today I'm chatting with Tom tugan 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 service 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 defense 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 it's 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 he's he's his memory isn't as good as yours okay P can you leave me alone how old was I a few years ago go on can go two years ago exactly can you close the door please sorry I apologize for that no 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 uh 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 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 it was the customs house for 3 four 500 years you walk past uh 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 coupled together in various different ways and so I think Outsiders missed the fact that there's there's a real intimacy to London that 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 you see a
very very different kind of London you see 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 well there's a I think it does need to be changed but the reality is the UK is a very very centralized state so so the I mean although there is a mayor of London of course there 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 uh City police force Metropolitan Police um the Home Secretary so our interior Minister and the mayor of London both
have the ability to fire the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police uh and the mayor has certain rights or rather powers on planning but that's actually mixed with the burough as well so it's it's it's a much more diffused 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 um you know a regional Governor or something like that orate Governor sorry forgive me so how should
we change that to make London better governed well I think big thing for London actually is to is to make sure that its transport connections to the region are stronger I me the real hold up 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 cross rail built uh and already it looks like it's going to be a break even point in the next five or six
years which is a remarkable uh speed of return and the reason for the speed of the returns frankly that so little other infrastructure has been built so it's 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 uh ability to provide for the community that it's 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 uh all of our cities and all of our towns as well we need a massive injection of infrastructure investment in the United Kingdom uh and we need the leadership to provide it because uh if you look at 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 20078 and the falloff uh 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 it's the infrastructure is hugely important if you're not willing to connect Britain guess what you you you get concentrations you get real
concentrations and then the challenge is you get the con ations 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 one of the Striking things actually is the mayor of
London who's been in in place now for eight eight and a bit years has been a complete failure in building houses he's 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 K but sorry Tyler but it's one of the uh it's one of the single greatest threats to to to to the ability to House people is is to introduce rent rent controls it's complete disaster of a policy that's been tried a 100 times and failed a 100 times uh and uh and that's what he's
talking about but that's Labor's controlling attitude rather than the uh the ability to build so I think there is a strong argument for um having greater devolved uh interest in in infrastructure development but we're a
we're a smaller country than the United States so infrastructure can't be all local uh it can't be all uh done at a state level if you see what I mean but nor can it be be all national as we're so so much bigger than say Belgium or or
the Netherlands so we need that relationship we need a better relationship between our devolved powers and our national power and that's and that's something we haven't achieved yet what's your most controversial opinion about London architecture oh that the recent architecture actually can be absolutely fantastic there's some really beautiful uh recent architectures there's some beautiful Town squares or you know the
sort of urban squares built recently uh and the um the condemnation of modern architecture I think is is wrong um I'm I'm a fan of what some uh Architects called pasti uh 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 uh changed the plumbing or the the wiring or the or or or the
behind the you know 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 uh the king uh has built poundbury uh I've seen some fantastic designs for communities near faam I've seen some a really nice designs for communities in other parts
of Kent uh 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 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 uh 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 the supply of land so they have to play 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 yimi has a bad name in a lot of Britain today yeah how is it we ensure we get yimi but don't repeat the the mistakes of the 1970s we say a
Christopher Ren church is destroyed look I think that's exactly right and when you I mean you don't need mean to tell you this but you see the same in New York the destruction of uh Grand not Grand Central the the other one Penn State P Pennsylvania Street Station was was appalling uh and you see it in um the attempt to destroy thank God that was resisted by uh Betaman but the attempt to destroy St panr station
uh was was something that was done the destruction of Houston Station you know we've seen some really appalling acts of vandalism um and in fact the King was one of the people the first people to to to criticize it in various speeches in the 1980s and at the time he was constantly referred to as a young fogy and now he seems to have been rather more preent than uh than I think people recognized at the time um 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 Boy Smith on uh 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 uh 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 uh to the feeling of the area then uh then I may feel that you're 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 uh remarkable actually and very
different from the rest of England it's very underappreciated but uh but I'm I'm a proud citizen of the Sovereign and independent Kingdom of Kent something okay I admit that we haven't been for about a thousand years but but 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 uh of the eldest son they had the Frankish inheritance which was The Inheritance shared between the uh the male Heirs of the father now 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 land Holdings and that had several effects actually one of the effects it had was it saw the greatest rise of industry
because of course you can't effectively just Farm the rents of your peasants by by owning a lot of land then you actually have to do something about it so you see for example the the rise of uh industry Kent earlier than in other places you see uh you know the the arrows that were made for the Battle of cresi and the Battle of and were all made in Kent they were made by kentish uh you know kentish Iron Works and and
they were made uh because they were small Holdings and there were small Holdings 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 you know don't forget seaways were the highways of of of the Medieval World so being on the coast and particularly on the coast between England and France and uh the low
countries and Germany meant that you were right on the on on the front line of Commerce and ideas so you get ideas coming into Kent in fact one of the uh one of the I mean they obviously right at the beginning it was um it was the
Romans who who landed in in in Kent and came up and fought the kentish men at the Battle of snodland in uh in just before the the turn of the first just before the turn of the year zero and the um and you then see uh the
reintroduction of Christianity in about 600 when St Augustine comes along and and meets with the first Christian queen of Kent Queen Bera and so you get these ideas and later on you get the the protestantism that comes through and you get revolution of course because you get the peasants Revolt comes from Kent uh and that's so when what Tyler managed 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 uh it's still challenging it's an it's an area where you get political Innovation you get political ideas coming out you know in in recent years we've seen uh We've certainly seen um some different uh politics coming out of the coastal areas of Kent and out of
the center we've seen uh different areas of of challenge but it's uh some of it's a loed away but but but you still have smaller land Holdings you still have uh 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 tumbridge school not only gives out lot of numbers of bseries so a lot of the kids who go there don't
pay full fees various description quite a lot don't well there's 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 it's you know and it and it sports
facilities are used by the whole town at various different points uh and uh and and very often for either low or free uh 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 kingd called the combined Cadet force uh and various other kids are involved in elements of that as well so it's it it's not a standalone you know 4050 years ago
it would have been a very Standalone institution but the fees would have been relatively lower now um the institution is much more integrated in many ways into this into the town it's true that the fees are higher they are they are very high um but the but but what it offers the rest of the community is is also a huge allow putting aside present company who was the great unselected prime minister in British history thank you people say
it was Dennis hey Michael heselton Ry Jenkins uh others who's your pick look I think prime minister all of those people are really interesting I think Ken Clark would have been very interesting as well I mean actually I think most recently the one who um would have been prime minister had he stayed in Parliament is George Osborne uh I think when Theresa May came back after after the 2017 election with a uh not only a reduced
majority but actually a slight minority Administration uh I think George Osborne would have been prime minister within weeks had he stayed in Parliament but he stood down uh and so uh I think it was a you know that's one of those moments where you know sliding doors in the history is slightly different can the British system of government in its current parliamentary form how well can that work without broadly Liber individualistic
foundations in public opinion uh I think it works extremely well at ensuring that uh truly liberal uh foundations are maintained uh I mean that not in the American sense I mean in a genuine uh the old liberal tradition uh that that is that emerges from the UK in the well in the 17 1800s where freedom of thought freedom of um you know freedom of assembly the right to own property U and all those principles that then became embedded in various
different constitutions around the world including your own you know I think it does very well at doing that because it forces you our system forces you into into partnership you know there are 650 people who you have to work with in some way in Parliament uh over the next four or five years and there's four of us currently going for leadership of the conservative party and there's one reason why uh despite uh the fact that
we're competing almost in a US primary system the the way in which we are dealing with each other is is very different is because we're all going to have to work together for the next four years whoever wins is going to have to
work with the other three uh and the idea that you can simply ignore each other isn't true there's only 121 of us uh 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 politic 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 if you look at the result of the last election for example in 24 uh in in in uh July on the 4th of July this year um you know the labor party won with a majority of 179 off 33 and a bit 34% of the vote uh now
normally an opposition party will get 34% of the vote and the governing party will get 38 40% of the vote but what labber have achieved is they've managed to get a lot of very narrow wins so they've got uh a lot of wins by 500 or a, votes across the country in fact uh 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 uh for it to be reduced from uh 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 a effectively a two-thirds victory in the in the Commons to to a you know to a
50/50 and putting aside any party loyalties but does the thinness of those mandates make you more optimistic about liberalism broadly conscrew in the UK yes it does it makes me much more optimistic about it and the and the
reason is because the re the the only way you get these mandates is by appealing to a wide enough section of your own uh voting block 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 supp 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
uh and it was very high because a lot of people either were extremely uh angry at one of the party leaders or they were absolutely determined that their own party leader should win and and the combination of the two meant have generated very high turnouts on both sides as they were and it also meant that uh 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 K starma nor was there any great fear of K starma uh and that meant that you got first of all a very low turnout but you also get a very low man uh margin of victory in in percentage terms although you end up with a very large majority in uh electoral terms and that's you know that's uh that means that these things can change quickly and I think uh the
important thing in 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 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 uh real momentum behind it relatively quickly and certainly within four years now to 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 so so I due to the extreme sovereignty of Parliament I accept this the criticism at the time
and the reason I accept it 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 a mandate that 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 FI terms parliaments act it 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 libdems made a cronous stupid mistake and thought that they
were about to sort of win an anti-brexit vote and and and you know lead themselves to Victory and they uh and they forced an election actually had they hung on and and and you know tolerated the the inability of parliament to get things done uh I think the the situation may have been very different but I think what it 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 ab 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 uh side because they may be voting themselves out of office should the House of Lords be abolished or phased out no it shouldn't uh the the
extraordinary thing about the House of Lords is look it's not something that anybody would invent um I might but it works well you might you're you're right you're you're the kind of 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 it it's a system of Randomness that injects
Lottery into into government now I you know I can I can certainly see an argument for turning that from a you know a family Lottery into a uh into like a like a a jury system where it's a temporary Lottery but the other thing
that the house of laws does which is very very difficult in a democracy is it 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 you know 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 you know that the the fact that most of the hered peers in fact I think they're all all male I may be wrong about that but there may be there may be a woman amongst them but but I think they're all male um is clearly an issue and and the fact that they come from a very narrow demographic of this 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 uh uh effectively a based beyond the day-to-day uh will of the Prime Minister I think is I think is a benefit uh and I think it's I think it's been good to
have as a revising chamber I don't think it should ever have preeminence and I think that that the elected chamber should always have the ability to overrule it which we do uh 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 far outlived that is the only explanation the monarchies of of the Netherlands Norway no one much talks about them say in the US but yours my goodness you're like the the global Reserve currency wh what's the pr genius behind that or how did that happen what's special I mean
there's VAR things I mean you know King Farooq said when he was in Exile after having left left Cairo for the last time he said one day there'll only be five Kings left the king of harps the king of spage the king of Club the king of you know diamonds and the King of England and uh and he's I think he's partly right and and the reason he's partly right is because it it it was the Queen's genius uh actually I we've never
been better governed better ruled than when we're when when our reigning monarch is is a woman we've we've always had very very good women monarchs Queen Elizabeth Queen Victoria then Queen Elizabeth again uh and the um it's been a it's been a remarkable success that she's been able to be a a guiding presence without having uh without her voice becoming in any way strident or separatist she's never divided uh and that was a remarkable gift now
um it's also I think the benefit that you know the English language really helps um and I think the fact that um most people in England uh well certainly in England Wales and Scotland the numbers are slightly different but but
most people uh and Northern Ireland of course different again but most people in the United king take the monarchy seriously and respectfully um but it's but know that it's not relevant in a day-to-day sense and I think divorcing
the uh The Splendid from the uh from the sworded uh if you like is uh is rather a healthy way of having a government you don't want we don't like our prime minister uh to be um to be bathed in gold and Glory uh and uh and we certainly look at your presidential system sometimes with a little surprise it does surprise myeric 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 well-being of the whole poity so I think I I wouldn't say it's gone too far no I'd say it's imbalanced uh and I think I think that's right I think there's an old principle
uh which you all 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 you you'd have to be nuts as a devolved representative uh seeking office and not to promise to play pay the Ste 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 this same level of um you know 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 the oversight is is stronger one of the disadvantages of course it means the responsibility for each individual area is weaker uh and and that leads to the
inequities of infrastructure and housing and and the and the misalignment of incentives that we we now see certainly if you look at England uh I'm not sure if this true in Scotland actually but certainly in England in the 1930s um the local authorities raised more uh and were able to keep more business rates but the changes that came in in 19478 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 you know I'm as you know I'm I'm pretty pretty British my uncle sits in the
house of laws 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 or or the United Kingdom I don't know it's you know it's certainly impossible to be a Catholic and and uh in the United Kingdom and not remember some of the English Martyrs who were uh who met pretty unpleasant ends uh under various of our earlier monarchs um and uh as
somebody who served in uh our intelligence Corp uh it's it's impossible not to remember that the first intelligence units in the United Kingdom were in England were set up to hunt Catholic priests uh that that was literally their purpose uh at which they were remarkably successful um so I think it shapes me there and I think the jewishness as it were and for me it's it's entirely PED in the sense I'm I'm I'm not culturally Jewish I'm certainly
not religiously I'm religiously Catholic but the but that links me to a 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 uh to guarding your freedom as well you know the the 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 uh had the privilege of U having many Northern Irish friends from many different communities um 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 they're look they're necessary I'm afraid and it's it's it's incredibly painful because for everybody there's a legacy of pain and loss right and 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 uh very very very old uh information again and again and again and again and the people
who are now being forced through these uh judicial processes are now usually men in fact almost entirely men in their late 70s 80s whose recollection of events uh if they have any Recollections at all are pretty sketchy uh and so we've got to a point where the correct way of uh having inquiry into the past is to um 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 um 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 me 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 um
because the reality is Afghanistan hasn't been uh either in Civil War or been um the death of Empires as people claim it it's been the playground of others so you constantly see that bits of Afghanistan are dominated by bits of
their neighbors uh and that domination leads to internal frictions and frictions between the two neighbors so you know you look at you you look at the way in which parts of Afghanistan are effectively played over by different
political interests from the region and you see uh 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 um any real optimism how did studying Arabic and Yen affect your life trajectory oh massively and and completely unexpectedly I I it because I was interested in it I'm a theology student and I'm just interested
in other religions um and I thought I was studying Islam out of interest um but it's because I spoke Arabic that I was mobilized to fight in Iraq and it because I was mobilized to fight in Iraq now I then served in uh the foreign office and then stayed in the military and ended up in politics so it's been funly enough it's it's one of the most consequential decisions uh I ever took and I took it very LLY but what happened
like what what happens next after you do that what do you mean after I after I the Arabic yeah how did that lead to the next stage of your life oh I see thinking so uh I studied Arabic because I was doing a masters in islamics and
because I spoke Arabic when I left University uh I decided to be a journalist and because I spoke Arabic and French I went to beut um and so I learned to be a journalist by working on a local paper in in in beut did that for
a few years went back to the United Kingdom um and was a Management Consultant for a little bit uh and while I was doing that I joined the British Army Reserve uh and uh I moved to uh work for Bloomberg News uh writing about commodity markets analyzing the energy industry that sort of thing and while I was doing that 911 happened and I was mobilized to go and fight uh in uh the various Wars That Then followed now as
of 2024 yayon 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 uh I say they're seeking to uh maximize their tribal influence over um Yemen as much as it's possible to do so they are um a remarkable organization of um 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 um 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 probably because you haven't understood the reason they're doing it if you see what I mean uh uh and 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
internal Islamic Civil War uh 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 uh so it it may not have rationality within our thinking because you know every every now and again Israel's likely to strike back and as indeed it did only a few weeks ago uh and actually closing down shipping in
the redc doesn't particularly help you in that Civil War but it does add to your legitimacy uh and makes you look like uh a competent uh military power so it's 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 uh 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 unbelievably Rich civilization uh as you know you don't need me to tell you that uh 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 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 all um millions of people in the most horrific way I mean it's it's it's one of the most brutal uh and and psychotic
actors in a in a in a dangerous region and what it's offering now is effectively a millenarian death cult um where it sees uh you know when people tell you what they believe it's often wise to believe that they're telling you
the truth and they they're telling you they're telling us very clearly that what they're doing is they're preparing for the for the coming of the Mahi and uh you know they need to they need to destroy Israel and and Conquer Jerusalem
in order to achieve it um 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 I Doles me so I see I see what 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 uh and it has successfully got most well not most but it successfully got um many people uh
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 so it's
I think I think that sort of alignment of government and people is easier when you can when people can travel and be exiled uh and I think that's what we're seeing uh and what we're seeing is a vile failure of leadership um and a failure of responsibility we've seen a we're seeing a government that 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 uh 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 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 more adjustments based on what you've learned uh I mean look the I 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 I believe in 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 uh in in some circumstances but 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 uh
freedom but Taiwan and South Korea didn't have freedom yeah they they had enough freedom and 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 uh and that deals you make will be in some way reasonably adjudicated when there's a dispute and Taiwan and and South Korea both had that China has an entirely separate court system it has an
arbitary uh wealth removal system to put it nicely uh 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're not you have a different and there are that has led to Massive Internal corruption uh and I don't just mean in the in the usual sense but corruption in the sense that it's very difficult to predict uh the
ownership of Assets in in in large scale and that's you know that's really difficult right I mean it it just makes investment for the long term difficult and you saw the arrest of Jack Mah being evidence of that you know that was one of those moments where the wealthy got too big for their boots and and were challenging the party and the party will always come first if we think about Russia for a long time may 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 so I I've 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 I ask myself whether it's to do with the scale of the country whether it's to do with um the fact that
the levels of Education or levels of connection between between urban and rural areas are so great I I don't know but your your wife left the Soviet Union when was it 20 years2 yeah yeah I what what would your view be I mean it's I I 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 uh 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 so as you know my wife's my wife's mother um was of a Russian family and and 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 going to 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 about 10 years years ago who was telling me that um they would set up this e-citizenship thing which I don't I don't know if you know about it but you can become an ecitizen
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 why have you done that and he said oh well so when the Russ Russ 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 uh yes we should uh in fact we're in the process of doing it in various different ways um and we should be constantly doing it um forgive me I'm not going to talk about Howell sure the no first use policy should
Britain ever announced such a thing I 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 tuen tot production function what's your favorite novel uh the retki March it's uh it's fabulous it's about uh have you read it it's of course yeah wonderful exactly it's it's about it's about the end of the end of a certain world in the
beginning of a new one and it's and and it's in many ways it's very mournful uh and of course it you know it's it's a book about loss it's a book about the end um but it's also a book about novelty and Innovation because it's the 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 um I I I have quite a few that I
quite like I've recently uh watched again sha Shank 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 uh and still has some of the greatest comic lines in in in in the English language um those are those are two of my two 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 uh what can they do with the franchise to keep it fresh when there's a lot of competition from other spy figures right B the born movies many others what is going to make James Bond distinctive going forward 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 for the actors will be popular enough you know it'll all be there because the brand is strong enough uh so I don't know who the next Bond is going to be um I'm sure they
could be from any background at all uh a little bit like the Doctor Who franchise that's uh where the uh where the where the doct re there's a they have a term for it I can't remember what the term is now but there reappears in various different human forms um Bond will reemerge uh and no doubt another dou o something or other will uh will will happen What did you learned from your father um kindness what did you learn from your
mother uh the same actually the same so double influence what's the most underrated Beetle song um that's a very good question I love Hey Jude um still a fan of that um but it may not be underrated right no it's not really underrated I'm I'm trying to think of what I'm not I would say you won't see me off rubber Saul as the most underrated but it's not the best it's not the best the pro 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 um I don't know U yeah sorry not Civil Service Civil Service salaries in the 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 uh um
one of them is to build more homes and the other one is to raise salaries one's quicker than the other um and and actually the truth is a combination uh is likely to be necessary because senior civil servants salaries have Flatline
largely um by which I mean of course they've gone down in real terms uh over 20 or so years uh and it's you know it's 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 you can offer uh similar salaries to to in in the private sector but it's the interest that's the real that's the real thing you're offering and it's one of the things I've noticed actually is that wherever the government is the only whenever sorry let me start that again whenever the government is the only provider of that service so intelligent defense and you can only really do it properly in
government then despite the salary differential you still get the best people I like unquestionably the best people in intelligence work in in security work are working for the state because only working for the state can you truly use all the powers and and resources available whereas in other areas where you know you can do logistics for a private company or for a state company you can do you know 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 uh you get a lot more responsibility much earlier than I think you'd probably imagine um you 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 in in most companies is you can change your job every two 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 quite that broad in reach but it's it's certainly not impossible uh and 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 it's um i' uh i' been a soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan for uh the best part of 10 years 15 years I mean not full-time Iraq and Afghanistan but I've been soldiering for 10 or 15 years and it was it was time for me to go and do something else and um if you if you care about your country and you care uh about the way in which we're governed then there's only one place the orders start and that's uh
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've seen some amazing leadership you know 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 defense staff so
the most senior General in BR Army um demonstrating real strategic leadership and and i' seem that we need to act on it and and so I I brought you know I I I brought what I thought was the best of that uh you know I tried to bring some of that to to to Parliament because you know there's a lot of people who these days I 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 oh they there must be a military answer to this not just by the use of force but you know you call in a general to fix a problem because you know generals do stuff and of course that on one level that's 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 you know young people to have an opportunity from a certain area is to join the armed forces but time and again the young 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' 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 got to find a better way of
fixing things you've got to find a better way out of these things you've got to find a better way of solving these problems uh and 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 and support leadership um and of in 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 uh at a moment when frankly the world is deeply uncertain and and and the 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 time toart thank you very much thanks Tyler it's good to see you again