Do Not Adjust Your Focus Episode 9: Gina Miller on Europe, ESG, ethics and education - and why we must preserve Britain as a tolerant place
In episode 9 of Do Not Adjust Your Focus, Stuart sat down [virtually] with businesswoman and campaigner Gina Miller, who has twice initiated legal challenges against the government standing up for Parliamentary democracy… And won.
Her first victory came in September 2017, when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of giving MPs a say over triggering Article 50 - the legal mechanism taking the UK out of the EU.
Her second victory came in September 2019, when the Supreme Court ruled that Boris Johnson's decision to suspend Parliament was unlawful.
Consequently known as one of the most prominent names and faces of Remain and somewhat of a figurehead of the pro-EU camp, Gina and Stuart discussed some of today’s major battles: Europe, ESG, ethics and education, highlighting why we simply must preserve Britain as a tolerant place now more than ever.
You can listen to this and previous episodes here, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:09 Intro
01:10 As a private citizen you brought a legal challenge to the authority of the government to invoke article 50 without parliamentary approval. It is hard to truly comprehend the resolve and single-minded belief in what is morally, democratically, and rationally right. What was it like being thrusted into the public eye at such an incredibly strained, emotionally fraught time?
“I thought in time people would understand. I really thought ‘this is such an important thing to preserve our parliamentary sovereignty’ that as time went on people would understand it. I was wrong. The level of politicising not only myself as a claimant, but also against the judiciary and the independence of the courts, I thought to myself ‘do you not understand how dangerous it is to politicise the law, the court, the judicial process’? These are things that will live on long beyond Brexit and will actually shape the sort of world or country we live in”.
05:59 You use words like naïve and claim you “got it wrong”. Would you do anything differently?
“I use those words having been a campaigner for nearly 30 years. I do not tend to pick easy battles, but I really underestimated the way certain media would react. In hindsight, there was very little I could have done differently”.
“I have learnt over the years that when you are attacked, not your arguments and the content of what you are saying, you have probably won already”.
07:43 The world and the media learned a lot about Gina Miller via that campaign. What did you learn about yourself?
“I learnt that I had more strength than I thought I had. It’s all very well when I’m getting abuse, but then when it extended to my family, to my children, I learnt that I would do anything for them which gave me even more strength than I thought I had”.
09:55 Talking about values, what did you learn about the values of this country?
“Like most people of colour, I have had different incidences, but I was still proud to be British. I was fighting for Britain, and I discovered that I was being treated as an alien, being told it wasn’t my place to speak up, that a woman of colour couldn’t possibly be bright enough.”
“The misogyny and racism was something that I thought had left, and what worried me was that the politics of division was being used to reawaken things I hadn’t seen and heard since I was a child in the UK in the mid-70s and 80s.”
“I would say to my children – ‘You are who you are. You must never hide the colour of your skin and what makes you proud to be you’”.
“In all societies there have always been extremists and they normally sit on the fringes of our society. But in the space of those three to four years I saw them being given the oxygen of mainstream acknowledgement and that was disturbing. To know that those extreme voices from the outside were being given voices on the inside”.
12:14 That politics of division, the polarised and polarising language that we see across society still even now, despite what has been going on with COVID – it is worrying it seems to still be so prevalent. Do you feel optimistic about the future?
“Some of the things that are playing out now are not new, they are almost a playbook of how you move towards an authoritarian government. You own the media, you politicise judges and the elite, you diminish voices of academics and experts.”
“You’ve got machinery that can destabilise democracies, institutions and our civilised modern society at a pace we’ve never seen before, and that’s extremely worrying.”
“[On the other side of that] You’ve got technology that can create in a handset a movement like Black Lives Matter or Me Too. It’s there to educate, but it’s also there as a means of poisoning a populus. I think it’s about us learning how to use technology and what we now have for tools of good. For hope not hate.”
“What gives me hope is the level of positive activism that I’m seeing in the UK. As a population we have never really talked about politics. We have tended to be fairly calm in our approach to politics and our civic duty”.
15:09 We are talking here about building a kinder, more humane, more caring society. You have said in media interviews that a central question occupying your thoughts is ‘how do we preserve Britain as a tolerant place? Particularly now that Brexit is happening, and we no longer have Europe to blame for our problems. What would the ‘Gina Miller prescription’ for a better, more tolerant Britain involve?
“Those of us who feel that we are not being heard have even more of a duty to go out and reach out. I think we have to learn to speak to each other and listen to each other, because ‘hurt people… hurt people’. There is genuine poverty, discrimination, and whole societies left behind, and I think that some of what we’re seeing both politically and socially is that you reap what you sow.”
“We need to find those pockets of poverty, of discrimination, of loss of hope and reach out to them and make us one society again. We are a very divided country – regionally, educationally, socially – we need to reach out and put a lot of things right.”
17:38 It’s interesting that during this time of division and degree of hopelessness, resentment, hurt and fear that the Black Lives Matter movement that has cascaded around the world has in some ways found its amplification through this underlying general sense of things not being fair, things not feeling right. A lot has been written about that movement feeling like a real inflection point right now in terms of empathy, equality, tolerance. Do you agree, or have we been here before?
“At each previous point of inflexion in time (every 100 years or so) – American Civil War, Great Depression and so forth – you have an opportunity, it is merely a case of what you do with it.”
“This pandemic has come at a time when we were already starting to talk about the change that needs to come, and what’s happened is it has amplified at such an extraordinary rate and put it at front and centre, and it’s quite extraordinary to me how quickly that has happened. And I hope it doesn’t die in this ‘new world’ that everyone keeps talking about.”
“The failure of us as a generation would be if we think it’s so easy to create change. Because I read some of the articles and commentary, and it is this naivety to think that change will just happen. Change takes determination, tenacity and understanding”.
21:08 You mentioned the broader ESG issues that we were increasingly aware of and COVID has shone a light on some of the underlying forces beneath that. It will take a lot of effort to make the change, and also… a lot of money. I’m interested in the role the markets can play, and the role that ESG/ ethical investing can play. You are a Co-founder of an investment management firm, and have been highly critical of the murkiness and mis-classification that is endemic of the ethical investing sector – what’s going wrong there?
“Economics, money – we have to look at it and be honest about the conversations of ‘does aggressive pursuit of profit serve a purpose for the future?’ And I would argue it doesn’t”.
“Pre-COVID, the emphasis was disproportionately focused on the Environmental E in ESG. Now what we are seeing is that there is a lot of conversation around Sustainability and Governance, and how corporates behave. And people are looking for and wanting companies to behave differently, they want to see a different corporate culture”.
“At the moment we have very little regulation and transparency in the ESG space, and we have no agreement on the bench-marking.”
“Independent auditing would be a quick fix - but would we have to train accountants differently in the future to be able to achieve this?”
“If we want sustainable change, we have to drill all the way back to education”.
“Learning is different from teaching. We teach children how to learn. Do we teach them how to think?”.
28:33 I feel that psychologically we are still quite a backwards looking country in so many ways, and we pay more attention to our past than our future.
“One of the things we have not really looked at is the idea of how professional our politicians have become. Rather than leaders they have become professional politicians. How do we change that?”
“Our politicians have no employment contracts. We pay them with our taxes, so how do we hold them to account?”
30:30 I do worry that ‘we’ as the electorate are not necessarily equipped to make those decisions about what kind of political system, constitution, and politicians we want. It comes back to your education question - should we be teaching things like ethics and leadership in our schools?
“Human rights do not belong to lawyers or in books, but I’d like for children, at a much younger age, to have more ownership and understanding of their contribution to the world and shaping the world. And this comes from education”.
“A society is stable when it’s built on strong foundations and values”.
“Schools are not just a place you go to teach children. They have a social dimension to them in terms of the most vulnerable being looked after. But it’s also a place where you teach them values and understanding of the society around them and the world around them”.
32:17 Let’s talk about COVID quickly. I wanted to link back to what we touched on before in terms of social issues and the ‘S’ of ESG. COVID has highlighted those issues more starkly than ever, human rights, employment rights, workplace health and safety etc. Do you agree there will be much more scrutiny on those from now on?
“It’s going to be up to us as consumers to see how corporate behaviour changes in the future. But I do worry that in a post-Brexit-no-deal world the excuse will be that for our economic viability there is a trade-off between employees’ rights, health and safety, protection for certain parts of the community – I could see that happening, and it’s about us staying very vigilant”.
“The court of public opinion is going to be what is going to change the world we live in. If our politicians are not showing the bravery and the leadership we need, it needs to come from people. And I do think we need to stand up for each other to ensure that we all benefit”.
“We should be at the forefront now of creating a new standard for consumer protection when it comes to banks and credit cards. And we could look at introducing a whole new level of financial education, which we could be the leaders in. ESG – I think there is an opportunity here for us to really set the bar high and be the country where other countries look at us and say, ‘we should be doing what the UK does’”.
39:47 I want to finish today by asking about your new campaign “Messages of Love” that grew out of a very important little known campaign issue – you’ve been calling for legal reform around the act of making a will. Do you want to explain the problem briefly and what you want to see change, and then how “Messages of Love” works?
…We’ll let you discover the wonderful response to this one yourselves.