We Need To Democratise The UK Economy | Danny Sriskandarajah

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1:32We get loads of comments from you guys that say that you love the economics episodes and want even more deeper dives. So let's look today at the history of our economic system, the difference between markets and capital, and should we have extreme poverty lines and extreme wealth lines. So today I'm going to be having a conversation with the chief executive of the New Economics Foundation, Dan Shreeskandarajan.

1:58Hi, Danny. Really glad that you're here to join us. We did an event recently for 40 years of the New Economics Foundation. Happy birthday. Thank you very much. It is important to point out at the beginning of the podcast, though, you are a non-party political organisation. In fact, you're willing to give advice to any politician who listens. I really appreciated your advice. I hope Rachel Reeves asked for your advice, too. I'm sure she's watching. There we go. She's gripped to bold politics, I'm sure. That being said, as part of my speech, a lot of what I was talking about was 40 years of neoliberalism around Thatcher and Reagan.

2:27And something I'm really interested in exploring with you, because I know you've got this amazing mind, particularly for history, both democratic history and economic history. Is it just this 40 years? Is this ahistorical, this gap between rich and poor? Or is this right throughout human history? I think what's really special about the last 40 years, what's really worrying about the last 40 years is that it's seen the dismantling of the sorts of things humans put in place during the middle of the 20th century to create welfare systems, safety nets, protections, to curb the power of capital. All the stuff that was being done in the early part of the 20th century seems to have been dismantled in front of our eyes over the last 40 years.

3:07And that's what, you know, The privatization, the financialization, the deregulation agenda that we've seen in so many parts of the world has undermined what should have been a period of human flourishing in which more of us are able to feed ourselves, look after ourselves, enjoy all sorts of opportunities. But we're going backwards. There isn't often a distinction made between capitalism and markets because markets have been throughout history, but not necessarily capitalism. Yeah, exactly. I think the market is a very sensible way of organizing particular types of human interaction, right? It's an efficient way of doing some things.

3:45What seems to have happened is we've seen a very perverse and powerful manifestation of market ideology or power that seems to not only have corrupted capitalism, but has had pervasive impacts across the rest of society on politics, on aspiration, on human happiness. And that's really worrying. You mentioned politics there. You've written a book, Power to the People, which is about the attack on democracy. How exactly is democracy being attacked and what can we do about it? Well, I start with the sort of foundation of democracy, which is people. And, you know, we spend a lot of time talking about politics and elections and changing the people in power.

4:26But we don't spend enough time thinking about the buttressing of democracy, which is about citizens being able to express ourselves freely, to protest, to come together, to assemble, to associate through voluntary associations or even formal charities, what we call civic space. the space in which outside the market, outside the family, outside the state, humans come together to solve problems, you know, to fix their communities, to speak truth to power, all that wonderful stuff that happens in civil society, sadly, is under attack almost everywhere in the world. That civic freedoms are being undermined by not just autocrats, but even in mature democracies, people's right to peaceful protest is being challenged.

5:12They're giving punitive punishments for daring to protest. Organizations that speak truth to power are being undermined through regulation and red tape through bureaucracy. And of course, no wonder then that people are feeling more isolated, more angry because they're fed up with mainstream politics, which feels like it's not really speaking to their needs and interests, but they're also unable to sort of come together in civic life. We see it here in places like the UK, but I spent six years of my career working in a global civil society network and we're seeing really worrying things happen around the world.

5:53Two-thirds of humans now live in countries where civic freedoms are under serious threat because their inautocracies or their fundamental civic freedoms are being undermined. It seems to me part of the problem is that if you have a dominant narrative that then manage to control or oppress the population, it then becomes even harder to fight back for those rights to protest. What can be done about it? Because presumably once it reaches a certain line, it becomes very difficult for people to organize. Well, I think the important thing is that each of us plays our role as active citizens. You know, one of the things that I worry about is that democracy has been reduced to a very sort of narrow realm about, you know, voting every few years, whereas democracy to work has to involve each and every one of us playing our part as being an active citizen, holding power to account, speaking up when we see injustice or wrongdoing.

6:46the last thing we can afford to do is watch as the system is being undermined or challenged and complacency is really dangerous so i think the first thing you know the subtitle of my book is use your voice change the world because each of us has to play an active role for this to work secondly we need to remind people especially those who have economic and political power that it's unsustainable in fact it's dangerous the path that we're heading on because if you concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few, that will inevitably tear the social fabric apart. It will lead to violent uprisings, as we're seeing in some parts of the world.

7:26It will lead to people challenging, you know, even democracy itself. You know, worrying numbers of young people around the world would prefer an autocrat or a strongman leader to democratic politics because they're worried that democratic political institutions aren't delivering for them, aren't protecting their futures. And so think, hold on a minute, maybe some strongman autocrat might do it for us. And that's a very dangerous place for humans to be in. And so the reminder is also to power holders to be responsible, to take precious care of this fragile thing that we call democracy. And don't be tempted to shut down a protest or, you know, for a justice system, to not be tempted to, you know, mete out really harsh sentences for people who simply are trying to protest something that they feel is unjust.

8:18And it feels like the two conversations are starting to really link now because we initially spoke about a historical moment or this moment of huge wealth inequality. And now we're also talking about a moment where powerful people, I would say once they've bought all the assets in terms of homes and start then to buy the media and then start to buy our democracy. Are there fiscal interventions that need to happen here? Or is it much bigger than that? Well, the one moment in human history where we've really tackled economic inequality, wealth and income inequality, has been in countries like the UK or the US or in other parts of Western Europe in the 20th century, where we put in place tax systems that tax, sometimes at really high rates, 70, 80, 90 % rates of tax on very rich people, in order to build social welfare systems or the welfare state, as we called it.

9:10You know, so we know from history how to address, you know, inequality. It comes back to the point I was trying to make before. But, you know, we did all of that building in the 20th century. And then we've watched as all of that good stuff has been dismantled before our eyes. And, you know, I've been fascinated by this sort of the history of wealth. Because most of human history, there was no such thing as wealth. You know, we're barely surviving, barely getting by. There weren't things that you could hoard or control. And my reading of human history is most of it has been, you know, we've been a very collaborative species.

9:46Yes, we fought with other tribes or, you know, we've been mean to each other, but we've also succeeded as a species because we've shared what we had. You know, you pooled what crops you had to make sure that no one, you know, in your community was left starving and we protected each other and nurtured each other. And then about 10 ,000 years ago, we discover these little trinkets and artifacts and coins and shells and money. And that led to, across societies, across history, the temptation by some to hoard. In most of human history, that was done through coercion. It was leaders, rulers, kings, chieftains who sort of asserted their power or asserted some sort of divine right to control and hoard that wealth.

10:30And then what's remarkable about the last couple of hundred years in democracies and social democracies is we've said that's not right. That's, you know, we need to challenge that. It's not right for people to hoard wealth and power. And we're going to correct for that. But then fast forward to today, we are living with eye-watering levels of accumulation. You know, when I used to work at Oxfam, we published that report about how many people, men, own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world's population. When Oxfam first started doing that comparison, it was in 2014, it was something like 62 men owned the same as the poorest half of the world's population.

11:12Then it was 30-odd. And then it was 20-odd. Then it's, I think the latest is six. soon, if Musk becomes a trillionaire, it'll be one person. How can we think that's an acceptable way to organize our societies, our economies? You know, you might agree that capitalism needs some sort of profit motive or some sort of incentive, but this is a really vulgar manifestation of that to allow a small number of people to not just hoard economic wealth, but then use it to buy political influence. It's thoroughly unsustainable and deeply dangerous. And it's not just with excess wealth, is it? Am I right in understanding that with stocks and shares, the amount of people who have a diverse kind of stuff that they own, in inverted commas, is getting smaller and smaller and smaller because a smaller group of people are owning much more?

11:59Yeah. I mean, it's to your point around the sort of perverse way that capitalism itself is evolving or mutating, because you could argue that shareholder capitalism could be a very interesting and good way of organizing society. In fact, Margaret Thatcher used to call it shareholder democracy, right? The idea that we would all own assets in society and we would therefore be sort of active participants in the way that capital is deployed. On paper, that sounds like a great idea. What's happened in practice? It's a smaller number of people who've started to own these assets. And instead of those assets being put to good productive use to create jobs in the everyday economy or the foundational economy, it's just become a system of extraction.

12:44And those assets simply find the easiest way to seek returns. And that might be through effectively casino capitalism, sort of gambling on asset markets. Nothing to do with the foundational economy that so many of us rely upon. And so you're right that there's a sort of this version of capitalism is a sort of perverse interpretation of what I think the system was supposed to look like. And here we are. This year is the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith's foundational book, The Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith will be rolling in his grave to see this version of capitalism as it's being practiced today, I think.

13:24And you used the phrase there, foundational economy. And I remember we were in a meeting once and you used it and I said, that's a great phrase. Tell me about it. So I'm going to do it now publicly. What do you mean by foundational economy? Economics is often seen as this sort of really opaque, complex thing. That's part of the problem. You might want to talk about that. But ultimately, for me, it's a way that humans choose to organize the sort of economic aspects of our lives to trade or to share between us. In principle, a foundational economy is about how those economic instruments work to help humans thrive or flourish in their communities.

14:03And we know how that works throughout history, the world over. That's through being able to put your own talents to good use, to be able to enjoy some things in life, to be able to have some degree of choice and freedom in what you do. So the foundational economy for me is about the economic activities that allow human thriving or human flourishing. What seems to be happening is that's sort of neglected. And instead, we focus on the financialization of so many aspects of our lives that it's all about returns to investment. And in the UK, which is an incredibly open economy, something like 25 % of our GDP is accounted for by foreign multinationals.

14:47We've become not only privatized and financialized, but owned by asset holders in other parts of the world. And before you know it, public policy is all about making sure that we keep those markets happy, those investors happy, and not this idea of supporting people in their everyday lives, going about their everyday activities. And we need to flip it. And, you know, it's interesting. You mentioned Rachel Reeves. In 2018, Rachel, long before I started with the New Economics Foundation, came to Neff to launch a paper called Everyday Economics. Right. And has some really good insights into how you might nurture that.

15:28But I lament the fact that she and many other folk in public life aren't paying sufficient attention to everyday foundational economics. And you just referenced then the selling off of our assets to foreign investors. And in fact, one of the points I made of my speech, and I really meant it, was when I talked to younger people about the fact that we used to own British gas and that we owned the water companies and we just sold this off in kind of a bonfire of sales. They can't quite believe it. Now, it's easy for me to say a narrative of the reason why that was done was because there was a game plan to move our public money to private wealth.

15:58Was that entirely the game plan or was this something that happened, you know, with good intention, but actually along the way, dystopian forces took over? I think it was intentional on the part of many actors. Coming back to the sort of historical moment, you know, one of the things that did happen in the 20th century was bringing a whole bunch of things that were critical to society's functioning into public ownership. We invented railways. We recognized that in order to do that effectively and efficiently, to make sure, again, it supports people's lives, you needed to have a national system, you needed to run the railways to the places where it needs to go rather than just where it was profitable, make sure that pricing systems work so that people can have affordable travel to get to work, but also to explore the country.

16:41And that worked in public ownership. So we had British Rail. And you could say the same thing for essential services around electricity, around water, even housing. As I'm sure you know, lots of young people can't believe that it was the public sector that built the vast number of new homes throughout most of the 20th century. You know, something like 60 % of house building in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s in this country was backed by public capital of some sort. So again, remarkable progress in the 20th century through public cooperation through the state or other forms of sort of collective ownership.

17:22But then that prevents capital or it limits the scope for capital to be able to exploit returns. And so the sort of at the heart of what we now call neoliberal ideology, people called it Thatcherism or Reaganomics rather, is the idea that, well, no, the state is actually quite bad at organizing economic life. So we need to leave it to markets. Bonanza, because before you know it, you have the sell off often at discounted rates, the very rules in which that sort of those sales happened, favored investors. And then before you know that you've privatised so much that any public policymaking is constrained by pleasing the investors.

18:03Just as we've got ourselves into this mess, I think the nephew, having been around 40 years, is we can easily get ourselves out of this mess because we could reorganise our economic life, our public institutions with people at their heart. And it might not actually involve recreating the state as it was. It might be that we do things more creatively. Maybe we We make things mutuals. Let's make the post office a mutual owned by shareholders across the country rather than say, okay, let's leave the state. Let the state run it in the way that it might have been before. Could you spell out what a mutual would be?

18:41Yeah, a mutual is like a cooperative where we all own a share and become sort of co-owners of something, not through the state. Because the state works by saying, okay, we pay taxes and we contribute to the state. and the state runs it as a sort of arm of the state. If it's a cooperative or a mutual, it's something that's still held in public ownership, but where each of us might have a say or a stake. And the good news, again, is there are hundreds, thousands of amazing cooperatives and mutuals in this country, and they've been around for hundreds of years. And some of the most inspiring new economic formations that I see are things like community energy companies, You know, solar and wind plants owned by communities, driving decarbonization, but also community ownership of those assets or equal care cooperative.

19:33You know, the care sector is notorious for being, you know, for profiteering. Lots of hedge funds and others own these care operators. They provide a bad service. They pay people poorly. And the people who they're supposed to be serving don't feel any ownership of the services they're accessing. So why not make it a cooperative? And so this Equal Care Cooperative is a small, but I hope part of a movement where the caregivers, the care receivers, family members and others are equal shareholders, if you will, in a cooperative arrangement that they all sort of co-own. It's an efficient way of organising an important service, but importantly, it's an efficient way of keeping ownership and power shared amongst us rather than sort of handing it over to some nameless, faceless investor somewhere else.

20:22It just makes so much sense. I had a public meeting recently with some credit unions and they talked about how it's hardly used in the economy, but actually what an amazing resource this is. And you just listen to these ideas and you go, they're there for the taking. Credit unions are a fantastic example. I think I'm like one or one and a half percent of the British population banks with credit unions. In Ireland, in Australia, in Canada, even in the US, it's something like 20 or 30 percent. You know, I met someone from the Vancouver Credit Union. It has investable assets of$35 billion Canadian.

20:56Hundreds of thousands of people are members and they're just opening up their first national bank owned by the cooperative members. like why in the UK where we had some of the earliest credit unions can't we be taking a leaf out of that book and say that's how we reform our financial services industry rather than having big corporates with big towers in Canary Wharf let's democratize the way our economy works. I realized I brought it up but can you explain what a credit union is? Yes absolutely. Credit unions are some of the oldest forms in which humans have done financial transactions. And they started when a community, when someone needed a pot of money to be able to buy a house, for example, and not everyone had enough.

21:36So people banded together and they pooled their resources. And in some cases, building societies, which is another form of ownership, said, okay, well, 10 of us might pool our money together. One of us gets the capital in the first year or the first month. And then the next month we all put in a share. And then the second person gets that capital and so on. So we all access capital, but we're mutually accountable to each other. A credit union is where people with a common bond, because you work for an, you know, you're in a profession, the police have lots of credit unions, for example, and you're all pooling your resources together.

22:08That's then creates the capital from which now you can borrow. So again, it's, it's a communal way or public way of owning these really important parts of economic life, rather than being slave to the market. I think there's a really interesting project, I said this to them in public, that they're not doing yet, but about credit unions for decarbonization with businesses. So actually there's a way of leveraging capital, but a conversation maybe for another day. But also for individuals. I mean, buying a heat pump, for example, is an investment. The state is trying to subsidize it, but not enough.

22:38But imagine if you had, you know, with your community members or people in your profession, you were able to access subsidized credit to be able to invest in a heat pump. I mean, it solves so many issues all at once. Business is booming, but you know what really helped? Zero. the accounting platform for small businesses. I used to think spreadsheets were just part of it. Ugh. But real-time cash flow? Wow. Invoices that chase themselves? Even better. Books that automate? That's a big one. And I can keep track from my phone while I get the job done. No spreadsheet in sight. What a life. Do right by yourself and your business and search XERO for your free trial.

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24:24So the New Economics Foundation is full of brilliant ideas. And anyone watching or listening can find those ideas because they're on the website as research papers, which I would say are pretty accessible. They're detailed, but they're often laid out. But, you know, people can follow the story. And one of the ideas that really caught my eye was this idea of abolishing the Office of Budget Responsibility or replacing it rather with an Office of Fiscal Transparency. Can we begin with the Office of Budget Responsibility? What's it for and why is it not working? That's a very leading question. No, I think it was created with some good intent to say, look, politicians come and go, parties come and go, but there needs to be an independent assessment of sort of public borrowing and public finances.

25:03Let's create an independent committee, in this case, three people, and give them the ability and a team to be able to check government projections on growth, inflation, borrowing, and assess whether the government is meeting so-called targets. and chancellors at any one point are sort of held to account by the OBR. The intent was good. In practice, what seems to have happened is that it's a very narrow way of defining success because you're basically each chancellor and each budget is being scored against a particularly narrow target, not a range, whereas almost everything in economic life is a range.

25:42No one knows for certain exactly what's going to happen on inflation or growth or whatever else it is. So it seemed pretty silly to base your targets on something narrow. Secondly, it's based on a system of scoring particular types of public investment that we've colleagues have written reams and reams, but hopefully accessible, as you say, that are problematic. You know, some public investment is not scored properly for its long term return. So chancellors or treasuries are sort of disincentivized from spending in that way because we're not properly reflecting the value of them. And thirdly, it's not at all a democratic way in which we can do this work because, yes, our politicians are accountable, but these, you know, able civil servants are not really accountable.

26:32So they hold huge power using very narrow forecasts, we would argue with problematic methodologies. And those decisions and how the media and sometimes the market reacts to them basically condition everything else in public policy. Because if the Treasury says there's no money, every other department can't do what they want to do on transport or education or whatever else it is. So it seems a really undemocratic and unaccountable way of managing something so fundamentally important as public borrowing. And so colleagues have come up with an idea to replace the Office of Budget Responsibility with an Office of Fiscal Transparency.

27:10It's much more about making transparent the various assumptions that are being made. So it's not about scoring against the target. It's about being clear about the assumptions and creating a system of fiscal referees, if you will. maybe you can come up with a better term, but that's the best we can do, which is sort of saying, well, actually, yeah, this particular investment is likely to deliver these sorts of returns. So it's probably a sensible thing to do. This other sort of investment that the state's doing may not have so similar returns. And so more nuanced approach to particular decisions rather than a sort of very clumsy tool, if you will, that's driving these dysfunctional decisions, as one of our colleagues from the Institute for Fiscal Studies recently called it.

27:51And then hanging over this whole conversation is, I'd say, the cloud of Liz Truss's mini-budget, where, in fact, a journalist, Nick Robinson, I was talking about, are plans to invest in transport and schools and hospitals, and he brought up Liz Truss instantly. And my argument always is, you know, Liz Truss was borrowing to fund unfunded tax cuts, which is very different to borrowing to invest. And Nick Robinson just kept replying by saying, well, it's still spending. I guess it's partly a question about journalism and economic literacy, but more widely, what is the answer to that when people try and compare these things?

28:20It's the same point as I was trying to make around having a nuanced approach to public borrowing. You have to do the same for public expenditure. There are very different types of public expenditure. And we've got into this framing, I suppose, that all public expenditure is necessarily bad, that the state is bad. And so therefore, when the state borrows or spends, it's also bad. Take poverty and expenditure to reduce poverty, something like the two-child cap that was in place until very recently. We've been told, well, that's a cost. If we were to lift the two-child cap, it would cost the state X billions of pounds.

28:58It's nonsense. By allowing children in our society live in poverty, we are costing the economy as well as society billions more through the costs directly of addressing issues when they arise because they have health issues or mental health issues or whatever. else it is, through the loss of productivity, through the loss of those children being educated and being active contributors to the economy. And so we need to rethink the way we talk about public expenditure, because I would say spending a bit more now to do the right thing to address poverty is exactly the right thing that we should be doing.

29:34I mean, if you want to see it in economic terms, it will save us billions more down the line. But we've thought about it in the wrong way. The same with expenditure on the green transition. We're living in these turbulent times when we can no longer rely on fossil fuels from a security point of view, let alone a climate security point of view. We should be pumping as much public investment in as rapid a green transition as possible so that we can minimize or mitigate the adverse impacts on the climate, but also deliver energy security. And better still, if you could do that in a way that also helps people who are facing the cost of living crisis, then you've got a triple win.

30:15So if you still simply think of public expenditures, well, it's all very bad if it involves borrowing, but don't realise the payoffs on addressing poverty or the green transition, then we've got it all wrong. We're thinking about public policy in the wrong way. Beautifully put. Something people will know about was this idea of an extreme poverty line that was looked at throughout the world. But you have a different idea, right? I think we should have an extreme wealth line. And there's a bunch of us who are working together. So the NERF working with a group called the Patriotic Millionaires, which are really rich people who want higher taxes, and an academic called Ingrid Robaines, who wrote a fantastic book on limitarianism, and some colleagues at the London School of Economics.

30:55And our dream is that every society in the world has an extreme wealth line, a line above which we as a society think it's immoral and harmful for any one individual or household to hold more wealth than that line. The analogy is with the extreme poverty line because, you know, most people these days might know that there are poverty lines pretty much in every country. In fact, there are several poverty lines we talk about. But until the 1970s, we didn't have those. And in fact, those people who talked about an extreme poverty line at the time were ridiculed by mainstream economists. How on earth can you quantify poverty?

31:32Or why would you set a line? Or why should policymakers be obliged to make sure that everyone lives above the line? But we have one. So we say it might seem a bit counterintuitive now. And there's a huge lobby of people, as you can imagine, who hate this idea. I think it's really important we do because we need to be just as worried about what's happening at the top of the tree as what's happening in terms of poverty. And having a societal conversation, a democratic conversation about when we think too much is too much, I think is really important and timely. And, you know, I'd love to see a government in the UK ask, say, a citizens assembly, 99 people randomly selected to sit for six months or a year or whatever it is, hear all the evidence about, yes, you know, the incentives that people have to earn and the opportunities through wealth accumulation, but also the harms.

32:28Like what happens to society when rich people buy political influence? What's happening when rich people fly in their private jets in terms of the carbon emissions? What's happening in terms of the sort of social harms of wealth? And come up with a sort of agreed line saying, you know, it might be a million pounds, it might be 10 million pounds. I don't know what it is. And we say, okay, look, that's the line that policymakers then need to bear in mind when they set policies. So they might set their tax policy so that once you have wealth above that amount, you are taxed at very high rates. Again, not unfamiliar because we were doing that through the 1950s, 60s, 70s.

33:08Or you might say, look, 10 million is the extreme wealth line and no one should be allowed to inherit more than that. So if you happen to do well and, you know, accumulate more than 10 million in your lifetime, you just have to give it away or do something with it so that your children can't inherit more than 10 million. And, you know, one of the things we've been doing is interviewing rich people as part of this process. It's fascinating because many of them are very concerned about the sort of damaging impacts, the harmful impacts of wealth. But many of them have also set their own line for their children.

33:42You know, one very rich person told me recently, you know, they've worked very hard. And the last thing they want is to have sort of their children have no incentive to work at all. And so they will limit the amount of money the child will get as inheritance because they want for them to keep that drive to work hard. And so I'd love to see an extreme wealth line here in the UK, but maybe every country. And of course, we then importantly, you know, we need to have global cooperation because capital is mobile, doesn't care about borders or nation states, really. And so if we're going to have any chance of tackling the wealth emergency, the wealth inequality emergency, we're going to have to take global action.

34:24And does that link our entire conversation together? Because we started talking about democracy and the need for people power. We're also talking now about extreme wealth inequality around the world. What does democracy look like around the world? Because we can't solve these things just as a country. Yeah, I think there is a fork in the road, I think, for humanity at the moment. And it's a global one. It is exactly that. I think if we do nothing, we see democracy dying away and replaced by autocracy and dictatorships and strongman politics. If we do nothing and don't have meaningful international collaboration, then we can't address the climate crisis, the inequality crisis, you know, all sorts of other global challenges, migration.

35:06And we end up in this sort of dystopian scenario in which, you know, we're retreating into sort of nationalism and populism and warfare and resource competition. And I think that's what lots of people, especially young people, are fearing, right? But there is also another very plausible road that we can take and we have to take. And that's to say, actually, we can reimagine democracy. Let's make it more participatory so that in addition to voting every few years, we are manifesting our democratic citizenship through other forms of liquid everyday democracy. We're shaping how budgets in our local authorities are being spent.

35:47We're owning our community energy company. We're in a mutual that owns the postal service. We're feeling empowered both politically and economically. And we're working together as one humanity to address some of these challenges. Take wealth and equality. We're told, of course, oh, if you tax wealthy people, they'll leave. Well, the obvious answer is to have one agreed minimum tax around the world on wealth. It could be done like that. It was done like that a few years ago for a global minimum corporate tax. Decades, people said it couldn't happen. Countries of the world agreed that every country has to have tax at least 15%.

36:25We could very easily say every country in the world has to have a 2 % tax on assets over a billion or whatever the amount is. And so we renew democracy, we renew international cooperation. I often think that this should be the century of the citizen. You know, for most of humanity, we lived as subjects and then capitalism said we should be consumers. This should be the era of humanity in which, you know, we have enough to survive. We have enough to thrive. We have all these amazing tools and technology to be able to live very interesting, creative lives supported by machines, not ruled by machines.

37:06And, you know, a few decisions, I think that we need to take in the urgently in the next few years to protect and reimagine democracy, to democratize our, our economies, and have much more effective international cooperation. And we can make this the century of the citizen. I love this. I hadn't heard you use that phrase before, but I think it's beautiful. I don't want to be the doomsayer on this, but I do want to put a gentle challenge. yes to liquid democracy so more people getting involved but is it not a risk that we're building the bicycle while riding it i guess the metaphor is we're building the plane riding it that unless we make things more equal right now if things were more democratic people who are stressed and just trying to survive wouldn't actually be able to engage with a democratic process and it would still be run by people who are donating to political parties anyway yeah no so we do do need to do everything all at once to and we need to make sure that formal politics works you know 19 million people chose not to vote in the last general election in the UK across the world.

38:03I mean, something like 80 % of democratic elections since 2020 have seen the incumbent lose power because people are angry. They're angry at politics or politicians. And so we need to buttress and protect formal democracy, if you will. But we also need to nurture civic participation. And here, I think, you know, to your point about people feeling isolated or angry or lonely. This to me is ultimately the power of civic action or citizen action because civil society, you know, this arena outside the market or the state or the family where we're coming together to do stuff is useful for two things in the outside world.

38:42One is to buttress democracy, speak truth to power, hold power holders to account. And the other is to fix things. You know, I love the repair cafe up the road where volunteers come together literally to fix things, but then the volunteer-run football club where kids play football on a Saturday morning or, you know, making our communities better. So those are instrumental reasons about democracy and communities. But there's a third fundamental thing about civic life that I think we've also neglected, and that's that by doing things that put our own talents and interests to use, working with others, not because we're trying to seek profit or power, but because we're in community, we're doing stuff together, is fundamentally important to human happiness.

39:29Every single philosophical tradition recognizes that. You know, Aristotle talked about eudaimonic happiness, not just hedonic happiness, that humans can only truly be happy if we put our own talents to use for the greater good or what we think is the greater good. And that might be through volunteering. It might be through protesting. It might be through joining a knitting club, whatever it is, organizing a knitting club. I think if we're going to solve some of the mental health challenges, the loneliness challenges, the disenfranchisement that people feel, again, we need to nurture civic life.

40:05And so, yes, we need to fix formal democracy, but we need to nurture the sort of undergrowth, the buttressing of democracy through civic life as well. It's been such a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much, Danny. And I know that as well as speaking to Greens and Green MPs. You speak to Labour MPs too. So I'm really hoping that they listen because I think so much of what you and Neff offer would put us in the exact right direction. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.

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