Tariff Special: The Intelligence Squared Economic Outlook with Helen Thompson (Part Two)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti.

Today is part two of our event with Helen Thompson, part of our Economic Outlook series, which is in partnership with Guinness Global Investors. If you haven't listened to part one, we recommend jumping back an episode to get up to speed with the conversation. In this half, Helen continues to unpack the far-reaching consequences of Trump's radical economic policies and explores how these shifts might redefine global power structures going forward. Let's rejoin the discussion live at Smith Square Hall now.

Let's go back to energy, if we may. You mentioned the problem of intermittency, of the wind not blowing and the sun not shining, to be very clumsy about it, and the need to therefore have carbon-based fuel generation on hand. How at all the issues of intermittency and net zero, the ambition of net zero, meet?

Well, I think that this is really hard. And I think that I come back to a point I've made in a number of different places, really, over the last five years, which is that it is quite staggering in retrospect how the UK Parliament came to legislate for net zero in 2019. It was June 2019. Theresa May was a lamed-up prime minister. It was incredibly difficult...

as we might recall, at times for even standing orders about how votes could take place in the House of Commons to be agreed upon by that House of Commons. There was nothing that it could agree on about Brexit to do on anything. And yet somehow, in the midst of all that conflict with the lame duck Prime Minister, is the House of Commons decided, without any meaningful division, that we were going to reinvent in this country the material basis of

of Western modern industrial civilization over essentially a 30-year period without a strategy for doing so. Not even really understanding how much the net bit of this was going to do of the work of net zero. And I don't think that there were people standing up in the House of Commons who were saying, well, why are we being that optimistic about solving the storage problems that are...

there in the face of intermittency and why is it the case that we can be as optimistic about using solar and wind as say the Spanish can be about using solar who I'm leaving aside what happened a few weeks ago but who can do a lot better simply on the simple fact of how often the sun shines than any North European country can do and I think that the reckoning for not having that political discussion

in making the net zero commitment back in 2019 is now coming. And it is part of the way in which Nigel Farage is trying to reinvent the Reform Party. And I don't think that the government, Starmer's government, has got answers to that any more really than Rishi Sunak's government did. And Rishi Sunak tried to pull back from the net zero agenda, but he found it, in practice, very difficult to do so. Were you advising...

would you be saying, pull back, pull back? Yeah, I think that there has to be a way in which we can be really serious about climate change and really serious about energy, to be realists about both. And I think the difficulty in this country, it wasn't only in this country, but the one that I've observed the most carefully, obviously, is it got turned into a binary question. Either you were serious about energy questions or you were serious about climate change questions.

And I don't think that's the right way of thinking about it. And that every country has to have an energy strategy. It has to be serious about that because energy is quite literally the life force of the universe. We can do nothing economically without energy. So wishful thinking isn't going to get us very far. Now, that doesn't mean that we can't be committed to an energy transition. In fact, I think...

that we have to be committed to an energy transition over the medium to long term for reasons to do with the dysfunctionality of fossil fuel energy markets themselves, and not just because of climate change. It just means that you have to be realistic about what can be achieved in energy terms

over the time frames that we're talking about and to recognize that there is no parallel in human history for the kind of commitment that net zero was because every energy transition that has taken place historically has been about adding new energy sources. It's not been about replacing.

energy sources. Now that doesn't mean energy sources can't be replaced if you look at again for long-term horizons, but you've got to understand, everyone's got to understand that what it would mean actually to eliminate energy sources in a world in which the expectation is that energy consumption will continue to rise. I mean we are incredibly lucky in living in a country where per capita energy consumption is as high as it is. It's not the norm and

to consume as much energy as we all do. And it's not like those parts of the world that don't consume energy at the rate in which we do don't want that too. It's a great luxury to be able to do this. Yeah, that's the world in which we live. That's what it means to be a rich country is to be an energy-rich country. What it means to be a poor country is to be an energy-poor country. They don't want to stay...

energy poor country and we have to think realistically about energy in all respects and this is the thing that the chinese are very good at the chinese do not think that it's a binary question they're doing astonishingly well compared to the rest of us with any number of renewable things but it doesn't change the fact that their fundamental approach to energy is as much energy as possible by whatever means is necessary to get to have

that energy they don't think in these binary ways but is it your presumption that when the new government walked into the ministries and you know one of them was edmund laban that there will have been civil servants coming up and saying look these suggestions these ideas this ambition is broadly speaking impossible at which point politicians have a decision to make i mean the

I understand that you are very learned, but there are other people who presumably know the numbers as well. There are people who know far more about energy than I do, not just because they're actually engineers rather than studying politics. I don't want to make this too personal about Ed Miliband. And it has got very personal in the newspapers. I think what's true is that Ed Miliband has an article as Faith...

that the energy transition is necessary for climate change reasons and that any compromise with that is not to take climate change seriously.

seriously. And so I think that he succumbs to wishful thinking about the energy questions because he doesn't want to think about the energy questions. He wants to think about climate change. And you can't actually think about climate change in the terms of actually having a different economic structure so we produce fewer carbon emissions without thinking about energy. And yet I don't think that that's where his mind goes.

I think his mind stays in the article of faith about climate change. So I think that in some sense, he mentally shuts out what he doesn't want to hear about energy.

Helen and I are going to talk for about five more minutes, and then we're going to move on to questions. We have questions coming in from the online audience. Thank you very much indeed. I look forward to getting to those, and we'll also speak to you here in St. John Smith Square. You've spoken of the need and written of the need for an energy revolution. Can you sketch out the shape of that?

Well, I'm not sure that I think that there should be an energy revolution, not least because I don't really think it's possible in any time frame that we can think about. But what I've been wanting to stress is that if you take the energy transition seriously, it would constitute an energy revolution in the sense that the entire basis of modernity, if you like, of modern industrial civilization rests on fossil fuels.

That is what the historical change of the industrial revolution, to my mind, is. Fundamentally, it would be better called the industrial energy revolution because that would get to the fundamental change, I think, in some sense in human existence that came about when we moved from primarily using human and animal energy with some wind tidal to moving to fossil fuel energy. So if we want to change that,

and move away from fossil fuel energy and use other forms of energy, we are redoing the Industrial Revolution. We are redoing what it means to be a modern human being. And so that, to my mind, entails, if you like, a counter-revolution against the form of energy revolution that the Industrial Revolution constituted. And if you look at what's happened in terms of the energy changes

that have taken place, including the one that moved from, say, using wood for burning it for heat to using coal for burning it to heat. It wasn't the case that wood stopped being used.

as an energy source for heat. There's still lots of wood being used for energy sources today. In the same way, when oil came along, it didn't replace coal. There's more coal being burnt in the world than there's ever been in human history before. And that's what I mean in saying that actually, when we say we're trying to achieve like net zero, we're trying to achieve something that hasn't been done before. That doesn't mean to say that it can't in principle be done. It just means to say that we need

if we're going to be serious about it, to understand the immensity of what it means to move to net zero. Let's go from one immensity to another. And I want to bring in the thoughts of Martin Wolf, who gave the last economic outlook here, actually. And he wrote in the Financial Times, I think last week, essentially that the old economic order was dead. Do you agree?

I do in the sense of that I think that the old geopolitical economic order is dead. In the sense it's that China's rise, both in terms of the size of China's population and its technological success, and actually maybe the third thing, and the fact that the share of

now is so concentrated in China means that the world certainly that I grew up in as a child of the 70s essentially I think has disappeared and I think...

that if you think about that through the lens of China, it's where it comes out most clearly. And I go back in a way to saying it in terms of the energy point. In the 70s, then most of the hypercapita energy consuming states were Western states, not entirely because of the Middle East, some of the Middle Eastern ones. They weren't particularly Japan accepted Asian states. That's simply no longer true.

Asia's the most populous part of the world. That fact alone means that the old order, the one that we grew up in, just I don't think exists in any way, shape or form any longer. And then if you look at a more compressed time scale and you look at what's happened, say, since the economic crash, like in 2008, is the world economy has just fundamentally become geopoliticized. I think there was always...

undercurrents of geopolitics. I mean, I wouldn't spend as much time thinking about geopolitics as I do. I didn't think that was the case. But it's much more overtly on the surface now. It's inescapable part of economic dynamics in a way that I don't think was quite true before the crash. I know you're an academic and you're sort of somewhat above the sort of the partisan fray. But when you look at

manufacturing and economic power of China and ally it to the fact that it is led by a government, broadly speaking, inimical to Western values, does it cause you concern? Yes, in the sense that I don't see any way in which the

world economy in which China has the part that it does and the United States has the part of which it does and the European Union has a part in which it does and I'm saying this in a non-judgmental way. I just don't see any way it can be of stabilizing it. I mean, I think there are consequences of China's form of government for these issues, but I think that even if China was more democratic or more liberal, I

in a deep sense, it wouldn't really make any difference to the instability. Thank you very much. Let's go to questions from the audience and also those that have come in online. First of all, you, sir. Yeah. Hi, Helen.

In a world in which things are unstable or unpredictable, countries with lots of options, so high optionality countries, might be in a better position. Would you say that Britain, would you characterize it as being a high optionality country? We've got lots of choices about what we do. Is it a low optionality one and we kind of have a small number of choices and have maybe some bad choices to make? Thanks. Thank you very much. Sir? Big question. Do you think we are worse governed

in the UK than we were a generation ago? And if so, by both our politicians and our administrative class, why is that? Thank you. And then the microphone to the gentleman there with his hand up in the blue shirt. Thank you. Hi, thank you for your analysis on the energy market. Very interesting. I note most of your comments were on a macro supply side.

To the average consumer though, what really mattered during the crisis was pricing. To what extent do you think OfWatt was totally captured by the energy industry and as a result prices were a lot higher than they used to be? Just to give two examples, it appeared at the time, and there was a lot of talk in the press, that wholesale prices that went into the energy formula were based on the European wholesale price

rather than the British wholesale price, which was a lot cheaper as we had an excess supply because we couldn't get the excess down the channel converter. And secondly, that the transmission costs looking at the formula, I know this is quite detailed, but it's illustrative.

rose very significantly along with the gas price, which struck me as absolutely perverse because you're still fundamentally putting the same amount of gas through the same pipes, albeit at a higher price. Thank you. Let's start with the, I think it was high optionality and low optionality. And that was for Britain, wasn't it? Yeah. I mean, I don't think that we have particularly good options. And that's partly the legacy of history and

in the sense of we've had very complicated relationships with Europe in one way or another, and I don't just mean as the European Union, and that in circumstances in which the European Union developed in the way in which it did, and particularly in which we stayed out of the Eurozone, I mean, I think for good reasons that we stayed out of the Eurozone. I think we're kind of doomed to have a complicated relationship with the European Union without good choices, right?

I think that that was made quite clear by the whole saga of Brexit from the point in which Cameron called the referendum until I was actually leaving the European Union. As I've already said, I think our energy choices are pretty difficult. Some of them are not things that we can control.

being like the weather. Some of them are the legacy of, I think, poor choices in the past and then the interaction with the macroeconomic problem. It doesn't mean that we're powerless completely. I mean, I think, for instance, that one of the things that the present government has not done a good job on, because it's one of the easier wins in the set of not great options with which it is confronted, is house building.

in terms of as an engine for some growth in the economy. But I don't think that we have the options of the United States, certainly. But even if you look in a European context, and let's say we were trying to think that there were certain, perhaps, advantages that the UK in principle has in the AI field compared to other European countries. But

If you look at it in terms of our electricity costs and you look at the importance of electricity for AI data centers, then we have a problem. I mean, why wouldn't you go to Spain where the electricity costs are going to be significantly cheaper than come to the UK? So I think a lot of British policy is having to make the best of bad choices.

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McCrispy strips are now at McDonald's. I hope you're ready for the most dippable chicken in McDonald's history. Dip it in all the sauces. Dip it in that hot sauce in your bag. Dip it in your McFlurry. Your dip is your business. McCrispy strips at McDonald's. Which leads us towards the question from the gentleman in the front about are we, do you think we are better or worse governed than, I think you said 20 years, several generations ago, whatever, whichever way you want to phrase it.

I think that if the point of comparison is 20 years ago, I'm not really that convinced that the quality of the political class, I think the administrative class is a bit more complicated question, has gone down. I think the fundamental thing that has happened is

is that our structural economic position, ultimately, I believe, driven by the energy position, has deteriorated very substantially. And that period which Mervyn King described as nice, which is essentially from about 1982 to 2005, so he meant non-inflationary continuous economic growth by nice, that was bound up not just with the general...

conditions of lower oil prices but also the particular British situation in relation like to the North Sea and then that interlude like came to an end so I think the political class faces much harder questions than it did and

I mean, I a little bit think there's been some deterioration in quality. Sometimes I think maybe I'm just being nostalgic for something that isn't true, if you see what I mean. I think what we can say is that the...

and obviously I take partial, not personal responsibility, but I'm not exempting people like me from this at all. I'm not sure that we do that good job of educating the political class. I think that the administrative class, there has been some changes that do worry me, and that's partly, I think, about the...

demographics of recruiting and giving senior positions to people who are significantly younger than would be the case I think I remember reading that the average age in the treasury in 2008 and the crash was 29 I think for dealing with the kind of incredibly complicated situation that the crash was in 2008 seems to me to be like rather young so these questions they do worry me

As I say, I always want to guard against the argument where you simply say, oh, things were better when you were younger. But I think that the fundamental change is actually about the difficulties of the predicaments rather than about the quality of the politicians. On the question about the costs and the pricing, I mean, I'm sure there's something in what you say, like on both counts, right?

What I do think, though, is that there was a very genuine gas price shock in not just 2022, but in 2021. And I've spent quite a bit of time in 2022 insisting on this point about 2021 because...

I think there was a tendency to sort of say, oh, well, it's all Russia's fault. And if Russia hadn't invaded Ukraine, none of this would happen. Whereas to my mind, it was a much deeper structural problem that was manifesting itself and was manifesting itself before Russia invaded and that Russia then intensified. And I think the reason why I think that this point is important is because it seems to me that what has happened in the last decade

10 years probably now, is that the natural gas market, particularly liquefied natural gas market, has become a center of tension between the European and the Asian parts of Eurasia. And that has come from the rise of Asian demanding in gas. In the same way in which Asian demand, particularly China's, in the first decade of the 2000s changed oil markets dramatically,

than the rise in their gas demand, particularly China's transformed gas markets. It created, if you like, structural competition between Eurasian countries in those markets

and that European countries benefited in 2022 actually because they could pay, were able to pay higher prices than most Asian states were willing to pay. So although I don't doubt that actually there were some

Taking advantage, shall we say, of the energy shock situation by energy companies, I think that the underlying issues about changes in supply and demand were real. And that actually they were driven in the first instance on the demand side and not by what happened with Russia's invasion on the supply side.

Thank you. Some questions that have come in from the online audience. First one, how much is the economic instability of the moment fuelling the electoral success of reform? How seriously should we take reform?

As I said, I do think that the net zero issue has become something that reform is successfully exploiting. I don't think it's the primary issue at the moment. I still think that migration is the primary driver of reform support plus, and this is where I think that energy is at least sort of subtext, if you like, because it's one of the best...

best examples of the difficulties that the Starmer government have faced. A lot of the support for reform, it seems to me, is driven by projection. The reality of the last six years now is that a conservative government was elected in this country with a quite reasonably sized majority, and very quickly it fell apart.

I mean, you've only got to think then to the autumn of 2022 when they ended up with three prime ministers in six weeks. Boris Johnson was elected in part because he wasn't Jeremy Corbyn, but also on the get Brexit done that was tied to migration and then implemented a policy that went off in the opposite direction. There's complete loss of faith there.

the Conservative Party as a governing party to the point that it's quite difficult to see how the Conservative Party recovers anytime soon from that and then I think Labour won for no other reason actually than how useless the Conservatives were so the projection went from how could the Conservatives be like this to well they're the opposition that's what you do when you lose complete faith in the government you put the opposition in and

But actually, even that was quite hard work, given the small proportion of voters historically, by historical standards, that voted for Labour. And very quickly, it doesn't deliver. And it gets itself into a whole set of both scandal kind of things with the expenses, but also decisions that are intrinsically very unpopular, like winter fuel prices,

And so it doesn't look that their ability to govern is any better than the government you've just kicked out. So what you then do, you project onto something else. And if reform had to in any way govern, the same thing would happen to them. I mean, I don't think they'll even get as far as the next election without it being projected somewhere else again, just because I think the underlying instability is so deep. And in that sense, I think...

the failure of British governments to solve, if you like, the growth problem underneath that, which I think to a significant extent lies the energy problem, is fundamental to why the voters or enough voters just keep almost like grasping for something else to put in place. Are you at all surprised by what you might describe as the impatience of the electorate?

The idea that after six or nine months of a Labour government, somehow the country would be, if not turned around, then turning around. No, I'm not surprised at all, because I actually thought this is what would happen to the government, the Labour government. I mean, partly because I don't think that they understood...

that they won the election because they weren't the Conservatives rather than because they were the Labour Party. But I think that the depth of the loss of confidence in the British governing class is too deep to...

You don't get a chance. You don't get a chance, no. Particularly you don't get a chance if you promise something and then you can't deliver it. Or I think that part of this goes to Starmer's problem is that he's not particularly convincing in the guises that he adopts. I mean, so if you take the get tough on migration speech that's come is...

it's the speech written by morgan mcsweeney like pretty clearly it doesn't sound very kirstarmer when when he gives it and so actually you know if this is what that they want to do as a response to the reform problem and say okay we're moving to the right like on migration you wouldn't say that kirstarmer was the prime minister that you would have to do that

Let's take another question from our online audience. Is there any clear Trump strategy? This is an easy one. If there isn't, can we take heart from the fact that the economic and political system survived his first administration and appears to be surviving the second? I mean, I think that Trump 1 and Trump 2 are really quite different from each other. I think that it's not at all clear that actually Trump wanted to win in 2016 or that he expected...

And obviously, if you look at trade policy in the first term, he did turn to a trade war in 2018 with China. And there were some tariffs on the European Union, steel too. And there was renegotiation of the NAFTA agreement with Mexico and Canada. But if you look at the central markets,

plank of that, which was the attempt to reset trade with China, he was quite pragmatic about it. And he actually did get what he wanted, which was the agreement in January 2020. It was the pandemic that then ensued and meant that that agreement was never really implemented. I don't think there's anything that was anything as chaotic in the approach during the first term. And if you take another instance, Canada,

Again, quite confrontational on trade with Canada in the first term. Nothing like what he's been like this time. I mean, there was no mention last time of annexing Canada. And if you listen to him, I think he is sort of half serious about it.

this he does think that canada is a problem for the united states i think in a geopolitical context in terms of competition with china china's canada's in his mind openness to chinese influence so i'm not so sure that we can take comfort from how things worked out last time and say that that's what things will be like this time nonetheless i would say that although i think that the

non-strategy tactics, whatever we're going to call them, chaotic, that there is some rhyme and reason to it as an American president trying to reset the world order. And I think that if Kamala Harris had won the election, you'd

we'd have seen a different way of trying to reset it and would have taken much longer into the presidency for it to become clear. But I still think there would have been some attempt at reset. And partly that is because the United States cannot continue with its debt in the way in which it has. And so something is going to change. And as I say, what's very disruptive and risky is the way in which Trump is going to go about trying or is going about trying to bring about that change and being willing to take...

What are risks that our normal politicians simply wouldn't do in a democratic politics? And I think if you wanted a good example of where he's both different from himself last time and different than politicians that America has produced, at least since Jimmy Carter, with the comments that he made about how, well, these girls don't need $20, they can make do with two. There's sort of a willingness to attack consumption.

almost to attack excessive consumption. That's not something that any American president sounded like since Carter in the 70s in the context of an economic crisis. And what it suggests is Trump's willing to sort of turn on their head, a certain chivalrous in democratic politics. You don't do that, particularly in American democratic politics. You don't attack consumer interests.

And if he's serious in what he says and whoever knows whether when he is when he isn't, then that would suggest someone who might be prepared to accept quite a lot of disruption to try to get what he wants. We're going to have to leave it there. Thanks to you, Helen. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks again to Guinness Global Investors for supporting this event. It's just been a real pleasure for the last hour and a half. Thank you very much indeed.

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Cirenti, and Connor Boyle, and it was edited by Mark Roberts. To join us at our future live events, you can head to intelligencesquared.com forward slash attend to see what we have coming up. This is an ad by BetterHelp.

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