Good evening, my name's Helen Mountfield and I'm the principal of Mansfield College,
and it's my very great pleasure to welcome you here, at least virtually to Mansfield and to the 2020 Hands Lecture.
Our annual hands lecture is an important moment in the Mansfield year where we
invite a high profile speaker to our academic community often but not always,
someone from the political arena to encourage the sharing of ideas and debate about some of the most pressing issues of our time.
And this evening, Speaker Lord Hague certainly fits the bill for a high profile speaker.
And the next 20 years of Western democracy, which is the subject he's chosen to speak to us about,
certainly fits the description of being a pressing issue of our time.
I'm very grateful to Guy Hands, who is an alumnus of Mansfield College, and his wife Julia,
for founding this lecture and for their long standing and very generous support of our college over so many decades.
This year, Guy is going to say a few words to introduce our speakers,
he knows him very well and also some remarks at the end after you've all had the opportunity to ask some questions using the Q&A function.
Now, the Hands lecture is a hot ticket, and in normal times when we're here on site at Mansfield,
invitations have to be reserved for our closest friends and supporters, or at least they get first dibs.
But this year is the first time ever that we've held the hands lecture online.
So we're delighted to be able to open it up as a free and public talk for everybody.
And like the series of public talks that we hold on on Fridays at Mansfield during term time, which is a series that I convened,
this is really very emblematic of how Mansfield wants to open its academic community to the world.
And our ability this year to adopt that plural and democratic approach in might call it is
one of the silver linings of the dreadful pandemic which we've been living through this year.
And another one, of course, is the pride in being a member of the university that appears to have brought us a
safe and affordable vaccine which can be made available on a not for profit basis,
truly a vaccine for the world. So that's another thing that's been cheering us up this week.
But I am really delighted to welcome as this year's Hands lecture, Speaker William Hague,
Lord Hague of Richmond Law take sir for 26 years in the House of Commons and from 1986, I believe, as the baby of the House.
Then until he stood down in 2015, as very much an elder or middle aged statement statesman.
And in that time he said many senior roles, including as leader of the House.
But he's also best known as the leader of the Conservative Party between 1997 and 2001
and as the first secretary of State and Foreign Secretary between 2010 and 2014.
Lord Hague now pursues a wide range of business and charitable activities.
He's the chair of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, his royal foundation,
and he's a very well-known writer of historical biographies and a newspaper columnist.
Now, because this event is online, we're going to structure it as a conversation,
although I hope it will take doing most of the talking rather than a lecture, and I'm going to kick off with questions.
But there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions in the Q&A function before guy hands make some remarks.
I would ask you to note that this event will be recorded. And so that's the way we're going to be doing things this evening.
Before I kick off with some questions or take, I'd like to hand over to guidance hands for his personal introduction remarks.
Guy. Thank you. And thank you, everyone, for joining us today for the annual Hands lecture this year.
The format as head of state is going to be very different, but of course, that's the story of twenty.
My wife, children and I are very grateful that this could happen, and thank you very much, Helen and her team, for making it happen.
Also, thank Zuma wouldn't have known Watson was a year ago, but now it's become sort of a standard vocabulary.
It's the 20th anniversary of her involvement with Mansell's Access to Excellence campaign.
Twenty years ago, Julia and I made a promise to Matko Mansfield, the college I myself attended in the 1970s.
We promised Oxford that we would find a way to have as wide as possible get access to the very best higher education that could be offered.
And that would occur from attending Mansfield College, Oxford, as entrepreneurs and business people,
we believe passionately that a diverse population representing the full makeup of society is essential.
To ensure that the business world is successful, but certainly when you have to divest and see that you get the very best ideas in business,
you can't get them having people coming from just one group. We also believe that through diversity, you get the best ideas in politics,
the greatest innovations and the most workable solutions for society as a whole, and you cannot believe that this is more important today than ever.
So 20 years ago, in return for supporting financially, jeden I set an objective for Mancia to achieve.
And that was an admission rate of at least seventy five percent of students coming to Mountstuart from state schools back 20 years ago,
that seemed like a complete pipe dream.
However, two decades later, an admissions to man still stand at 96 percent, a current first year, yes, being from state schools,
manslaughters has become the poster child of the college's diversity on every level and was ranked in the top five colleges,
not degree results in 2019. That's a quite remarkable achievement.
And both you and I are very, very proud of Mansell's Cheadle's, I'm thrilled to introduce today Speaker A. William Hague of Richmond,
who's going to discuss with Helen the subject of Western democracy and what the next 20 years will look like.
Then when I first met as students at Oxford in the 70s,
it was a time which saw great political shifts and a time of great uncertainty, similar in many ways to what we're seeing today.
I took it upon myself to make sure that William didn't fall into the wrong branch of the Conservatives when he arrived at Oxford.
I didn't want to develop developing into a non Thatcherite.
Particularly given the Sun cartoon of him appearing as the birthday cake for Mrs. Thatcher's birthday, we got off, we got on very,
very well and start and I made sure that William was introduced to the spices in Indian dishes for my favourite curry house on the county road.
He discovered pretty quickly that lime pickle was not a citrus flavoured cooling
addition to mealtime and that Bombi Ducks had really nothing to do with ducks at all.
William then sold pictures door to door for me, and he was my secretary when I was president of the Oxford University Conservative Station.
He also became my tenant in Nelson Street, but even as often as I was his mersa when he was president of the Oxford Union.
He's been a wonderful, supportive friend for over 40 years, been the best man.
Mind you, this wedding where he makes a great speech that was both tasteful and funny, the best line at which, according to Julia,
is that marriage is a mutual admiration society where one person is always right and the other is the husband.
And he added, Never has this been so right here today to marry a guy.
William is never boring. And I'm sure you have many highlights for us today that I had to.
Over to William. Thank you. Thank you very much, Guy.
And so will you. You said you want to talk about the next 20 years of Western democracy.
And I first those are the founding question is why do we care? What why should we value democracy?
Well, thank you, Helen. Hello to everybody listening to us. And just before saying why we should care.
Let me pay tribute to to a guy who's just been told by me I will not retaliate
with a lot of stories about guy at Oxford that would detain us a long time.
I have to say. But I hope it's of some encouragement to students listening to us today that, yes, we met forty one years ago.
We're still great friends today. We've been lifelong friends so far anyway.
And that we were we started off as sort of poor students, really.
But Guy has been so successful in his career that he's able to be a benefactor to Oxford
and to support the objectives he was talking about as someone who came to Oxford,
albeit to a different college from a state school, I very much applaud that work.
And so I pay tribute to Guy and Julia and that that creation of this lecture.
And it's very much in recognition of their efforts that I'm taking part in it today.
Why should we care as your good opening question, Helen, about this?
And we should care because there is a lot of evidence of growing disaffection and disillusionment amongst young people with democracy.
The study, carried out internationally for the Centre for the Future of Democracy at Cambridge University,
found increasingly negative views and disillusionment with democracy across many parts of the world,
particularly in the English speaking world, and that young people felt that disillusionment with democracy more than older people did.
And it found that when populist leaders were elected, there was some short term relief from that feeling.
But once you're into a second term of a populist leader, you've got a real questioning of the legitimacy of the democratic system.
And we should care because that's disturbing. When democracy is the best form of government, it's not just one of of many to choose from.
It's the only form of government that we found in human civilisation that is compatible with human dignity and human rights,
with a diversity of views that is compatible with the competition between ideas
in a peaceful way rather than through bloodshed and military takeovers or coups.
And of course, in our recent history, it has been the system most compatible with prosperity and economic freedom.
Although now China under Xi Jinping is setting out to show you can be the biggest economy in the world without being a democracy,
which is an important challenge, the democratic idea. So it matters for all these reasons that it is.
It's the only form of government we've found that is compatible with the best of human nature.
But there is increasing disillusionment with it today.
And you you say that democracy is the only system of government that's compatible with human dignity.
But of course,
I have been in the not so very distant past governments which have been democratically elected in the sense of elected on the basis of a popular vote,
who have very swiftly set about taking away human dignity.
And the obvious example is the Nazi government in Germany in the 1930s.
But one might argue about that happening at a lesser level in other places far more recently.
Now, I just wonder what you mean by democracy, because it's quite a contested term at the moment, isn't it?
It is indeed a contested term. And I think this it's the reason you're asking me this is it's an important point to
establish at the outset that democracy can mean different things to different people.
And at different times in history, we regard Athens and classical civilisation as the cradle of democracy.
That's where we get the word from democracy.
But in Athenian democracy, where people gathered to deliberate together and come to a collective view about what their city should do,
they're what they were all men and they owned slaves. So it wasn't an idea of democracy that we would cherish today.
And our own democracy is constantly changing and developing.
A hundred years ago, women didn't have the votes and at that time,
Oxford University had had its own members of parliament that had its own special members
of parliament elected by a much smaller number of people than most members of Parliament.
It's always changing. I sit in the House of Lords, which is not democratically elected,
and I was once being advised by some Foreign Office officials to complain to the Russians when I was
on my way to Moscow that their upper house was all appointed by the president and not Democratic.
And I said, well, wait a minute. We have an upper house that is a bit like that, and I hope that will change.
I actually believe we should have an elected upper house. I will always happily vote for my own abolition in that sense.
So democracy is changing all the time. I think the example you gave of the Nazi takeover in Germany.
Yes. Said that started with a Democratic vote,
but it also represented the collapse of democracy because the way that regime was then able to operate and
do so much to assault human dignity was to to demolish very quickly democratic institutions around them.
But we do have different definitions of democracy.
And this is really the point about discussing what happens in the next 20 years, because it will change again.
It's not in a fixed form and it will change in a negative direction if we do not do things to push it in a positive direction,
which I'm sure is what we will go on to be able to discuss.
Yeah, I mean, we are we're going to go on, I think, to talk about some of the threats to democracy and what we might do about it.
But again, I just want to press you a little bit on what you think is a positive direction.
And just to frame this, and this is about the future of Western democracy, not British democracy.
But here there are very serious threats or at least verbal threats to the
institutions that have often been held to keep up the institutions of democracy,
the judiciary and the civil service, public service broadcaster, the media, the mainstream media, as it's now known.
And I just wonder what you think. Can democracy withstand those threats or if it's going to be an ongoing system in which people are
equally valued and have equal dignity must sometimes be constraints on what the majority can do?
Or is it simply one person, one vote? And if you vote to abolish democracy, well, that's your choice.
Certainly, I belong to the school of thought that there are constraints,
that democracy does not just consist of a majority having its way of a 51 percent temporary majority having its way.
Democracy in the United States is, of course, very topical at the moment,
and it was deliberately designed by the founding fathers so that a short term
majority or at times any majority actually could necessarily have its way.
That is why they designed the Congress the way they did, where small states have as much power as large states.
So it's not necessarily the majority of the population that are able to have the key decision over legislation.
That's why they designed their electoral college rather than the popular vote, determining who was the president.
And of course, democracy should always take place within a framework of law which is slower to change than just the Democratic views.
And so in recent times, the British government could say it was going to prorogue parliament because we
had this great controversy last year in order to achieve its objectives on Brexit.
And the Supreme Court was able to say, no, you cannot actually within the framework of the law and this country,
which you can't alter, you can't alter in sufficient time to change this outcome.
You cannot do that. Parliament has to be able to meet.
So in so many ways, in a in a democracy, we do limit the power of a majority or temporary majority.
And it is very important to do that. Otherwise, we end up with the tyranny of the majority.
But the key point when when you ask, you know, what is the I think you are asking what is the what are we really driving at here?
And what I want to be able to expand on in our conversation is democracy requires deliberation together.
The virtue of that Athenian gathering, although it had so many faults in the eyes of our eyes today,
was that the citizens not only voted on what Athens should do, but they heard the arguments together and deliberate together.
And that by hearing the same arguments together that often change their views.
Now that is something we're losing and the way that modern democracy is working.
And of course, I'm happy to expand on that theme.
Yes. Well, let's let let's do that. I mean, just just before we do, you mentioned the prorogation judgement.
And, of course, the reason that the prorogation judgement went the way it was it did was because
the entire unanimous Supreme Court thought that proroguing parliament like
that forestalled the process of deliberation and the parliament had a role in
scrutinising whatever form of Brexit the executive chose to bring to it to,
um, to get its approval. But that was absolutely decried as an undemocratic use of judicial power.
Some people said this shows we need to put constraints on our judiciary.
And I just wanted you I mean, John Major, in fact, joined that litigation as as an intervener to say that he thought that that was the right approach.
But I just wonder,
do you think that was the right approach or do you think that was judges overstepping their role and going into the political arena or something?
Very controversial. Actually, I agreed with the what the judges said on that.
Despite being a former conservative leader and a conservative lord, I do differ from my party.
That's another feature of democracy, of course, that people can feel perfectly entitled,
perfectly secure in disagreeing with their party and the government even when they're in the same party.
And so I thought the Supreme Court was quite right and the attempt of parliament was a Democratic outrage.
And I think the government in Britain has learnt its lesson over that,
although it also now has such a large majority in parliament, it doesn't have to worry about being in that situation.
But I think for the longer term, governments will have learnt their lesson.
That was an important, timely reassertion of the power of our unwritten constitution.
And hopefully we're seeing today in the United States a a reassertion of their written constitution that even though an
incumbent president insists that he has actually won an election where there is no evidence at all that he has won it,
and even though he has been talking to members of his own party about efforts to frustrate the implementation of that result, those party members,
while they may be keeping quiet about it a lot of the time, are going along with implementing the law and the functioning of democracy.
So his term is steadily coming to an end. So democracy has a resilience.
This is an optimistic note to note at this point that there's a lot of resilience in the institutions of countries where democracy is in our DNA.
And so this is the problems of democracy are not something to panic about, but they are considerable and they do not need attention.
Yeah. So not not not to panic, but you think democracy is under threat?
What do you think some of the threats are? You can put them in whatever do you want.
But I mean. Well, if we if we can go through some of them, perhaps in ascending order of importance,
one that I think we have to note that we have to deal with is far from the whole story, is foreign interference today and democracy now.
You can voters can hear many messages, read many messages in an election where they cannot be sure where they come from.
This is breaking an important principle of democracy.
In fact, Guy Hands and I were once involved in exposing something of a scandal in a student election in Oxford,
where it would take the whole our whole time to tell you the details,
which was all to do with the absence of an imprint on a piece of election material.
And that's a very important feature of British democracy and our parliamentary elections,
the imprint that you can tell who published and who printed a piece of information.
And by that means, if it is libellous, if it is demonstrably untrue, if they are printing so much of it, they are exceeding their spending limits.
You can pursue all these issues.
Now, of course, in the age of social media, the imprints are not there and you don't know when that is coming from from Russia.
And then recent efforts by Twitter, for instance, to to clean up against Russian and Chinese bots, Splett spreading disinformation in democratic life.
They ended up closing down. 200000 accounts that were busily doing that, some of which are dedicated to creating division, so,
for instance, after a terrorist attack in this country, sending out messages saying retweeted,
if you think Islam should be banned and messages to try to create impassioned division
of a particular objective but to destroy political consensus in the UK and elsewhere.
So one threat that we have to be fully cognisant of identify and defeat that is an effort to undermine the legitimacy of our elections,
is foreign interference in them, and that requires transparency, requires working with those social media companies.
It requires digital imprints in the future, you know, changing the law.
I think the British government is looking at that so we can identify where information is coming from.
And it requires democratic nations to stand together and calling out and identifying
that sort of behaviour so that people can be aware of it when it is happening.
So that's one that we can sort of that is quite a sort of discrete threat that we can deal with and maybe move on from that.
Yeah, I mean, you've identified, I think, quite clearly why and we can move on, I think, to talk about this,
about why these foreign threats have perhaps been amplified and supercharged by the ways in which we communicate politically at the moment.
But it puzzles me that Cold War having ended quite why the Russians and the Chinese,
I suppose, can care so much about destabilising Western democracy.
And is it that just, you know, you're the forum for former foreign secretary.
This is just realpolitik as it is. Just doesn't even seem to be ideological.
It's just it is realpolitik. It is.
I when I began as foreign secretary, made huge efforts to improve relations with Russia,
the high point of which was when I took President Putin to the judo at the Olympics in London.
He and I both being judo enthusiasts and we had such a great time and relations had never been so good.
Well, within a year they were terrible again,
because we had fallen out over events in Syria and over Russia's invasion of a neighbouring country and Crimea,
not something that we democratic nations regard as an acceptable piece of behaviour.
And President Putin has been on the receiving end of European unity with sanctions against Russia and,
of course, all the disputes over Ukraine, Georgia and so on.
So it's not surprising there is a Russian strategy to weaken the unity of European democracies.
And there have been Russian links identified in the financing of far right political parties across European countries and,
of course, interventions and elections and political discourse of the kinds of describe.
So it is for a reason, which is to weaken the capacity of a rival system,
a democratic system, to impose penalties on Russia and to stand up for itself.
OK, so this is is this a current form of foreign interference is particularly a problem and part
of the problem because of the very rapid development of social media and and media discourse,
the kind of polarisation which has developed very, very fast.
And I just wonder what you think why you think that is any more threatening than the some of the Daily Mirror to take a sort of,
you know, our generation way of looking at who is influencing people's views.
Why does this matter any more than that, that some people read left wing newspapers,
some people whose right wing newspaper it is a it is a big problem, actually.
And let me just start with a little story. Last year, I met a man here in Wales who said to me, well,
I voted to leave the European Union because I found out they were going to abolish the queen.
And I said, oh, that's very interesting because, you know,
there may have been many reasons to vote to leave the European Union, but I can assure you that wasn't gonna happen.
In fact, were in in many other countries of Europe.
So don't worry about that. And he said, oh, I wish I'd known that before I should have bumped into before.
But anyway, I voted to leave the EU for that reason.
And that was that tells us something important, because when I asked him, well, how did you find out they were going to abolish the Queen?
He said, I found out on Facebook and the friends we circulate various opinions, and that's how I found out they were going to abolish the queen.
Now, this is the difference between social media and the newspapers and the broadcast that we relied on in the past,
that he never heard any contradiction of that.
And that wasn't an idea with sufficient credibility that newspapers would have printed it.
Apologise my clock in the background, announcing the hour and then A would not have been broadcast at such a ridiculous story on the BBC.
But in social media, he thought that was true.
And there is a serious problem of the echo chamber effect in social media.
And so I do think we have to find ways of protecting democracy against that and of actually requiring through regulation,
balance of views, differing points of view to be heard by the same person.
It's very difficult to do this, of course, in social media, but I do think it is essential to do so.
Barack Obama is one of the interviews he gave the other day about his new book was bemoaning the fact
that there in the United States now there is no common set of facts about any public situation.
He said there is no Walter Cronkite now, the famous news anchorman giving the same perspective to the whole nation about the
assassination of John F. Kennedy or saying to the whole nation in the Vietnam War,
you know, maybe these figures we get from the government are not believable.
And so we lose that common sense of what the facts of the situation are.
And we have to find ways to put that right. Yeah, I mean, I really do think that such an enormous difficulty after the referendum campaign, I.
By somebody who was a whistle blower for Cambridge Analytica against what we've got against Cambridge Analytica,
but one of the issues was that because the capacity and because you cannot see even what you should check,
what you would have seen as a Facebook ad or a message last week, you won't see the same thing that deliberately opposing messages could be put out.
So you could put out messages in Asian areas of Birmingham saying, isn't the EU dreadful?
It's a white Christian club. It stops people coming to work and family run Asian owned restaurants,
whereas people from who don't even speak English can come from Eastern Europe and they can come.
And it's not fair. But the different constituency was being put out.
If we leave the EU, we can have no immigration at all. We don't want these people message.
So not here it is. Here's my message. I may finesse it depending on who I'm talking to, but here is broadly what I stand for.
But just saying whatever you thought people wanted to hear that would get them to vote for you.
And that does seem very corrosive because you no longer have a battle of ideas.
But I do wonder what you think we can do about I mean, I just ask you that until 2015, you were an elected politician.
I suppose Facebook's much bigger now than it was then.
But do you does anyone you know from any political party not buy Facebook ads?
Well, they have to do that, of course, in order to in order to compete with each other, although it is open to us to to ban that.
You know, we don't allow television advertising, political television advertising in the UK.
And it is possible to to clamp down on it in social media.
And there are many other ideas.
I'm just looking at my notes here because I have assembled quite a list of things that one could do to change the way social media polarises opinions.
They get quite technical, you know, about changing the actual news feed algorithms on Facebook and Twitter to stop the emergence of
echo chambers because the algorithms actually give people more of what they already agree to,
but often a more extreme version of it and ways of actually giving less attention on social media to super sharers,
the people who share thousands of posts who get a then a disproportionate share of influence on social media,
that it's entirely in the hands of social media companies to put that right.
But of course, what we're talking about in social media is one aspect of increasing polarisation that is exacerbating polarisation.
That is the bigger the bigger threat. And I wouldn't want to claim that that's all the fault of social media, all the fault of foreign interference.
These forces are aggravating a problem that we have anyway, a deeper, longer running problem,
which is the increasing polarisation of people around different identities,
which we've seen very much, and and the way American politics has developed and in our own Brexit debate and in many European countries.
And I think that is the that is at the heart of our problem.
There are there are also things we can do about that now.
OK, so we can if if politicians feel a power and politicians don't always feel great power in the face of powerful media operators,
I can think of the mainstream media and the powerful operators there and the extent
to which politicians of many different colours feel a great desire to humour people.
But this is perhaps supercharged on social media and more atomised.
What else do you think is a particular threat to democracy?
Well, the the deep polarisation of society into different identities is undoubtedly a threat.
And this we have been building up over many years ago, and that's illustrated with an anecdote and a personal story rather than abstract ideas.
You know, a guy was talking at the beginning about people coming from state schools to Oxford.
And I came to Oxford from rather from the Rabaa Valley in South Yorkshire, coal and steel producing area.
Not many people went to Oxford from there, but of course,
the people who did like me and who went to other universities as well never went back to work and live in the rather valley.
Once we'd been to Oxford and elsewhere, we made our careers and London and globally.
And globalisation has been a wonderful thing for us, for that, for our opportunities and life.
As far as I'm aware, all of my friends who left the wrath of Ali and went to university 1979.
Voted to stay in the European Union, whether they were conservative or liberal or whatever in the referendum,
and all of our friends, as far as I can determine,
who didn't go to university and stayed in the rather valley and stayed and lived and worked there for the last 40 years,
they all voted to leave the European Union. So now I'm not saying here who's right and wrong.
It's just the dividing point. And our attitudes, whether we were liberal internationalists or more conservative voters with a small C,
was that age 18 and those who went to university and those who didn't.
And I think we have greatly underestimated over the years the effect of that divide and given
far too little attention to the education and the status of the other 50 percent in society.
And now we are seeing them the result of that.
And we might see more of it in the wake of the pandemic.
Just to be a little alarming, because I suspect we're on the edge of a wave of innovation, of automation and digitisation in the coming years,
which will be marvellous for everybody who has the skills to make the most of that and pretty terrible for those who don't.
So education and skills are attending to the education skills of the other half of the population as a fundamental part,
in my view, of avoiding this long term polarisation of society.
Now, there are many great minds have turned their attention to this in recent times.
Francis Fukuyama, famous commentator in his book on Identity,
that's a very readable book called The Wake Up Call about this year's Pandemic by John Micklethwait,
which all talk about the need to recreate a common identity in Western societies that we are breaking down into different identities.
They may be ethnic, they may be cultural in many different ways. They may be political.
But we have to find ways of creating within democratic nations more of a common identity.
All of them end up arguing for more national service and that sort of thing.
National community service, not necessarily military service, so that people of many different backgrounds mix together much more.
Now, we will have to think of many effective ideas of that kind if we are to recreate a common identity that is currently being pulled apart.
I'm sorry, that's a very long answer to you. It's very interesting.
But I mean, you're talking about hollowing out and the loss of a sense of shared identity.
And I think when you originally talked about the idea of democracy as being deliberative,
how many citizens are viewed as being in that discussion and being prepared to share ideas and discourse with people?
I mean, one of the things that happened in when I was growing up, I also went to the same Oxford colleges,
you from a state school from different end of the country, but about five years, six years later.
But one of the things I happened to be when I was growing up was the famous statement by Mrs Thatcher.
There's no such thing as societies, as just individual men and women and families. And in a sense, why wouldn't you leave wherever it was?
There aren't very interesting jobs or opportunities and go away and not come back.
What do we do to create that sense of belonging and association of community of some kind?
But one of the questions that's come up, which I can throw in at this stage,
is someone Cronan there saying it was news to him that Oxford University had its own MPs.
But what is the role of civil society institutions like universities or churches or trade unions in keeping democracy on track?
So how do we kind of reknit people if given that there are we all going into
our echo chambers and given that actually society is becoming more unequal?
And I think it's been for 100 years and in certainly in Europe? Well, there are a couple of of broad ideas here which need to be discussed.
One is localisation giving people a greater say over the local decision making.
There were some efforts to do that in the in the coalition government, at the parish level of a local planning level.
But there have also been some important experiments by local authorities.
And here I think it's very interesting what has been done by a Labour Council in Preston in Lancashire to create greater localisation in the sense
of trying within rules of public procurement and tendering rules to ensure that the more of the wealth of the of that area stays in that area,
that people choose wherever possible to support local businesses and to use local services.
And they've done that within the confines of the powers of a local authority.
But I think they have achieved some things with that.
And I think that type of policy can give people greater hope that local democracy means something to them.
Another important idea which can be at the local or the national level is the citizens assembly and how this is being experimented with.
And in several countries,
President Macron has had has called citizens assemblies together after after the after the riots in France over the last couple of years,
Ireland very successfully used a citizen's assembly to explore what change could be made, what might be an acceptable change to its abortion laws,
and historically a very Catholic country, the citizens assembly,
or a random but representative group once that came up with a more radical change than political leaders would
have suspected and agree that within the assembly and that was the option that was approved then in a referendum.
And there was an interesting experiment by, I think, the Constitution units at University College London a few years ago with a citizens assembly
on Brexit of people who made up equally of people who voted for and against Brexit.
But when put together in a room to argue it through together, to deliberate together,
rather than just vote against each other in a referendum as to how to implement Brexit,
they came up with a reasonable, workable option of doing Brexit.
But doing it in a in a fairly soft form with continuing close trade and other ties with the countries of the European Union,
they actually found more of a consensus than our political system has been able to find.
So I'm not suggesting this is the whole answer,
but I do think the hallmarks of the things that are the answer include deliberation and include more localisation so that
democracy is tangible and so that people are working on solutions together rather than taking up entrenched opinions,
entrenched positions against each other, and to then to include the question that that came in,
what is the role of institutions where they all have a role and that churches,
local authorities and others can all play a role in promoting the kinds of things that I've just been talking about?
It interesting that you spoke about trying to promote localism within public procurement rules, and of course, you could.
And it is a matter of legislative change or anything else you could put that in as a relevant consideration when a public authority was contracting.
But another question I've been asked is one of the problems that has arisen in relation to democracy is trust in the people who are the politicians.
And particularly, for example, in the light of the recent spate of stories about the setting aside of an ordinary public procurement rules because
of the emergency for PPE led to widespread perception that there's been favouring of Bush's conservative party does.
Do you think that that undermines public trust in government,
that perception and the idea that actually democracy damages democracy and the idea of deliberation?
Well, it would if that turned out to be true, it would. And that would be quite wrong if that happened.
Frank? I'm five years out of government, so I don't know whether it has, but I would be very disturbed if it had.
It's not surprising, of course, in a crisis well, in a war or a pandemic, that a lot of money is spent in a hurry,
but it certainly shouldn't be spent on the basis of favouritism or political connexions and such allegations and many others,
of course, that we can think of can undermine public trust.
And it is a problem for democracy that.
The mature democracies have not coped very well in this pandemic.
This just this underlines the fact that we do have a problem.
Of course, many of these societies, like our own,
now have a are in demographic decline or actually most European ones are rather than us are in demographic decline.
And they have expensive welfare systems. The state has become very sprawling, very expensive and rather ineffective.
It turns out it's rather ineffective at what we really need it to do.
We need the state to keep us safe, to keep us free and democratic societies to keep us educated.
And it's not doing very well at those jobs compared to more recent democracies and Taiwan or in South Korea.
They've done a much better job this year and keeping their citizens safe and free.
So it is time to look at the performance of Western democracies.
And one of the reasons the performance has been lacking is lack of trust in government.
There's a higher degree of trust in those countries that have proved more cohesive in a way in the pandemic,
and the people would be more likely to follow the requests and instructions of government.
So those sorts of things that we have been talking about,
the whole panoply of these things of resisting foreign interference, of reforming social media,
of ensuring there is a deliberative path to democracy,
of ensuring there is more localisation and decentralisation and democracy are necessary in order to start to build greater trust.
Now, one of the questions and please do start to put questions in the Q&A box, which lots of you have.
So I'm trying to weave these in as we go. But one of the questions that's been asked is really a counterpoint, I suppose,
to the point that you were making about localism, which is that some of the issues which are facing us and let's face it,
the biggest issue that's facing us, climate change and ecological catastrophe are not only bigger than a local area, they're bigger than a nation.
And it's a trust trust in our national democratic systems is breaking down.
I think it's fair to say that trust in international systems of governance is even weaker.
So how are we going to capture a level at which people can feel they have some say and some agency in affecting the very big questions that affect us?
It's very difficult, of course. That's why the question is being asked to give it to people at the local level that say over those global events.
Don't forget, of course, there are a lot of things that we can do globally, locally.
Sorry about global issues since the solution does lie and all of us taking actions.
But it also requires, as the question implies, cooperation between governments.
Now, global governance has certainly declined sharply in the last decade.
When you think that when Lehman Brothers collapsed in the global financial crisis,
the first phone call of George W. Bush as president was to Hu Jintao, the president of China, to start coordinating the response.
How different is that from the response to the pandemic that just underlines how dramatically global governance has declined?
Now here, this is where democracy has to make some compromises,
because in order to deal with those global issues, we do have to work with countries that are not democracies.
We can't stop a future pandemic without working with China.
We can't address climate change. Without that, we can't have worthwhile arms control agreements.
We probably can't stave off some future global financial crisis without working with China.
And so we do have to get used to the idea that we will have sharp differences with authoritarian or totalitarian
systems and we will end up in serious rivalry with them over the future of technology and over issues like Hong Kong.
But at the same time,
we have to have a framework of cooperation on those global issues and sit down and talk with people who are not Democrats at all.
And inevitably,
I spent a lot of my time as foreign secretary talking to people who were not at all Democratic and who I wouldn't have wanted to vote for to anything.
But I had to deal with them because you have to have a way of dealing with countries you disagree with.
Yeah. Yeah. But that that you're talking about the relationships, the necessary cooperation between democracies and democracies, of course,
the other thing and we're talking about the future of Western democracy here,
if you Western democracies are going to stay strong, they are going to have to cooperate with one another.
And that's where the U.S. system of sharing sovereignty came into play.
Now,
we've chosen to leave that system and we'll have to work out what our future relationship is going to be with that large bloc of Western democracies.
But that means that within our own family of nations, we're going to have to talk about what are the relationships and the cooperation between us.
And that's one of the things that the internal markets bill is discussing.
And I've been asked whether you see Scottish and Welsh nationalism as an
expression of lack of trust in democracy and I suppose localism within the UK.
It's I suppose the answer to that is a little complicated in that it is an expression of distrust in the UK all over.
It's also a reassertion of historic loyalties.
It is a feature of the polarisation, really, that I was talking about earlier,
that people are clutching for attaching themselves to a cultural identity
rather than finding some new common identity in the in the modern nation state.
It's not necessarily about localism after I think now in the age of devolution or localism is stronger in England than it
is in Scotland because the Westminster government has gone further and devolving power to the local level not far enough,
many of us would say. But it's gone further in that direction than than Scotland has.
So I see that as part of the polarisation as well as a lack of trust, it's connected to all the things that we have been discussing, I think.
OK, and then finally and again, I think it comes back to some of what you were talking about, about deliberation against identity and polarisation.
And someone asked, how much inequality do you think a democracy can survive?
Well, democracies have many levels of inequality, but this is it's very relevant to the point that I was making about education,
of course, because you will it will be a major contributor to polarisation and disaffection if people feel economically excluded.
And so I do think inequality has a role in undermining the performance of democracy.
And I just wanted to add, if I may. Hello. The other thing that I've not mentioned,
that is the one of the necessary solutions on top of protecting ourselves against foreign interference
and regulating social media and encouraging localisation and mechanisms where we deliberate together.
It is also essential to have leaders who use forbearance, employ forbearance in the use of power,
who themselves recognise the importance of democratic institutions and avoid winner take all situations and how they use democracy here.
Obviously, I'm thinking of of President Trump and but one of the one of the worries of both sides
in the American presidential election was that it was a winner take all outcome,
that America might change irrevocably if the other side won.
That was the fear, at least of both sides.
There has to be a tolerance of the other side winning and acceptance of that and that not everything will change.
And that depends on the behaviour of the winning side as well. When I lost to Tony Blair in the 2001 election, I was disappointed to lose.
But it didn't mean that Britain, as we knew it was coming to an end.
It didn't mean the Conservative Party couldn't be back one or two elections later in government, which indeed we were.
It was just part of how democracy functions.
To many more recent political leaders have ramped up the stakes that we're fighting
for in elections to such a degree that people think they can't afford to lose.
And Donald Trump now can't afford to stand aside from the presidency.
So it does require that however many citizens assemblies and locally empowered people we create,
it is very important to have leaders who behave in that way.
And dealing with that, the leaders who behave in that way sometimes asked what sort of protections do you
think that we could adopt against increasing populism if we see that the problem?
I think all of the things we've talked about, hopefully,
are that that if people got a more balanced view and more varied view in the media that they are using,
and if we were making a great effort as a society to avoid that division into two parts that I was talking about,
well, I think those would be big contributors to defeating the future rise of even more intense populism.
But these things are urgent. And so while democracy is not about to collapse, we do have to attend to it.
It is in a poor state of repair. And now it's like a building that we have to attend to,
that we have to refurbish and we have to make sure it's up to date again for the modern world with rules and regulations for the modern world,
which we don't actually have at the moment. All of this is part of resisting a collapse into populism in the future.
I'm going to ask you one more question before I hand over to a guy to give us some more remarks.
But I hope a positive note to end on.
Someone's asked you if there's a particular democracy and that you admire at the moment,
which you believe you could learn from someone where you think they're doing things well.
Well, we can all learn from each other, can't we, and there are many attractive attributes of British democracy,
but when we think of the pandemic this year, we can particularly learn from countries which have accepted strong scientific advice,
but not been under the illusion they can follow the science and where national,
local and regional leaders have been able to work together in a way based on that scientific advice.
If you looked at the major European countries,
you'd have to say Germany was a functioned better than the other big democracies in the face of this pandemic,
although they have many serious problems, as we all do today, with the pandemic.
And then you could point to other countries. I mentioned some of them.
I mentioned Taiwan, for instance, or we could look at New Zealand, which, of course inherited our own concept of democracy,
which have used their island advantage, democratic nations that opted for strict use of the advantage of being an island, something that we didn't do.
Although Guy is sitting happily in Guernsey, where they have absolutely used the advantage of being.
It's a very small island. And and one final observation.
What do all these countries I'm talking about have in common?
Apart from being democracies, they are all led by women. So maybe that is something we have to learn from.
Thank you. Well, that's a very interesting whole other question.
We could go go down that path, but I'm going to stop now and and before I come back,
just to round off and thank you to Guy so I can I apologise to people who invite some fantastic questions.
I have been able to fit them all in, but I hope that at least the essence of them has been captured,
most of them a guy you want to contribute your thoughts.
Thank you. And thank you, Helen, and thank you for that really insightful discussion.
And thank you to those people who raised some very obvious questions.
And sorry that we couldn't go on all evening, which I'm sure we could have done it.
Democracy today is a very hot topic. Interestingly, democracy in the seventies was a very hot topic.
And the good news is. The 70s finished and we did have some pretty good times, so I'm not negative at all, I'm concerned, but not negative.
Many people out there feel negative towards Western democracy today for many, many reasons, some some of which in a lot of which William identified,
he also identified it's very important to remember that democracy takes many different forms.
People often forget. What the advantages of Western democracy actually is.
I think about the Cold War and how for 50 years we were fighting a battle against communism on behalf really of Western democracy,
in the process of that fighting, we really forgot the reasons why we were fighting the battle in the first place.
And to a large extent, winning of that battle. Meant that we didn't have the same belief in defending what we thought was good about democracy.
Democracy is a is a very, very good system. It comes with a lot of values that are wonderful values, it's really, really important.
Unfortunately, the polarisation that's occurred, as we have pointed out over the last probably the last 30, 40 years,
but it's crept on us very slowly and then over the last 10 years, it's become very obvious, has threatened the form of democracy we've got used to.
In the States. We now have the most polarised of all Western democracies.
And that polarisation is a huge threat. I believe we have a functioning and engaged democracy is worth saving.
But I think to bring democracy back to life. Is going to require.
Very direct representation and participation by many of those it represents.
That doesn't mean quick referendums. It doesn't mean people going on Facebook.
It doesn't mean people putting slogans up in their driveways.
The issues we face today are complex.
However, my view is that the population actually has an amazing ability to understand the complexity of those issues,
if taken out of a system which shouts and screams and doesn't give anyone time to think.
How we get a level of honesty, of communication stays critical system is clearly difficult.
covid has like a bear the consequences and the huge challenges facing Western democracy.
When you can't have those discussions, it's taken place at a time when a large part of society doesn't feel represented.
And on the one hand, you can see in countries around the world, most clearly the United States,
where we don't have a consistent policy, which everyone can buy into.
You can't deal with those. You have differences. And literally thousands of people die who there was no reason to die.
However, on the other side, it's also shown and as he points out, this has largely happened in countries which have been run by women.
It's also showed how collectively society can do good.
And we shouldn't forget that within the U.K., there's been a massive community social response that's been largely positive,
people across the country looking out for their neighbours, the inspiring image of Captain Toms determined fundraising for the NHS and changes
occurring in everything from how we run hospitals to how acute a grocery stores.
Those ideas and those behaviours come up from the bottom and they've come up where people have felt engaged,
and that proves to me that when people are engaged to solve problems, change shouldn't be radical and it can be quick.
I see this same businesses the whole time, and I'm sure it's exactly the same in politics.
As William said, good democracy is not about those who win the vote, imposing their values on anyone else.
Democracy is about bringing people together. Not just the individuals being voted in, but also collaborating with the losers.
To achieve by and for the majority of population children, I have a simple belief, the society that as many people as possible.
Coming up, solutions.
Which achieves general support, but will not just be a happier society, it will also be a more successful and prosperous society.
That's why as 20 years ago, we supported Mansfield in going for diversity.
We founded a new charity, Engage Britain. Last year, engaged Christians mission is to build commitment to people power policy.
It exists to ensure that people, communities sit at the heart of finding answers to the challenges facing the UK.
It aims to support people learning from each other and working together to develop new ways forward and find solutions to our greater challenges.
In business, all the businesses I've been involved had the answers come not from the people at the top, they come from the people at the bottom.
And they rise to the top and then the people on top can get people can push them through,
but that's they aren't the people who come up to them and therefore drop it in Great Britain is not to come up with the answer.
S to make it easier for people who have goodwill will therefore get assistance, even those with differing views, even those with very different views.
To not to get together, not just with those like me with but also with those they strongly disagree with.
It's simply there to help people engage, not to lecture.
Not to tell them what to think, not to tell them what to do, not to them, but to make it as possible in Britain to engage as many people as possible.
Coming up, the answers. I believe that technology, which has been very negative, can also be positive.
I've got absolutely no idea what decisions can be made by these groups, what policies will emerge.
But what I do know is to make things succeed. You have to bond, you have to involve everyone.
And I believe that this is the path to save Western democracy over the next 20 years.
The path has to be one about how we get the conversation going amongst the majority of people, the so-called silent majority.
If you're interested in learning more about engage and joining the conversation, this is a terrible idea.
But I'm going to give it. You can go to engage Britain dot org and sign up to to to learn more, receives the newsletter and get information.
I really, really enjoyed listening to William.
I really, really do believe that saving Western democracy is really, really important.
Which values? I made a promise when I interviewed for Mansfield back in 1977 that if I got in,
I would spend a part of my life trying to find what I described then as the middle way.
I haven't done any of that yet, so I think maybe now after 41 years, it's about time for me to.
So I want to thank all of you for joining us today. A huge thanks to William Hughes, thanks to having the entire city put together.
And next year, Julian, I will see as many of you in person as possible.
Thank you. Back to you. OK, well, thank you very much, Guy and Julia, for all that you have done and continue to do for Mansfield.
And thank you also on behalf of Mansfield College to William Hague for the very thought provoking and actually inspiring thoughts about
why we can and must come together to protect our democratic societies and the ideas and the conversations we can have within them.
One of the things that this evening has made me feel is how lucky I am to have a job in such a deliberative, deliberative.
I still can't say the word and collaborative place.
One of the most special things about Mansfield is our remarkable track record in widening access to higher education.
It's been very much supported as guys explained by itself and junior Julia and other kind benefactors.
But it's also part of our nonconformist history. It's in our DNA to question who should be here, why they should be here and what they're learning.
And we think that we have evolved that concept in the way that the concept of democracy has evolved.
We are taking very much 21st century view of nonconformity and its very broad sense.
Our students at Mansfield are breaking new ground. Often they're the first in their families to go to university or funded through bursaries.
They share ideas they are questioning and they're brilliant scholars.
And some of them would not have believed that Oxford was a place for them or might not have had the chance to come
here if we hadn't over 20 years developed the ideas that we have about looking for merit in a very broad sense.
And we do believe that that is why Mansfield now rides so high in the Norrington table, which is the rating Oxford has for academic excellence.
We are delighted that because of moving this event online,
we have been able to have so many people join the conversation and consider the ideas
and please carry on sharing ideas with us coming and hearing different points of view.
If you want to find out more about Mansfield College, you can go to our website.
And there is real news. It's a film about Mansfield, some newspaper articles about us,
and many of the wonderful Friday talks which we've held are published there or recently.
You can see the recordings of them will go to the YouTube links for them.
So please do follow us on social media or check out our website for notifications of future talks.
This Friday is the final talk of the term and before our months of celebration.
And it's Rishi Dastagir, who's both a brilliant branding consultant and a wonderful poet who will be talking about creativity in
the 21st century and is a marvellous advertisement for the varied ways of being that man's can give.
People will help them find their own roots to. Now, just before I close,
I know there are a number of people who have joined us today who are great friends and supporters of Mansfield alumni and others.
And I did just want to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support of our college.
It does seem to be to be part of supporting democratic and plural discourse.
Mansfield, frankly, wouldn't be here without you, and we are very grateful.
So thank you, guys. Julia. Thank you, William, and thank you to everyone who's here tonight.