Tom Tugendhat on Modernizing the UK and Political Reform

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Today I'm chatting with Tom Tugendhat. Tom has served as a Member of Parliament for Tonebridge since 2015. He has served as security minister. He has also stood up to the UK's enemies and been sanctioned by Russia, China, and Iran for that privilege. As a backbencher, Tom was elected by MPs to serve as the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Before being elected as an MP, Tom served in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's worked for the Foreign Office, helped to set up the National Security Council of Afghanistan, and on returning to the UK, Tom served as military assistant to the Chief of the Defence Staff, the professional head of the UK armed forces. Tom, welcome.

Thank you, Tyler. It's lovely to see you. Forgive me, I've just been interrupted by a child. Children are welcome.

This is my boy, Adam.

This is my boy, Adam.

Hi, Adam. Good to see you again. You probably don't remember me.

You remember Tyler? You met Tyler? No, I don't remember. You did meet Tyler, yes. I don't remember. Oh, I'm sorry. His memory isn't as good as yours. Okay, Pusa, can you leave me alone? How old was I? A few years ago.

Gone.

Two years ago. Two years ago, exactly. Can you close the door, please? Sorry, I apologize for that.

Oh, don't worry. No problem. You know the famous Korean clip? Yes. By CNN. Yeah, it's one of the greatest. TV episodes of all time, and it's fully natural. Okay, first question. What is your favorite walk around London and what does it show about the city that outsiders might not understand?

Oh, my favorite walk is down the river. And you know, a lot of people walk down the river, but one of the best things about walking down the river in London is first of all, it shows two things. One, that London is actually an incredibly private place. You can be completely on your own in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world within seconds, just by walking down the river. There's very often, even in the middle of the day, there's nobody there. And you walk past things that are just extraordinary. You walk past a customs house. Okay, it's not used anymore, but it was the customs house for 300, 400, 500 years. You walk past obviously the Tower of London, you walk past Tower Bridge, you walk past many things like that, but actually you're walking past a lot of modern London as well. And you see the reality of London, which is actually, the truth is London isn't a single city. It's many, many different villages all cobbled together in various different ways. And so I think outsiders miss the fact that there's a real intimacy to London that you miss if all you're doing is you're going on the tube or if you're going on the bus. If you walk down that river, you see a very, very different kind of London. You see these real communities and real small, smaller communities.

As a question of governance, how does London becoming so large, so wealthy, so successful mesh with the relatively weak federalism of the UK? One might think if you have a city that critical, you need a lot of federalism to build up the intermediary bodies governing it. Is— does something in there need to be changed or is it optimal as is?

I think it does need to be changed, but the reality is the UK is a very, very centralized state. I mean, although there is a mayor of London, of course there's a mayor of London. The reality is the mayor has very, very limited powers. They control Transport for London. They are joint heads of the City Police Force, the Metropolitan Police, the Home Secretary. So our interior minister and the Mayor of London both have the ability to fire the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. And the mayor has certain rights or rather powers on planning, but that's actually mixed with the boroughs as well. So it's a much more diffuse system. And if you compare it to the United States, it's nowhere near as powerful as the mayor of New York, for example, or a regional governor or something like that, or a state governor. Sorry, forgive me.

So how should we change that to make London better governed?

Well, I think the big thing for London actually is to make sure that its transport connections to the region are stronger. I mean, the real holdup for the whole of the United Kingdom is the lack of infrastructure investment over whatever it is, 30, 40 years. You know, we've just seen Crossrail built and already it looks like it's going to be at break-even point in the next 5 or 6 years, which is a remarkable speed of return. And the reason for the speed of the returns, frankly, that so little other infrastructure has been built. So it's almost in a, it's not quite a monopoly provider status, but you know what I mean? It's got such a dominant ability to provide for the community that it's making a huge difference. And the biggest thing that London could do is to get the investment going. But it's not just true of London. That's true of Manchester, Birmingham, all of our cities and all of our towns as well. We need a massive injection of infrastructure investment in the United Kingdom. And we need the leadership to provide it because if you look at the pattern of growth in the United Kingdom, we were growing at a very healthy percentage, you know, 2 to 3% up until 2007, '08. And the fall-off since then has left us effectively, I mean, depending on who you ask, anywhere between 18 and 25% poorer.

Why do you think England in particular is so unbalanced economically compared, say, to the Netherlands or Germany? What is it in the history or is it really just the infrastructure links?

So the infrastructure is hugely important. If you're not willing to connect Britain, guess what? You get concentrations, you get real concentrations. And then the challenge is you get the concentrations and you don't get the housing. So if you don't have the housing, you don't have the ability to invest. And one of the striking things actually is the Mayor of London who's been in place now for 8 and a bit years has been a complete failure in building houses. He's been really reticent on building houses and he talks about rent control, which as you know, the moment you start talking about rent control, nobody wants to rent a house and nobody wants to build a house because it, I mean, you don't need me to tell you this, Tyler, but it's one of the single greatest threats to the ability to house people is to introduce rent controls. It's a complete disaster of a policy that's been tried 100 times and failed 100 times. And that's what he's talking about. But that's Labour's controlling attitude rather than the ability to build. So I think there is a strong argument for having greater devolved interest in infrastructure development, but we're a smaller country than the United States. So infrastructure can't be all local, can't be all done at a state level, if you see what I mean. But nor can it be all national as we're so much bigger than say Belgium or the Netherlands. So we need that relationship. We need a better relationship between our devolved powers and our national power. And that's something we haven't achieved yet.

What's your most controversial opinion about London architecture?

Oh, that recent architecture actually can be absolutely fantastic. There's some really beautiful recent architecture. There's some beautiful town squares or the sort of urban squares built recently, and the condemnation of modern architecture I think is wrong. I'm a fan of what some architects call pastiche. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time. If there's a good design, if there's a good form of architecture that works, that people like, I don't see what's wrong with repeating it just because you've changed the plumbing or the wiring behind the facade.

But even though we're much wealthier and better educated, it seems that we— and I don't just mean the UK here— we can't build anything like, say, Bath or York. And why is that? Where have we gone wrong?

Well, we can actually. The King has built Poundsbury. I've seen some fantastic designs for communities near Faversham. I've seen some really nice designs for communities in other parts of Kent. And there are people who are willing to do it. But But the challenge you've got is you've got to have long-term interest. And actually the great irony is that what we've swapped is we've swapped the ability to plan for the long term with the ability to plan only for the short. And once you do that, then you put huge financial constraints on. And once you restrict the ability of people to access land, and so you put all of the costs on the land rather than on the building, you end up massively distorting the amount that people are willing to spend on the architecture and on the quality. Because of course, You know, people aren't doing this for charity. They need to make a profit out of it. Profit is a perfectly noble motivation, and we need to make sure that people are able to do that. But if we constrain their ability to spend on beautiful architecture by restricting the supply of land, so they have to pay an inflated price for that, then you end up with worse quality design and worse quality housing.

If I think back to the 1970s, and I suppose even the '60s in Britain, My impression is a lot of very good buildings were knocked down, probably by mistake. Is that why Yimby has a bad name in a lot of Britain today?

Yeah.

How is it we ensure we get Yimby but don't repeat the mistakes of the 1970s, or say a Christopher Wren church is destroyed?

Look, I think that's exactly right. And when you, I mean, you, you don't need me to tell you this, but you see the same in New York. The destruction of Pennsylvania Street Station was, was appalling. And you see it in, The attempt to destroy, thank God that was resisted by Betjeman, but the attempt to destroy St Pancras Station was something that was done. The destruction of Euston Station. You know, we've seen some really appalling acts of vandalism. And in fact, the King was one of the people, the first people to criticize it in various speeches in the 1980s. And at the time he was constantly referred to as a young fogey. And now he seems to have been rather more prescient than I think people recognized at the time. And one of the things that we've got to do is we've got to make sure that We're building beautiful. There's a really interesting piece of work being done by a guy called Nicholas Boyce-Smith on Create Streets is his project. And it's about building beautiful. And it's amazing when you, when you set out beautiful design codes, when you set out buildings that really add to the environment, people don't object so much. You know, it's hardly surprising that if you're, if you're going to build some modernist monstrosity next to my house, I might object. If you're going to build some sort of Georgian villas that add to the feeling of the area, then I may feel that you're increasing the value of my house, not diminishing it.

What makes Kent, which is where you're based, special in the history of England as you see it?

Oh, Kent is remarkable actually, and very different from the rest of England. It's very underappreciated, but I'm a proud citizen of the sovereign and independent Kingdom of Kent. Something, okay, I admit that we haven't been for about 1,000 years, but we still claim it. So Kent was actually colonized, if that's the right word to use, by the Jutes, not by the Angles and Saxons. So by a different Viking tribe, a different Viking people. And instead of having primogeniture, so the inheritance of the eldest son, they had the Frankish inheritance, which was the inheritance shared between the male heirs of the father. Now, it's still sexist, but it meant that you ended up with a very different system. So you ended up with much smaller parcels of land, you end up with much smaller landholdings, and that had several effects actually. One of the effects it had was it saw the greatest rise of industry. 'Cause of course you can't effectively just farm the rents of your peasants by owning a lot of land, then you actually have to do something about it. So you see, for example, the rise of industry in Kent earlier than other places. You see the arrows that were made for the Battle of Crecy and were all made in Kent. They were made by Kentish Ironworks and they were made because there were smallholdings and there were smallholdings because people only had enough land to farm for themselves. They didn't have enough to profit off the wealth of others. You then see, of course, the fact that Kent is on the crossroads of Europe. Of course. And don't forget that seaways were the highways of the medieval world. So being on the coast and particularly on the coast between England and France and the Low Countries and Germany meant that you were right on the frontline of commerce and ideas. So you get ideas coming into Kent. I mean, obviously right at the beginning, it was the Romans who landed in Kent and came up and fought the Kentish men at the Battle of Snotland just before the turn of the year zero. And you then see the reintroduction of Christianity in about 600 when St. Augustine comes along and meets with the first Christian Queen of Kent, Queen Bertha. And so you get these ideas and later on you get the Protestantism that comes through and you get revolution, of course, because you get the Peasants' Revolt comes from Kent. And that's so when Wat Tyler manages to get the men of Kent to rise against the king. But you get, so you get various ideas and various uprisings out of Kent. So Kent is a land of revolution and ideas.

And how does that shape the politics in Kent today, that history?

It's challenging. It's still challenging. It's an area where you get political innovation, you get political ideas coming out. You know, in recent years we've seen, we've certainly seen some different politics coming out of the coastal areas of Kent than out of the centre. We've seen different areas of challenge, but some of it's eroded away. But you still have smaller landholdings. You still have much more of a feeling of equality in Kent than you do in many other parts of the United Kingdom.

Now your town of Tonbridge has a very famous private school. Does that system need general reform in the UK or is it just fine as is?

No, look, I, it's, I think it has reformed an awful lot. I mean, the impressions about what a school does in a community, I think are very often mistaken. I mean, Tonbridge School not only gives out large numbers of bursaries, so a lot of the kids who go there don't pay full fees of various description, a fair few who don't pay anything at all, but also the school has a really important role in the community. So, its sports track and its, you know, and its sports facilities are used by the whole town at various different points and very often for either low or free. A lot of the other schools use the theater and use their facilities like that. And they run something in which is relatively common in the United Kingdom called a combined cadet force and various other kids are involved in elements of that as well. So it's not a standalone, you know, 40, 50 years ago it would've been a very standalone institution. But the fees would've been relatively lower. Now the institution is much more integrated in many ways into the town. It's true that the fees are higher, they are very high, but what it offers the rest of the community is also a huge amount.

Putting aside present company, who is the great unselected prime minister in British history? So I've heard people say it was Denis Healey, Michael Heseltine, Roy Jenkins, others. Who's your pick? Should have been Prime Minister.

All of those people are really interesting. I think Ken Clarke would have been very interesting as well. I mean, actually, I think most recently, the one who would have been Prime Minister had he stayed in Parliament is George Osborne. I think when Theresa May came back after the 2017 election with not only a reduced majority, but actually a slight minority administration, I think George Osborne would have been Prime Minister within weeks had he stayed in Parliament, but he stood down. And so I think it was a, you know, that's one of those moments where, you know, sliding doors and the history is slightly different.

Can the British system of government in its current parliamentary form, how well can that work without broadly liberal individualistic foundations in public opinion?

I think it works extremely well at ensuring that truly liberal foundations are maintained. I mean that not in the American sense, I mean in a genuine the old liberal tradition that emerges from the UK in the 1700s, 1800s, where freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, the right to own property, and all those principles that then became embedded in various different constitutions around the world, including your own. I think it does very well at doing that because it forces you, our system forces you into partnership. There are 650 people who you have to work with in some way in Parliament. Over the next 4 or 5 years. And there's 4 of us currently going for leadership of the Conservative Party. And there's one reason why, despite the fact that we're competing almost in a US primary system, the way in which we are dealing with each other is very different, is because we are all gonna have to work together for the next 4 years. Whoever wins is going to have to work with the other 3. And the idea that you can simply ignore each other isn't true. There's only 121 of us Conservative MPs in Parliament. And what this system forces on us is the need to deal with each other in a way that you have to deal with somebody if you're going to deal with them tomorrow. And I think that's one of the reasons why the British political system has endured, because it forces you to remember that there's a long-term interest, not an immediate one, not just a short-term one.

Putting aside particular hypotheses about specific elections, but why do you think for a while now party outcomes in the UK have become quite uneven relative to, say, the continent. That is, one party will win by quite a bit, right?

Well, it's partly down to the system, right? I mean, it's, it's a very small number of votes in a certain number of seats can swing certain seats quite a lot. So if you look at the results of the last election, for example, in '24, on the 4th of July this year, the Labour Party won with a majority of 179 off 33 and a bit, 34% of the vote. Now, normally an opposition party will get 34% of the vote and the governing party will get 38, 40% of the vote. But what Labour have achieved is they've managed to get a lot of very narrow wins. So they've got a lot of wins by 500 or 1,000 votes across the country. In fact, it would only require, I know it doesn't sound, it's quite a big only, but it would only require 175,000 votes to switch for it to be reduced from a majority to a minority. Now, Admittedly, that's a lot of votes, right? But the truth is, when you look at an electorate of 40 million, that's not that much to switch from effectively a two-thirds victory in the Commons to a 50-50.

Putting aside any party loyalties, but does the thinness of those mandates make you more optimistic about liberalism broadly construed in the UK?

Yes, it does. It makes me much more optimistic about it. And the reason is the only way you get these mandates is by appealing to a wide enough section of your own voting bloc and by convincing those who are against you either to support you or to stay away. And they stay away when they're not interested in supporting their own side or they're not too fearful of you. So you'll look at, for example, the 2019 election. The turnout was very, very high, and it was very high because a lot of people either were extremely angry at one of the party leaders, or they were absolutely determined that their own party leader should win. And the combination of the two meant it generated very high turnouts on both sides, as it were. And it also meant that the major political parties, the two major political parties got the bulk of the vote. Whereas in 2019, there's a lot of people who were angry at us, the Conservatives, after 14 years in office, but there was no real enthusiasm for Keir Starmer, nor was there any great fear of Keir Starmer. And that meant that you got, first of all, a very low turnout, but you also get a very low margin of victory in percentage terms, although you end up with a very large majority in electoral terms. And that means that these things can change quickly. And I think the important thing in a democracy is to be ready for change and to make sure that ideas, good ideas, can cut through. And that's why, you know, I'm extremely optimistic for the next election, for example, because I think that the kind of economic reforms that we need to see, the sort of conservative revolution that we need to see, that the back to service, back to leadership, and back to action that we need to see is something that can generate a real swing and a real momentum behind it relatively quickly. And certainly within 4 years.

It's a common view with outsiders that the mechanisms through which Brexit evolved and was achieved show there was some kind of defect in the UK system of government, that somehow you got stuck at a certain point and there weren't enough moving parts in the system to budge you from that, either to getting the deal done or reversing it. So independent of whatever one thinks of Brexit, do you accept that criticism that somehow the system can get stuck due to the extreme sovereignty of Parliament?

So I accept the criticism at the time, and the reason I accepted at the time is because we had something that was introduced called the Fixed Terms Parliaments Act, which meant that the government in theory could not dissolve Parliament. Now you can have two systems, right? You can either have a system of government where the government sits outside the Parliament and they both have fixed terms, in which case you have a mandate that endures like that. But then you get your obstacles between the two. Or you can have the government in our system where the government by definition can command a majority in the Commons. That is the definition of a government in our system. It's anybody who can command a majority in the Commons is by definition the Prime Minister. Now, we got to a position because of the Fixed Terms of Parliament Act, which was introduced during the coalition years, where there was somebody in the Commons who was sitting in the seat of the Prime Minister but could not command a majority. Well, that led to complete inertia until the Lib Dems made a cretinously stupid mistake and thought that they were about to sort of win an anti-Brexit vote and lead themselves to victory. And they forced an election. Actually, had they hung on and tolerated the inability of Parliament to get things done, I think the situation may have been very different. But I think what the lesson was from that was that you need to remember what the system is and why it works. Our system means that the Prime Minister either has the ability to command a majority in Parliament or the Parliament collapses. And that forces a level of truth and honesty into a debate that means that members of Parliament have to think very hard before they vote against the government, before they vote down their own side, because they may be voting themselves out of office.

Should the House of Lords be abolished or phased out?

No, it shouldn't. The extraordinary thing about the House of Lords is, look, it's not something that anybody would invent.

I might.

But it works. Well, you might. You're right. You're the kind of economist who might. But, you know, the weird thing about the hereditary peers, and there's plenty of changes you can make to the hereditary peers, but the weird thing about it is it's a system of randomness that injects lottery into into government. Now, I can certainly see an argument for turning that from a family lottery into a jury system where it's a temporary lottery. But the other thing that the House of Lords does, which is very, very difficult in a democracy, is it forces you to think longer over time. And what the House of Lords used to do through its hereditary principle was force you to think not only long-term over time for yourself, so 20, 30 years, but actually think generationally. If you want to guard the stability of your country so that your children and your grandchildren inherit your wealth, then you need to be thinking over 50 or 100 years. And one of the problems that democracies have is short-term thinking and balancing long-term and short-term thinking is something that every democracy should be trying to do. Now, I'm not going to tell you that the democracy, that the fact that most of the hereditary peers, in fact, I think they're all male. I may be wrong about that, but there may be a woman amongst them. But I think they're all male, is clearly an issue. And the fact that they come from a very narrow demographic of our society is clearly an issue. But the fact that they introduce long-term thinking, that they don't actually have the ability to block anything, and that they force effectively a power base beyond the day-to-day will of the Prime Minister, I think is a benefit. And I think it's been good to have as a revising chamber. I don't think it should ever have preeminence. And I think The elected chamber should always have the ability to overrule it, which we do. But I think having that long-term thinking is really important.

Why has the global fascination with the British monarchy so persisted? Now, surely some of that is the legacy of empire, but it seems to have far outlived that as the only explanation. The monarchies of the Netherlands, Norway, no one much talks about them, say, in the US. But yours, my goodness, you're like the global reserve currency. What's the PR genius behind that or how did that happen? What's special?

I mean, there's various things. I mean, you know, King Farouk said when he was in exile after having left Cairo for the last time, he said, "One day there'll only be 5 kings left, the King of Hearts, the King of Spades, the King of Clubs, the King of Diamonds, and the King of England." I think he's partly right. And the reason he's partly right is because it was the Queen's genius actually. I think we've never been better governed and better ruled than when our reigning monarch is a woman. We've always had very, very good women monarchs. Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, and then Queen Elizabeth again. It's been a remarkable success that she's been able to be a guiding presence without having, without her voice becoming in any way strident or separatist. She's never divided, and that was a remarkable gift. Now, it's also, I think, the benefit that, you know, the English language really helps. And I think the fact that most people in England, well, certainly in England, Wales and Scotland numbers are slightly different, but most people, and Northern Ireland of course different again, but most people in the United Kingdom take the monarchy seriously and respectfully, but know that it's not relevant in a day-to-day sense. And I think divorcing the splendid from the sordid, if you like, is rather a healthy way of having a government. We don't like our prime minister to be bathed in gold and glory, and we certainly look at your presidential system sometimes with a surprise. It does surprise my American friends when I tell them that the entire government can fly in the same plane, but the King and the Prince of Wales are never allowed to travel together.

Has the extent of devolution for Scotland and Northern Ireland gone too far? Because to an outsider, it seems like they have a great deal of autonomy, but actually not quite enough responsibility for the wellbeing of the whole polity.

So I think, I wouldn't say it's gone too far, no. I'd say it's imbalanced. And I think that's right. I think there's an old principle, which you'll know, of aligning accountability, responsibility, and authority. And one of the challenges we've got in our devolution system in the UK at the moment is, you know, you'd have to be nuts as a devolved representative seeking office not to promise to pave the streets of your community with gold and then to blame Westminster for not paying for it because you have very little responsibility for raising any of the money that you're going to spend. So we don't have in the same way, the same level of that you'd have in the United States, the same level of city, county, you know, state and federal taxation. It's much more centralized in the UK. Now, one of the advantages of course is it means that the oversight is stronger. One of the disadvantages of course, it means the responsibility for each individual area is weaker and that leads to the inequities of infrastructure and housing and the misalignment of incentives that we now see. Certainly if you look at England, I'm not sure if this is true in Scotland actually, but it certainly in England in the 1930s, the local authorities raised more and were able to keep more business rates. But the changes that came in in 1947, '48 in the Town and Country Planning Act meant that a lot of this was centralized and it became a rebate from central government. And of course the incentive at that point went away.

Now you're a Roman Catholic and part of your family background is originally Jewish from Austria. Do you think that in any way gives you a slightly different understanding of British history? And if so, what would that be?

Yeah, I guess it does. I mean, as you know, I'm pretty British. My uncle sits in the House of Lords. My father was a High Court judge and I served in the army. Look, I think that perspective is important to me. How much it shapes my view of Englishness or the United Kingdom, I don't know. You know, it's certainly impossible to be a Catholic in the United Kingdom and not remember some of the English martyrs who were who met pretty unpleasant ends under various of our earlier monarchs. As somebody who served in our intelligence corps, it's impossible not to remember that the first intelligence units in the United Kingdom, well, in England, were set up to hunt Catholic priests. That was literally their purpose, at which they were remarkably successful. So I think it shapes me there. And I think the Jewishness, as it were, and for me it's entirely past in the sense I'm not culturally Jewish. I'm certainly not religiously, I'm religiously Catholic, but that links me to a lost past in Eastern Europe that I think reminds me why the investments and the efforts that you make in your own home are so absolutely fundamental to guarding your freedom as well. The work that we do in defending British democracy is absolutely fundamental to guarding all of our liberties.

Do you think you end up with a deeper understanding of Northern Ireland as a result?

It's very hard to overstate the complexity of Northern Ireland. As somebody who's had the privilege of having many Northern Irish friends from many different communities, be careful what you think you understand. If you think you understand Northern Ireland, you may not be understanding anything at all.

The immunity provisions of the 2023 Legacy Act for Northern Ireland, good idea, bad idea, you're not sure?

Well, look, they're necessary, I'm afraid. And it's, it's incredibly painful because for everybody there's a legacy of pain and loss, right? And everybody feels quite understandably that they want to have recourse to justice. But the reality is that we've now had 40 years of inquiries, many of them quite literally raking up very, very, very old information again and again and again and again. And the people who are now being forced through these judicial processes are now usually men, or in fact almost entirely men, in their late 70s, 80s, whose recollection of events, if they have any recollections at all, are pretty sketchy. And so we've got to a point where the correct way of having inquiry into the past is to do historical inquiry based on written record. And I think that's, that's what this offers.

What did you learn on active service in Afghanistan? That most people would be surprised by?

Be kind.

Be kind.

Yeah.

What do you think is the case for medium-term semi-optimism about Afghanistan, or is there no such case?

Medium-term, I think it's really hard to make even a medium-term optimistic case. I think there's a long-term optimistic case, but it requires some really fundamental changes to several of its neighboring states. Because the reality is Afghanistan hasn't been either in civil war or been the death of empires as people claim. It's been the playground of others. So you constantly see that bits of Afghanistan are dominated by bits of their neighbors, and that domination leads to internal frictions and frictions between the two neighbors. So you look at the way in which parts of Afghanistan are effectively played over by different political interests from the region. And you see the effect on the lives of, you know, particularly women and girls, but actually everybody in Afghanistan. It's, uh, and it's hard to see without the regional changes any real optimism.

How did studying Arabic in Yemen affect your life trajectory?

Massively and completely unexpectedly. I studied it because I was interested in it. I'm a theology student and I'm I'm just interested in other religions and I thought I was studying Islam out of interest, but it's because I spoke Arabic that I was mobilized to fight in Iraq. And it was because I was mobilized to fight in Iraq that I then served in the Foreign Office and then stayed in the military and ended up in politics. So it's been, funnily enough, it's one of the most consequential decisions I ever took and I took it very lightly.

But what happened? Like what happens next after you do that?

What do you mean? After I studied Arabic or?

Yeah. How did that lead to the next stage of your life and change your thinking?

Oh, I see. So I studied Arabic because I was doing a master's in Islamics and because I spoke Arabic when I left university, I decided to be a journalist and because I spoke Arabic and French, I went to Beirut and so I learned to be a journalist by working on a local paper in Beirut. Did that for a few years, went back to the United Kingdom. And was a management consultant for a little bit. And while I was doing that, I joined the British Army Reserve and I moved to work for Bloomberg News, writing about commodity markets, analyzing the energy industry, that sort of thing. And while I was doing that, 9/11 happened and I was mobilized to go and fight in the various wars that then followed.

As of 2024, Yemen is much in the news as of late, and I find it puzzling. If someone asks me, well, what are the Houthis seeking to maximize? I don't quite have a good answer. What would you say?

I say they're seeking to maximize their tribal influence over Yemen as much as it's possible to do so. They are a remarkable organization of very, very, very traditional tribal fighting with some extremely modern access to weaponry, mostly from Iran, but also bought from other places. And at the moment, what they're trying to do is they're trying to close off the Red Sea to limit the ability to sustain Israel, but they're also looking to generally do damage to global trade.

And is that instrumentally rational for them? I know it's a bad thing, but in terms of how they assess means-ends relationships, do you see them as rational actors?

Yes, they're rational. They're rational within their own metrics. I mean, it's, it's one of those things, if people do things you don't expect, it's probably because you haven't understood the reason they're doing it, if you see what I mean. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to fight a civil war. They're not particularly interested in Israel per se. They're interested in having legitimacy in a civil war. And one of the ways you get legitimacy in an internal Islamic civil war is by attacking Israel. And one of the ways in which you get weapons off Iran is by attacking Israel. So if you want to fight a civil war and you want to have legitimacy and weapons, attacking Israel helps you. So it may not have rationality within our thinking because, you know, every now and again Israel's likely to strike back, and as indeed it did only a few weeks ago, and actually closing down shipping in the Red Sea doesn't particularly help you win that civil war, but it does add to your legitimacy and makes you look like a competent military power. So it's done for a different reason.

Now, how should I think about Iran? If I see Iranians abroad,. They do so very well, including in Britain. Iran itself has a lot of science, a lot of tech, engineering, great deal of talent, and it seems energy. Yet the country is somehow fundamentally weak. They have a very bad government. They cannot exercise deterrence. What's the most fundamental way of thinking about what's gone wrong there?

Well, I think you, you should think about Iran extremely positively. Iran is an incredible country of an unbelievably rich civilization. As you know, you don't need me to tell you that it's an amazing place. With some of the most extraordinary scientists and artists that any culture has ever produced. It's a remarkable place. You should think about the Iranian regime very differently. That is a cancerous growth on the back of a country that came out of the chaos of a revolution that many people thought was going to go a completely different way and has effectively leeched the life out of millions of people in the most horrific way. I mean, it's, it's It's one of the most brutal and psychotic actors in a dangerous region. And what it's offering now is effectively a millenarian death cult. You know, when people tell you what they believe, it's often wise to believe that they're telling you the truth. And they're telling you, they're telling us very clearly that what they're doing is they're preparing for the coming of the Mahdi. And, you know, they need to destroy Israel and conquer Jerusalem in order to achieve it. They seem to be acting in that way.

At least as of the time we're talking in September 2024, their behavior is very cautious, right? They're not seeking to be sent to heaven immediately. And as a social scientist, I'm a little suspicious of explanations where the society and the government are so totally different, even under autocracy. Do you see what I'm saying?

It still puzzles me. So I see, I see what you're saying. And in normal cases that I would sympathize. The reality is, though, this is a very brutal autocracy. It does murder an awful lot of people a year, and it has successfully got most, well, not most, but it's successfully got many people expelled from the country. So there's a lot of, there's a huge Iranian diaspora, as you know, all over the world. There are many extremely impressive Iranians who've followed their own lives away from the dictatorship. I think that sort of alignment of government and people is easier when you can when people can travel and be exiled. And I think that's what we are seeing. And what we're seeing is a vile failure of leadership and a failure of responsibility. We've seen a, we, we're seeing a government that has absolutely brutalized an entire nation. So I think, you know, and one of the things you're also seeing is that the government has realized that it can conduct a lot of its, a lot of its violence through proxies. So we just spoke about the Houthis, but it's also true that Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah are mere proxies in many ways for the Iranian state.

Now, in your earlier role as security minister and other posts, you've had access to a lot of classified information. Of course, we wouldn't ask you to share that with us, but could you give us a sense, how much has that changed your view of the world? Is it like you learn all those things and then you say, oh my God, this is how the world works. I never figured that. Or do you just make marginal adjustments based on what you've learned?

I won't tell you any secrets, but I suppose the one secret that I can tell you that some people just won't believe me is conspiracies are unbelievably difficult and I just don't believe in them anymore. I believe in cock-up. I believe there's huge numbers of mistakes that happen and people are constantly misjudging things. That I believe in. And that leads to very, very unpredictable outcomes in some circumstances. But I think the conspiracies, I'm afraid I don't believe in them.

Taiwan and South Korea rose in per capita income. They became democratic. They're very healthy, vital democracies. China did not. Many people thought it would. What's the difference?

Freedom.

But Taiwan and South Korea didn't have freedom.

They had enough freedom. And the freedom you need is the freedom to be able to hold your own property, to know that wealth that you accumulate, you'll be able to keep, and that deals you make will be in some way reasonably adjudicated when there's a dispute. And Taiwan and South Korea both had that. China has an entirely separate court system. It has an arbitrary wealth removal system, to put it nicely. It has a very brutal tyrannical government that runs in a very disjointed way. If you're a member of the party, you have one form of court system. If you are not, you have a different, and that has led to massive internal corruption. And I don't just mean in the usual sense, but corruption in the sense that it's very difficult to predict the ownership of assets in large scale. And that's really difficult, right? I mean, it just makes investment for the long term difficult. And you saw the arrest of Jack Ma being evidence of that. You know, that was one of those moments where the wealthy got too big for their boots and were challenging the party, and the party will always come first.

If we think about Russia for a long time, maybe forever, Russia has not been close to a free country. If you had to try to explain in as most fundamental and conceptual terms as possible why that is true, how do you understand Russian history? Why has it gone so badly so many times?

I've read a fair amount of Russian history, but I'm afraid I just simply can't explain it. But it consistently goes wrong. I ask myself whether it's to do with the scale of the country, whether it's to do with the fact that the levels of education or the levels of connection between urban and rural areas are so great. I don't know. But your wife left the Soviet Union. When was it?

Yeah, 1992.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what would your view be? I mean, it's, I find it very difficult to say much about Russia.

I think it's a mix of size, its neighbors. It had its own version of the Turner thesis where it expanded, but that made them more brutal rather than giving them outlets to be free. Urban-rural imbalance, which you mentioned, partly heritage from a more Eastern version of Christianity, maybe is somewhat more authoritarian, never feeling secure, repeatedly having been invaded and almost having lost a number of historically significant times, and being this odd mix of European and Asian and even Muslim cultures mixed together in a way that has never quite had a stable core at its center. So there's always this great fear of losing order, but that's just me. I mean, I'm just making that up, right? We can't test these views.

We can't, but it's, but that sort of, there's a constant fear of chaos in the Russian psyche. As you know, my wife's, my wife's mother was of a Russian family and the fear of chaos is something that seems to live in a lot of the Russians that we know where they're constantly afraid you're gonna lose everything. But then of course, if you look at Russian history over even over the last 100 years, the probability of losing everything every 30 or 40 years is quite high. In fact, you remind me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine who was an Estonian. It was about 10 years ago, who was telling me that they would set up this e-citizenship thing, which I don't know if you know about it, but you can become an e-citizen of Estonia. And the whole of the Estonian public record, everything is now online. Every court case, every land treaty, everything, everything's online. And they've outsourced their record holding to, I think it's New Zealand, Canada, and Scotland. Because they're all common law jurisdictions with stable governments. And I said, oh, well, that's an extraordinary thing to do. Why have you done that? And he said, oh, well, so when the Russians come, I said, what do you mean when? And he said, oh, they always come every 40 years or so. The Russians come and they destroy us. So when the Russians come, we want to be a people without a land.

Should the UK modernize its nuclear deterrent? And if so, how?

Yes, we should. In fact, we're in the process of doing it in various different ways. And we should be constantly doing it. Forgive me, I'm not going to talk about how.

Sure. The no first use policy. Should Britain ever announce such a thing?

I don't think that anybody who's ever been privy to the nuclear command chain should ever discuss it.

I have a few questions about the Tom, Dick and Harry production function. What's your favorite novel?

The Radetzky March. It's fabulous. It's about— have you read it?

Of course. Yeah.

Joseph Roth.

Wonderful.

Exactly. It's about the end of the end of a certain world and the beginning of a new one. And in many ways it's very mournful. And of course it's a book about loss. It's a book about the end, but it's also a book about novelty and innovation because it's the arrival of things, is the arrival of the telegram, the arrival of the train, the arrival of that modernity and the challenge that that brings.

What's your favorite movie?

I have quite a few that I quite like actually. I've recently watched again Shawshank Redemption, which is just an absolute classic. I mean, it's, and it's a classic because the dialogue is amazing. I love The Princess Bride, which is incredibly funny and still has some of the greatest comic lines in, in the English language. Those are two of my favorites.

Do James Bond movies have a future? So to some people, they feel too politically incorrect. In the last Bond movie, this is no longer a spoiler, Bond dies at the end. That just seemed wrong to me. What can they do with the franchise to keep it fresh when there's a lot of competition? From other spy figures, right? The Bourne movies, many others. What is gonna make James Bond distinctive going forward?

Now, the brand, I mean, you, you know this, Tyler, you don't need me to tell you this, but as an economist, the brand matters, right? The brand is your assurance that enough money will be spent on it, that they don't want to devalue it, that the special effects will be good enough, the music will be original enough, the screenwriter will be famous enough, whatever, whatever it is that you're looking for, the actors will be popular enough. You know, it'll all be there because the brand is strong enough. So I don't know who the next Bond is going to be. I'm sure they could be from any background at all. A little bit like the Doctor Who franchise, where the Doctor re— they have a term for it, I can't remember what the term is now, but the reappears in various different human forms. Bond will reemerge and no doubt another double-o-something or other will happen.

What did you learn from your father?

Kindness.

What did you learn from your mother?

The same, actually. The same.

So double influence. What's the most underrated Beatles song?

That's a very good question. I love Hey Jude. I'm still a fan of that.

But it may not be underrated, right?

No, it's not really underrated. I'm trying to think of what—

I would say You Won't See Me off Rubber Soul as the most underrated. But it's not the best.

Yeah, it's not the best. The problem is when you say underrated, you immediately go to your favorite one, and your favorite one is almost by definition not underrated because you know it very well. So I don't know. Yeah, sorry, not helpful on that one.

Civil service salaries in the UK, they seem to an American quite low. The cost of living in London by any standard is quite high. How should that problem be addressed?

Well, there's two ways to address it, aren't there? One of them is to build more homes and the other one is to raise salaries. One's quicker than the other. And actually the truth is a combination. Is likely to be necessary because senior civil servant salaries have flatlined largely, by which I mean, of course, they've gone down in real terms over 20 or so years. So you're asking people to do really important and difficult jobs, and the competition for those jobs is not just the salary. Of course, very often you can offer similar salaries in the private sector, but it's the interest. That's the real thing you're offering. And it's one of the things I've noticed actually is that Whenever the government is the only provider of that service, so intelligence or defense, and you can only really do it properly in government, then despite the salary differential, you still get the best people. I mean, like unquestionably the best people in intelligence work, in security work, are working for the state because only working for the state can you truly use all the powers and resources available. Whereas in other areas where you can do logistics for a private company or for a state company, you can do processing for a private company or a state company, then the competition is much harder.

So if a talented young person comes to you and wants you to make the case why they should work in the British Civil Service, not at a top job, but mid-level, maybe a higher job later on, what's the case you would make to them?

You get a lot more responsibility much earlier than I think you'd probably imagine. You really get an extraordinary breadth of opportunity to take decisions that actually do have really serious influence to shape government policy and very often to work with some incredibly interesting people. I mean, one of the things that you can do in government that is harder, it's not impossible, but it's harder in most companies is you can change your job every 2 years and you can go and do things across the range of government in ways that it's very difficult to do across the range of business. So, you know, I know people who've worked in intelligence, who've worked in trade, who've worked abroad, who've worked at home, you know, who've worked in various different things in a career that's lasted, you know, 10 or 15 years. That's not— it's unusual to be quite that broad in reach, but it's certainly not impossible. And that's a remarkable ability to do that.

And very last question, what led you to enter politics when you did?

It matters. It just really matters. I'd been a soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan for the best part of 10 years, 15 years. I mean, not full-time in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I've been soldiering for 10 or 15 years and it was time for me to go and do something else. And if you care about your country and you care about the way in which we are governed, then there's only one place the orders start, and that's with a democracy that's in Parliament. And you know, what I'd seen in the armed forces was young men and women doing the most extraordinary things, demonstrating the most extraordinary courage, serving our country in the most extraordinary way. And I'd seen some amazing leadership. Real leaders at every level, leaders at very junior level, 21, 22-year-old corporals demonstrating real leadership, and the person I worked for, the Chief of the Defence Staff, so the most senior general in the British Army, demonstrating real strategic leadership. And I'd seen that we need to act on it. And so I brought what I thought was the best of that, and I tried to bring some of that to Parliament because there's a lot of people who these days, I know in both of our cultures, because there's a very high respect for the military in the United States and the United Kingdom, there's a lot of people who say, well, there must be a military answer to this, not just by the use of force, but you call in a general to fix a problem because generals do stuff. And of course, on one level, that's true, that's right. But on another level, it simply cannot be right that the only way to help disadvantaged kids is for them to join the armed forces, or the only way for young people to have an opportunity from a certain area is to join the armed forces. But time and again, the young of the men and women I was working with had a brother or a sister or a parent who was unbelievably disadvantaged and just couldn't get a way out of it. And they'd got out of it through the military. But again, that can't be the only way out of it. And so I got into politics because I think there, you've gotta find a better way of fixing things. You've gotta find a better way out of these things. You've gotta find a better way of solving these problems. And I think a military attitude helps because it's a, it's an attitude of building a team and delivering. And it's an attitude that seeks to respect and support leadership. And offering that leadership, I think, is what matters. And that's why I'm standing as well. I'm standing because I think if you want to serve your country, if you want to offer leadership at a moment when frankly the world is deeply uncertain and the challenges at home of underinvestment over 30, 40 years have never been more obvious, the need to act in the national interest has never been stronger. And that's You know, that's what I think we need out of British politics today.

Tom Tukettat, thank you very much.

Thanks, Tyler. It's good to see you again.

Same here. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.