Matthew Syed isn’t simply a newspaper columnist. As the descriptions for the various podcasts he has appeared on will tell you (among them, Eat Sleep Work Repeat and Jonny Wilkinson’s I Am…), Syed is a “thinker”. He’s a corporate consultant, a keynote speaker, and the author of seven books, among them 2019’s Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking, as well as the more humbly titled kids’ book, You Are Awesome: Find Your Confidence and Dare to Be Brilliant at (Almost) Anything, published in 2018 (and described as an “uplifting read” by Dermot O’Leary).
Syed has been in the news this week after a speech he gave at the Conservative Party conference on Monday. The Tories, now banished to the wilderness, withered by the rise of Reform, are in need of an idea. And who else to turn to but a thinker? At the outset of the speech, he offered a “simple and devastating” reason as to why “the greatness of Britain is fading”. Not the privatisation of public wealth after 14 years of Tory rule, not the mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, or the chaos of Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, not the repression of free speech under Keir Starmer’s government or the growing influence of foreign tech oligarchs and their support for Britain’s far right. The reason we are in this mess is, for Syed, this: “The jamboree of British politics moved wildly to the left.”
The audience in Manchester sat in bewildered silence as Syed gave his reasoning. After the usual scaremongering about mass immigration and “the bigotry of reverse discrimination”, Syed explained that Britain is now more left wing than ever due to “a massive expansion of the state in almost every sphere”. In 2001, “debt as a proportion of GDP was 30 per cent. It is now 100 per cent and rising.” In the last 20 years, “taxes have soared to their highest level since the 1940s”. Meanwhile “regulations have spiralled”, adding “a dead-weight burden to entrepreneurs” and stifling “the dynamism of capitalism”.
Even the uninitiated among you may well point out that if the percentage of debt as a proportion of GDP were the criteria for whether or not a country is left wing then Singapore (173 per cent) would be to the left of Venezuela (164 per cent) and the US (124 per cent) would be more socialist than Cuba (119 per cent). But Syed is, after all, a rebellious thinker. With characteristic mental acuity, he has even noticed that the right and far right are now more left wing than ever: Reform’s proposals to “nationalise the commanding heights of the British economy” and remove the two-child benefit cap are “way to the left economically of the Corbyn-McDonnell manifesto of 2017”. “I do not believe Nigel Farage is a racist,” Syed argued, “but I do believe, based on what he has said, that he is a socialist.”
The problem with Britain is, for Syed, summarised by one statistic above all others, delivered with the emphatic faux-outrage of an accomplished after-dinner speaker on a roll: “53 per cent of British people live in households that take more from the state than they pay in.” This may well be true, but Syed doesn’t think to consider the point he is making. Does he mean to say that we should all pay more into the state than we take? That each of us should make a net loss on the amount of tax we pay? That the state should rip us all off, and that none of us should see a return on the investment we make into our environment, infrastructure and culture?
Syed did not address this in the speech. In fact, he preferred not to interrogate or qualify the statistic at all. As well as the Lionel Asbos of this world, that 53 per cent would include, presumably, the royal family and every sitting Member of Parliament – which Syed would know from experience had he been elected as MP for Wokingham in 2001 (he stood for Labour and came third). That 53 per cent would also include, surely, the beneficiaries of PPE Medpro, the company that was this month ordered to repay the government £122m for substandard PPE during the Covid-19 pandemic. Earlier this month, the BBC reported that “an interim report for the chancellor said failed PPE contracts had cost the taxpayer £1.4bn”.
Syed is uninterested in the idea that capitalists have been ripping off the British state for decades. The truth is the UK in the first quarter of the 21st century has been less like Soviet Russia than its post-dissolution counterpart. Just like the so-called “wild Nineties” in Moscow, Britain today is beset by rising inflation, botched privatisation, and growing social turmoil. Our public assets are continually extracted to enrich a few powerful figures. And this isn’t, as Syed thinks, a left-wing arrangement: indeed, one of the few politicians trying to devise an alternative to “rip-off” Britain is the Green Party’s Zack Polanski.
So what, really, is Syed rebelling against? Accuracy of thought? Precision of judgement? His argument that Farage and Reform are socialists is really no more than political name-calling: Syed hopes that calling Farage a socialist will make Reform less attractive to right-wing voters. But if the Tories are to do well enough at the next election to prevent a Reform government, they’ll need more than this playground tactic. Forget rebel ideas: they need a real one.
Before his “intellectual” career, Syed was a distinguished sportsman: for almost a decade he was England’s highest-ranking table tennis player. He was the English men’s singles champion four times (1997, 1998, 2000, 2001) and he represented Team GB at two Olympic Games: Barcelona in 1992 (first-round knockout) and Sydney in 2000 (first-round knockout). This may seem, at first, incongruous, but what could be more apt? Syed’s ideas, like ping-pong balls, are full of air: they move quickly, bounce clumsily, and you have to do that embarrassing stoop if you want to pick one up.
[Further reading: Kemi Badenoch rides Tory conference high – for now]
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