Podcast: UK politics can’t ignore Brexit’s failure forever

The political debate around the impact of Brexit on the United Kingdom and its future economic relationship with Europe is ‘just on hold at the moment’ and in a ‘phoney war’ stage, according to one of the UK’s leading political scientists, Professor David Runciman.

And although Labour leader Keir Starmer is determined not to reopen the Brexit discussion - ‘he won’t let anyone even mention it, for fear of unleashing forces he can’t control’ - he won’t be able to avoid it forever, says Professor Runciman on this week’s Inside Politics podcast.

‘If you are a Labour government that wants to pay nurses more, that wants to invest more in schools and hospitals, that wants to reconstruct public infrastructure in Britain - the money isn’t really there. But were we still in the European Union, Britain would be a bigger economy. So join the dots. When he’s prime minister, he’s going to have to take some tough choices about that’.

A Professor of Politics at Cambridge University, David Runciman became widely known as a co-host of ‘Talking Politics’, a weekly podcast that ended last year and won listeners for its insightful analysis of Brexit and other forces shaping Britain and the world.

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Professor Runciman expects Labour to win the next election, aided by Starmer’s solid if staid leadership.

‘Keir Starmer has managed to make the Labour Party so boring, no one in Labour ever says anything interesting ever. And that probably will be enough to win him the next election’.

Conversely, a lack of excitement is seen as a weakness for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who must lead his party out of its polling slump to prevail in any election.

‘There are real mutterings of discontent in the Conservative Party with Sunak, partly because of the thought that Sunak is too dull for this kind of politics. He’s got to have something beyond just being a safe pair of hands’.

Professor Runciman was speaking after delivering the annual Philip Monahan lecture at University College Cork last week, where he argued that it is the behaviour of states and corporations, not individuals, that must be radically altered to halt and reverse trends such as climate change and biodiversity loss.

‘There’s a word that gets bandied around a lot in academic circles, the Anthropocene, which is the idea we’re living in an age where humanity has stamped its selfishness all over the planet. And human beings are going to have to change before we burn the whole thing up. And my argument in a sentence is that’s the wrong name for it. It’s not that we’re not responsible, we are responsible, but it’s through our states and corporations that this happens’, he tells Hugh Linehan on the podcast.

At UCC he proposed an alternative term to describe the age of state and corporate destruction: the Leviacene, after the Leviathan, the machine-like government imagined by 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

‘I think we spend far too much time in politics thinking, “if we could just get better people running the show, they would save us”. But actually, these machines are out of control. It’s very hard for even the best-intentioned people to regain control of the state. All states, the Irish state, the British state, the American state, have a huge internal wiring legacy that makes them very, very hard to manage’ he says.

Part of the problem is that elections are our only meaningful way of telling politicians what we want, he says.

‘Elections are very important for democracy because you can kick the bastards out. But they’re terrible ways of signalling what people really care about’.

‘So we need to reengineer our states and reengineer our corporations. Stop corporations being profit-maximisation machines, stop states from being so responsive to certain kinds of short-term stimuli’.