British Parliament and Boris Johnson

HUGH HEWITT: Morning glory, America. Bonjour. Hi, Canada. Greetings, everyone listening on hughhewitt.com. In the relieffactor.com studio. I've been gone for the last two days, but I am back for this hour, because I did not want to miss the opportunity to talk with Dr. Larry Arnn about something I think is actually extraordinary.  

I think it's an incredible moment in the West. I think it's the rebirth of Britain, and I am overstating this only a little bit. Because I think what Boris Johnson did upon taking the keys to Number 10 was amazing last week, and I wanted to talk to Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, about it this week.  

Not just because it's the Hillsdale Dialogue, which it is, the last radio hour of every week. Everything Hillsdale is available at Hillsdale.edu. All of our conversations dating back to 2013 are at Hugh for Hillsdale.  

I wanted to talk to Dr. Larry Arnn, because this is one of the things on which he knows something. He knows how to actually pretend quite well on many things, but about the British parliamentary system, he knows a lot. And can we remind, for the benefit of our new audience in Bloomington, Indiana, for example, Dr. Arnn, how it is that you came to know so much about British politics?  

LARRY ARNN: Well, I went over there to get myself a girl, and I found that I had a bit of spare time, so I boned up on it. No, I went to England to study in 1977, and I ended up working for Martin Gilbert, the Churchill biographer, where I met my wife. And I watched Margaret Thatcher come to power and prosecute her first year as prime minister.  

And that's the best political theatre that I've ever witnessed with my own eyes, and British politics are a drama. And especially in those days, gosh, they were good, and so you're just watching the best show you ever saw. And you couldn't watch it back then, it wasn't on TV. But you could hear it on the radio and read it in the papers, which was a great thing.  

So yeah, and then if you study Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill is the individual, "I've turned down a dukedom," because he wished to be remembered as the man of the House of Commons. What was so important about that? Well, Churchill explains that at great length.  

HUGH HEWITT: I have to ask you, before we go further, it came to my attention this week at the Nixon Library that Frank Gannon had worked for Randolph Churchill for a while when he was getting his PhD at Oxford and pursuing a degree in Great Britain. Have you crossed paths with Frank?  

LARRY ARNN: No, we exchanged short notes years ago, and he knew Martin Gilbert way back then. And I knew of him from Martin Gilbert, but no, I don't know him.  

HUGH HEWITT: At some point, we'll have to arrange for you to meet, but he and I talk British politics on this coast, and you and I talk it on the East Coast. And I think it's edifying for Americans to know about it, because we are derived from this system, but our Framers did not want this system. And in a nutshell, Larry, why did we not want a parliamentary democracy in America?  

LARRY ARNN: Well, the source of the parliamentary democracy in America is not like the source of government—sorry, in Britain is not like the source of government, because parliamentary democracy developed out of monarchy, right? It took a long time.  

HUGH HEWITT: Yep.  

LARRY ARNN: And they had to cut the head off the king and depose another one. But the king had the authority, and then the first parliamentary gestures were the lords, the strong barons who also controlled land, having a body to get together and talk and advise the king. And then the society grew, and they included the commons.  

HUGH HEWITT: Doggone it if people didn't want to be involved.  

LARRY ARNN: Look, first of all, in Britain, the first election in which everybody, every adult, voted in Britain was 1928.  

HUGH HEWITT: That is pretty remarkable.  

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, and as late as 1875, there were still narrow franchises in rotten boroughs, which means boroughs that nobody lives in. And so the lord who controls the borough gets to really appoint the member of Parliament. In other words, they came to all of this after we did, and well after.  

HUGH HEWITT: And so they're developing along—it's called pathway evolution. They go in a different direction, but our Framers do not want the executive mixed up with the legislative.  

LARRY ARNN: And in that they were right, in my opinion, and they have the assent of Winston Churchill, who always interpreted the British political system not as Walter Bagehot interprets it. Cabinet and government is his deal, and he is the dominating commentator on the British constitution from the time he wrote in the late 19th century through 1950, as late as that. But Churchill never went along with that.  

What Churchill thought was, we have a system of separation of powers. We in the House of Commons pick the executive, and then we watch their every move like a hawk, and we debate them every week. And so everybody realizes, because separation of powers is born in the human nature itself, according to James Madison. In what respect are we all created equal? Not height, not weight, not smart, not anything, but we're all above the animals and below the angels.  

HUGH HEWITT: Yes.  

LARRY ARNN: And so we have to have laws, and those who make the laws also have to be controlled. And the first device for doing that is representation, in other words, we have to elect them. And the second device is separation of powers. And so the Founders had absorbed that from great writing. Especially Montesquieu, who was an inspiration to them on this particular point and the most important author on this subject, and so they wanted to divide the powers. Well, Churchill wanted to do that too and had an interpretation of the British constitution to show that they were divided.  

HUGH HEWITT: But when the power changes in Great Britain, it is not like the United States. It changes completely in the form of a person. When a prime minister falls and is replaced by a prime minister, that prime minister goes to the head of the table at Number 10, and what powers do they have, Dr. Arnn?  

LARRY ARNN: Well, we talked about debates the other day. That has been changed by television, because what the prime minister was, was the first among equals. And that is to say at the end of a—first of all, the executive action is delegated to the cabinet, and the cabinet does control what is debated in the House of Commons until the members get mad.  

HUGH HEWITT: Yep.  

LARRY ARNN: And then they take it back from them, and that happens commonly, by the way. They're always worried what the members think. If you're Winston Churchill and prime minister, as he was twice, you've got a guy in the Parliament in his second premiership. It was George Harvie-Watt.  

And if you're traveling around the world, say, fighting the war, he's writing you memos every day about what goes on in the House of Commons that day. So they are paying attention. They have to. So what more, if this were 60 years ago, they would sit down and have a cabinet meeting, and he would have to appoint his cabinet from people who commanded respect in the House of Commons—sorry, in his party in the House of Commons. So that he could win a vote of his party members in the House to be the leader of the party, which is what makes you prime minister.  

HUGH HEWITT: Now, quick question. The leader of the House of Commons is not the prime minister, but he is a member of the government. We have a new leader of the House of Commons in Jacob Rees-Mogg, which is I think a terrific development. But did Churchill ever serve as the Leader of the House?  

LARRY ARNN: No.  

HUGH HEWITT: So it's the one job he did not have.  

LARRY ARNN: Well, yeah, and that job typically is joined with—well, back in Churchill's day at least—was joined with some other job. You know, Anthony Eden was Foreign Minister and Leader of the House of Commons for a time under Churchill. So at least back in those days, you got two jobs, and I don't know if that's Jacob Rees-Mogg's only job.  

HUGH HEWITT: It is.  

LARRY ARNN: But I agree with you that that is an inspired choice, and on Brexit, Boris has been very hardline in his first few days.  

HUGH HEWITT: When we come back from break, we're going to talk about what happens when there is a—they call it a shuffle. This one was called a decapitation. A bigger change in one day than any intra-party swap at Number 10 has ever seen. That's kind of remarkable, isn't it, Larry?  

LARRY ARNN: He fired them all!  

HUGH HEWITT: He fired them all.  

LARRY ARNN: And he's no respecter of persons. If you were for remain, you're not in the cabinet.  

HUGH HEWITT: It sent a shudder through every academic institution in America. What if someone had that authority? What if the president could come in and fire everyone in Congress or the president of a college could come in and fire everyone? And I know of one person who did it, Dr. Albert Mohler at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. I believe he did it once, and I have never heard of it except Boris Johnson last week.  

We come back from break, we'll talk about what he did, why he did it, and what it means for Europe. I think it's the greatest thing that has happened to Great Britain since Margaret Thatcher's election. Not the election of David Cameron, not the election of Theresa May, but the entrance of Boris Johnson into power with his agenda. I think it's the greatest thing for the UK and, thus, for us in a long time. We'll talk about why when we come back to the Hillsdale Dialogue with Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College on The Hugh Hewitt Show.  

HUGH HEWITT: Welcome back, America. Hugh Hewitt, last radio hour of the week. It's the Hillsdale Dialogue. If you have not signed up for Imprimis, go do it today. You will be so happy every month when Imprimis arrives in your mailbox.  

It's old fashioned. It's snail mail, and you can read it and mark it up and save them. And millions of Americans do, and it's absolutely free. You just have to sign up at Hillsdale.edu for the newsletter—I call it the speech digest, actually—of very smart people saying very smart things.  

Dr. Arnn is the president of Hillsdale College— all things Hillsdale at Hillsdale.edu— and he is my guest. Dr. Arnn, Boris Johnson, your thoughts on who he is before we get to what he did.  

LARRY ARNN: Well, he's a strange and brilliant man.  

HUGH HEWITT: All right. Well said.  

LARRY ARNN: He's got weird hair, which seems to be the executive fashion these days.  

HUGH HEWITT: Yes, executive fashion. I hope you adopt that at Hillsdale.  

LARRY ARNN: Yeah. Yeah. There we go. He is what they would have called in earlier times a polymath. That is to say, he writes fluently and at length about lots of things. He wrote a biography of Winston Churchill. It's pretty good. He's a little bit like a pixie, the way he moves around and jumps and jumps from thing to thing.  

HUGH HEWITT: And he's an old boy, right? Eton and Oxford.  

LARRY ARNN: Oh, yeah.  

HUGH HEWITT: Tell people what that means—again, we're talking to people from Indiana, so we're going to slow down today. Sorry, Bloomington. Tell people what that means.  

LARRY ARNN: Well, Eton, so there are these things for—before college, there are these public schools, they're called, and in Britain, public means private in this one context, only this one context. There are these famous public schools. My wife went to the most famous of the girls' schools, Roedean. But the most famous of the boys' schools are especially Eton, and close to it, Harrow, where Winston Churchill went. And so to go to Eton is to be on your way.  

HUGH HEWITT: And to be in the view of Windsor Castle.  

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, that's right, and it's a little pricey, and they give lots of scholarships too. And so you can get there, because you're richer and well placed.  

HUGH HEWITT: And somebody said at some point that the world wars were won on the playing fields of Eton.  

LARRY ARNN: That was Wellington who said that.  

HUGH HEWITT: Was it?  

LARRY ARNN: He said the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.  

HUGH HEWITT: By which he meant what?  

LARRY ARNN: What?  

HUGH HEWITT: What did he mean by that?  

LARRY ARNN: Well, he meant that Napoleon did this incredibly foolish thing and actually took his army to Eton, where he lost to the Russians.  

HUGH HEWITT: You know what? The sad part is the Steelers fans are writing that down.  

LARRY ARNN: Public schools are rough in Britain.  

HUGH HEWITT: Yes.  

LARRY ARNN: And Eton was rough, and is. Well, I don't know. It's probably not as bad anymore. But like, if you want to know how it can be when it can be bad—and it can be very bad—read Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis. And you know, you're hazed and beaten, right? And Wellington, the Iron Duke, he looked at all that, and thought, hey, that's the way. Let's do that. You know? So yeah, in other words, it toughens you up to go to Eton in those days.  

HUGH HEWITT: And in a way that you could endure incredible hardship. That was the point. You could endure incredible hardship, because you had put up with so much abuse. Now, that underestimates the contribution in both wars of the men who were in the rank and file and had never gotten close to Eton. But the Officer Corps would lead from the front, and they suffered grievously, as they did.  

LARRY ARNN: That's right. Well, if you go in the Oxford colleges and Eton and Harrow and those places, you'll just see that the rolls of the dead are very long, because everybody answered the call. Right? In both world wars, but in World War I, Britain went with an all-volunteer army for a year and a half. And everybody joined up and then among the ones who joined up first were the best placed.  

HUGH HEWITT: And so that's Boris Johnson. He is coming out of a storied place, with a storied history, and with an expectation that is what, Larry Arnn? For an Eton-Oxford man, what's the expectation?  

LARRY ARNN: Well, they expect you to be like David Cameron. Right? Smooth, artful, little bit Bill Clinton, Tony Blair-ish. Right? That's what they're like these days. Boris Johnson's just not like that.  

HUGH HEWITT: He's not, and boy, was the first week evidence of that. When we come back, Dr. Larry Arnn and I look back at Boris Johnson, what it means for Brexit when we return to the Hillsdale Dialogue on The Hugh Hewitt Show.  

Welcome back, Americans. Hugh Hewitt, Dr. Larry Arnn is my guest on this, the last radio half hour of the week now. It's the Hillsdale Dialogue which we do almost every Friday with either Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, or one of his colleagues from that lantern of sweet reason up north. Or the Kirby Center, the lantern of sweet reason in the shadow of the Capitol, where they're always pumping out what you need to have, which is an understanding of the founding of the country and the documents and the ideas on which it was based.  

Great Britain is not the United States, but it matters a lot to us how it goes. What it's been trying to do is disentangle itself from Europe after a merger, a bad merger, of 40 years. They're trying to get away, and the European Union does not want them to leave.  

So they had a referendum, and Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, led the leave forces, and they won. Which promptly led to Theresa May, who was a Remainer, being named prime minister, and that worked out into the worst deal. In fact, it's such a bad deal, Dr. Arnn sent me, to prepare for this, a column that told me something I did not know because I have been focused on the backstop. That the Theresa May deal left Great Britain under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. It's unbelievable to me.  

LARRY ARNN: Yeah. That's right, binding arbitration. See, Britain is in an argument with an oligarchy.  

HUGH HEWITT: Yes.  

LARRY ARNN: Those people in Brussels are effectively tenured and can't be recalled, and so they have this interest. Right? They command this great thing. Somebody told me the other day—and don't quote me on this. Look it up before you use it yourself, oh, listeners—that Britain is owing 460 million pounds to help build the new European government structure.  

HUGH HEWITT: Yeah, that is true. That's in the agreement.  

LARRY ARNN: That's insane, right? What do they get—there's many countries, right? How much is that thing going to cost? The McNamara Terminal, which is really great, at Detroit Airport, is $1.5 billion, right? And that's a great way to waste government money. If it had been built privately, it would have been cheaper. But it's really cool, and it's huge. It's a mile long. Right? How big is this government going to be?  

HUGH HEWITT: Enormous, gigantic, they're going to build buildings and employ people forever, because that it creates the renters. They are rent-seeking people that go to work for the EU, and they will continue to seek rents. But it's a bad, bad deal, and it did not get through the British Parliament, thank God, three times. And so Theresa May had to leave, and they elected Boris Johnson.  

Now, explain the British cabinet and how big it is, Dr. Arnn, and what Boris Johnson did. We alluded to at the beginning, but let's go through it in detail.  

LARRY ARNN: So the people elect a Parliament. One of the parties will have a majority. That majority nominates somebody to go to the king and kiss hands, it's called. The king actually formally picks the prime minister, and in narrow cases, may have some discretion about whom he calls. But they pick somebody, and Boris won a constituency election.  

That's an innovation. They never did this before. And local Conservative Party affiliates and council members and stuff, they voted, and he got more than two times as many votes as Jeremy Hunt. And so now, he's the guy, and he goes to the Buckingham Palace. And he kisses hands, and he comes back, and he invites a bunch of people to join his government.  

Except first, he disinvited a large number of people to join his government, and people should understand, this is breathtaking. Because the way you pick a government is to shore up your position as the party leader, and so you always pick a large number of them from people who are enemies of yours and want your job. Because in exchange for you making them foreign minister or chancellor of the Exchequer, they will encourage all their friends to vote for you.  

HUGH HEWITT: And these jobs come with enormous status, prestige, and agencies at your disposal. And the opportunity to rise even further on what Disraeli called the greasy pole, which is to end up as the prime minister. If you're not in the cabinet, it's really hard to become the prime minister in 3, 5, 7, 10 years.  

You've got to be in the cabinet. You've got to have authority. So when Theresa May left, and Boris Johnson came in, he had a cabinet in place. She had a cabinet waiting there, and they all really wanted to keep their jobs.  

LARRY ARNN: That's right, because to be a foreign minister in Britain is a stronger thing to be than to be Secretary of State in the United States. Because the prime minister, if he fires you out of hand, he could lose his majority, and you have an independent political base of the president. You're an elected official too. So they love those jobs, right? And what he did was just cashiered everyone who had advocated remain in the referendum.  

HUGH HEWITT: He also cashiered people like Dr. Liam Fox, a friend of this show, who had been the Minister of Trade, who had long favored leave but also had favored Jeremy Hunt, who was Boris' opponent.  

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, and so the point is, here's what's great about this. I think it's good, what he's doing and why. Because it is unprecedented—it's maybe unprecedented, certainly extremely unusual. And why, because they've roped themselves into a god-awful mess.  

HUGH HEWITT: Yes.  

LARRY ARNN: Right? And because the decisions that have been made here since the referendum are simply disastrous, and here's why. First of all, now you're going to leave, and you're going to go over there to Brussels, and you're going to negotiate with them. Well, the first thing you say is, the Bank of England publishes a paper and says that the British economy will be crushed if we leave without a deal.  

And then Theresa May gives a bunch of speeches and says, we have to have a deal. We're not going to subject this country to the pain and misery of a no-deal Brexit. That establishes her negotiation position, when she goes over to talk to what I think are a bunch of oligarchs, right? And so they read the papers, right? And they think to themselves, we've got this woman.  

HUGH HEWITT: Yes. They did.  

LARRY ARNN: And so they put two things in it, we now know, because of Rupert Darwall, D-A-R-W-A-L-L, which people should read. Just google him. You'll find this stuff, and thank God he's got an unusual name.  

HUGH HEWITT: Rupert Darwell.  

LARRY ARNN: Darwall.  

HUGH HEWITT: Wall.  

LARRY ARNN: Wall, yeah.  

HUGH HEWITT: OK.  

LARRY ARNN: And I know him. He's a delightful man, and he sends me his stuff which helps keep me better informed than if he didn't. And I send it to you, and Lord knows, you can use that help.  

HUGH HEWITT: I do, and I read it, and I learned that the European Court of Justice gets arbitration—I just couldn't believe it, actually.  

LARRY ARNN: So the two things in it, one is, it's called the backstop. And what that means is there has to be—so Britain has an old history in Ireland, and you know, some of it is not credible to Britain. But its history in Northern Ireland very much is because the people of Northern Ireland want to remain united with Britain, but they don't want—they're Irish, right?  

And Belfast—I was just there—and people have been killed in Belfast in very large numbers. That's in Northern Ireland. But there used to be walls and checkpoints everywhere in the city for years and years and years. Now all that's gone, and now you can move freely between Northern and Southern Ireland.  

HUGH HEWITT: And this is to the credit of—  

LARRY ARNN: Once they got relations over there.  

HUGH HEWITT: Yeah, this is to the credit of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who negotiated the Good Friday Agreement whereby the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland laid down their arms after 200 years of shooting each other.  

LARRY ARNN: And bless them for that, by the way.  

HUGH HEWITT: Yes.  

LARRY ARNN: A chance to say something great about Bill Clinton.  

HUGH HEWITT: There you go.  

LARRY ARNN: I'll add another thing, preferable to Obama.  

HUGH HEWITT: Yes, he was. Yes, he was. That's well said.  

LARRY ARNN: Or for that matter, to his wife. Sorry, I didn't want to weaken there, but yeah, Bill Clinton, he had some virtues. That's just a fact. But so now, the Irish are saying that—I mean, the European Union is saying, there has to be a hard border between the two. And the British are thinking of ways where it can be a soft border, where you can go pretty much freely, but there's some little check.  

HUGH HEWITT: And that is the Canadian-US border, is it not?  

LARRY ARNN: Yeah.  

HUGH HEWITT: That is what we have. There is a little guard gate, and you go through it, and they make sure you're not bringing in bales of heroin or something. But they have ways around this, because the border cannot be the Irish Sea. Because that effectively cuts the UK and a quarter of it is lost—the United Kingdom, when it includes Ulster. And they're afraid, and Britain is afraid, of having their sovereignty over the Northern Ireland severed.  

LARRY ARNN: That's right, recall to people, you used to not need a passport, until 15 years ago or something, the terrorist attacks. You used to not need a passport to go to Canada, or they to come here, and that was better. Now, maybe the limited checks we have today are necessary, but that's different than saying that they're good. Because you want flow, right, when it's not a problem. Right?  

So anyway, that's the first thing, but now the second thing emerges. And that is, they've signed a binding arbitration agreement that any dispute will be mediated by the European Court of Justice, that is to say, fellow oligarchs, to the people with whom they are negotiating.  

HUGH HEWITT: Yep.  

LARRY ARNN: And so that's just crazy, right?  

HUGH HEWITT: Yep.  

LARRY ARNN: And so Boris is manifesting—but also he manifests in every action, we've got to just go at this thing now. We're the ones who called this referendum. We're the ones who were losing votes to the United Kingdom Independence Party and now to the Brexit Party, and we promise to do this thing. We promised that if it passed, we would do it, and that's why David Cameron resigned honorably, and that's what Theresa May came in promising to do. It's time to do it. And so he's vastly improved his negotiating position by the simple and emphatic and often-repeated statement that on October 31, of 2019, we are leaving the European Union, no matter what.  

HUGH HEWITT: No ands, ifs, or buts.  

LARRY ARNN: That's right.  

HUGH HEWITT: Now to that end, he also brought in Sajid Javid as the chancellor of the Exchequer and Dominic Raab as his Foreign Secretary, and they are hard-nosed about leaving as well.  

LARRY ARNN: That's right, and see, then again, Donald Trump has talked to them and friends of yours and mine in the United States Senate, including Tom Cotton. Well, I don't know if I can name who else. Let me be indiscreet. I think there's a letter going around that they may send—  

HUGH HEWITT: Oh.  

LARRY ARNN: —that will offer the help of the Senate of the United States.  

HUGH HEWITT: To expedite a US trade agreement, a treaty about the US and Great Britain? They need a free trade agreement. They absolutely must have a free trade agreement with us, negotiated quickly. 30 seconds to the break. I think they'll get it, don't you?  

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, and we need to—what if there's a run on the Bank of England or something? Then, we should help them. This needs to be done, and I think that the European Union will, for a time, do everything in their power to punish them, and that's a warning to the others.  

HUGH HEWITT: I think they were thinking about—when we come back from break, we'll talk about that. I think that Boris’s new attitude may, in fact, oblige them to blink. We'll talk about that after the break. Don't go anywhere, America. Larry Arnn will be right back with the Hillsdale Dialogue.  

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt with Dr. Larry Arnn talking about Boris Johnson taking over at Number 10 two weeks ago. It's the first chance we've had to discuss this. He cleaned house. He had a massacre.  

It was all the rage for the tabloids in Great Britain that Boris killed everyone off and brought in a whole new team, and they're getting settled in. But Michael Gove is put in charge of hard Brexit preparations. He took someone who's alleged to be the smartest guy, and with whom he had some trouble in the past and some alliances in the past. And said, you prepare the country for a hard Brexit, sending I think a signal that he really is preparing for a hard Brexit, Larry Arnn. And if you're going to negotiate, that's what you want the other side to believe.  

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, and you have to be prepared to do it. Right? Because the time is going to go. Right? What is that? That's August, September, October, it's three months from now.  

HUGH HEWITT: It's 97 days, I believe now.  

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, and so they need to make emergency preparations for this change, and they should have been doing that from the day after. Right? The day after the referendum passed, and Boris is making another argument, and it's bound to be powerful. He says, we are the home of democracy.  

That's not quite true, but it's tolerable true, and certainly they have a long and honorable record of that. And so if we cannot follow a democratic vote that we have called, then there's nothing left for us. So he's drawn a line now, and he had to, and all credit to him for being the one who understands that he had to.  

HUGH HEWITT: Yeah, and by doing so, by moving out there and saying, we're going to get this done, I think what he says to the European Union is, if you punish us, we will not be friends. We will do NATO, but we will not be friends, and he is really obliging Chancellor Merkel and President Macron of France to consider they had an easy walk the last three years. Now, they're confronted with a choice—do we want an ally, or do we want someone with whom we are fighting across the Channel? I think they're going to take that seriously. What do you think?  

LARRY ARNN: I think they—well, I think that—I would guess. I don't know—but I think that there may be a bad patch. I think they may do some vindictive things. I think they will surely do them between now and October 31.  

HUGH HEWITT: Right up into the end, I think.  

LARRY ARNN: And I think there might be some things after too, but in the fullness of time, it's a very important fact that will help to produce political pressures that Britain has a significant trade deficit with the European Union. And that means that the countries of the European Union send more stuff to Britain than Britain sends back. Now, if that stops—and this is why the Bank of England is a sensitive thing.  

British people have pounds, and so if they buy a BMW, they've got to pay for it with pounds. And the car comes over to Britain, and the pounds go over. And that is what one of the things that helps to make London a major financial center, which, by the way, it's been forever, a long time before the European Union. And so that could lead to some rockiness there, and I think we should monitor that ourselves and be prepared to be of help to them.  

HUGH HEWITT: Well, that is to go to the defense of an ally who's being punished. I am more optimistic that they simply had a mark in Theresa May. And I know she served steadily, and people like her, but she was a mark. She negotiated exactly the wrong way from every negotiation I've ever been in. Which is to give everything away at the beginning and reserve nothing for the end game and ended up getting stuck with this deal that she tried to repackage six ways to Sunday.  

And Johnson has taken that all off the table, and he's torn up the agreement. And they're starting over, or they're just going to leave, and then they can come back and deal with him. But I do think that, if you're confronted with that, Europe has a lot more to lose than Great Britain.  

LARRY ARNN: I think so, and eventually, and it'll take some time, and this is all very dicey, because the majority is—I think the Conservatives have a majority of negative nine. That means they need nine votes from some other parties to stay in power, and there's lots of remainers in the Parliament in the Tory Party. And so can he hold his majority if there's hard times after this?  

Who knows? And credit to him. He also, by the way, has a very bold and comprehensive platform of stuff he's going to do and take care of the farmers, because Britain sells stuff abroad to Europe. It does have a positive trade balance on that.  

HUGH HEWITT: I have one minute left. I have to ask you one question. Do you think he can prorogue Parliament in order to make sure that they do not block no-deal?  

LARRY ARNN: Well, he said there'll be no election, and I don't think he'll prorogue Parliament —but that'd be a bold thing. And if he looks like he's going to lose his majority, and that will be—because things are going to happen here in the next few months that are going to affect things for a long time in Britain and, therefore, in the world. And it's not often, it's not beyond the pale of reason, that the Tory Party could be destroyed over this.  

HUGH HEWITT: No.  

LARRY ARNN: And new parties created.  

HUGH HEWITT: That has happened before in Great Britain. It can happen again, and we shall see. Dr. Larry Arnn at Hillsdale College, always the expert to go to on UK politics and Winston Churchill and now Boris Johnson. Thank you, my friend.  

Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Ben. Thank you, generalissimo. I'll see you on Monday on the next Hugh Hewitt Show, America.