Labour there are any interesting lessons and overlaps. Largely because I don't think the Labour Party even today really still knows where it is, actually, in terms of its ideology, its program and strategy. I think it's done well at attacking Johnson on coronavirus, but if you ask me what does Keir Starmer stand for, I would say, I don't know.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next 10 years and for a variety of reasons that batch we can come back to in the questions, the European Union and the Eurozone will not, at least in my view, be anywhere near as dynamic and as successful as some suggest. And I think that will also factor into the calculations within the United States. But one other last point before we turn to questions perhaps is I think there's also been a misreading about who Biden is. I think Biden economically, programmatically, in some senses on the economic axis isn't that different from Trump. I mean, he is pretty protectionist. He's got the Made in America tax incentive for companies to end offshoring. He's got penalties for companies that leave the US and sell back in. He's retained Trump's tariffs on China. He's only said he's going to review them. He hasn't said he's going to get rid of them. And so I think on all of those issues, we're likely to see an acceleration of the US-China dispute.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he probably means that we might be overlooked on certain questions. I think he will instinctively, you know, he's a liberal, multilateral leader. I think he will look to the European Union on a number of big questions. I think he's on record and so are his advisors in saying that they view Brexit as quote unquote a historic mistake. And I think that given where the UK is, there is an uncertainty over what global Britain means. may be leaning instinctively more toward the EU. Now, that won't be smooth sailing, as we discovered with the European Union signing the new deal with China, which has greatly irritated the Biden camp. On some of these issues philosophically, actually the UK and the US are still closer in spirit than the United States might be with the European Union. There is also the fact that over the”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do with why those children are falling through the cracks. And I would also add that we now have evidence from a number of reports and freedom of information requests that have gone out and have been reported that actually these things are not imaginary. There is a narrative within our society. The fact that we're even talking about this point reflects the fact that we have a narrative within our society that suggests that white privilege is an empirically reliable sound robust concept in British society. And also that our society is without question structurally racist. And I'm afraid to say the empirical evidence on that is not there to support that proposition.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Serious metric that we have, the groups that are falling behind at primary school and secondary school, and then the groups that are not making it into university are white working class children. The only groups that come close to their low rates of performance are children from Gypsy, Roma, traveller communities, and to some extent black Caribbean communities. But actually, there's a lot of evidence over the last three years to suggest that even those groups have eclipsed white working class children on free school meals. I was actually asked within a education committee meeting by a Labour member of parliament as to whether the differences in educational attainment have something to do with white privilege. So I wasn't making that point up, Will. I was responding to a question from a Labour MP about whether white privilege had anything to do with the”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think just to provide context for people who aren't familiar with that particular story, the education committee in Britain has just started a few months now has been undertaking a new inquiry into left-behind white working-class children within the education system for the simple reason being that if you look at every”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Diverse. Different groups in our society and the role that that's going to play in politics. And I'm completely sympathetic to Will's points about the economy and how certain groups are being left behind. But away from that, we are also going to be dealing with lots of people who are going to go from majority to minority status. And we'll find that within our lifetime and we'll find that profoundly unsettling.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was going to just briefly say that not everything that we're debating is imaginary and not everything that we're debating is a conspiratorial plot to distract from how the government is handling the pandemic. There are real world changes happening to things like education, policy in the UK, to how we manage universities, to whether we should decolonize our reading lists for university students to how we deal with freedom of speech and nonconformists within the public square. These things are not imaginary. These things are real. And the way in which our values are rubbing up against one another, I think is a sign partly of that, but also the way in which these underlying disputes are probably not going to go anywhere anytime soon. We know where Britain is going to be in 2030, 2040. It's going to be much, much more ethnically, religiously, culturally.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think what we saw through Brexit, and I won't kind of rehash how we got here, but in terms of why we're here and where we're going, what we're seeing in Britain as in other advanced Western democracies is the emergence of a new fault line underneath our democracy that's much more about culture and our values than it is about the traditional left-right divide over the economy. So the reason why we're all talking about age and education. My agreement is to say that where I think we're probably going to end up if we're not careful 10 years from now, 20 years from now, is a deeply polarized political system that is anchored around those value divides. We might not be as bad as America, but we're certainly on the same road as America. We're probably just 20, 30 miles behind America, but we're definitely heading in the same direction”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How you curb that polarization. And I'm sure we can talk about social media, we can talk about the Great Recession, we can talk about all of this stuff. But I don't think any of us actually have the answer to how you can really curb that degree of animosity between two political tribes that are separated not by economic policy, but by their values. And values don't really change. And that's what makes me deeply skeptical about the US going forward”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That didn't have any real legitimacy within the American system. And we've seen it as well now on the right with Trump giving the nod to protesters. So I always remember at an earlier intelligence squared debate, probably about two years ago, Jonathan Hyde, the social psychologist, musing out loud whether the United States of America would actually make it to 2050 as a coherent, unified country. And as I was watching the events yesterday, that came back into my mind because as I looked at the opinion polls last night and was sort of sharing them and looking at the complete degree of polarization that 85% of Democrats blame the actions yesterday on Trump and 85% of Republicans blame the outcome on the Democrats. I don't know how you come back from that. I don't think in any advance Western democracy we've ever seen an answer to the question”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I wasn't surprised. I was shocked at Trump's statement, which I thought was deeply irresponsible. And even at that point, I suppose the degree to which he essentially sanctioned violence and aligned himself with the protesters, I thought was deeply disturbing. But the one thing that I would push back on that Will mentioned is clearly what we're seeing is an entire political system that has become deeply dysfunctional. And so whereas Will will say, actually, this is essentially about the right, my view is that actually the polarization that we're seeing running through the American system is cumulative in nature. It's the right bouncing against the left, against the right, against the left. And we've seen that through the actions in Portland. We've seen it through the way in which the Democrats at certain points over the last two years have given credence to conspiracy theories.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It may now just spin off from the Republican Party again and go back to some spaces of Facebook, YouTube and bits of Fox News, depending on how Murdoch chooses to play that. And then I really don't, you know, and I think that this has been present for a long time. I think Obama managed to keep it at bay to some extent, but this has been a dangerous and hateful dimension of the American right that is not the full story as to what happened in 2016, but I think we need...”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Behave in a kind of an accountable fashion. I mean, he's show business. That's what he is. He's always being box office. That's been his main appeal, is you don't know what he's going to do next and he's not remotely constrained by the public record or what he said yesterday and that sort of thing. It's very eye-catching. But I think the big question, I think, is whether, you know, to what extent did we get his supporters wrong as well? I think that's the question which I would put back to Matt is to what extent was some of the analysis of national populism also willing to overlook quite how radical some of not just Trump supporters had become or were right from the offset, but also I think the Republican Party has become something deeply strange and frightening and violent. And I think that what will happen to Trumpism now is that it will probably now having sort of briefly used the Republican Party as its kind of the host for this particular kind of violence.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cannot hold power legitimately. I mean, they didn't see Bill Clinton as a legitimate president, many of them. They didn't see Barack Obama as legitimate president because of his race and because of the various conspiracy theories that people like Trump circulated around where he was born. So there are figures, parts of the Republican Party that have now kind of broken free of any kind of sense of respect for electoral norms that have been around quite a long time. So I think that we have to be honest about that. And I think that the other thing which is worth mentioning, and I know Matt is aware of this because I think you tweeted this today, there's a new poll out showing that 45% of Republicans agree or support what happened yesterday. So I think that it's good that Matt has said that he's got aspects of Donald Trump's leadership wrong, but I don't think any of us really thought that Trump was a stable or sort of responsible figure. I mean, he's never been someone you would expect to be.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, equally, I mean, obviously, it was shocking to see, but it's also worth remembering some of the precedents for this. So there was a plot that was busted last year to kidnap the governor of Wisconsin. There were the events in Charlottesville from a couple of years before where Donald Trump famously said that there were very good people on both sides of a conflict between white nationalists and various protesters against the march that was going on in Charlottesville at the time. Trump himself has been saying for quite a long time that we'll have to see what happens with the election, but he's definitely going to win. And it was pretty, he's been pretty clear for a while that he was not someone who was sort of believed in kind of playing fair in any sense. I think the problem is that the Republican Party itself has not really believed in playing fair for a very long time in ways that long predates Trump. Actually, I mean, one thing which I've always struggled to get my head around with American politics is that for many people on the right, Democrats simply do not.”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was willing to let that experiment But I think yesterday it became apparent Charlottesville was another moment, but yesterday was much more”
2021-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Trump, Brexit and the Direction of 2021, with Will Davies and Matt Goodwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source