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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Hey, Nia, how are you doing?
N. Rodgers: You know what? I'm great because we have Chris Burdett back for our second half of our episode and you had asked a question, and I cut you off because I was being more important. But now we get to ask him more questions, but in the meantime, how are you, dear?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm fine. Notwithstanding the fact that we'll have yet another episode of where Chris Burdett will go ahead and make fun of me. I don't know if my friendship.
N. Rodgers: I feel certain because I'm about to remind him that door is standing wide open and he needs to walk through, which I feel certain he's ready to do, because you asked him to have votes of no confidence.
C. Burdett: I'm contractually obligated to make fun of John. I need to put that out there. This is not something I have a choice.
N. Rodgers: We're glad that you said for the second part of the episode.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. I mean when we hired. When we hired Chris, I don't know if I shared this with you. When we hired Chris, one of the questions we asked him during the interview process was that was he willing, and capable of making fun of his colleagues, and he assured us.
N. Rodgers: Ed out of the park.
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, yes, he did. He continues to demonstrate that on a daily basis?
C. Burdett: I said only under duress, but please, I'm just going to let the audience try to figure out what John has hanging over me.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I have many thoughts about that at many people at the university that they must have information on other people. But anyway.
J. Aughenbaugh: John Aughenbaugh, extortionist anyways.
N. Rodgers: But you had asked about a vote of no confidence, and I agree that. That's an interesting question I'd love to know. Wait, let me back up and say so. The people elect MPs, and the MP's are clearly from mathly broken parties, which we will not get into see first episode if you don't know what I mean about broken math. But anyway, once they get there, then the people who have the most seats elect from within their group a prime minister.
J. Aughenbaugh: Prime minister.
N. Rodgers: Now they elect them. Do the members of parliament elect them? The people don't get to have a say in that.
C. Burdett: Well, indirectly. We talked a bit about how you don't have a direct election for the prime minister, but during elections you have the party leader. You either have the incumbent prime minister who's out leading the party in the general election and if they were to win the most seats or the majority of seats, then that's going to be the prime minister, so there's not a lot of, there's clarity and no party is going to campaign without someone out in front. But ultimately that individual is going to be elected from their own district, along with all the other MPs. They're equivalent. They're equal to each other at that moment. But when they arrive in Parliament, then they come together and if they have that majority, then they just elect their prime minister from their ranks. But it's presumably the person that was out campaigning as the presumptive prime minister if the party wins. That happens.
N. Rodgers: Is that who we vote to have no confidence in?
C. Burdett: That is it's about the government. This is a constitutional, an unwritten constitutional question in the UK where you have to command the confidence of parliament in order to lay a claim to legitimate authority. Because parliament represents the voice of the people. If the voice of the people doesn't support you, then how can you make a claim to be a legitimate authority. That's a very political philosophical angle to take to this, but that's really the way that they framed this whole thing. The way they framed the idea of confidence. One mechanism that exists is the idea of a vote of no confidence, which as the name implies, it says the parliament no longer thinks that your government is legitimate, it doesn't support you anymore. It's like imagining this, you've got the government coming up with legislation and then it takes the legislation, puts it before the House of Commons, in the House of Commons, and votes on it. If the government commands the confidence of the House of Commons, then its majority is going to ensure that its legislation passes. When there isn't confidence the government comes along with its legislation says here, House of Commons vote on it and they're not going to. That's not a government anymore. You are not governing at that point. You've got all this legislation. You're saying vote this in, vote this in, and no one is. That is where the system breaks down conceptually and what justifies then, this idea of a vote of no confidence that says, you no longer should be in charge, and we need to do something different. We need to have some other alternative. British system.
J. Aughenbaugh: How often do we see votes of no confidence?
C. Burdett: In the UK super rare. If you look at other parliamentary democracies, they can be a little more common. Some people argue that votes of no confidence in parliamentary democracies are going to be a source of instability. But we find that there is a certain reticence to use them. You can threaten them and that's happened more recently in the UK Parliament, where you've had the threat of a vote of no confidence, but votes of no confidence, at least ones that pass. I should clarify that ones that actually force a government out are super rare. In fact, I mentioned, the last one was in 1979, and the one before that was I think in the 1920s. That's a long time where you had this mechanism that can conceivably throw a government out. It just doesn't work. Now that's where have this idea of, you can have a vote of no confidence, but it doesn't pass and that's a great way to signal to the government that you better do something. You better change what you're doing.
N. Rodgers: You shot across the bow.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because I was going to ask you, even just the mere threat might suggest to the prime minister and their cabinet ministers, if you will, that they need to make some significant changes. Is this where you sometimes see turnover in the various ministries?
N. Rodgers: Can I ask that question too? Where do they come from? The secretary of Bob, your uncle secretary of grass growing. Don't they have 465 secretaries. Are they the similar to our cabinet in that sense? Are they cabinet positions under a prime minister or are they?
C. Burdett: Well, I think the difference between like a secretary and a minister is important. Secretary is more like a career bureaucrat, whereas a minister is an appointed official. That power to appoint comes from the Prime Minister as the leader of the cabinet. That's what they do. Have a cabinet and that functions as the executive, and the ministers are department heads and then they sit in charge of various bureaucracies that make the British government go. They also, they generate legislation. They implement the legislation. There's oversight within these bodies, this bureaucracy. They have the bureaucracies that do a bureaucracy to. But that's the government. When we talk about the government, that's the prime minister and the prime minister's cabinet. But ultimately it's the Prime Minister that has control over it and John Aughie, you're right. One way to signal that you're paying attention to the fact that your authority may be slipping in the parliament is to throw out your ministers and say change is afoot and that can also be a way to reward different factions that might be forming within your party that are destabilizing and threatening your premiership. Because there is that internal party dynamic that we can't ignore. It isn't self evident always that the most popular MP from that party is going to be prime minister. It certainly isn't something that you can gauge from any of the elections that send these MPs to parliament. There's no one who's going to turn and say, well, you got 30% in your district, I got 55, therefore I should be prime minister. It doesn't work that way. There's a lot of internal party dynamics, but I digress. To circle back to this idea though of that vote of no confidence. I do want to clarify one thing that I may have been a bit confusing in the way I expressed it was while the passage of votes of no confidence are rare. That's just a majority, a majority of the Parliament has to say, yeah, we have no confidence. The use of them is more common. That's oftentimes a signaling effect and you can actually even have a sitting government saying, let's have a vote of no confidence as a put up or shut up moment where you have some dissension and it's less about the opposition at that point because the opposition is always going to vote you out. It's within your own party that you have to worry.
N. Rodgers: You can call it on yourself?
J. Aughenbaugh: If you call it on yourself. You basically say it to the rubble rousers. If you really want.
N. Rodgers: Bring up your vote of no confidence.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you really want change.
N. Rodgers: Oh my great gig [inaudible] was prime minister, he'd have a vote of no confidence every week.
C. Burdett: On 30th.
N. Rodgers: Concerning what you say to me, bring it with a vote of no confidence or shut up.
C. Burdett: It works in a number of ways because it puts the pressure on those MPs to decide whether their principles are that important to their jobs. Because we have to also acknowledge that party leadership, which if we're talking about the government, it's nested within the prime minister, party leadership. The party leadership makes a lot of decisions about who runs in a district. What support you get within the campaign structure. You run that risk if you want to see the collapse of this government. You also run the risk of just, maybe even losing your seat. That as a way of firming up support among what we call the backbenches, those are the MPs who are not in positions of authority within the party. They are the grunts there to vote on legislation, but they are not the ones who are making a lot of the decisions. Their support is essential, but you have to galvanize their support and make sure that you can rely upon it, because then we're back to that question of is this government legitimate? Because when your backbenches start to defect, when they stop voting for your legislation.
J. Aughenbaugh: Legislation.
C. Burdett: That's where your majority starts to wither away. Even if by numbers you have one, your legislation is going to be harder and harder to pass. Governments like right now with a more comfortable majority can weather the storm if you have some defections. It's where those majorities are razor thin that those defections start to really make a difference. That's where you can use some of these votes in no confidence as a way to actually discipline your party. Not just say [inaudible]
J. Aughenbaugh: Remember Nia, and we've had a series of conversations on this podcast episode about why Republican speakers of the house currently continue to deal, interact with that 7, 9, 12 extremists in the party. Well, they have to deal with them because their majority is razor thin.
N. Rodgers: Right they need numbers.
J. Aughenbaugh: If the majority was 25, 35 or 40.
N. Rodgers: They can just be like either, I don't care what you think.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thanks for sharing. But and again, this is where party dynamics come. I really like how you described that, Chris. Party dynamics explain so much.
N. Rodgers: I think that Chris just gave the perfect description of what passive aggressive is. The British Parliament is passive.
C. Burdett: I didn't meant to.
N. Rodgers: But the British Parliament is passive aggressive. You know what I mean?
C. Burdett: That is basely a passive.
N. Rodgers: Then I'm calling a vote of confidence and we'll see what you do about it. It's fascinating. Wait, so you said secretaries are bureaucrats. How do we get secretaries, like the home secretary or a secretary of something?
C. Burdett: I should say, excuse me.
N. Rodgers: Some of they are appointed by some honor.
C. Burdett: Well, that's a titular difference. I'm sorry. The upper echelon is typically going to be appointed by the sitting government. That's the case to even amongst our bureaucracies but you'll see leadership turnover within departments. Because clearly if you have a different legislative agenda, you don't want someone who isn't ideologically aligned overseeing it. That just doesn't make any sense. You push out that leadership. If you're that leadership, then you don't want to be there either. Because you're going to be asked to do things you don't ideologically agree with. But I want to come back to what happens if a vote of no confidence. If it's a rare thing and a vote of no confidence passes, then the government resigns and you go to the polls, more than likely, the government still has to go to the king in this case and say, king, we've lost the confidence of Parliament. Can we have another election? The king could say, you go back and fix things. No, but that's not how the British system would work. The king will do what the government says needs to be done and there would be another election. One of the things though, when we say how rare they are, one of the phenomena that we also have to consider is that sometimes a government sees a vote of no confidence ahead of them and they resign preemptively. In effect, it's the looming thread of a vote of no confidence. Even someone who said, I'm going to make a motion. It can be even that explicit or it can just be, I know that we don't have the support anymore. And rather than wait until they have the distinction of losing a vote of no confidence, which as I've mentioned, is a pretty kiss, it's a rare thing. They'll just go ahead and go to the king and say, we need a new election. I no longer have the support and they haven't had a vote of no confidence, but the outcome is the same. They've given up early.
N. Rodgers: Is that common?
C. Burdett: Yeah, it's more common, but in recent years, no. In recent years, the more common phenomenon would be the use of a no confidence vote within the party to galvanize support within your back ventures. That's more common than a government going to an election early because they anticipate a vote of no confidence in the British system. In other systems, you're going to find variation. But in British system even that isn't that common. I'm just saying it's a possibility.
N. Rodgers: I'm assuming that resigning is career ending. If you go to the king and you say, I, as the prime minister, have lost the confidence of my party, of the Parliament, I'm resigning. That seems like that would be career ending and yet we get BoJo who is, I'm not [inaudible] . But he's like the cockroach of British politics right now in that he cannot be killed. There could be a nuclear bomb dropped in London and BoJo will survive.
C. Burdett: I'm going to go slightly off. I'm going to go on the [inaudible] No, no.
N. Rodgers: Question.
C. Burdett: No I know who you're talking about.
N. Rodgers: I should call him BoJo like he's my friend 'cause he's not my friend but also I shouldn't call him that 'cause.
C. Burdett: I actually like that. I mean that's I'm going to start to document.
N. Rodgers: I call the head of the Supreme Court, J. Rob.
J. Aughenbaugh: I was about to say Nia, really, you want to treat British politicians with kid gloves, but American government officials. We've been like hanging not knowing nicknames on them since this podcast has been in existence.
N. Rodgers: That's true. I'm just going to go back and call him BoJo because that's what I call him mentally. But anyway.
C. Burdett: Well, I'll say this Boris Johnsons' probably as or out in the hinterlands now as he's going to be. I don't see his career reviving. That has a lot to do with more recent issues that have come up over COVID era policies. The parties that he was throwing. By the way, I think I can do this here because none of us have a stake in this. If you haven't watched it. There is an incredible, I think it's ITV that produced it. Kenneth Branagh is Boris Johnson. It's a mini series that tracks Johnson's policy decisions when COVID was hitting Britain initially. First off, he nails Boris Johnson. It's eerie and incredible because Boris Johnson is very much a cartoonist character. I know that he's not sitting here somewhere saying, how dare you, you're not, the combinates are already going write Boris Johnson, his fans are maybe doing to say no, he loves, he cultivates that image, so that we call him [inaudible] .
N. Rodgers: He messes up his terrible for he walks out the door like it's [inaudible] .
C. Burdett: That is deliberate. But Boris series is worth watching because it gives us a little more insight into that dynamic within his administration that only really comes to light later. But so you asked about what happens when you resign. You don't necessarily find your career disappearing. You see a bit more of resign and come back in the '50, '60, '70s as you remember. Like for example, I mean, you can even lose an election and you can still have a career afterwards Churchill that happened to Churchill. But more recently though, what tends to happen is if you either lose an election and you don't think that you can recover that ground, then you've lost the support of your party, you can remain in parliament. Teresa May is an example of that. She actually had a better. A renaissance where she was actually relevant again because she was critiquing Boris Johnson's government for a point. Because I want to say he ousted her, but he certainly played a part in pulling the rug out from underneath her when the opportunity rose. You have that fade into the back benches. Then you can have people like David Cameron who lost the British referendum. He didn't lose an election, he lost a referendum, he resigns the prime ministership. Says, I'm just going to become a regular MP. That lasted for like a week, and then he's out on the farm, and now he's back as a diplomat. You've got these changing career paths that can happen. I think it depends on a lot of factors like maybe how narrow an election loss there was, whether your administration was corruption ridden like Johnson. There can be a lot of those things that come into play. There isn't, in other words, a typical outcome that happens when you resign. But convention, they tend to fade. They don't necessarily parliament, but they become a backbencher themselves.
N. Rodgers: I'm sorry Aughie, I keep asking all the questions because I'm just fascinated by all of this MPs. Do incumbents have an advantage in the same way that they have an advantage in the United States in terms of money, in terms of name recognition? We know that incumbents argue they are re-elected 97,700% of the time or something.
C. Burdett: It's usually 99,500%.
N. Rodgers: It's a huge advantage to have already won, is a huge advantage.
J. Aughenbaugh: But there is a variable that maybe Chris can address whether or not it's relevant in British politics. Remember one of the reasons why incumbents do so well in the United States, particularly in house elections and state legislative elections, is that their districts are gerrymandered. That's a huge contributing factor. Does gerrymandering exist as a political phenomenon, Chris, in British politics?
N. Rodgers: That's a great question. I didn't even think about that.
C. Burdett: You have what are called like safe districts and it's a similar idea. Gerrymandering implies intention behind the way that districts are drawn. That isn't necessarily the case, but what you have are districts where it would require a demographic upheaval for the voting tendencies within that district to change. So, you know that, if you have a safe district, then you could put up the absolute worst candidate in terms of qualifications, but as long as they are your party, then they're going to be elected, so you have those.
N. Rodgers: So this is a working class neighborhood, it's going to be a labor person who goes to parliament, unless they stand in the street and do something so heinous that we just can't vote for them, they're going to end up being the.
C. Burdett: Yeah. That's how if there's similarity in that idea, you gerrymander to get the safe district. In this case, you just have these by virtue of the demographic patterns that exist.
J. Aughenbaugh: Of the population. Yeah you're right.
C. Burdett: The voting tendencies in the area.
N. Rodgers: Do Labor and Conservative broadly line up with Republican and Democrat or no?
C. Burdett: Good. That's a good question. I think it depends. Labor under Tony Blair was very much with some differences that we could attribute to European sensibilities with respect to things like having a national health system or certain nationalized industries that we wouldn't see a Democratic candidate necessarily advocating for here in the states. But you saw Blair and Bill Clinton campaign together, They were part of the Third Way movement and so in that way, you saw Labor look a lot more like a modern party. Because really until Blair, you had Labor trying to appeal to the working class, that's where the Labor comes from. Like it's Labor union support, its support of the working class. But with Blair, the modernization, it was more about being the youth movement within the party. Appealing to Labor unions wasn't quite going to cut it. Instead, you might appeal to things like socialized education and health care things that an electric might respond differently to. That Jeremy Corbyn, since you mentioned him previously, he was cut from that old Labor union cloth. He cut his teeth in Labor party that was wedded to the Labor unions and he was trying to pull Labor back in that direction. But he coincidentally, if there was a chance for him to even have a shot at the PM at becoming Prime Minister, is when he actually found that there was youth appeal. But he couldn't tout the same policy mix that he would have dearly wanted to. Labor then to get to your question, and apologies for the [inaudible] to get there.
J. Aughenbaugh: No. This is actually pretty fascinating because there's a follow up question that I'm going to go ahead and tie to the changing demographics of the political parties in the United States.
C. Burdett: Yeah, there is that ideological alignment so we can put them on that kind of a political spectrum of left and right and the differences between them are not huge. Again it's just one of, with those cultural policy interests are going to be different because of the way that the British system works. There are going to be those issue differences that exist. But we could say Democrats are left, Labor is left, Conservatives are right, Republicans are right. Then they all have their blend of people that go way further left and way further right, and some that gravitate more towards the center.
J. Aughenbaugh: The question that I alluded to a few moments ago was, here in the United States, the demographics of the political parties. We're beginning to see some shift. The base of the Republican Party, it's populated by folks who don't college degrees. You're almost seeing an inverse relationship, Republican Party for decades was populated by well educated wealthy Americans, but now you see more well educated wealthy Americans voting for the Democratic Party. Chris, are you seeing that kind of demographic shift among the conservatives in Labor in Great Britain?
C. Burdett: The Conservative Party is-
J. Aughenbaugh: How would you describe them demographically? That would probably be better. How would you describe Labor and Conservative parties demographically? What are their bases like?
C. Burdett: We have the idea of the landed gentry would be throwing their lot in with the conservatives. Wealthier business people not always but might be voting conservative. Then you also have the aging demographic, the age cohorts, I guess is a good way of putting it. Your age cohort for the conservatives probably trends more toward the older generations than Labor, which has been having greater success polling amongst the youth, and some of that is about the policies and some of it's about Brexit because you had a lot more of a concentration of youth vote in favor of staying in the EU and the Conservatives have hung their hat on being the party that was going to take Britain out. That also pushed some of that youth vote toward Labor, or at least even toward maybe some of the third parties. But Labor benefited the most. I want to correct what I was saying about Corbyn. There was a moment where Corbyn the polls, it could have gone either way. It was when Teresa May called a snap election that that people were like, why did you do that? It was very much a well, actually, you don't really know why. But she came back. Well, I think it was one of those moments where she's like, things are going to get a lot worse for us, so to do this right now. But I think it was her looking at things getting really bad for the conservatives, so if they were going to try to maintain their hold, they better do that election now. That was the moment where you had support. This is before you had the change in the electoral law so you had to have support from the opposition and the opposition was like, you're joking, right now? They left at that chance, so like we might be able to win this election and that's when you had Corbyn, who up to that point everyone was like, here's this died in the wool labor from the 1950s running the modern labor party. He's out there campaigning with the youth vote and for a moment, it looked that might be successful. Now that it didn't work out that way, Teresa May returned with just enough to get by.
J. Aughenbaugh: I recall that.
N. Rodgers: You mentioned the B word, Brexit. Now, Brexit by the way, for our listeners who are not familiar, Brexit is a meme, British exit, Brexit. That's where the phrase or the word comes from. Nobody actually, I think, intended at the beginning to call it that, and then it became the hipster cool thing to call it. But basically, from my point of view, Brexit was Britain saying, we don't want to be part of the EU because the EU is too European for us. We just want to go off and be British on our own, God save the Queen thing. I'm sure there's more nuance to it than that, but that's what it looked like from the outside and so the level of fussing involved in this was enormous, wasn't it? Aren't there still people who are mad about Brexit this number of years later?
C. Burdett: No doubt. Your characterization of the origins of it is fairly sound. This dates back to where the issue of European integration was on the table for British politicians and you see that there is a love hate relationship with it in the Conservative Party and while you had some in the elite and then in the rank and file that were in favor of it, you also had offsetting the members that were against it. Here's a little tip or a little bit of trivia for you. The Brexit referendum was 2016. Was there another Brexit referendum? Now, I know the answer to that. The answer is yes. There was a referendum in the 1970s and what's surprising about it is that was a referendum where you had a bit of unity emerged between labor and the conservatives. Margaret Thatcher actually was at that point a newly christened leader of the conservatives and she led the party into the referendum to vote yes, we will stay within what was the European community at that point.
J. Aughenbaugh: At that point.
N. Rodgers: Really, Margaret Thatcher?
C. Burdett: It's historically ironic.
N. Rodgers: You would think that her as a person, like she's very pro British, Britain being its own thing and it's weird to me that she would want to be part of the European community. But when you think of it in terms of the financials, it is better for the tiny little island to be part of a larger group of people who do all the trade and all the other stuff together than for them to say, no, that's fine, we'll just hang out in the North Sea by ourselves.
C. Burdett: The economic argument was at the time, fairly convincing. There was also a sense of, I call it like a buyer's remorse, because the parties that negotiated the European community and then previously the European Coal and Steel Community reached out to the British and wanted them to be a part of it and the British demurred. The negotiating parties ultimately said, we're tired of waiting for you, so you can go off and be on your own, like you say off in the North Sea, and we're going to go ahead with this. Then you have years of development of institutions and rules and laws and then you're also watching the European economic community become quite successful. We could have been in on the ground floor, but we said no. Now, with Brexit coming about, it was an attempt by David Cameron to do two things. One, it was an election poll. It was an election, I want to say gimmick but it was something he did because he wanted to shore up his base going into a general election. He wanted to have a United Party and he said, if we win, I will have a referendum. He could have done a lot of different things but he said, if we win, we'll have a referendum. It was too quiet that division within the Conservative parties that existed when the question was originally posed, should we join, but was made worse by, as you pointed out, Thatcher. It didn't work the way he wanted it to, clearly, and because he campaigned to stay, lost the referendum, which he by the way, worded. He's the one who said. He had advisors telling him, don't make this yes, stay, or go, make it like, do you like us or not. Make it something that gives you wiggle room. He's like no. I'm confident we can do this, I'm going to renegotiate our terms, I'm going to win at the referendum, and he lost, and he's like, well, we're on our way out.
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, my God.
N. Rodgers: Then he promptly resigned.
C. Burdett: Yeah, he resigned.
N. Rodgers: Forgive me for cursing, a chicken shit move when you consider that you just got us into this and now you're leaving before the actual leaving, because uncoupling from the EU was painful.
C. Burdett: It was.
N. Rodgers: That was really hard to do. I'm off, see you. Sorry, that's a jerk move. Right there I said it, that's just a jerk move.
C. Burdett: I do think there's probably some personality dynamic at work there. You maybe have a feeling of embarrassment, but you also have to realize that the result of that election would have forced him to represent and engineer a policy that he was on record as against.
J. Aughenbaugh: He was opposed to it.
N. Rodgers: That's a fair point. Oh you're being nice, that's fine.
J. Aughenbaugh: No. But again, it comes back to if you're a politician or principal, at some point in time, you have to go ahead and say, where is the line. Truth be told, do you really want him to be the one negotiating? No.
N. Rodgers: Not if he doesn't want to negotiate it. That's not the guy you want in charge of things. That's fair. You guys are right. That's fair.
C. Burdett: He'd already negotiated slightly different terms, things that the EU would allow Britain to do differently over hot button issues that were being contested within this, let's get out discourse. He already had a package, he already had a plan and he put it in front of the people and said, here's our plan, this is what the EU has agreed to, and this is what it will be like if we stay. That wasn't enough. Again, you want to talk about that legitimacy of the Prime Minister. He lost a referendum to the general public. He can't possibly lead the party at that point if the party is going to legitimately contest future elections but then also to beholden to the referendum. But I know what you want to talk about. You want to talk a little bit more about the repercussions of it all?
N. Rodgers: Well, I want to know if it's still reverberating through the political economy. If Texas suddenly left the United States, first of all, I would hold the door, let me get that for you. But also the repercussions of that would be generational, because Texas is huge. We can't just uncouple something like that and have it not have huge effect. I assume that saying, see you European Union, we're now willing to pay 10 times the price for champagne that we were paying before because now we're foreigners.
C. Burdett: Well, consequently the price of food has seen the biggest jump in terms of different sectors of the economy, the price of food went up and this is pre-inflation. As much as you had a bigger marketplace for British farmers, which again, was something that would appeal to British farmers in the electorate, food prices have gone up for people. But first off, I'm still reeling from that Texas thing, the views on this podcast are not necessarily representative of the use of it. Can we say something like this? Because now we're starting to really, I'm going to alienate a lot of people just by association and I don't know if I'm ready for that.
N. Rodgers: I love Texas.
J. Aughenbaugh: We could have used California as an example.
N. Rodgers: We could have used Montana, we could have used Maine, anybody that's at the edge.
J. Aughenbaugh: Florida.
N. Rodgers: We were close to anybody in the middle going because then you have a bigger hole in your country.
C. Burdett: I love it. Equal opportunity alienation is what this is all about. I admire you all for your verve and vigor.
J. Aughenbaugh: We use the shotgun approach, we aim for the mass and we hope we hit something. No, seriously.
C. Burdett: You're asking about Brexit is still an issue. Well, I came across the phrase recently which I thought was clever because the mash up Britain and exit. Well, I came across BriGrets.
J. Aughenbaugh: BriGret.
N. Rodgers: BriGret? Which is not a musical tattoo, it's a meme.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
C. Burdett: It is now. It is. The complexities of the voting dynamic, Brexit are still reverberating. That's where all of the questions you might ask about the economic benefits of Brexit, the benefits to British sovereignty, because one of the principal messages behind the campaign was the idea of reclaiming sovereignty to getting back the ability to control your own fate. But along with it was this presumption that the British economy would not suffer to a great extent and that it would actually be able to grow without being saddled by EU restrictions and regulations. Within the current discourse, you definitely have regret, you have people who, and I was actually reading something really interesting about this. Polling numbers, now that we're a couple of years out from both the referendum and actually leaving the EU formally, because that took a couple of years to make happen. You see two things happening. You do see some segment of the population saying they've changed their minds, they do regret voting to leave, which wasn't a huge majority mind you. It wasn't. It was like less, right around four percentage points difference. That is a really lousy thing. If you go and look at typical norms that govern referendums in Europe, they usually demand a higher percentage of the population voting in favor of the referendum for it to stick. No, that was enough, so they were on their way out. But anyway, you've got people who said, maybe I wasn't the most informed, because there was a lot of misinformation swirling about that campaign. They're like, okay, this isn't what we thought it was going to be. Those £300 million a week that could go to the NIH. You made that up. Wait a minute, buyers remorse, but you also have changing demographics in the electorate as well, where you have a lot more of the British youth onboarding and you have the older age cohort offboarding, which is my way of saying dying.
N. Rodgers: Off boarding. Could I have that-?
C. Burdett: I don't want to alienate the dead. I just don't want to.
N. Rodgers: Born this year, offboarded this year.
C. Burdett: Offboarded later.
N. Rodgers: That's awesome.
J. Aughenbaugh: Chris, you don't know this. You and I are coming up with a merged line associated with the podcast.
N. Rodgers: Offboarded, 2024.
C. Burdett: I love it. As long as I get a larger cut than I'm getting right now to appear on this thing, that's all. But the offboarding, the idea that they're no longer participating in these polls creates a little bit of a distortion, when we see that more people now would vote to stay or than they did in 2016, which implies that they changed their mind. It's not just a function of people changing their mind. Some people are, but it's also the-
J. Aughenbaugh: The electorate has changed.
N. Rodgers: But it's 12 year old that are now 20. It's that thing.
C. Burdett: If you looked at a lot of the support, it was a lot of the youth who are like, this is our future. We think it's better. If we are in the EU, we can see past a lot of the smoke and mirrors that were put in place during the Brexit campaign, during the leave campaign, the deliberate, even obfuscation of issues and lying, even that went on to the general public to win this election or win this referendum. Well, if they could see through it. Now they're voting age, now, they're participating in these polls and those numbers have started to change and shift in that direction. This was maybe a bad idea, but what stinks about all it is that you have parties that were campaigning. People within parties or positions of power that have gone on record to saying, well, that's again a once-in-a-lifetime referendum, just like if labor wins the next referendum, as much as Keir Starmer, the current labor party leader, who would be presumably the prime minister. If there were election today, labor would likely win and he would be the prime minister. He said, I'm not going to turn around and go to Brussels and say, can we come back into the club. You've got this change of heart, but then you don't have, you can that political parties who are saying, we're stuck with this.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, is that a factor of British political culture?
C. Burdett: I think so.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because here in the United States, we get a changing presidential regime. Policies that we may have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on in the past 8, 10,12 years. Well, hey, whatever. We're going in a different direction.
C. Burdett: Sorry, John. Go ahead.
J. Aughenbaugh: No. Because political culture, you know this. With what you teach, political culture explains what can be done but also what can't be done within a nation. We oftentimes forget about how important political culture actually is. In regards to policy decisions, policies that get considered or in this case being willing to go ahead and say, we screwed up.
N. Rodgers: Do you think that's a function of age, Chris? Like in 20 years when all of the politicians who went through Brexit are gone, have been off-boarded, is there a possibility they could go back and rejoin EU? Assuming the EU still exists at that point, could they rejoin the EU then? Is this one of those things that you have to wait for that generation to go before you can consider or is this one of those things where the British are like, nope, we made a life-altering decision and we will stiff upper lip it and just deal?
C. Burdett: That's you could see that attitude prevail. There's a mathematical answer to this too.
N. Rodgers: Is another broken math thing? Which is a broken math.
C. Burdett: Well, no. It feels and we have to think about, this is not necessarily a British cultural phenomenon. It's simply a rational political party phenomenon. We know, what is the rational goal of a political party.
N. Rodgers: Stay in power.
C. Burdett: You want to get elected and then stay.
N. Rodgers: Getting power and then stay in power.
J. Aughenbaugh: You win elections because you want to be in control of the government.
N. Rodgers: You have finished what you want to do.
C. Burdett: To get to that point, you have to appeal to the electorate. One of the things that happened in Brexit was you had this hidden electorate that all of a sudden never voted and came out to the polls. Now I think that hidden electorate is dying off and then receding again because voting may not be for them after all. But you still have to dislodge the conservatives, because the conservatives right now are very clear. It's Brexit, no other options available. It's labor that you could potentially play this as something to draw voters to them, but the question is whether that's going to be mathematically enough for them to displace the conservatives. If there are people in the middle that labor can appeal to, but were people in the middle who were Brexit-minded? Then they've got to walk that type rope of being either ambiguous about plans or just coming out and saying no. When Kirsimer has come out to say no, that's when labor has been at the polls much more vulnerable than it is right now. I would also say that it is a reflection of election realities in the mathematics of a party that wants to get back in power. It's not a position, you're not going to lose voters necessarily because you're saying that in as much as you might gain voters who could be disaffected with the conservatives at this point.
J. Aughenbaugh: No, you make a really good point here, because it's one of the challenges, Chris, you know this in teaching your classes and I experience this when I teach intro to US Government. Students who are not or that interest in politics will say, no, why did this party do X? I'm like, okay. But you got to understand that they're trying to win elections, which means they may have to go ahead and on one hand say X and then the next day say Y. They may not necessarily seem like they're compatible, but they are walking that really fine line because they want to come back into office. Political parties want to win elections, and that's why a party like Labor, can have policies that may appeal to the youth, but they also have to go ahead and appeal to moderate older voters.
C. Burdett: If we go back to, remember one of the important concepts from our first session together, was that majoritarian system. There's a lot at stake when you lose and a lot at stake when you win. If you were, like say, you want to influence policy, well, you don't get, there is no influence of policy for second place in the British system. You're out, you're shut out.
N. Rodgers: It's one or nothing. You're either Number 1 or you don't exist basically, except the call offer a vote of confidence at some point.
C. Burdett: You end up then with some moderating or influences that may lead officials to say, go on the record about something when in their heart of hearts they would wish something different. But I know that we're probably running close on time here. I want to squeeze one thing in that I think does respond near to one of your earlier questions and it's about the practical impact of Brexit. Boris Johnson, despite his fumbling of COVID, actually in a way benefited from it, because COVID had a huge impact on the global economy. What that did is it masked the true impact of Brexit. Then furthermore, by depressing the economy, you have a catch up effect as things start to return to normal, which also could be used to say, hey, look, Brexit's not that bad. COVID gutted us the economy wise and now we're rebounding from this. Look, is Brexit isn't that bad? What's the rebound from COVID is actually making Brexit look like a better policy decision that really is. Then we have to add into this the war in Ukraine's impact on things too, because that followed along pretty quickly and that hit the energy sectors and also had an impact on the British economy, helped push inflation prices up. That too disguised the impact of Brexit-.
N. Rodgers: When we're trying to the impact of Brexit for years because all those other factors have to smooth out or shake down or whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because Chris, what you just mentioned are any number of intervening variables that can go ahead and affect a nation's economy that are wholly unrelated to access to markets, the costs of regulations. You mentioned sovereignty, this idea that you get to make these decisions. Well, these are decisions that, particularly, the leaders of the Conservative Party can go ahead and say, but we're making the decisions on how we respond to X. Again that mobilizes their base. But these intervening variables, wow, those are really good points, Chris. Thanks.
N. Rodgers: I didn't even think about that. Because the United States elections live and die on the economy. If the economy is good, the incumbent wins a huge amount of time. If the economy is not good, the incumbent is held responsible. But if your economy if it's not clear because there's all these other issues that are happening in addition to that, then I imagine that this won't be clear election results as far as the mandate of the people, which of course in Franklin doesn't count because they don't know how to do math. But anyway, she said bitterly.
C. Burdett: Again the views on this podcasts are not necessarily representative of all the participants out there.
N. Rodgers: I can see where that's going to carry on for quite a while. My last question, if you don't mind. I'm not trying to be difficult or divisive, although here I am. Does the British government work? I guess what I'm saying is a lot of people feel in the United States that our government right now is not working particularly well. We're very polarized. As Aughie mentioned, I can't remember if it was this episode or last the 12 junior members of Congress who managed to do all wonky stuff. Does the British system work for the most part?
C. Burdett: It depends on who you ask. I guess the best way for me to answer that since I know we are trying to wind things down. The best way for me to answer that is to say that at this moment there is a lot of doubt in the Conservative Party's ability to govern Britain well. It isn't just a function of Brexit, it isn't just a function of COVID, or it isn't at the Scottish National Party wanting to have a referendum to leave the United Kingdom. There's a certain stagnation that sets in when you've been in power for a long time. Sometimes it's more about a desire for change in as much as some repudiation of your ideological agenda. What's interesting is the current Prime Minister Sunak has been, I would argue, much more successful and active dealing with some of the serious problems confronting Britain. Now there are some controversies like the immigration policy that has been working its way through, but he's got a big policy win just the other day with the Northern Ireland agreement that's going to restore participation of the Ulster or the DUP, the Ulster Unionist Party. That is going to actually return the Northern Ireland Assembly back into action. It's going to try to address some of the lingering issues from Brexit. Anyway, he's got some successes. I was looking at the polls today, and it's been over the past year consistently in terms of people who intend to vote for the Conservatives, he's hovering right around 25% while Labor is in the 45-50% range. That says something about, even with these wins, granted, he might get a bump, I'm not sure, but I'm not going to try to speculate about that. But it looks like he might be at that point where people are like, well, if you give me a vote now, I don't care. I'm going to vote for somebody else just to get an alternative into government. It may be oversimplifying just a little bit to say that.
N. Rodgers: I know that you can't build in all the nuance because of me. I shouldn't have said, does it work is broad. But you're writing a book about that. But that's a really interesting.
J. Aughenbaugh: But Chris, you just mentioned something that I think we Americans tend to forget. If you look at this millennium in US national politics, we had eight years of Bush, 43 and a significant percentage of those who voted for Obama, wanted change. It was eight years of a Republican president, they wanted to change.
N. Rodgers: A significant number of the people who wanted Donald Trump wanted change.
J. Aughenbaugh: Change after eight years.
N. Rodgers: Not regular politician, somebody from outside the system.
J. Aughenbaugh: Chris, what you mentioned was, that the Conservative Party had some self inflicted wounds. Again, if you're already thinking this might be time for change, well, if you look at how they're governing, you're like, okay, well maybe we should bring in the next bunch. Let's see what they can do.
N. Rodgers: Chris, would you be willing to come back after their election this year and talk to us about, I know you can't predict the future with your crystal ball and this is what's going to happen. But a where you think this might take Britain, because whatever else is true about the United States and Britain, we remain the oldest allies. They remain our oldest allies.
C. Burdett: Sure. A special relationship.
N. Rodgers: Even when we're crappy about their politics that there is a special relationship. Would you be willing to come back after their election and talk to us about what went well and what went wrong and all that stuff?
C. Burdett: I'm tapped out.
N. Rodgers: That's it. I'm done here. You want to know something read the London Times.
C. Burdett: Exactly. I'll just read some articles to you from my computer. No. I want to correct something, I said DUP, I said the Unionists, I want to make clear it's the Democratic Unionist Party. That's the party that's coming back into the assembly in Ireland. I want to come back and correct that. But I would love to come back and talk about it because I do think it's going to be interesting. Sunak inherited a big majority and he is sat on it because I think he knows that if he went to the polls, now he had a really strong chance of losing. Well, I do think that that's probably the trend. I do think we're probably going to see a Labor government after the next general election. A lot can happen this year, but I do think that that's the greatest likelihood. I'm not saying it's going to be a huge majority, but that would be my expectation. One of the things, though, is that these polls can be really unpredictable and there have been moments, where it looked like one party was going to win the day and they didn't. That was the case with the Brexit referendum, that was the case with the last general election. There was some doubt, and then they come back with that huge majority. The math is broken.
N. Rodgers: They could pull it 75% and end up with three seats in parliament.
C. Burdett: Let's do it. This is so much fun. I'm on board. You don't have to ask me twice. That'd be awesome to come back and talk about it.
N. Rodgers: Thank you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thank you very much, Chris. This has not only been educational but also enjoyable. It's been a pleasure having you on. We feel very grateful that you're willing to spend the time with us. Thanks Chris.
C. Burdett: I really enjoyed it. It's not often that I get to slum it.
N. Rodgers: I was going to offer to help you with your new podcast, but you know what.
C. Burdett: I wanted to change it up. On the end of the last one I was praising you guys profusely. I just can't be a one trip pony.
N. Rodgers: You don't want to get out over our skis because we're both clumsy and that'll just end up as a mess.
C. Burdett: We have to bring it back down. Now that was great and you all are still awesome and I would love to just be a part of that. Thank you so much.
N. Rodgers: Thank you.
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