I'm Tom Billio, and this is Impact Theory. Today I'm joined by Rory Stewart, former diplomat, politician, and author who has spent his career navigating the high-stakes complexities of geopolitics and economics. We dig into some of the most pressing issues influencing our lives today from the rise and causes of populism and social media's ability to mess with people's heads to the profound effects of economic inequality and rising unrest across the globe. Rory is extremely thoughtful, and while we disagree on many things, he has a voice that I think adds an important dimension to public discourse and I'm glad that I had a chance to sit down with him.
I'm eager to hear what you guys think about his ideas, so be sure to leave a comment on Spotify with your take. With that, I bring you my conversation with Rory Stewart. Rory Stewart, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.
It is an honor, man. You're going to help all of us think through what I think are some very difficult problems, and I want to start with the economy and some of the knock-on effects. So let me ask, why are so many Western economies right now very fragile? Well, I think one answer is that nobody really knows.
I mean, it's amazing how often very distinguished Nobel Prize-winning economists get this stuff wrong. But clearly, we have certain problems, and the most obvious one is demographic. So most of our countries are birth rates falling, and we're getting older. And as we get older, we become more expensive to look after, particularly medical terms.
In Britain, the statistics are very stark. When we set up the welfare state before the first world war, there were 20 working people for every one retired person. Today, we've got just under three working people for every one retired person. So you can see the balance has changed dramatically in terms of who's paying for who.
Second bit that comes out of that, of course, is that our economies are increasingly dependent on immigration. And that's particularly for running care systems, running service industries, but it's also increasingly true for skills. And the problem there is that immigration is very unpopular, with large swathes of the population in the US and Europe, and it's driving a lot of votes for the populace right. And I guess the center hasn't really worked out how to deal with that.
So maybe those are two things to be getting on this. All right, those are two very good things. So let's first address the demographic bombshell. As we have this happen, the pyramid gets inverted.
We have a ton of people at the top that are going to require a lot of care. They're no longer in the workforce. Is immigration going to be the only response to that? Or do you look at something like AI and you say AI and robotics is going to solve the problem?
Or do you take a totally different approach to this? Well, I think ultimately, immigration can't continue always to be the answer because if you did that, your population would keep growing indefinitely. And in the United States, I guess it's a very, very large country. But in some of the United Kingdom, we're already more densely populated than India.
So if the pyramid inverted and then you tried to build a bigger base to the pyramid, by bringing in more and more people indefinitely over the next 300 years, you'd end up in an impossible situation. Ideally, you want not to have a pyramid at all. You want to have something that's pretty static and sustainable. And to get to that, you've really got to work out how to become more productive.
And that includes more production of the care industry. So that does involve learning from Japan on what can be done with machine learning, what can be done with robotics. It involves thinking seriously about jobs that we currently do that may be replaced by AI. And that, of course, we're often reluctant to do because we're very risk averse.
We can be very impacted by regulations, by unions and by others. But no, I don't think the answer can be indefinitely bringing in more and more younger people because those people get old and they in turn will have to be looked after by more and more younger people and you'll end up with a never ending growth. Okay. Well, here is an interesting hypothesis.
So one thing that does seem to be playing out is that the immigrants that are coming into the country are coming from countries that have higher birth rates. Now, that could give you that static column that you're looking for over time, obviously you're going to have this sort of weird transitionary period. But what becomes fascinating is you get this very populous spark against that because what drives the higher birth rates is a wildly different culture. That seems unarguable.
And without putting any value judgment on whether one culture is better than another, I will say it is the architecture of the human mind is very tribal by nature. We grow up in the culture that we grow up in. We tend to hold on to that. And so anything that disrupts that is going to cause this sort of weird moment that I see us living through.
Do you think that is an accurate read on why we're seeing populism now or is there something else afoot? So I think that that's partly it. Although remember that immigrant communities have often had much higher birth rates. So if you look at the Irish American community when it began to come into large numbers in the United States, late 19th, early 20th century, they had significantly larger families than the kind of...
And you think that's a function of being an immigrant? It's usually a function of poverty. It's not really a question of which part of the world you come from. Poor people tend to have larger families.
And that's partly because if you're coming from a subsistence economy, you feel you need firstly the labor of your children. But secondly, most importantly, you're worried some of the kids are going to die and you need a lot of replacement. So birth rates come down for a number of reasons. One of them is that you think that the children you have, you hope, are likely to survive and adulthood.
Secondly, kids become more expensive. They no longer seem as they might do if you're a small farmer in Ecuador or in Ireland as though they're net positive and contributed to the family. Instead, you get into a worldview where you think, oh my goodness, I'm going to have to pay for that college education on this, that and the other, and they're not really going to bring me much in in return. So we can see that those countries get wealthier.
Their birth rates fall very dramatically. And the biggest birth rates in the world, place like Niger, which at the moment is in the Sahara in Africa, has a birth rate of about 7.6 on average per couple. Whoa. But that's one of the very poorest countries on Earth.
And I assume they still have a pretty dramatic infant death rate. Huge infant death rates. Whereas countries like Italy, which had very high birth rates in the 1950s and now in a position like the United States where the indigenous population is shrinking. So it's not a simple question of culture and religion.
The way that we used to think, we used to think, the point is that I don't know, people from Italy or people from Ireland had big families because they were predominantly Catholics and there were provisions on the use of birth control. It now seems more plausible that the reason they had big families, generally speaking, was that they were poorer. Is the rise of populism predictable? Or is this a totally unrelated thing to immigration, totally unrelated to the economies?
And it just happens to be happening at the same time because in my current mental model, they are effectively one in the same phenomenon. Yeah. So I think the first thing is that you're right. There's a very, very strong factor there.
Immigration is clearly driving the rise of far-right populism across Europe and the United States. And if you were trying to explain why the far-right in Germany just got nearly a third of the vote in the latest state election, that's very closely related to immigration. You just have to see their literature. You have to interview their supporters.
It's immigration. And the perception is that the ruling elite has failed to control borders. It's a little bit more nuanced than you might think because often the people interviewed will say, look, we're reasonably happy with having a more diverse society. We just want to know that we've got control of our borders.
In fact, we don't even mind more people coming in, provided we think the government's making the choice to do that rather than being forced to do it by, in Britain, for example, a debate between people who are very, very focused on the absolute numbers, which is a minority, and the people who are focused on people who are legally crossing on votes, which seems to be the thing that's upsetting people most. On your second question, which is, are immigrant populations generally having more children? Yeah, there is some evidence for that. I mean, this stuff is all very controversial.
And, you know, I'm waiting into tricky territory, but in London, for example, it seems as though over 60% of the children born in London are born to people whose parents were not born in the United Kingdom. When looking at this problem, there are obviously conspiracies that abound. The great replacement theory, people get very paranoid that there's something that is happening intentionally. Now, you've said that one of the ways to offset the inverted pyramid is to bring in immigrants, not going to solve the problem the whole way, but when you have an economy that is based on growth, which I would say in the West is the primary base assumption of our economies.
So you have this economy that requires growth. You are the elites making policies. You probably are going to be pretty pro people coming into the country. Then, if you have stats like this, and London over 60% of the people are born to mothers that are foreign, all of a sudden, I hate even using the phrase replacement theory.
But it's like, that is a fact that is happening. That the people that are locally, that are already there are birth rates far lower. And so they're just, you know, again, trying to use financial language. Yeah.
And again, there's an interesting thing that I need to learn from you about, which is the difference between the United Kingdom and Europe and the United States, on the other hand. So the UK and Europe, predominantly, if you looked at the genetic profile of people living in the United Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s, a very high proportion were descended from people who had been there 6,000 years ago. It's now clear that these Viking invasions, the Norman conquest, didn't really change the gene pool of Britain very much. The United States is different.
And that's what I never quite understand in the Great Replacement Theory. And the Great Replacement in the United States was of course the Great Replacement to the Native American population. And therefore, as a European looking at the US, I get a bit confused. I mean, what exactly is it that people are anxious about?
Their own parents, grandparents, grandparents, where immigrants are not that long ago. So presumably, that's a little bit different to what's going on in Europe. I don't think it is. So this feels to me like the phrase I will say a lot.
This is just the architecture of the human mind. So Dave Chappelle has a quote that I think can be broadly applied, which is, everything is funny until it happens to you. When you're the person coming in and conquering and getting the land, hey, it's all good. When you are the person being conquered, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
And now all of a sudden, it's all breaks all the time. What the hell is happening? And so that to me, I understand. I think it is just going to be the natural human response.
I would have expected Native Americans to be wildly pissed off as people roll in and start taking their land. And I would expect them to, as they did, fight to the death to feel betrayed every time a treaty was made and then broken to have longstanding generational bitterness over what happened. I think we see the exact same parallels between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All of this feels like, yeah, this is pretty predictable.
The things I want to tease out are how much of the future can we see by saying, okay, I understand the human mind. I understand how it reacts to this stuff. And I would like to predict as many of the second and third order consequences as possible. So I think now would be a good time to plan to flag in populism.
What is it exactly? And if I am correct that populism happens when you feel, in fact, there's one more thing I have to put out there. I have a feeling that people only conflict ethnically once you have cultural assimilation. If you don't have cultural assimilation, then people will fight at the level of culture.
So I would not expect ethnically diverse UK to be where the battle lines are drawn. I think people that sound and act quote unquote British will all get along no matter what they look like. And then people who don't and are espousing foreign values, that's going to be where the line of conflict is. And so to me, immigration is really a bigger question of assimilation, which is why it probably feels slightly different in the US.
Because I think the US ethos largely is one of, yeah, give me immigrants. I'm here for it. But when they roll up, they better feel American. So they better want American values.
If you roll up and you feel like you're trying to shut down the things that are classically American, then you're going to have a problem. That would be my gut instinct. Yeah. And the question of what's American, of course, changes have a time making it even more complicated.
Because I guess if you were part of the kind of Brahmin elites in Boston in the mid-1800s, you would have seen a lot of immigrant communities turning up in the 1800s as not being classically American in the way you defined it then in the 1850s, 1860s. And what's classically American now, I guess, is the kind of post-war American vision? No doubt. And you will, when you look back in history, you see the pockets of discrimination, violence, et cetera, when they are perceived to be the other, right?
That they haven't assimilated. And look, that's complicated. I know I'm sort of rounding things. Of course, they didn't just, to make it even more complicated, it's not just that people assimilate.
In assimilating, they changed the culture. So it's partly because of immigration that the culture of the United States in 2024 is quite unlike the culture of the United States in 1954 or the culture of 1924. And the same will be true in Britain. It's not that there's a given thing called British culture into which people assimilate.
In the process of assimilation, British culture itself shifts and alters. So, for example, you would expect, in 2030, it's time, very different views of the monarchy, the Royal Family in Britain. And that will be largely driven by people coming from other countries who didn't grow up with this Royal Family, who think a lot of British traditions are a bit peculiar. And a lot of those traditions will be stripped out and the same will happen in the United States.
If you end up with a much larger population, many of whose parents, grandparents grew up in Latin America, you will expect a more hybrid culture to emerge, which will have features, which will have more associated with Latin America and not associated with the Americas in the 1950s. The people who win, they're not smarter. They just absorb more ideas faster. There are thousands of books right now in business, psychology, leadership, books that have already changed how the best operators think.
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Yes. And the final button I'll put on that is no one likes change or the vast majority of humanity don't. So in any transition, everyone goes through transition, which is one of the big questions in my life right now. I've started paying attention to World Affairs.
Is that just because I'm about to turn 50? Or is something actually happening right now that we're paying attention to? I have a hard time parsing those. But it does feel like there's a larger wave of immigration, which I think is explained by economics.
We've already been through that. So I do feel like this moment is going to be more contentious. But I think your point is well taken, that these moments are occurring basically at all times. And even if it's just generational, where they're assimilating new values, you're always going to see this movement.
Okay. Plant a flag in populism for me. What is it exactly? Populism at its core is a very exclusionary worldview, by which I mean the populist claims to speak for the people against the elite, and usually claims that the elite is somehow foreign or alien to the country.
So when a popular says, I'm speaking on behalf of the American people or the German people, in actual fact, often their supporters are barely 50% of the population. But that's not how they present themselves. They don't present themselves in a pluralist way. They present themselves as having a monopoly on truth and identity.
And people who are against them are not perceived as fellow citizens who have a equally valid but different perspective on things. They're perceived as people who are somehow traitors to the cause. So it's got a sort of monopolistic structure built into it. And that's what makes it so dangerous.
That's why often you'll see populists challenge the constitution, challenge the rule of law, challenge checks and balances, because it's a mindset that assumes that they represent in a verdict comes to the real people, that they're right and everybody else is wrong. And therefore anything that stands in the way of doing things in the way that they want, constitutions, amendments, courts, legislatures are to be swept aside because they are defying the will of the people. And of course, this is not just found on the right. I mean, this was a very, very apparent in the Bolshevik revolution in the created the Soviet Union.
The Bolsheviks were a tiny proportion of the Russian population, but they claimed to be the people. And proceeded to rip up everything that stood in their way in order to fulfill the will of the people. And anyone who opposed them was a traitor to the people. If they actually don't have a majority behind them, why does that rhetoric work so well?
Well, I think it works partly because it gives a great deal of confidence and energy to their supporters. It gives their supporters a degree of moral legitimacy that they might feel they lacked if their leaders were just saying to them, well, you know, we've got ex-million votes and they've got a few more votes than us and we're going to take it in turns. That removes some of the authority, which is necessary for the extremism. It's also that they're able to draw on very deep roots of nationalism, blood and soil.
If you say you speak for the nation, you are making America great again, for example. You have a whole language which is not available to your opponents. Your opponents may be talking about tariffs or economic growth or how to fund a Medicare system, but you are saying, I am making my country great again. And the whole structure of that creates a very different type of politics.
Okay, so I have a thesis on why this works. Let me know what you think about this, I suppose I should call it a hypothesis. The reason that the strong man works, the reason that populism works, even when they don't necessarily, in the beginning, represent the majority of the population, is that leadership works because the average person feels lost and confused. They are looking for short hands, always.
This is just, again, architecture of the human mind. And a strong man will intoxicate people with certainty. They will say, this is the problem, this is what we're going to do about it, and your life is going to be better. I think it only works if there is underlying frustration in the populace, even people that would not have at the beginning of this identified.
There's, it could be a subtle as a malaise. Things aren't growing. I don't know why it feels like it's going to be worse for me than it was for my parents. Things just seem harder.
But if you have that open door of frustration or malaise and you come in and say, this is why you feel terrible. And this is what you need to do about it. People feel seen, they feel heard, and now they have an answer. They don't have to think for themselves.
They just have to identify with that person. And it's like, all right, well, things suck now, so I'm going to get on board with this. Yeah, I think it's right. I think any successful insurgent movement and populism by its nature is quite revolutionary.
Always has to draw on a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo. I mean, the only way you can run a campaign against the elites or the establishment is if the elites and establishment are associated with something that seems to be failing people. Now, some of that is objective and some of that can be made up. So objectively, the 2008 financial crisis was a humiliation for all the credibility of markets and exposed profound inequalities, inequalities between people's incomes and inequalities between people's wealth and inequalities between regions, right?
Difference between what it's like living in Flint, Michigan and what it's like living in Massachusetts. The Iraq and Afghan wars were complete humiliating catastrophes. Three and a half trillion dollars, so three and a half thousand billion dollars was spent by the United States as allies, and they achieved nothing. Invaded to get rid of the Taliban, spent 20 years in Afghanistan, handed the country back to the Taliban.
So these are objective facts, but it's also true that such facts exist at many other periods. And the question is, are the political entrepreneurs able to exploit people's frustrations successfully or not? So the Vietnam War was an equal catastrophe, but it didn't lead in the way that the Iraq and Afghan disasters did directly contribute towards the rise of populism. Now, why is that?
Partly because of social media, and I think one of the most dramatic changes in our lives has been the introduction of Facebook and Twitter and indeed the algorithms that underlie Google and the way that those have contributed to very, very particular ways of perceiving the world. Contributed to polarization, contributed to the erosion of borders, contributed to the dissolution of traditional news networks. And that's necessary because people in Flint, Michigan were always in a worse situation than people living in fancy parts of Boston. But the modern world makes that much more visible to people.
And I think, and also gives the populace an opportunity they didn't have before Donald Trump, for example, whatever you think of him, was an immense beneficiary of the world of social media, because he's able to benefit from the fact that if he says something provocative, in the 1950s, he wouldn't really be reported, right? The New York Times could ignore him. The television news anchors could decide not to cover him. He wouldn't really go anywhere.
As soon as the world of social media exists, if he says something provocative, he gets a double benefit. He gets a benefit from his supporters who say, whoa, this guy speaks the truth. He's given us permission to say things we haven't been able to say. But he also gets the benefit from the people who are outraged by him.
Because the people are outraged by him are also viewing his things, retweeting his things, sharing his things. And a whole revenue stream comes in and an attention stream from supporting outrage, which wasn't possible. Really before this stuff really gets going, I guess, in about 2014, when smartphones become very, very available and when a critical mass of people are using these platforms. So this contemporary populism, yes, it has some relationship to fundamentals, but it's much better understood as a product of a changing media culture.
Do you think that social media is a net benefit or a net attraction from society? I think politically it probably has been a net attraction. I think there's huge things that we all enjoy about it enormously. I think it gives us wonderful access to things with incredible ease.
I spend a lot of time on TwitterX, and like many people are all kind of wonderful rabbit holes that I go down, which I wouldn't be able to go down 15 years ago. I can look at cute cats. I can work out. I can follow people with strange theories on medieval Britain.
I can look at lovely architecture. I can learn how to follow a new diet regime, right? All that stuff I'm able to do. But when Elon Musk decides to take control of a platform like that and then say to people in Britain on X that there is a civil war in Britain and is able to guess it to a very, very large number of people instantaneously this claim and is then able to do something that wasn't possible in a traditional media, which is to have 500 replies, which seem to validate the post from people saying, oh, yeah, there is a civil war in Britain.
I looked out the window. Look at this. It has a power, which simply didn't exist before. There was no equivalent to this.
There was no way of doing that before. And that's what the Arab Spring was kind of the first hint of. Now, when it happened in the Arab Spring, did that feel positive or negative to you at the time? At the time, it felt positive.
At the time, I felt right the way through that social media and the internet more broadly was a wonderful, liberating phenomenon that would allow us to speak directly people to people that would push out the control of the old hierarchies and elites that would allow people to topple dictators to self-organize. And it took me some time to understand the risks associated with that. What are the risks? Well, the risks are exactly these examples I've tried to give from Donald Trump or Elon Musk of being able to mobilize very, very rapid, very aggressive, very exclusionary movements, often on the basis of very scant facts of getting visibility and support and enthusiasm for projects which previously were curated.
I mean, previously when news anchors dominated, when the newspapers dominated, there was a normative structure, there was an ethical structure embedded in the editors that chose what to display to the public and whatnot. And often that put an emphasis, for example, on the truth. I mean, these paper editors, of course, were always vulnerable to advertisers. They were always flawed human beings, but they had some notion of public service, and particularly publicly funded broadcasters, the NPRs, the BBCs to this world, believed they had an obligation to the public to try to check whether what was being said was true.
But as those business models have been destroyed and they have been destroyed, they have been destroyed so that these platforms now struggling to compete with a YouTube influencer who can make more money than the New York Times. Then it becomes much more vulnerable to all these things we're talking about, polarization, post-truth, populism. Let's talk about the most powerful force in wealth building. Compounding.
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I participate in restaurants in Canada. Do you think the general public is better off with a curated reality? Well, it's a really good question. I don't know how I work my way through that because you can see so strongly the arguments on both sides.
On the one hand, I was the beneficiary of social media. When I ran to be Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, I was able to come from nowhere and use social media to develop a momentum I would never have been able to find before. I was able to get huge support for my particular program in a very unusual way. I was able to circumvent traditional party structures.
I was able to crowd fund and do all that kind of stuff. And of course, people like me who tend to be on more on that side of politics. We got very excited by President Obama's ability to do that. Again, it's difficult to imagine his campaign in the old world of the democratic party machine.
On the other hand, if we are really losing any sense of truth, if anything goes, if we can no longer really rely on serious journalists with serious editors fact-checking, we find ourselves in the old world. Yeah. This I think is going to be one of the defining arguments of our time because to your point, you can see the arguments on both sides in terms of, man, the very sense of what is real begins to break down when you just have a wall of information coming at you. You need algorithms to parse the information in some way.
Even time-based display of the information is a decision, right? And not necessarily the best decision and it will be game and all of that. People will start posting right when they think the right people are waking up. It's really interesting, but I think it forces everybody to lay bare what their base assumption is about what I'll call the people.
And I have a base assumption that authoritarian rule is the only way to enforce a controlled narrative, even if you're doing it for the quote-unquote right reasons, that you will eventually have to do it through violence. And given that, my fear is always that the authoritarian government is far more terrifying than the mob, meaning a bunch of people let loose, going crazy, saying whatever they want to say. But I guess where the Founding Fathers would challenge you is they would say that that isn't really or shouldn't be the choice, that the idea of representative democracy was supposed to be finding a middle path between authoritarian despotism on the one hand and what you call the mob on the other, that these structures, the electoral college, the Senate, and coming out of that, things like the presidency was supposed to be ways of giving some voice to the people, but balancing that voice with other things, balancing it with a Supreme Court that was supposed to be composed of highly educated jurists, balanced with a carefully written constitution, an executive balance with a legislature, and elected senators and representatives who were supposed to be using their judgment and conscience, not simply acting as a transmission mechanism for whatever their vote has said, because if you are Thomas Jefferson thinking about government, yes, you want to get rid of the king, you want a revolution, but you do not have much confidence in the idea that a kind of free-for-all is the way to go, that things need to be curated and organized. I suppose this conversation we're having follows certain kinds of rules, certain kinds of expectations.
You know, you very courteously let me speak. I occasionally listen to you and ask a question back. But the risk and the public sphere is that those rules disintegrate, and you end up with nonsense. Yeah, I aggressively agree with the Founding Fathers.
I am completely enamored by what they put into place. I don't think that they could have ever conceived of social media, and it is very possible that they would have put different things in place had they been able to predict that, but I look at the first and second amendment and I say, yeah, word, like that's exactly how you have to be thinking. So the first amendment says you barring an incitement to violence, you have the right to say anything, and that has to be as a matter of priority as the first amendment that has to be protected. And I can go into reasons why, but I'm actually more interested here if you agree with that or not.
But the first amendment, and then followed up with the second one, which is the right to bear arms, and once you understand that the Founding Fathers were far more worried about the government becoming tyrannical and you needing weapons not to protect against your neighbor going crazy and coming and stealing your chickens, though, yes, that too, but that it's really about the government to become a problem. So to your point, they're trying to get away from the king, authoritarian rule. They're like, we don't want that anymore, but the people are like, hey, you don't just want anarchy, love the third way idea, but I think people need to, at a minimum, have a hypothesis of mind reading into the Founding Fathers and why they would put those as one and two. That was mine.
How do you take that? How do you feel about free speech? Well, I think the idea of free speech is a smart and good one, and I think it's good that you added short of incitement to violence. I mean, we just had this in the United Kingdom.
The people who've been prosecuted have not been prosecuted for sharing ideas. They've been prosecuted for defining how to attack immigrants and hostels, telling people to wear gloves, telling them what fuels to use, telling them which hostels to attack. These are not martyrs to expressing their views. The people who've been put in prison have been put in prison for stuff that you would be put in prison for before social media, that breaks your first amendment.
On the second amendment, look, this is a difficult conversation, but I come from the United Kingdom. In 1960s, we had about 100 people a year being killed by gun violence in the United Kingdom, and you had about 15,000 people a year being killed by gun violence in the United States. Fast forward, since when about two and a half million people have been killed by gun violence in the United States. We are now in a situation where in the United Kingdom we have about 65 people killed a year through gun violence, and you have approaching 45,000 people killed a year.
In other words, the number of people killed a year in the United States by gun violence has tripled when it's almost halved in the United Kingdom from a very low level to begin with. In fact, at such a low level, it's pretty difficult writing a crime drama in the United Kingdom. It's just not enough people murdered to be able to generate the plot, right? I mean, it's our average crime drama.
So basically, the body counts as most of the people that would be killed in the entire year. So I think that the Fanning Father's anxiety around despotic government is a good thing to be worried about. I think they would write to be concerned about it, but I also think that governing involves balancing very different considerations. It involves balancing the ways that societies change over time.
Technology changes over time. Would they have taken the same view of an assault weapon as they would have a musket, which is what they were talking about? Would their views of government change once government has the ability to surveil in the way that it does now? Would their view of government change if they saw that two and a half million people have been killed by gun violence in the 1960s?
I don't know. But I certainly think that one of the things that we have to do is remain alert to the possibility that the world changes, things change. And the things that we once believed, we may change our beliefs. I mean, I think a classic example in Ireland will be the debate around abortion, which has changed very dramatically in the last 40 years, from a very strong Catholic opposition to a compromise.
And the United States is now this very strange outlier. I mean, I was a member of the Conservative Party and Britain. I had a friend come to one of our conservative conferences in American. Couldn't believe the fact we didn't mention abortion at all in the entire conference.
It's just not a subject. Nobody talks about nobody's interested in it. We have a pragmatic compromise on how many days and the number of days beyond which you can't have an abortion. And the number of days within which you can.
And it's settled the issue basically permanently in Britain, Europe. And in the US, it hasn't. But that I don't think is telling you much more than that cultures change. And they change at different places.
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