The Davos Elite Live On A Different Planet

The world's elite have been gathering this week in a luxury ski resort in Davos, and suspicions that they're criminally out of touch just won't go away. Speaking at the Forum, this was the Editor-in-Chief of the Financial Times. Ironically, I think the UK will appear to be by the end of the year, and Martin, I think you will disagree, but let's see, but by the end of the year the UK is going to appear as one of the more stable countries, because we essentially have gone through our era of populism. I'm not being complacent, we could have another wave, but we've gone through our populism, we had Brexit, and I think now we have essentially two parties, sort of, I think business can live with, and will probably be far less consequential in election than everywhere else. So I don't really understand what that means, we've gone through our era of populism, as if it's something that only happens once, right? Because the United States, you could say, also went through that era of populism with the election of Donald Trump, but the idea you only have one era suggests, well, you do it once, you sort of lash out, you have this sort of irrational crazy moment where you're sort of protesting against the world, and you elect someone like Donald Trump, and then you realise it's a terrible idea, and then you move on. Well, look at the polls in the United States, right? The era of populism isn't over because they've done it already, they're going to re-elect Donald Trump, the fundamentals haven't really changed. Aaron, I know you weren't particularly impressed with that intervention, what do you make of it? It doesn't get more cliche, does it, Michael? The editor of the Financial Times in Davos, saying, oh, they've gone in, as if it was some teenage blip, we've grown out of it now, guys, don't worry. And for me, as somebody in the UK, most of our viewers and listeners are too, right now we're looking at the potential collapse of the Tory party. I think on the same day, Reform got 12% in an opinion poll, the Tories got 20%. Now, I don't think Reform will get 12% in a general election, I don't think that, but I do think that after the general election, which right now the Tories look set to lose, the question is how badly, there will be a fight for the soul of the Conservative Party, and either it will be destroyed or replaced by a party to its right, and people to the right of the people who have been generally running the Conservative Party for a lifetime, ever. They want to be far more nativist, far more socially conservative, and of course, the Thatcherite economic agenda would come back. It's really on the cultural stuff, on the value stuff, a wholly different creature to what we've seen with the Conservative Party thus far. You've got people saying, oh, would Nigel Farage lead the Conservative Party? This is now something which is in circulation as a talking point. I'm not saying it's likely, but it's a talking point, and you have the editor of the FT saying, oh, populism's over. Really? When people are saying, Farage might be a Tory MP leading the Conservatives, the Tories might get less than 100 seats in the next general election. I think if Reform ran with Farage as being someone prominent, they could. And then, of course, in that aftermath, the role of talk TV, GB News, The Telegraph, The Mail, I think The Telegraph in particular, you know, there is clearly now a political project at the heart of The Telegraph, which is to replace the Tory party, we know it was something different. So, you know, push the Cameroons aside. That's right-wing populism. Donald Trump just broke the record in the US. I know she was saying the UK, but broader context here. Donald Trump in the caucus in, what was it, Iowa, the first primary, he got 51% of the vote. The record before was 41%. He got 30% more than the next best person. And people say, well, only 13%, 14% turnout. It was minus 30 degrees. That's kind of what happens when it's cold. So the idea that the era of populism is over, no, we're looking at an era of populism, which is being driven by technological change. The costs of entry to politics, media have fallen. Time Navarro media can even exist, right? We're looking at massive economic and political grievances, economic really since 2008, in this country especially. And those things aren't going away. You know, the technological kind of shifts and the economic malaise, those aren't going away. Walk down a high street. I know I say this all the time. You know, I posted a video of a place near where I live, Waterlooville in Hampshire, about what a dump it is. It's a dump. The place looks awful, awful, awful. Looks like something from 28 days later. It was picked up then by a bunch of papers, the Sun, the Mirror. I instructed the Sun to remove it. And I got the Mirror to pay the lady whose video it was. They gave her some money. But then the Daily Mail of all people, they sent a reporter down there taking pictures. I recommend people Google this, Waterlooville Daily Mail. You'll see the pictures. It looks horrific. And that is the experience of much of England, including the Southeast outside of London. But the reality is, Michael, these people, like the editor of the Financial Times, only care about a few square miles of this country. Really. Mayfair, a little bit of South London maybe these days, Dulwich, the City of London, Canary Wharf. That's what they care about. And then, yeah, maybe like their country piles. The rest of the country can go to hell. They don't care. They literally don't care. The people watching this, whether you're in Aberystwyth, or Brighton, or Bournemouth, or Carlisle, doesn't matter. You don't matter. And as she says, the point of quote unquote democratic elections is that they have really two parties that are amenable to business. By the way, she doesn't mean business as you and I understand it, like small business. Again, go to a high street. Business ain't thriving. She means asset managers. She means multinationals. She means financial services. That's who she means. We have two political parties who will do what we want. Okay? A bugger the rest of you. Bugger the rest of the country. And that mindset has already exercised extraordinary political blowback over the last 15 years. Extraordinary. Why would it stop? Why would it stop? Why would the effect and the consequence disappear if the cause is still there? The basic causality. Apparently, that's too difficult to grasp if you're the editor of the Financial Times. I suppose people always come up with these sort of reasons why it's just specific. Oh, yeah, Donald Trump might get re-elected, but that's because the electoral system, you know, they've got these primaries, and then they've got first pass. We've also got first pass the post. I mean, it seems, you know, the odds are on that we will have a conservative party after the next general election, which is more Trump-like. And then we will have a general election where the two horses in the race are a centrist center-left liberal party and a populist right party. Very much like what they're having in the United States right now. And as you say, the fundamentals, I don't see how they would have changed whereby, oh, yeah, that was possible in 2024. It's not going to be possible in 2029. I don't get it. I live in East London. I live in Hackney. You know, there are lots of problems, high rents, lots of poverty. But one thing you can say about Hackney is that the high streets are thriving, right? So I don't see the sort of same day-to-day sort of struggles of sort of downtrodden high streets that you do. What is your sort of solution? What do you think, you know, beyond sort of governments talking more about this, do you have any sense of sort of how you would revive high streets outside of Britain's major cities? Yeah, it's a great question. And by the way, there are some great high streets not in major cities. You know, near here, Winchester, very affluent place, has a great high street. If you go to the Hay Festival, Hay on Why, there's not many empties. You know, it's very prosperous. That's one part. You know, if you have a wealthier, more prosperous society, high streets won't look like that. However, if you go to Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Poland, you don't see high streets like you do in this country in smaller cities and towns. So what would I do? I think we need to recognize they're not going to go back to what they were before. I'm not suggesting they can. We need to recognize they probably need more green space. You need to have more housing. That doesn't mean the kind of housing we presently see, which basically means, okay, that used to be a shop, but a white UPVC door and it turned into an HMO. No, we need thoughtful, soft density with regards to mixed residential commercial development. That's one thing. We need to not make every last piece of housing infrastructure, infrastructure just generally, about shareholder returns and creating money for asset managers. That's the second thing. Thirdly, we need to understand there needs to be a greater role for the state in building a different kind of economy in regions beyond London. So you probably want some kind of regional investment bank investing in small and medium sized enterprises. And then fourthly, you need a better quality of local government. So you have to reverse the austerity that we've seen to local government since 2010. This is just a start, by the way, but it would make a huge difference. You need to reverse that austerity, just basic stuff like picking up litter, keeping streets clean, dealing with antisocial behavior, basic stuff. It's not going to get rid of any of it, but it just rolled the clock back a little bit. And I would personally, at half the number of councillors we have, I'd make them do twice as much work and pay them twice as much. We need better people as councillors. And then people have said, well, if you have fewer councillors, you have less representation. Guess what? Most councillors are over 65, they're retirees. I love many of them, but we clearly need a better cross section of society and public administration and local government. I have city mayors for pretty much everywhere, town mayors too, because if there's an issue, you say, there's a problem, there's people are fly tipping, what are you going to do about it? With councils, I don't think it's the same level of accountability. And I would really aim at a renewal of local government and try and devolve tax raising powers well away from Westminster. So a lot there, Michael, but lots of low hanging fruit as well. Lots of low hanging fruit. We choose not to do it because our economic model suits certain people who are very powerful, very wealthy. They don't live in these places. They don't care about these places.