Douglas Carswell MP BOOKtalk

campaign events. Don't miss a single moment on BBC Parliament and BBC

iPlayer. Pure politics. My guess today has written a book

about rebellion and he knows what he's talking about. As a new

backbencher he led the Commons of writing which unseated Michael

Martin over his handling on the expenses scandal. He harried David

Cameron and then quit the Conservatives for Ukip before

falling out with Nigel Farage and going independent. He is does this

card well -- Douglas Carswell. The central argument of this book seems

to be when the free market is moved in on by the state or a powerful

vested interests, prosperity goes out of the window. How does that

work? We are used to the idea that it is normal for us to become

wealthier, children will be wealthier than their parents.

Through most of human history, per Capita income has remained constant

and people have remained poor. The reason for this I argue in the book,

there tended to be some kind of extracted elite group, whether it

was Princes, priests or furrows which kept it from the masses and

Society pro. What changes is one society disburses power and when it

is able... The key engine is able to specialised to trade freely. One

society has discovered that, they take off. I go back to history in

the Roman Republic, Venetian Republic and the Dutch Republic.

Those are examples of modern societies who achieve this happy

state of affairs. The liberal order is pretty ubiquitous, it is the

driving force behind globalisation. But it is always under threat and

the parasitic oligarchy which overthrew the liberal order in the

past, is present and emerging today. What do they do to overthrow that

order, that poisoned the market? Extractive elite need to have things

done on force rather than free exchange. In history you see small

elite is presiding over societies, where they found all sorts of

pretext to redistribute wealth by force. I look at how, for example,

in the late Roman Republic, and oligarchy emerges, you get this

inflow of wealth into the Roman Republic from the provinces and this

elite emerges and it grows beyond the ability of the Roman republican

constitution to constrain it. You get a similar thing in Venice and a

similar thing in the Dutch Republic. But I argue we are seeing a sudden

inflow of wealth which is leading to the emergence of oligarchy today.

From prosperity to the bond market and banking. The very rich and the

very powerful accumulate power and freeze the market beneath them?

Absolutely. We have seen this nexus of power between central bankers,

bankers and politicians, if you like, what you might call the Davos

elite. They have emerged in the past 30 or 40 years may have enormous

power, they take public policy decisions without reference to the

public. Central bankers decide the price of credit and drive economic

policy. I cannot ever remember them appearing on a ballot paper. When

the Americans had the revolution, they argued for no taxation without

representation. The ability for the government to request taxes from the

taxpayer a wonderful constraint on the state in most western societies.

I argue in the last 30 or 40 years, Western elites have worked out waves

of subverting that. They can spend a asking the tax payers' permission.

What bad things happen if that continues? We are already seeing it.

Since the 1970s when this was created, many industries move in the

wrong direction. We start to see less social mobility, we see less

innovation. This huge transfer of wealth from people without assets to

people with assets. If you own a home in the South East of England,

or hedge funds, you have done well just for owning it, not for doing

much with it. You have inequality, not an income inequality, if

anything, less income inequality, it is the inequality between those who

rely on income for wealth and his wealth is in assets. But is a huge

driver of social inequality and it has become, I would say,

increasingly obvious since the financial crisis. Very few

politicians know what to do about it. You are best known in politics

as a leading proponent of Brexit, leaving the European Union, that

will happen now. How does leaving the European Union fit into this

analysis, or is there a different reasons? The European Union is only

one manifestation of this problem. The European Union is founded on the

idea that a small elite can organise an order human affairs by grand

design. They have currency, trade policy, agricultural policy all done

by top-down design and it is pretty disastrous. Leaving the European

Union is part of what I think we need, this broader reassertion of

what I would call classical liberalism. We need to challenge

this idea that human economic and social affairs can be organised by

design. The liberal elites and we have today, are not about liberal.

Liberal means, from the Latin, freed that you believe the world requires

little intervention, it doesn't require blueprints, it does not

require a small group of people to shake things for us. Again and

again, we see these attempts to impose blueprints to order human

society. Often they ending catastrophe, communism, socialism,

fascism. We see the same version of the elite's conceit when they try to

order contemporary society, according to blueprints and design.

It is the cause of our malaise, it empowers small groups of people over

the rest of us and it is incompatible with being a democracy.

It is striking, if you look across much of Europe, where people want to

get their particular country out of the EU, it is almost for the

opposite reasons for the one you are suggesting, not liberal free

trading, it is the conception of the nation state and your's

supranational and therefore they don't like it. In France, they had

to shedders. We see the voice against the oligarchy, the voice

against the Brussels machine and the centralisation of power is a raw

data is, pretty obnoxious bitter populism. By arguing the book, the

popular order faces this twin challenge, not just oligarchy

emerging, but the response is this hideous populist backlash. One of

the wonderful things I think about political culture in this country is

the new radicals in this country have been a decent bunch. Ukip, my

former party, nothing like as angry and nativist as perhaps the National

front in France and others. Perhaps, I would argue, Brexit in this

country is actually a safety valve. Maybe Geert Wilders, Donald Trump

and Marine Le Pen what you end up with if you don't have that safety

valve. Brexit has been our safety valve and perhaps that has taken

some of the obnoxiousness out of the system, it has allowed us to take

power back from the oligarchs, to some extent. Not far enough, but it

means the alternative is not between extremism and the oligarchy. You

have put this into practice yourself. It is stated clearly in

the book that one of the main reasons you switch to Ukip was to

stop the wrong kind of backlash from being in the lead to get Britain out

of the EU. You were there trying to make sure Nigel Farage was not the

face of the league campaign? Absolutely right. I was conscious of

this in the run-up to the referendum on the battle to make sure the right

people run the right campaign, I was conscious throughout history when

you get a populist reaction against oligarchy, often the people who lead

that, the grudge brothers in Rome, they are not attractive characters

and they often play straight into the hands of the oligarchy. If you

are in favour of a federal Europe, perhaps having Alex Cypriot is

writing numerically illiterate budget in Athens is a good way of

justifying governance by the trike up. There is an irony in the

sentence that the fight against the elite has to be led by the right

people? It has to be led by people who are able to persuade and

understand the problem and not just address the symptoms. Again and

again, I found, when looking at some of these populist movements

throughout the Western world, both in America and in Europe, often the

populist insurgents are talking about the symptoms of the problem.

They have very little ideas of what to do to tackle it. Again, if you

look back in history, when there was this anti-oligarch rebellion in

Rome, they actually introduced measures that were supposedly to

redress the symptoms of oligarchy. They played into the hands of

oligarchy and I fear that we perhaps see some of this today, some of the

populism is actually as much a threat to the liberal order as the

oligarchy. Heaven forbid we should end up being what France is today,

where in effect you have a choice between a technocrat on one side and

political extremist, I would on the other. How does Donald Trump fit

into this framework for you? I think Donald Trump is, on a good day, on

the right side of the fence. But I am very worried, for example, about

some of his economic policy. There is nothing liberal about it, it is

Roosevelt new deal. We have had, in America for ten years, monetary

stimulus, cheap credit to revive the economy. He is now talking about

fiscal stimulus. If that would happen, it will play into the hands

of vested corporate interest who would see lots of dollars coming

their way and I think it would end the liberal economic model that has

made the United States this extraordinary productive and

inattentive republic. I think the United States is probably the most

extraordinary and most miraculous republic that has ever existed. I,

as an outsider who loves America and their Republican ideas, is very

worried they may not survive another Roosevelt type a new deal. What

about Douglas Carswell himself? You have been pursuing this set of ideas

through two political parties and into independent status in the House

of Commons. Is part of the issue here, I don't know if it is your

ideology or just a personal thing, you don't easily fit into collective

organs like a party? I am delighted to be regarded as not very

collegiate, the alternative is fitting in with the groupthink in

the Commons tea rooms. But this isn't about me. It is a more

profound question. Given liberalism, in the true sense of the term, is

what the secret of our success is as a society and has led to growth,

prosperity and innovation, where do you go if you believe in liberalism

today? Where is the party that represents these ideas? I said in

the book, many of the parties believe in the big man, or the big

woman met, a single individual as a leader can somehow solve the world

and make it a better place. What we need is a recognition that that is

precisely what is getting us into this mess. We should challenge those

people who make public policy, who presume they know enough to know

what's right for the rest of us? Politicians love blueprints, ideas

and innovations imposed on the rest of us. I do think that for those of

us who are genuine liberals, there is a crisis as to who we vote for.

What does the Douglas Carswell of Utopia look like? I suppose it is

the wrong question to ask, what is your grand design, but what would

you like to see this country looking like five or ten years after Brexit?

There was an extraordinary Greek man, Epicurus, and I am an epic

curing, cos people think I am into hedonistic pleasure. Actual epicure

Inez is this idea, you can't achieve Utopia, but the idea is, the world

is self organising and our duty and obligation is to be happy and live a

life that we believe in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of

happiness. That idea is echoed in the founding of the American

Republic and it underlines the Western success. What I think we

need to do to achieve, the closest we could ever get to Utopia is to

live in a world where small elites don't try to organise human affairs

by design. That has always been the enemy of progress and happiness. The

small elites who organise the BBC Parliament schedule, have reached

the end of their tether with this programme. We'll be back again soon,

goodbye for now.