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Unknown A
So I'm curious about your thoughts because I would organize the hierarchy. It sounds like slightly different than you. You do, but I see why you're doing it. I think about the religious presuppositions as being the deepest presuppositions and then the cultural presuppositions nested inside those. Now you just pointed to a situation where the cultural framework supersedes the religious and alters it. And so, you know, you can see that, you can see that there could be a shift in that. But having said that, I'm very curious about your comments on a high trust society, because it's been my understanding that there actually isn't any natural resource except trust. Like if you have trust, then everything can become a resource because you can now cooperate or even compete in a civilized manner that's sustainable and productive over the long run. But it does require this intrinsic trust.
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Unknown A
And then the question would be, what are the characteristics of a high trust society? And you point it to some while there's everyone thinks violence is wrong. That would be one nobody steals, no matter what, right? And this is something that's particularly characteristic right now, let's say of Japan that's starting to disintegrate in the west. And we've seen a lot of that in the United States, for example. Like the problem with low trust societies is you have to be suspicious. In a low trust society, everyone's a potential enemy. In a high trust society, everyone's a potential friend and collaborator. Well, you're rich in a society like that. And that Japanese are another good example of that. Japanese have no natural resources, but they're rich. And the richness there, their wealth is their ethos, their moral ethos. The fact that the default Japanese citizen is unbelievably law abiding, unbelievably law abiding.
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Unknown A
Now your sense, your intuition is that you fragment high trust societies with a careless immigration policy sake, a careless multiculturalism. And there's Robert Putnam, the Harvard professors shown that quite clearly that more homogenous societies, let's say, tend to be higher trust. And I guess it's partly because there are just fewer differences to take into account, right? There's a shared set of presumptions about the nature of proper behavior and of reality itself. And if you diversify that to great a degree, nobody knows which way is up. Nobody can tell the difference between a man and a woman, for example. But what do you think is dissolved in what do you think dissolved or is dissolving in the west, in the UK more particularly. That is undermining that high trust reality that was part and parcel of UK culture. I mean, the queueing is a good example of that even.
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Unknown A
I mean, it's something that people always point to when they go to the uk. But it really matters that people will spontaneously organize themselves without duress, in a civilized manner. Right. It speaks volumes about the nature of the culture itself. What do you think has undermined that?
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Unknown B
We still queue, by the way. I remember someone showing a video. There was a set of riots that happened about 10, 15 years ago and the looters were queuing to get into the shop. We still.
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Unknown A
That's good. Civilized looters. That's a good thing to see.
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Unknown B
Yes, we still keep. So the question is, what is the thing that is undermining the high trust nature of our society? And I think it's complacency. And you know, you talked about the careless immigration policy. This is something that I find unbelievably infuriating. How did this happen? Because everybody thought someone else was dealing with it. And whether the minister thought the Civil Service was doing it or the Civil Service thought that the bos, the border people were doing it and so on, at the end of the day, we as the political party in charge have to take responsibility for that. But it's one of the things that I find most frustrating because there is a complacency in this country that it doesn't matter when something's happening because everything's going to be okay. We are the uk, we are a rich country. And so everything's going to be fine.
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Unknown B
And it doesn't matter what you do, the UK is the uk. It's a civilized country. People queue and it doesn't matter how many people come in, we're always going to be the uk. Everything'going to be. Everything's going to be fine. It is complacency. And the complacency comes, from my view, the memories of harder times receding, almost fading from living memory. And by that I mean war, when people were very alive to the threat from other people, other countries. When you have generations that have grown up where everybody is having a great time and we're not really at war. And, you know, I think all of that contributes to the complacency that's number one. And complacency means that people stop looking after things because they think it's always going to be like that. And there are a large number of people across our cultural establishment, even the political establishment.
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Unknown B
I would say, in fact, it's probably especially the political establishment who are suffering from what I call cargo cult syndrome. Do you know what I mean by cargo cult syndrome?
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Unknown A
You should explain it for people though.
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Unknown B
Okay, so just to summarize and paraphrase, In World War II, there was a plane that would drop supplies on a Pacific island. And the islanders saw air traffic control people moving their arms, they saw runways had been drawn and eventually a plane would come around and drop the food. And after the plane stopped coming, they wanted the food supplies to return. So they drew lines on the ground and they made the hand signals, but they didn't understand why the food was no longer coming, why were the plane'not coming. And it is what happens when people have a very superficial observation of what is happening and assume that they understand it all and they know everything. They don't test themselves, they don't really query. And I see that behavior in a lot of politics. Just today we had a chancellor who went out and made a whole bunch of announcements, oh, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that.
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Unknown B
And said, we're delivering growth. That is not how growth is created. Announcements are not policy. But many politicians have just seen that you stand up and you say, we're going to do this. And they imagine that there's an army of minions somewhere that make the thing happen. This is what happened with our immigration policy. You know, the ministers would say, the prime minister would say, we're going to cut immigration, vote for us. And an assumption that we've said it, of course, you know, the people who are responsible for doing it will make it happen. It was complacency and I hate it because I always felt that immigration in this country was too high. But I did know that we needed to get good people coming and high skilled because other people were leaving and you needed to replace that. It never once crossed my mind that as we were saying, let's have some good, high skill immigration in limited numbers, that people would use that to wedge the door open and effectively just let anyone who had a good story come in that needs to be fixed.
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Unknown B
And just because we got it wrong before doesn't mean that we don't have a right to talk about it anymore. We know more about this than anyone else. We know how to fix it in a way that other parties don't. And we have the will as well. Certainly under my leadership. And that's one of the things that I'm trying to get people to see, that the Conservative Party is under new leadership. I am a different person from what we had before. And, yes, I was there when we had those previous governments, but I was working on the inside to stop a lot of nonsense which is aggravating people out there, and I will never stop doing that.