Pod Insights Freakonomics Radio 392. The Prime Minister Who Cried Brexit About this episode In 2016, David Cameron held a referendum on whether the U. K. should stay in the European Union. A longtime Euroskeptic, he nevertheless led the Remain campaign. So what did Cameron really want? We ask him that and much more — including why he left office as soon as his side lost and what he’d do differently if given another chance. (Hint: not much.)
Transcript 10,534 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:47 Stephen J. Dubner? You know, there's research that shows that happy endings are really powerful, that even a bad experience like going to the dentist or having a colonoscopy, if the last couple minutes is somehow made more pleasant, people remember the entire term as being not so bad. It strikes me that you got that exactly backwards with your political career.
3:06 Speaker 01 Well, obviously, as this uncertainty continues, there will be those who say, well, you made a promise about having a referendum, you kept that promise, and that is a credit. But there'll be those who say, we shouldn't have had a referendum, and look what's followed, and I accept my share of responsibility for the situation we face. Look, at some stage, this will be resolved. We will either leave with a deal, and people will see a certain path for Britain on the outside of the EU but with a partnership with it that I believe will be very close. Or, who knows, maybe we're going to get so stuck, we have to go to a general election or a referendum, and that might mean a different outcome. One way or the other, this uncertainty has to come to an end.
3:50 Speaker 01 It has gone on already for too long, and, you know, I for one can't wait for it to end.
3:57 Stephen J. Dubner? Today on Freakonomics Radio, the man who many people believe to be singularly responsible for Brexit, David Cameron, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He explains why he called for the referendum that effectively ended his political career, and he explains the other stressful parts of being Prime Minister.
4:16 Speaker 01 It is very intense, very noisy, pretty terrifying.
4:20 Stephen J. Dubner? We get into his relationships with Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and Vladimir Putin.
4:25 Speaker 01 I found in the end, I just couldn't trust what he was saying.
4:29 Stephen J. Dubner? All this from a man who, it turns out, loves American football.
4:33 Speaker 01 Yes, I'm a bit of a cheese head, actually.
4:36 Stephen J. Dubner? But not, alas, American cheese.
4:39 Speaker 01 I think it's one of the very few weaknesses of your great country.
4:43 Stephen J. Dubner? David Cameron has just written one of the most candid political memoirs in recent memory. It's called For the Record.
4:50 Speaker 01 Well, the discipline I put on myself was thinking, what did you think then? What do you think now? What decisions do you think you got right? What decisions do you think you got wrong? And, look, all memoirs are exercises in self-justification, and I accept there's quite a lot of self-justification in the book. But I tried to be honest about things that could have gone well, could have gone better.
5:28 Speaker 02 From Stitcher and Dubner Productions, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
5:45 Stephen J. Dubner? On June 23rd, 2016, voters in the United Kingdom, that's England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, were asked to vote on a referendum put forward by Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party. It asked a simple question: Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? The European Union, or EU, being an economic and political consortium of 28 member states. The outcome of this Brexit vote, as you likely know, has been anything but simple. A couple foundational facts to keep in mind. Cameron was a longtime Euroskeptic, believing that the UK contributed much more to the EU than it got back.
6:27 Stephen J. Dubner? But he also said he didn't want the UK to actually leave. Rather, he wanted to negotiate with the EU better terms on trade, regulation, immigration, and so on. So even though it was Cameron who put forth the Brexit referendum, he led the campaign for the UK to remain in the EU, not to leave. The vote was widely expected to go his way. But then, it didn't. An extraordinary moment in British history. The British people have spoken and the answer is, we're out. The vote was 52 to 48 percent in favor of leaving.
7:03 Speaker 03 The immediate economic and political consequences tonight are grave and the future deeply uncertain.
7:09 Stephen J. Dubner? Those who voted to leave were thrilled. We've got our country back. But those who wished to remain, younger voters especially, and those concentrated in London, Scotland and Northern Ireland, they blamed David Cameron. After all, who calls for a referendum, campaigns against it, and then loses? As weird as that was, it instantly got weirder. Cameron had promised to stay on as Prime Minister, whatever the votes outcome.
7:38 Speaker 01 I will do everything I can as Prime Minister to steady the ship over the
7:42 Stephen J. Dubner? But then, he didn't.
7:44 Speaker 01 But I do not think it would be right for me to try to be the captain that steers our country to its next destination.
7:52 Stephen J. Dubner? His resignation had the whiff of noble intentions, but it wasn't received that way. It was received as if Cameron were a party guest who'd knocked over a tower of champagne glasses and then ran for the door. He was replaced as Prime Minister by Theresa May, his home secretary. She began trying to negotiate a sensible exit from the European Union, but no country had ever done that before. And, as it turns out...
8:17 Speaker 04 The ayes to the right, 202. The noes to the left, 432.
8:25 Stephen J. Dubner? It was difficult and complicated.
8:27 Speaker 05 It is clear that the House does not support this deal, but tonight's vote tells us nothing about what it does support.
8:34 Speaker 03 You can't say we're leaving the single market, the customs union and the European Union. We're going to do our own free trade agreements across the world. And by the way, you have to allow us seamless access into your market too. Why would the EU ever facilitate that?
8:47 Speaker 04 The government has lost control of events and is in complete disarray.
8:53 Stephen J. Dubner? The government had lost control of events. And ultimately Theresa May lost control of the Conservative Party. She had spent three years trying to come up with a workable Brexit strategy and failed. This past July, May was replaced as Prime Minister by Boris Johnson, her former Foreign Minister, and before that, the Mayor of London. A few foundational facts to know about Boris Johnson. He and David Cameron are longtime frenemies. They'd gone to the same schools, eaten in Oxford, they ran in the same political circles, and they seemed to irritate and snipe at each other in equal measure.
9:31 Speaker 01 If any other politician anywhere in the world got stuck on a zip wire, it would be disastrous. For Boris, it would be an absolute triumph.
9:39 Speaker 06 I was pleased to see that you've called me a blond-haired mop in the pages. Well, if I'm a mop, then you are a brood.
9:48 Stephen J. Dubner? During the referendum campaign, Johnson, unlike Cameron, was in favor of Britain leaving the EU. Although, as Cameron writes about Johnson in his book, he seemed to have done almost no thinking about what sort of referendum, when it should be held, or what the government's view should be. Given Boris Johnson's reputation for operating with more vigor than rigor, this may well be true. And yet, it is now Johnson's job to extricate the UK from the European Union. The deadline, twice delayed, is currently set for October 31st. There may be a soft exit from the EU with trade and border terms and other details agreed upon in advance,
10:33 Stephen J. Dubner? or there may be a hard Brexit with a complete separation from the EU, the equivalent of an acrimonious divorce. Either way, Johnson is determined to leave.
10:43 Speaker 06 And I'm confident of getting a deal. We will leave by October 31st in all circumstances. There will be no further pointless delay.
10:58 Stephen J. Dubner? It's been very messy, even messier than I've made it out to be. There was Boris Johnson's unlawful suspension of Parliament, investigations into the campaign finances for the Leave campaign, rumours of Russian interference in the referendum vote, all of which have produced a deep reservoir of uncertainty.
11:16 Speaker 07 So the big question is, what happens next? Nobody knows what's next. People just want a decision. Are we leaving or are we staying? But let's just get on with it because the uncertainty is now killing the economy.
11:26 Stephen J. Dubner? One of the few constants since the vote has been resentment toward the man who pulled the Brexit trigger.
11:33 Speaker 07 They called all this on.
11:34 Stephen J. Dubner? And then vanished.
11:35 Speaker 07 Where is he? He's in Europe, in Nice, with his trotters up. Yeah, where is the geyser?
11:41 Stephen J. Dubner? But last week, David Cameron was in New York City.
11:44 Speaker 01 Thank you. Great to be here.
11:46 Stephen J. Dubner? Over the years, he's spent a fair amount of time in the States.
11:49 Speaker 01 I love coming here. It's the only place where your politics is almost as crazy as our politics at the moment. The difference being that, at least in the UK, you can watch one television channel and find out roughly what's going on. Here, if I watch Fox, I think the president's doing brilliantly. If I watch CNN, I think he's about to go to prison.
12:06 Stephen J. Dubner? So I've read what you've written. I've heard what you've said. I've heard what everyone else has said. People are so angry at you in some quarters.
12:15 Speaker 01 Well, you've got, I mean, the 52% of people who voted to leave the EU, those people are pleased we had a referendum, are pleased that their voice got across. There are many also on the Remain side, on my side of the argument, who lost, who accept that a referendum was inevitable or accept that a referendum was mandated by Parliament. I mean, nine out of 10 members of Parliament did actually vote to have a referendum. But I accept there are some people who won't forgive me for holding a referendum. They didn't think it was a good idea and they're furious that my side of the argument lost.
12:53 Stephen J. Dubner? So how did it come to this? How did a relatively popular prime minister, who seemed to be doing a relatively good job of steadying his country after the global financial crisis? How did he produce such a calamity? To be fair, there were a number of contributing factors, as we'll hear today. Economic pressures within the UK, what the UK saw as intransigence within the EU, even a faraway civil war. But it would be wrong to understate the role of David Cameron himself. He represented a new breed of political leadership in the UK, especially in the conservative wing. He was younger than usual and more chipper, with an optimistic bent and an embrace of what's come to be called compassionate conservatism. Sober on the fiscal front,
13:37 Stephen J. Dubner? but open-minded on social issues like gay marriage and eager to address climate change. On many issues, if he lived in America, he could easily be mistaken for a centrist Democrat.
13:49 Speaker 01 Well, that's what Obama always used to say to me. But I used to say, please don't say that publicly.
13:53 Stephen J. Dubner? Cameron is a political animal, as one must be to thrive in British politics. How does he rate as a thinker? That's hard to say. He was well-bred, well-reared, well-educated, and he married well, too. He is tall, quite handsome, and he has lovely manners. Knowing what we know about cognitive biases, it's easy to see why he might also be perceived as brilliant, or at least very clever. There's a telling anecdote in his memoirs when Cameron is being interviewed by three, quote, "badly dressed and disheveled dons" as part of the university admissions process. "I still shiver at the memory," he writes. They were asking Cameron which philosophers he'd read. Turned out, the answer was not many. The three men, he recalls,
14:39 Stephen J. Dubner? were trying to work out whether you were just the product of a good education or genuinely bright. They were pretty convinced that I was the former.
14:52 Stephen J. Dubner? Cameron became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 2010. His Conservative Party hadn't won a clear majority in the election, so it had to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. Not a natural fit, at least ideologically, but a workable one. And it was the UK's first coalition government since 1945. That said, it was not the best time to come to power. The global financial crisis was still deepening, casting long shadows in every direction.
15:20 Speaker 01 Well, Britain, we actually had the biggest. I mean, here we are in New York City where you were very affected. But actually, the biggest bank bailout was the Royal Bank of Scotland in Britain. I think the longest and deepest recession was ours because our financial sector was so big. So, yes, we were very affected and I inherited a pretty difficult situation.
15:37 Stephen J. Dubner? So, talk about generally, for people who don't follow it at all. You had to consider austerity and you enacted some austerity. You also wanted to do a lot of reform in the realm of education, crime fighting, streamlining, the National Health Service. Talk about whether, in retrospect, you feel that the reforms and cuts were sufficient. There were good outcomes on some dimensions. You got the unemployment rate way, way down, but wage stagnation is still a big problem. And then debt is still very, very high.
16:07 Speaker 01 Yes, the fundamental point is that when I became Prime Minister, the deficit forecast was for an 11% budget deficit, which would have given us the biggest budget deficit in the world. And by the time I left office, we'd cut that by two-thirds. So, we still had a deficit, but it was, you know, well under control. And now it's been virtually eradicated.
16:27 Stephen J. Dubner? But the ratio debt to GDP is still relatively very high.
16:30 Speaker 01 It is high, but it would be a lot if we'd carried on with a 10% or 11% budget deficit. And I tried to explain in the book, it's pretty dry stuff, your debt to GDP ratio. But to me, it's a fundamental thing about political responsibility. If you allow the debt GDP ratio to get up towards 100%, there's no capacity left when the next crisis hits. And I don't believe we've abolished boom and bust. We've abolished the trade cycle. I know there'll be another crisis at some stage and you've got to have the capacity to deal with it. But we knew that you couldn't stand aside as financial institutions went to the wall. We'd learnt the lesson of the 1930s, which was, you know, you must recognise the monetary nature of the crisis. But we were very concerned that the budget deficit was
17:12 Speaker 01 out of control, that we had to have a programme to bring it back. And we fought the election. Very rare for a party to fight an election on the basis that we're going to cut spending and we're going to have to put up some taxes and we're going to have to make some difficult decisions. But that gave us a sort of window of permission to take these difficult steps.
17:28 Stephen J. Dubner? We should say also, one measure that you improved a lot on, which in this country we have not improved on, is income inequality.
17:34 Speaker 01 Yes, I'm not saying we've entirely avoided the sort of pickety thesis and what's gone wrong in America with stagnant wages at the bottom. But we saw huge job growth and then we also saw, partly because of the changes we made, inequality actually went down rather than up. We did protect the poorest in a number of different ways. For instance, we froze public sector pay, but we omitted from that freeze the very lowest paid. We cut taxes for the lowest paid.
18:03 Stephen J. Dubner? So we're sitting here in 2019. Let's pretend you were still PM. You would have been, you'd be a year away from the end of your second term. And let's pretend that Brexit had never happened.
18:13 Speaker 01 Or we'd won the referendum, I suppose.
18:15 Stephen J. Dubner? Or you'd won the referendum, right. Do you think that your administration would be seen as largely successful?
18:22 Speaker 01 I think if we had won the referendum, I mean, if you go back 2014, we were the fastest growing country in the G7. We had a very good relationship, obviously, with yourselves, a special relationship. But we also had very good partnerships with India, with China. We'd been ranked the second greenest government in the world, I think. We'd been ranked the most open in terms of information and we were a very transforming government in terms of digital and online services and the rest of it. I'm not saying- We were perfect, of course we weren't. There were lots of problems to deal with, some reforms that didn't go right.
18:54 Stephen J. Dubner? Name a few.
18:55 Speaker 01 Well, I think the health reform's less successful. I love our National Health Service, I'm a great believer in free healthcare, but I think our reforms were too much about changing the bureaucracy rather than really focusing on the problems a modern health service faces, which is actually the costs of looking after the elderly, the costs of people with multiple health conditions, and the sort of divide we have in Britain between healthcare, which is free, and social care, which is means-tested. So I think there are lots of areas we could have done better, but it was, I would argue, if you leave Brexit to one side for a second, it was a successful government economically and in terms of reform.
19:35 Stephen J. Dubner? So it is hard to leave Brexit to one side, obviously, because it came to dominate the conversation. The way I assess it, and I may be totally wrong, is that you and your administration were making significant progress in renegotiations with the EU on immigration and regulations and the power of national governments, but you felt you weren't making enough progress, and therefore it seemed like a good idea to propose a referendum to create more leverage for further renegotiation, while however, hoping and thinking that the referendum would fail, because then you went out and campaigned for the remain side. So that's the calculus that, for me, is difficult to understand.
20:20 Speaker 01 The calculus was this, that I knew we needed reform of our position in Europe because of this problem of the changes in the eurozone. I was hoping that a more general treaty change was coming down the track, and to me, the referendum and the renegotiation went together. You wouldn't get much renegotiation without a referendum, and I wouldn't want a referendum on its own, because you'd just be saying, do you want in or out on the status quo? I want to improve on the status quo. So these things did go together, and you know, I think the reforms we achieved, which were carving Britain out of ever closer union, so for the first time, the EU is accepting, not that we were going to the same destination, but in a slightly slower way, but actually, we had a different destination in mind to
21:04 Speaker 01 the rest of Europe, hugely important. We also fully protected the pound sterling as our currency, recognizing that, you know, the euro was the currency of eighteen of the twenty-eight members, but it wasn't for everybody. I always wonder what England would have been like had you accepted the euro. Well, I think, you know, I think if we'd joined the euro, I've got a feeling the whole project might have come badly unstuck by now. Oh, badly unstuck, meaning? Well, if you go back, there's an important chapter in the book about when I worked in the Treasury as an advisor, when we were in the exchange rate mechanism, which ultimately failed. And that was one of the things that taught me we should stay out of the euro.
21:46 Speaker 01 There are times when economies need different interest rates, different economic policies. And the problem with the euro is easily stated, you know, here we are in the United States, you've got a single currency called the dollar. If Texas has a bad year, it gets more in federal spending, it pays less in taxes, not that Texas ever does have a bad year, of course. You know, we don't have those fiscal offsets in the European Union. So I've always believed that the euro, you know, is problematic because you're creating a currency, but without a single banking system, without a fiscal union, without offsets to deal with it. And I've always felt it inherently unstable. Had Britain joined it, which I think would have been a disaster for us, I think it probably would have been a disaster for the euro as well.
22:29 Speaker 01 Was the original sin, in your view, in terms of the UK having joined the EU itself? No, I believe that Europe is our biggest market and our neighbors and friends. You know, our relationship with the French and Germans and Italians and others is very, very close. And I've always believed that- Not as close today as it was a couple of years ago. No, but don't underestimate the sense of partnership and shared endeavor that there is, and that there will be, even when we leave the EU, if we do so, we will be their closest friend, neighbor and partner. So I've always believed for Britain, it's in our interest to be round the table with the other members of the EU, making sure that the rules of the market, which is our
23:11 Speaker 01 biggest market, suit us and making sure that as we deal with Russia or as we deal with Iran, that we have the leverage of working together and in many cases, trying to lead. I've always loved that bit of Europe. What I've not liked is the sort of pretensions towards statehood, that the EU has always loved the flag and the parliament and all the rest of it. So like many British prime ministers, I was always sort of battling to stay in the bits that we liked, but to try and carve us out a special place.
23:42 Stephen J. Dubner? Well, it doesn't seem so strange to me that lesser countries would want to feel that sentiment with a bigger union because you already have it.
23:51 Speaker 01 Well, I think there's, I think there's that aspect. I think if you're a smaller European country, you feel sometimes your power enhanced because you're sat round that table. And often sitting round the EU table, you notice that representatives from Malta or Cyprus or whatever, you know, they, they're loving it because they're having, you know, they're round the big table. I think there's that aspect of it, but there's another aspect, which is of course, the UK, we've always seen our nationhood as part of the secret source of our success. And if you, you know, we go back to such a crucial moment in British history as May 1940, when the rest of Europe had fallen and Britain was standing alone against Nazi Germany, you know, why that's so important to our consciousness is it's not only a fantastic
24:36 Speaker 01 thing that we did on behalf of humanity, but it was, it was something our nation did. So we've not seen our nationhood as a source of trouble or strife or difficulty, we've seen it as a part of our success. So that, that has marked us out a bit too.
24:51 Stephen J. Dubner? One common critique of David Cameron is that he called for the Brexit referendum because he wanted to settle the so-called Europe question once and for all, to get it added away so he could spend his second term as prime minister on other priorities. He'd been re-elected in 2014 to a second five-year term. Going into that election, one poll showed that only 8% of British voters listed Europe as one of the most pressing issues, although that answer doesn't take into account concerns about immigration, which did feed the appetite for a Brexit vote. So too did Cameron's austerity policies and public spending cuts.
25:29 Stephen J. Dubner? For his part, Cameron was adamant that a Brexit referendum was just a matter of time. After all, euroscepticism has deep tendrils in the UK, going well beyond the Conservative Party.
25:41 Speaker 01 Yes, of course. I mean, the thing I like reminding people is that, or sometimes I do it as a quiz, can you name a British political party that didn't support a referendum?
25:50 Stephen J. Dubner? The answer is, there is none.
25:50 Speaker 01 There isn't one. Between 2005 and 2015, the Labour Party, the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, the Green Party, they all, one stage or another, supported a referendum on Europe. So it was, it's not just that the Conservatives were interested in this issue, it was an issue running through British politics.
26:08 Stephen J. Dubner? Cameron's own euroscepticism dates all the way back to his youthful admiration of Margaret Thatcher, the budget-conscious former Conservative Prime Minister. Although, as Cameron writes in a typical case of his habit-both-way-ism, quote, "I had always felt myself more of a Thatcherist than a Thatcherite." At Oxford, Cameron studied PPE, Philosophy, Politics and Economics, the gold standard degree for Britain's political elite. He went straight into politics and wound up serving under Chancellor of the ex-checker Norman Lamont in the Treasury Department, just in time to see Lamont forced to pull the flailing British pound out of the European
26:50 Stephen J. Dubner? exchange rate mechanism. That, as Cameron noted earlier...
26:54 Speaker 01 That was one of the things that taught me, we should stay out of the Euro.
26:58 Stephen J. Dubner? But it was once Cameron had been Prime Minister for a year and a half, that he experienced perhaps his sharpest bout of euroscepticism. It happened during the so-called Eurozone crisis. Several weaker EU economies, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus, had massive debts or needed bailouts, and the value of the Euro was dropping. So it fell to the richer countries, like the UK, to step up. There was a proposed treaty change to address the crisis. David Cameron vetoed it.
27:28 Speaker 01 I did veto, and then they went ahead and did the treaty anyway.
27:31 Stephen J. Dubner? European Union treaty changes were supposed to be unanimously approved. In this case, as a workaround, the EU instead established an accord.
27:41 Speaker 01 And that was the moment, it seemed to me, that Britain's position within this organisation was very precarious and we needed to sort it out. And I believe that allied to the fact there was growing political pressure to solve this problem, meant that it was inevitable and right to try and renegotiate and hold a referendum and sort things out. But I accept, this attempt failed. I mean, in the end, my aim to keep Britain in, but in a special place, wasn't successful.
28:09 Stephen J. Dubner? Difficult decisions are inherently difficult to predict. You can make a good decision based on all the available logic and information, but you don't know what the outcome will be. Had you the decision to make again today, whether to put forth the referendum, would you do it again?
28:24 Speaker 01 Well, what I say in answer to that is, I believed at the time that it was inevitable a referendum was coming, and I thought it best therefore to try and affect a renegotiation and improve and deal with these problems at the same time. And I still think that's the case. So if you go back in time and say, you know, could you have done things differently? I mean, if I had put off the referendum, all I would have done was put it off. I mean, it's still, it would have landed on maybe my successors.
28:54 Stephen J. Dubner? But there might have been some value for you personally, reputationally, correct?
28:57 Speaker 01 My feeling was what the job of a prime minister is to try and confront the issues, not just in front of you, but the ones you see coming down the track. And, you know, not doing something is also a decision.
29:10 Stephen J. Dubner? After Cameron's impotent veto of the EU treaty, but before his eventual call for the Brexit referendum, came another referendum. In 2014, the Scottish Nationalist Party wanted Scotland to break away from the UK, and they wanted to put it to a vote.
29:26 Speaker 01 Of course, I could have said to them, no, you're not having it. Let's put it off. But that would have just made the problem worse.
29:31 Stephen J. Dubner? So the Scottish referendum did come up for independence. It failed. I was curious whether that may have given you and some of your allies a false sense of security that a Brexit referendum would also fail.
29:41 Speaker 01 I think it gave me a sense that, you know, here was a problem that was coming down the tracks and we confronted it, and that was the right thing to do. So the way I think about it is, You have to try and confront and deal with these issues. And then there are all the decisions around the decision you make. Was it the right campaign? Was it the right renegotiation? Was it the right timing? And I'm pretty frank that I think I probably got some of those wrong. But on the central question, was this problem coming? And was a referendum inevitable? My answer is yes, it was.
30:14 Stephen J. Dubner? Coming up after the break, was it inevitable? Maybe, maybe not. We've already heard about the economic and nationalistic drivers, but there was another much more distant event that also drove Brexit sentiment. It's coming up right after this.
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33:14 Stephen J. Dubner? Former British Prime Minister David Cameron has just published a memoir called For the Record. If you identify with the 48% of Britons who voted for the UK to remain in the European Union, the book may not improve your view of Cameron. But it's a remarkably interesting account of a remarkably tumultuous era of modern history. It's also rather direct. Cameron pulls few punches in his descriptions of world leaders, Vladimir Putin, for instance.
33:44 Speaker 01 Look, I did try to forge a good relationship with him because, you know, in spite of all the disagreements and difficulties, you should make an effort. And there were moments of success. But in the end, when it came to the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner, when it came to what was happening in Syria, when it came to chemical weapons and what Assad had done, who was his ally. You know, I found in the end, I just couldn't trust what he was saying to me as true.
34:13 Stephen J. Dubner? Here's how you put it in the book, for Putin lying is an art form, which is, I guess, a left-handed compliment. He was very good at it, at least, yeah.
34:19 Speaker 01 Well, you know, if we take what was happening in Ukraine, where effectively Russia took a part of a sovereign country, always trying to claim that it was sort of, you know, Ukrainian breakaway forces, but we all knew that they were largely Russian soldiers. And so he is very good at information war. You know, modern war is fought not just with tanks and bombs and guns, but with the PR and media and manipulation.
34:49 Stephen J. Dubner? And cyber attacks as well.
34:50 Speaker 01 And cyber attacks. And, you know, that was something the Russians got very good at, and frankly, we need to raise our game at it.
34:55 Stephen J. Dubner? Now, Germany, Angela Merkel, you seem to hold in very, very high regard.
34:59 Speaker 01 Yes, I mean, she's a remarkable politician, also with huge staying power. I mean, I remember watching her back in 2006, I think it was, when she first sort of fought her campaign and became chancellor, and here we are in 2019, and she's still there.
35:15 Stephen J. Dubner? Well, just barely. I mean.
35:17 Speaker 01 Barely, but still.
35:18 Stephen J. Dubner? I get the sense from reading your book that she very much empathized with your desire to disentangle the UK from the EU. And I wondered if she was a closet Brexit fan and maybe even a Jerxit fan. Would she, if given the opportunity, no chance?
35:34 Speaker 01 No, I think, look, I would phrase it differently. She didn't want Britain to disentangle itself from the EU, but I think she did have an understanding that Britain was quite a eurosceptic nation, that we were in the EU for the things that we wanted, the trade and cooperation, but we didn't, you know, we didn't want deeper political union. She did understand that. You can argue that she didn't do enough to help us with that.
35:59 Stephen J. Dubner? What should she have done, or could she have done?
36:00 Speaker 01 Well, I think she did help, and we cut the budget together. That was important. We were cutting budgets at home, and it would have been outrageous to keep spending more in the EU. She did help with my renegotiation, but I think we came up against this problem, which was. The free movement of people in Europe is a good thing. Millions of British people go and live and work in other European countries. But what was originally the free movement of workers became the free movement for everybody.
36:28 Stephen J. Dubner? Well, let me ask you about, this is a complicated conversation, but let's, let's try to have a quick version of it. Merkel, one could say, was brought down primarily by her generosity in accepting refugees. Yes, primarily.
36:40 Speaker 01 Look, I think she made a mistake because I'm all for showing generosity. We actually went out to the camps and brought people back from the camps and gave them the right to live in Britain and educated their children and housed them and clothed them and fed them. And I think that's the right answer. I think the wrong answer is what Germany did, which was just to say, all who can make it are welcome. You know, it was a green light to the people smugglers to just keep going with their work. And I felt that Europe handled this issue very badly. You've, you've got to demonstrate. Look, we all know that border control is only one aspect of our sensible immigration policy, but you do need to have borders, particularly if you've taken down the internal borders
37:24 Speaker 01 between, you know, France and Italy and all the rest of it. If you take down the internal borders, you do need a strong external border. So I thought big mistakes were made.
37:33 Stephen J. Dubner? Well, let's unpack that going back to Syria because you write incredibly about your desire to get involved in Syria, to retaliate or to stop Assad. You write about your conversations with Obama, which led you to believe that America would lead the strike. And then you write this, it's hard to believe, I read it three times, it was so hard to believe that it was true, that you called Obama to help finalize the plan and he didn't return the call for four days.
37:59 Speaker 01 Well, this was after, there's sort of two Syria chapters and two Syria sort of things to focus on. One is the appalling civil war events that have taken place and the question could... America and Britain and others, could we have done more to try and help resolve this crisis? And I believe we could have done. Then there's a second question, which is on the use of chemical weapons, where Barack Obama rightly said it was a red line. Why was it that we failed to respond to that red line? And while I make the point that after it happened, it took too long for us to speak, I think the real mistake we made was that when we drew the red line and we discussed it sometime before the chemical
38:42 Speaker 01 weapons attack took place, and we were at the G8 in Northern Ireland, we should have agreed at that moment, right, we're setting a red line, if he uses chemical weapons, here's what we're going to do. And if we had agreed it, we could have taken instant action before having a sort of parliamentary and UN and debate and all the rest of it. And I think, I blame myself as much for that as Barack, because, you know, I could have made that argument, and I should have made that argument.
39:06 Stephen J. Dubner? Were you each kind of waiting for the other to take the lead?
39:08 Speaker 01 I think it was, and he would say this too, I hope, that we were both operating in the sort of post-Iraq world. And President Obama was very much elected on the basis of let's try and end some of these entanglements and make sense of them. And, you know, and in Britain, we had lost a lot of people in Iraq. And so we were operating in an environment where the public and parliament was deeply skeptical about getting involved in these entanglements. I just thought the chemical weapons issue was different, you know, apart from Saddam Hussein at Al-Awl, chemical weapons hadn't been sort of used on the battlefield for decades. And there was a taboo about it, and there was international rules about it. And I thought we'd have been totally justified to say, this is a red line, the
39:53 Speaker 01 red line's crossed, bang.
39:54 Stephen J. Dubner? But by the time Obama then reappeared or reconnected with you, you had had a vote in your parliament, correct?
40:00 Speaker 01 We reconnected before the vote in my parliament, but because we hadn't prior agreed the actions, I got onto a track of having to, you know, take it to parliament. And then I made one of these. Sort of miscalculations. I thought that others like me would be so shocked by the use of chemical weapons and would sufficiently separate it from the other foreign policy issues. But actually, people in my own party, in my own caucus, as you would say, a lot of them said, I'm voting against this action because of what happened in Iraq. And I was like saying, but this isn't Iraq. This is chemical weapons. This is Syria. This is, you know, but I didn't convince enough of them. And I lost the vote in Parliament, which was a very bad thing to do.
40:45 Stephen J. Dubner? So when we look at foreign policy, we know that economic sanctions don't often work the way they're supposed to. We know that military intervention is costly on many, many, many dimensions. But can you talk for a minute about the cost, in the case of Syria, of non-intervention?
40:59 Speaker 01 I think what's so hideous about the Syrian conflict is there were so many bad effects from it. Obviously, predominantly, the appalling suffering of the Syrian people and the civil war that has gone on for so many years. But it also helped to spawn the growth of ISIS. It also created the background to the refugee crisis that has caused so much human suffering. And possibly, you could argue, led to some of the problems in Europe, perhaps even Brexit itself.
41:30 Stephen J. Dubner? How much, if at all, did the Syrian war and the resulting refugee crisis contribute to the demand for Brexit? That is very hard to say. And there were, of course, plenty of other economic factors already pushing the UK in that direction. But it's a compelling argument. The Leave campaign certainly took advantage of anxieties over immigration. As Cameron noted earlier, the free movement of people is written into the European Union treaties, and it gives the citizens of any member state the right to move and live in any other member state without needing a permit. This provision was a major target of Cameron's renegotiations with the EU before he called the Brexit referendum.
42:14 Speaker 01 To the EU, free movement and not reforming it was something of an article of faith. And I couldn't persuade them that we needed some reforms to free movement. So in fact, what I did in the end was I persuaded them to accept something which was difficult for them, which was that new arrivals to Britain couldn't access our welfare system for up to four years, which was a huge give for them and a great gain for me. But in the end, it didn't quite take the trick in the referendum that I needed.
42:44 Stephen J. Dubner? So there was an economic analysis of migrants done after the referendum, which showed that European migrants to the UK produced more gains for the UK economy than the standard existing British citizen. So people were coming to Britain because the British economy was doing well.
42:59 Speaker 01 And they were coming to work, and that was great. I think there was, there are two problems I'd mention. One is when Poland and the other seven Eastern European countries joined the EU back in 2004, the UK government said, we expect about 14,000 people to come and live and work in Britain. And in the event, it was actually more like a million people came. So that had created a sense amongst the British people that the politicians just didn't have a good handle on the numbers, and that created a worry. The second thing was that, yes, these people were coming to live and work in Britain and contribute and pay taxes, but the way our welfare system worked meant that a new arrival
43:40 Speaker 01 could actually claim up to 14,000 pounds, sort of 20,000 dollars in their first year in terms of tax credits. And so this was an issue, and I thought that my negotiating the welfare side of it would really help. And I think it helped a bit, but it wasn't direct enough at sort of demonstrating a control of the numbers.
43:59 Stephen J. Dubner? You love and were petrified by, at the same time, Prime Minister's questions.
44:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
44:07 Stephen J. Dubner? Maybe you could just, in a sentence or two, explain what this tradition is?
44:11 Speaker 01 Well, what happens is every Wednesday at 12 o'clock, the Prime Minister turns up to the House of Commons, and you take questions from everybody for half an hour. You don't know what you're going to be asked. The leader of the opposition. Gets six questions at you. And because our House of Commons is is small. It was bombed in the war and Churchill rebuilt it on exactly the same size where you can't actually fit all the people in. And he did that because he said he liked it being small because it made it an exciting cockpit of debate and that's true. So for that reason, uh, it is very intense, very noisy, uh, pretty terrifying.
44:47 Speaker 01 And you can get caught out. So you can go from triumphant, brilliant, off the cuff or previously planned answer.
44:54 Speaker 04 And for the first time in a long time, the number of doctors is growing very quickly and the number of bureaucrats is actually falling.
45:02 Speaker 01 To really screwing up and failing to, um, remember the right fact or or figure.
45:07 Speaker 04 This is speaking in case the minister didn't realize it takes seven years to train a doctor. So I'd like to thank him for his congratulations for our record on the NHS.
45:15 Speaker 01 While it is terrifying, there's a purpose to it. And that is that because you know it's coming. It's a great moment of accountability where the prime minister's tentacles have got to get all over. Whitehall and the government machine and know the answer to every question. And it's often a time where you find out. Some of your own government's policies and you realize they're not the ones that you thought they were and you change things.
45:40 Stephen J. Dubner? So let me just devil's advocate this for a moment. I love prime ministers' questions. I've been a few times. I think it's a thrilling. Exhibit of democracy, which is what it's supposed to be. On the other hand, if we think about it. Economically, you think about opportunity costs. So you're getting your first round of prep on Monday, along with all your other work, then some more on Tuesday, then Wednesday is really devoted to it. Then afterwards, it sounds so draining that you have to go have some roast beef and red wine immediately after to re-fortify yourself.
46:07 Speaker 01 Takes up a lot of time. I think really it takes up Wednesday morning is very intense, uh, preparation. The rest of the time, you're perfectly capable of doing other things. And don't underestimate, if you didn't have this. You'd have to find some other way of absolutely mugging up on every different aspect of what the government's doing. So I found it quite useful as a sort of accountability. Mechanism. But it is, you know, look, it is more theatre than reality.
46:35 Stephen J. Dubner? Yeah, but let me ask you, and I mean, I really do admire the fact that every week the leader of the country stands up before the parliament. We don't have that. We have nothing like that.
46:44 Speaker 01 Obama once said to me, I'm thinking of doing something like that. So, you know, just hold on a second before you dive in. You might want to think about this. But no, I think, you know, I think there's a justification for it.
46:54 Stephen J. Dubner? Okay, let me again be pure devil's advocate for a moment and say this. One thing that many in your country, especially from the educated class like yourself, Eaton, Oxford and all the Oxbridge universe, one thing that you're particularly good at is talking, which we kind of underestimate as a skill, but it's a very effective skill. And so PMQs are in a way a pure demonstration of how well you all speak about the issues, about disagreements and so on. So let's put that in the pro column. In the con column, however, I believe it's in your book, a saying that goes back a ways to the military setting, that amateurs strategize and professionals execute.
47:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think I used the phrase that one of my generals said, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. And no, I, I, I think your critique is, is a good one. I would argue that good leaders have to be good teachers. You have to take the country with you, have to keep explaining. And Prime Minister's Questions can be a, you know, it is a time when you're trying to explain, you're trying to set out your course of what you're doing. And I think, looking back, I wish we'd done more of that, just trying to explain whether you're, whether you're reforming schools or you're intervening in Libya or you're trying to win a referendum on Brexit, just communicate, communicate. One thing we don't have that you have is that state of the nation moment.
48:16 Speaker 01 I find, sometimes find this a bit frustrating that too much of our politics is very confrontational and, you know, in that sort of cockpit of combat.
48:25 Stephen J. Dubner? But you're confronting each other in person, which is a totally different dynamic than sniping in the press. I mean, you do a lot of that too.
48:31 Speaker 01 So I, but I mean, I'm, what I'm saying is, I think your critique has got some fairness to it, but don't underestimate the importance of the communicating part of politics. It does matter. On the part of politics, which is actually delivering change and making things happen and the importance of logistics, I completely agree that I don't think there's enough attention to that in most governments. You know, I joke in the book that early on as Prime Minister, Someone asked me, what's the job? And I said, well, there's two jobs. First of all, you've got to find out what the government's doing. And second, you've got to stop it. Because, you know, it's an enormous machine that you're running. And I think I'm a huge fan of the British civil service, but if I had a criticism, it's they are great at developing policy, but not so good at implementing policy. And I think
49:15 Speaker 01 in schools of government, in training of politicians and civil servants, in thinking about these things, we need to spend a lot more time on how to get things done, rather than how to develop a policy.
49:24 Stephen J. Dubner? It's something we talk about on the show a lot. So in the medical field, for instance, innovations happen in medicine all the time, but they take on average about 12 years to work their way in. So government, I can understand why that's difficult. In the real world, however, what do you see as ways to kind of shorten that lag between good ideas and implementation?
49:43 Speaker 01 Let me give you one example, which kind of shows all the things we've been talking about. I became obsessed by the power of genomics to try and get to the answer of rare childhood diseases and cancer and other things. And so I said, right, let's be the first government in the world to sequence 100,000 genomes. And the officials all said, that's a great idea. Prime Minister, we're going to do that. Six months later, I said, how is my 100,000 genomes project going? And literally, nothing had happened. Lots of people sat around and talked about it. And then we set up a company. And now, as we sit here today, more than 100,000 genomes have been sequenced. Britain is still leading the world. We're now heading for a million sequenced.
50:20 Stephen J. Dubner? Is this an argument for the private sector providing the proper incentives?
50:24 Speaker 01 I think where I'm going to is, A, sometimes you think you've done something in government, but nothing happens. B, you have to drive change by going back and back and back and checking. But C, where I was going to is actually, I think genomics is a good example of how we must get new clinical discoveries into clinical practice faster. And I suspect we can because of, you know, the way we can change education modules, the way that we can educate people online, the way that doctors can share research, et cetera, et cetera. It must be possible.
50:57 Stephen J. Dubner? We should say your personal connection to this story is your son Ivan, your firstborn son who died at age six, yes?
51:04 Speaker 01 That's right. And he had a rare, he had Otahor syndrome, which was a a rare childhood disease, which meant that he had, he was quadriplegic. He couldn't move his arms and legs. He had terrible epileptic seizures. And so this was one of the things that sparked my interest in genomics, because when he was born. It was very, very tough and, you know, rewarding looking after someone like that, but but very, very tough. And interesting, when we sort of asked the doctor, can we have other children and what will happen? And back then genetic counselling was, well, could be genetic, in which case one in four, might not be, in which case one in.
51:39 Stephen J. Dubner? That's remarkable. It wasn't that long ago.
51:41 Speaker 01 Exactly. And so, you know, they gave us a blended probability of one in 20 and luckily I've got three healthy children since then.
51:48 Stephen J. Dubner? Has there since been a better test for Oda Hara in utero?
51:51 Speaker 01 Well, interestingly, one of the breakthroughs from genome sequencing has been, in some cases, discovering children with Oda Hara syndrome much faster. And I think in in some cases, actually, some changes in diet and vitamins has led to some better outcomes. But, you know, like all these things, when people say Oda Hara syndrome, what they really mean is it's like a description of the symptoms. We don't still know some of the underlying causes.
52:17 Stephen J. Dubner? I was always curious why you named him Ivan. It's not a common name in Britain.
52:21 Speaker 01 No. Um, I can't, I can't, my wife liked it. I took the view that, you know, she was the one who had the children. And I always used to argue my corner on names, but on the whole, she'd win these, uh, these battles.
52:39 Stephen J. Dubner? Let's get back to Brexit for just a moment. As we speak, it's the 27th of September. A lot of things are going to happen in the next month, including a Conservative Party conference and then theoretically the Brexit deadline. It's impossible to predict the future, but if I ask you to give me a high certainty prediction of something that you definitely think probably will or probably will not happen. And really, I'm mostly interested in what you think happens for Britain economically.
53:06 Speaker 01 I think it is too difficult to make an absolutely categorical prediction about what will happen next. I think the best you can do is sort of attach some probabilities for what might happen next. What I want to happen is for the Prime Minister to go to Brussels, negotiate a deal and for that deal to go through. So we leave on the basis of a deal. I think there's a good chance of that happening, but I can't absolutely for certain say it will happen.
53:29 Stephen J. Dubner? Are you speaking with Boris regularly now?
53:31 Speaker 01 We have texted a little bit.
53:34 Stephen J. Dubner? He asks for advice?
53:36 Speaker 01 Not so much, but I'm, I'm, you know, I want to do everything I can. That, that is the right thing to do. But of course, if that doesn't happen, you've got a range of other possibilities from a no deal Brexit, which I hope won't happen. It looks like Parliament has closed that option off. And then you get into general elections or potentially second referendums to unblock this situation. So I'm afraid, and I hate to say this, it is a period of great uncertainty.
54:00 Stephen J. Dubner? All right. Final question. Do you harbor fantasies that someday the average Briton will look at you as the man who saved the UK on some dimension, who salvaged its independence?
54:13 Speaker 01 I think, I don't harbor any fantasies about almost anything. I hope people will take a sort of balanced view and say that important changes were made in terms of our economy that strengthened it, important social changes were made. So I hope people will look across the record, but obviously until the Brexit uncertainty is, is ended, that's going to be a very big question. But look, you don't get to write your own legacy. Historians do that. I've written a book to try and explain my perspectives and I hope people will say that it's a frank and reasonable effort and some important things change for the better, but there are lots of challenges still to answer.
54:51 Stephen J. Dubner? I thank you for writing it. I thank you for speaking and I feel we need to let you go see the rest of America now, but thanks for stopping in.
54:58 Speaker 01 Great pleasure. Thanks.
54:59 Stephen J. Dubner? Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, it is tempting to see the Brexit vote as just the latest development in Britain's long slide from global empress to sad dowager. But is that really the case? Britain has had an extraordinary history of discovery and we head to London. Thank you so much. To hear what discovery looks like there today, from undersea exploration.
55:25 Speaker 08 And this is a really important zone that actually until 2016, we did not know existed.
55:34 Stephen J. Dubner? To the passage of time.
55:36 Speaker 08 We don't find that people's perceptions of feeling always rushed have changed over time.
55:43 Stephen J. Dubner? We discover how Liverpool Football Club used data to put together a team that won the Champions League.
55:48 Speaker 09 The sort of players that I really like are awkward, ungainly-looking players that have been overlooked.
55:55 Stephen J. Dubner? And we learn that the mayor of London is not 100% opposed to the idea of London seceding from Britain. I love the sound of El Presidente. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Daphne Chen. Our staff also includes Alison Kreglo, Greg Rippon, Harry Huggins, Zach Lipinski, Matt Hickey, and Corinne Wallace. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers. All the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio and give it a nice rating if you'd like on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts or Spotify or any podcast app.
56:40 Stephen J. Dubner? Our entire archive can be found exclusively on the Stitcher Podcast app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish show notes and transcripts and so on. To get our entire archive without ads, as well as bonus episodes, go to StitcherPremium.com/freakonomics. We also publish every week on Medium a short text version of our new episode. Go to Medium.com/freakonomicsradio. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected] . Freakonomics Radio also plays on many NPR stations, so check your local station for details. Most of all, thank you for listening.
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