Failed State: Inside Britain's Governance Crisis | Sam Freedman

21:28Demetri Kofinas:Yeah, this is one of the most interesting topics you explore in the book, from my perspective, at least, because I'm quite familiar with the growth of executive power in the United States. I mean, executive power has grown enormously since FDR's administration and the end of World War II. But since 9-11 and the war on terror, we've seen presidents rule increasingly by executive order. And in fact, many members of Bush's cabinet in the early 2000s were very explicit about their desire to strengthen what they called the unitary executive after what they felt had been an unintentional attenuation of its powers in the year since Nixon's resignation in 1974.

22:07Demetri Kofinas:So it was surprising for me to read in your book that Britain has one of the most dominant executive branches of any Western democracy. How powerful is Britain's executive branch? And where does that power reside? And what are some concrete examples you can provide to us to help us understand how materially relevant that power is in practice? Yes. So there's effectively no constitutional check on the power of parliament. And parliament is controlled by whichever party has a majority in the House of Commons, and they're the people who appoint the prime minister. So the prime minister, as long as he has that majority, he or she has that majority, and as long as he or she has the support of his party in the House of Commons, can do pretty much whatever they like.

22:54The House of Lords is a revising chamber. It has no real power to stop the House of Commons doing anything. So it will step back if the House of Commons wants to do anything. The King, in theory, still signs off legislation, but would never interfere with the process of legislation. So he doesn't represent any kind of check on power. We have courts, we have independent judiciary, but we have a parliamentary sovereignty, which means that ultimately if Parliament pass a law saying something, that's what goes. They can override the courts by passing a law. So there's no part of our system that can stop the executive doing anything it wants, as long as it controls parliament.

23:35And that's obviously very, very different from the theoretical model, at least in the US and indeed most other countries where there is some level of constitutional separation of powers. And the way it's kind of worked in the UK, it's sort of worked up to this point because people have respected convention that they don't do certain things and don't behave in certain ways. But it's all convention. There's no legal or constitutional structure that would prevent a Trump-like figure in the UK doing pretty much whatever they wanted. And to take some lesser examples, because we haven't yet had a Trump-like prime minister in the UK.

24:12But if we look at the financial crisis, just to give an example, in the US there was this huge negotiation between President Bush as it was at the time and his team and Congress and initially Congress would refuse to pass the bank bailout the TARP Act and then they did eventually after a huge amount of pressure and there's this huge battle between different branches of government in the UK they just did it the Prime Minister just said we're doing this we just did it and there was no need to sort of clear it with anybody at all during COVID, we passed an act within a couple of days that allowed for widespread lockdowns at a national level and so on with very little debate.

24:51So there is this extraordinary power within the executive when they want to use it.

24:56Demetri Kofinas:So in theory, because you guys don't have a constitution, the parliament could pass a law that says everyone under the age of 18 will need to be herded into cages and there's just no way around that. There's no legal buffer to protect people's fundamental rights in any sort of form or fashion. Is that an accurate description? So in theory, if you believe in the pure vision of parliamentary sovereignty, which many people do, then yes, they could do that. I would argue that if that did happen, we would get a constitutional crisis of a very messy kind because we don't have a written constitution.

25:33And you would get the court saying you can't do that. It's such a fundamental attack on human rights that we aren't going to allow that. But then you would have an impasse because there's nowhere written down anywhere who gets to win that argument between parliament and the courts if the courts say, wait a minute, this shouldn't apply. It's all convention. So we've never reached that point. We didn't have anything quite like that, but we did have a situation under the last government where we had a big battle over a proposal to deport immigrants to Rwanda. And the Supreme Court, our Supreme Court said, Rwanda is not a safe country to deport people to, so we're not going to allow you to do that.

26:10And then parliament passed a law saying Rwanda is a safe country, just defining Rwanda as a safe country. And had the government stayed in power and won the election and forced that through, it would have been very interesting to see whether the Supreme Court had accepted that and said, okay, we're subservient to parliament, you win, Rwanda is a safe country, or whether they would have tried to fight back. So we've come quite close, I think, to the edges of this constitutional impasse, but we haven't hit it yet.

26:38Demetri Kofinas:So is it fair to say that you think the American constitutional system with its strong judicial review by the Supreme Court is a more effective check on executive power compared to what we have in the UK and preferable? So every system, I would argue, has its merits and flaws. I think if you look at the US, system, one of the advantages of the UK of the US is we do have an independent judiciary. They're not appointed by politicians. One of the challenges, obviously, of the Supreme Court is they are political appointments. And so you get this situation where previous eras, it's been dominated by liberal judges.

27:10At the moment, it's dominated by conservative judges, which somewhat undermines that separation of powers. But I do think having a written separation and having a constitution has a lot of value. And I think you can see that even with the way Trump is behaving. And even though he's got a Supreme Court and a Congress who are fairly compliant, he's still being stopped from doing some of the things he wants to do because of those separation of powers. And that would be much harder to guarantee here.

27:40Demetri Kofinas:It's very interesting listening to you tell me about all the ways in which Trump is being stopped from acting. Because in my experience, and this is not just with Trump, obviously it's a result of the growth in executive power that I've experienced that we talked about over the course of my lifetime. The president has just become more and more powerful. And what the president wants, the president will often get, so long as it doesn't require legislation. And so much today, as we've already established, is done through executive order for exactly this reason. But again, I think this is something I found really valuable about reading the book, which is that it helped me draw comparisons across political systems.

28:20Demetri Kofinas:And it really helps me appreciate so much more how many checks and balances we actually do have in this country. So when it comes to actually holding the executive accountable in the United Kingdom, what are some concrete examples that you can provide us with that show how parliament's role in that process has weakened substantially? So one of the reasons it's been weakened is because the way in which debates happen in the House of Commons has been fairly dramatically changed. It was at the beginning of this century. So when you introduce a piece of legislation into the House of Commons, you introduce a timetable, which sounds very arcane and boring, but it's really important because you can set that timetable to be whatever you like it to be, as long as you have the majority and the majority will vote for it.

29:07So you can have an incredibly contentious, complicated piece of legislation and you can say, we're going to spend a day debating it, four hours debating it. And then when that four hours is up, that's it. Debate over and you have a vote. And if the government has a majority, they win the vote. So you have this process where there's just very little scrutiny of sometimes incredibly detailed and complex legislation. It doesn't happen every time. There can be a lot of scrutiny. But if a government doesn't want it, they can just root around and avoid that, which is then very dangerous because you've had lots of examples of very poor, poorly written legislation just being shoved through without debate or discussion and then often ends up in the courts because it was so poorly drafted.

29:50But sometimes you don't even need legislation to do something. We have something called secondary legislation, whereby an awful lot of stuff that happens that government does can be done using existing bills and you just tweak something within them without any debate at all. So our net zero target, for instance, which is a very politically contentious topic where we're supposed to be reaching net zero by 2050, was passed by the last government with I think an hours debate and no vote because they use secondary legislation to do it. A lot of COVID laws use secondary legislation as well with no debate, no discussion.

30:27So this big increase in the use of these essentially tricks to get around having any debate in parliament and a very weak House of Commons has contributed to bad laws.

30:37Demetri Kofinas:So we already spoke about two of the three sources of the UK's governance crisis. The over-centralization is something that is more unique to Britain, or in particular case of England that you highlighted. The growth in executive power is something we've seen in the US as well, though it sounds like Britain, the situation in Britain is much more severe. The third one, which you highlighted having to do with the modern media cycle and the short-termism that derives from it is one that I found really resonant. I mean, it really resonates with me in terms of what we're seeing to the US. And you show how it's fundamentally reshaped politics by emphasizing short-term announcements over substantive policymaking.

31:23Demetri Kofinas:What are the changes in media that have driven ever shorter news cycles, in your opinion? And how does it play out inside the governing power structure in Britain? So there's been a series of changes in the way that media works all the way back from the Second World War onwards that have incrementally sped up this media cycle. So if you look at coverage after the Second World War, it's incredibly deferential. There's a lot of gatekeeping. You have a small number of very powerful newspapers who have relationships with the government. You have at that point one broadcaster who are incredibly deferential to the government.

31:58And over the next 20 years, into the 70s, into the 80s, you start to get a bit less deference, a bit more focus on actually trying to poke and prod at government, more difficult interviewers coming onto the scene, more of a focus from newspapers on the personalities involved in politics, the prime minister themselves, scandal, less on policy and what goes on in parliament. But the really big moment is the introduction of 24-hour news, which happened in the UK, happened initially in 1989, and then the BBC introduced their channel a few years after that. And that started this sort of process where there was constant news coverage.

32:39So you move from having a situation in which you could really control the news cycle as a politician, because you just had to have a key number of relationships with the people who edited the newspapers and a couple of broadcast channels who had their one or two news programs every night, you could manage that news cycle fairly comfortably. And it moved when you got 24-hour news, it moved to being a sort of constant cycle where things could break immediately and you had less time and less space to think about what was happening. Then you had the internet arriving and that sped it up even more.

33:10Stories could break straight away and people who weren't the official news media could suddenly appear and make your life difficult, bloggers and so on. And then you had social media, which sped up even more, the government under even more of a spotlight, and made it even harder to spend any time thinking about something before you had to respond. And this sort of ratcheting up of the speed of the media cycle has focused Westminster's attention more and more, and government's attention more and more, and managing the media, because it's got so much harder to do and less on actually governing, which is what they should be doing.

33:45Demetri Kofinas:So this is not a question that I had formulated before we sat down, so I'm going to do my best to kind of articulate it. There was a book I read many years ago and I had the author on, his name was Mark C. Taylor, and the book was called Speed Limits. And I think one of the central insights of the book was that our world was starting to move faster and faster. And the faster it moved, the less in accordance our lives were with sort of nature and our ability to actually govern ourselves, I think is also an example of this. But so this is part of the issue. I mean, I think the speed of the news cycle, and now it's gotten so fast with social media.

34:18Demetri Kofinas:But at the same time, there's also another effect here. And social media is a really great example of where it has become exceptionally powerful. And that has to do with the creation of echo chambers. So we saw this with cable news in the US. Again, I don't know to what degree this was actually the same thing in the UK, but you had these different channels that people came to watch, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, based on their political affiliation. Social media has 10X that or 100X that with algorithmic feeds that are segmented to one person. And I feel like what we are seeing in the US with politicians is that they're essentially becoming influencers and they're having to become influencers in order to succeed at the ballot box.

35:03Demetri Kofinas:Now I've seen this in the UK. The first time I saw this in the UK was with Nigel Farage. Nigel Farage was like a phenomenon coming out of the European Parliament. Before UKIP ever won any seats in the UK, he was famously at the European Parliament. There were a number of ministers that were there and they were all very colorful. They were all very telegenic, very excellent at gaining media attention. And it wasn't just a social media phenomenon at this point. This was still legacy. I mean, social media was around and it was relevant, but it was really the internet and internet-based media that helped grow Farage's appeal.

35:41Demetri Kofinas:What are the similarities here, to the extent that you're familiar with what's going on in the United States with influencers, the various people, AOC, Marjorie Taylor Greene, whoever, what are these similarities? What are you seeing? What are the parallels? And I'd love to dig into this a bit with you. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And Farage here has by far the most TikTok followers of any politician in the UK. He has always been a natural at that kind of media, which comes from, similarly to Trump, I mean, I think they're different in many ways, but one of their similarities is they both have that ability to appear spontaneous and off the cuff and authentic.

36:17Whether they are or not, they can appear that way in a way that a conventional politician really struggles to do. And that gives them a huge advantage in an era of, as you say, where politicians can become influencers. And a really interesting difference in this one between the US and the UK is it happened a lot earlier in the US. And therefore the system has acclimatized more to it over time, whereas in the UK it was more of a shock. Because you had the deregulation of broadcasting rules in the 1980s, which led to the rise of shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh and then Fox News, which has always been highly partisan and other partisan channels.

36:53And you had this sort of complete polarization of the media quite early. You saw that effect coming in very strongly through the 90s with Newt Gingrich and the Clinton impeachment and so on. We have historically been very reliant on the BBC as the dominant source of news information in the UK. And the BBC, for all its flaws, does a pretty good job, I would argue, at trying to be neutral and genuinely trying to not be partisan in either direction. and until really the social media age the BBC was absolutely the dominant source of news information so the social media age has been more of a shock almost in the UK because that polarization that use of partisan media wasn't really there before and now is in a really really big way whether that's through YouTube and TikTok and so on or we now do have channels like Fox News we have GB News which is quite similar to Fox News, just starting to emerge now as a result of this kind of breakthrough against the gatekeeping power of the BBC.

37:54So it's a more recent phenomenon here, and almost having a more concentrated effect as a result of that. And it means you've still got quite conventional politicians like Keir Starmer, like Rishi Sunak in our system with a lot of power, but really struggling to adapt to this new media age, whereas US politicians have grown up, I guess, in a media environment in which your Fox News and MSNBCs have been very powerful.

38:19Demetri Kofinas:That's right. I mean, that's a good observation. The other thing that is happening in the US, and I'm curious to understand to what degree it's happening in the UK, because my sense is it's not happening in the UK. It's certainly not on this scale. And that has to do with this kind of reckoning that we're going through with respect to the ruling class, where Americans are becoming increasingly suspicious of their rulers and increasingly, I mean, I would say verging on paranoia. And when I use the word conspiracy, I'm not assigning a moral value to it. I'm simply describing what it is. And this fascination, for example, with Jeffrey Epstein, and again, I'm not minimizing the importance of the Jeffrey Epstein story at all.

39:00Demetri Kofinas:I'm just simply pointing out the narrative structure here. And it fits so perfectly in this preexisting bias in American society today, which is that essentially the elites are blood drinking, pedophiles, interdimensional child molesters. And this is not a small thing. It's a very potent narrative. Even if you don't believe it literally, there's a sense of disgust. I mean, a huge portion of Americans are disgusted at the ruling class. They find them to be reprehensible people. And so I'm curious how this compares to the United Kingdom today. So I think it's stronger in the US because the US has a much more polarized society and political system still than the UK, although I think there's ways in which we're moving in that direction.

39:48But there's definitely elements of it here too. If you sit in a focus group, as I sometimes do, there is a level of frustration and anger towards politicians of all parties and types that is new, I think, to me in terms of the level of hostility towards them. and I think that comes partly from this sort of breakdown of traditional media as we've been talking about and it comes from a sort of the fact that politics now operates in this sort of goldfish bowl you can see everything that happens there was always scandals and dirty dealings from politicians going on behind the scenes but it wasn't necessarily visible in quite the same way as it now is and when there is something that they do wrong and they do do things wrong and they do break the law and they do get involved in scandals, it's so much more visible now that there's almost a sense that they've got a lot worse, which I don't think they have, particularly certainly not in the UK.

40:44I don't think they've got particularly more venal in any way, probably less so, but it's just so much easier to see it now. And you do get plenty of genuine scandals in British and American politics. So you can see how, if that's your sense of it, and you're not part of it, and you don't sort of understand why these things happen, you would start to get this level of frustration, especially when cost of living has been so high, when there are all sorts of other domestic problems that you blame government for, that you would get this impression of politics.

41:12Demetri Kofinas:So let's talk about ways forward. You argue strongly for radical institutional reform. What do you mean by radical in this context? And why do you believe that incremental reforms will fail in the UK? Because I think we're reaching the point of where the crisis breaks through and become so serious that incremental isn't going to cut it anymore. We have a situation where there is very little support now for any political party. No party in the UK is currently polling over 30 % consistently. That's never happened before. The government is extraordinarily unpopular, but so was the last government and the Conservatives are still incredibly unpopular.

41:53reform, which is the party that's led by Nigel Farage, this new right wing party, it's very unpopular with a majority. So you've got this sort of really deep, powerful frustration with the governing class that you were talking about now coming through very powerfully. So just messing about isn't going to cut it. And if we don't do something pretty radical soon, we're going to end up with a pretty disastrous government doing all the wrong things as a way of dealing with what people consider these frustrations to be rather than getting in ahead of that happening and fixing some of those problems in advance.

42:28Demetri Kofinas:So I want to ask you what reforms you think are most urgent, but one more question. Because as I mentioned, Nigel Farage's popularity began, at least from my perspective, I began to notice him in 2011, I think. And we also in the US went through a cycle, the Tea Party movement was back in 2008 or so, and the Ron Paul revolution was also around that time. And so I was already plugged into a lot of these ideas and a lot of this discontent in that era. And I feel like a lot of it was then generational. I'm a millennial, so it was a part of this millennial cohort. So I feel like in some sense, I mean, my sense is that this has been building for a very long time, and it was simply a matter of generating enough political buy-in, getting enough people to be dissatisfied to be able to actually get to the point where we are today.

43:18Demetri Kofinas:I'm curious, one, if that resonates with you, and two, how long do you think this has actually been building in the UK? When did we begin to see tangible signs of people's dissatisfaction with the ruling class and the systems of governance? Well, I mean, the first thing to say is politicians have never been massively popular, but I think that you mentioned the Tea Party, and I think there is a reason that that and Farage's breakthrough happened around the same time, which is the global financial crisis happened then. And the Tea Party movement really initially emerged out of opposition to bailing out the banks and created this sort of opportunity for anti-establishment anger on left and right in a way to sort of foment around the same frustrations with this society that seemed completely rigged for the wealthy and powerful.

44:04And in a similar way, Farage got his breakthrough around that point. Now, he wasn't particularly talking about the financial crisis. But I think it was that sense of dislocation caused by the crisis and trying to find someone to blame for this sort of anger that emerged as a result. And in our case, it was they pointed the finger at immigrants, particularly, and at the European Union. And initially, a lot of this anger and this frustration was put into a movement to leave the European Union. And that was Farage's big cause, NUKIP's big cause. And they got the referendum, they were able to get the conservatives to agree to the referendum, and then that led to Brexit.

44:41But when Brexit didn't resolve any of those frustrations, as it was never going to, it's now morphed into something more dissolute, but probably wider spread, and with a real, real particular focus on immigration. So I'd say immigration is probably the one big unifying point for anger on the right, certainly now, that is where all of this sort of loosely formed anger since 2008 and so has ended up. And in America, you can sort of follow a similar path where a lot of that anger got put into the election of Trump, but then that hasn't actually resolved the anger either. So you're now starting to see some of that boil up around the Epstein case and some of Trump's online supporters starting to turn against him and so on.

45:26So it's created a very volatile situation in both the UK and the US and a lot of other countries around the world as well, which have undergone similar journeys.

45:35Demetri Kofinas:You know, Nigel's appeal to nationalism when we're comparing the US and the UK, it was unique to the UK because his equivalent, which was Ron Paul and the Ron Paul movement, was much more focused on systems of governance and taking the government increasingly out of its role in the economy. And that's understandable because Nigel was also responding to the sense of an overbearing bureaucracy coming from Brussels. And people don't know, I don't know how many people know this, but I interviewed Nigel back in 2012 on my old television program, and I spent quite a bit of time with him afterwards. We went for drinks and we spoke quite a bit.

46:12Demetri Kofinas:And I actually had met him and a number of the other ministers and some of the people on his team. And this is the other thing that's really interesting when you compare Nigel now to Trump. These guys had kind of an air of being somewhat rock stars. They dressed in a very flashy way. And they were entertaining. I mean, Nigel was incredibly entertaining and he was willing to denigrate anyone and everyone on the floor of European Parliament. And Trump in that sense is very similar. He's very entertaining and he's willing to denigrate. And I think that part of his appeal is simply his entertainment value.

46:48Demetri Kofinas:And I'm curious to what degree that has also been true for Nigel, for the folks at UKIP and now for reform. Absolutely. I mean, and if you look at reform, they really are the Nigel Farage party. There isn't a lot beneath him. I mean, they have an infrastructure and an organization, but if you asked your average reform voter to name another person associated with the party other than Farage, they wouldn't be able to. It is built around his personality in the way that the MAGA movement is built around Trump's personality. And as you say, in both cases, it's partly because they're very effective at using humor.

47:22They're very effective at seeming spontaneous and authentic and often being spontaneous and authentic and not seeming to be so uptight and worried and on message as your average politician, which is very attractive to people who are very fed up with the normal way of doing political business. But one interesting question as a result of that is the degree to which both Trump and Farage are sui generis. Can they be replaced? So neither of them are young. Trump is a bit older than Farage. They can't go on forever. Will the Republicans find someone who can replace Trump and have the same kind of impact that he does.

47:57Because I look at people like J.D. Vance or Ron DeSantis, and they don't have that ability that he has to, that sort of spontaneous human. I look at people around reform and I can't see anyone with the ability that Farage has to do that. So how much is it about these individuals who just have this ability in this social media age to have to cut through? And how much is it about the underlying movement beneath them.

48:21Demetri Kofinas:So I'm curious what, I think we started this conversation where we were to an end of this conversation speaking about reforms and radical institutional reform. What reforms do you think are most urgent for the UK and why? So decentralization, I would put very high on the list for the reasons that we've been talking about. I think that until you decentralize, until you take some of the powers out of Whitehall, it's simply not going to be able to operate in in a strategic fashion. And we are starting to see that a little bit. We've now got more powerful regional mayors than we've ever had before, but they are still nowhere near as powerful as federal officials in the US or Germany and so on.

49:03So I think we need to go much, much further to allow them to raise their own taxes, to allow them to make decisions across a far wider range of public policy, to free up Whitehall, to be more strategic, to have that more strategic kind of conversation about big issues like climate change and AI and financial systems. I think that we absolutely need to deal with the fact that we have no real proper scrutiny of legislation and what government is doing. I think that's been disastrous. So I propose quite a lot of ways you could strengthen parliament, not to sort of introduce the level of checks and balances that you in theory have in the US constitution, but to at least have a system in which there is meaningful scrutiny of legislation as it goes through the House of Commons and where MPs have a much more meaningful role as legislators, which they don't really at the moment compared to a senator, say, in the US.

49:55So that's really important. I talk a lot about, we haven't really talked about some civil service, but I talk a lot about how you can make changes there too, to make those bits of the government more effective. When it comes to media, that's a lot harder because obviously I believe in free speech and a free press. I don't think you can start interfering with the way media operates and we can't delete social media or the internet. and it has advantages, of course, too. But there are some things you could do, particularly looking at media ownership and concentrations of media ownership, and changing the way that government thinks about communications to accept that we're just not in the era anymore where you can control the media cycle in the way that it used to, and that you need to have a totally different approach to communications that is more in line with the sort of Farage Trump model, although certainly not necessarily saying and doing what they believe and say.

50:42So there's a lot in there that I think needs to change and pretty fast because right now government is struggling here.

50:48Demetri Kofinas:So how do you ensure long-term commitment to reform given the political incentives and constraints that any government would face, any future government would face? It's a good question and you can never guarantee that a future government will agree with what you've done. That's one of the pluses and minuses of democracy. It's in the nature of democracy. But my sense is that once you start decentralizing, once you start boosting the power of parliament and you do it very openly and explicitly, it's quite hard to undo because in undoing it, you are very explicitly stating that you are trying to take total executive control of the system.

51:26And it may be that a reform government or something like that would try and do that. And there's nothing you can do to stop that, but it's still worth trying to at least force them to undo it, if nothing else. And once you sort of just take decentralization example, once you have these powerful regional mayors, it's quite hard to take power away from them because they will oppose that. And you have a group of people arguing actively for keeping local powers, which we don't have at the moment. So it's definitely worth trying, though absolutely you can never guarantee anything.

51:55Demetri Kofinas:Is there an example of such radical institutional reform, either in the UK or internationally that you would point to, to give you hope that this is something that's possible? We haven't been particularly big on radical institutional reform in the UK for quite a while. Yeah, I wouldn't describe Brits as radicals. It's not our standard way of doing things, but there have been in the past. I mean, I talked earlier about our crisis of democracy in the early part of the 20th century. You had a government then that very fundamentally changed the balance between the House of Commons in the House of Lords in a way that gave the Commons control and stopped the unelected House of Lords, who were almost all aristocrats at the time, from blocking the introduction of the welfare state, things like pensions and so on.

52:37And that was a very dramatic moment of constitutional reform in the way that we do it, because we don't have a written constitution. In the 19th century, you had the creation of an independent meritocratic civil service, which we had not had before. So there have been moments when we've done these big radical forms, just not for a very long time. So it feels like it's very overdue that we have a look again at some of these systems that have been around for 100, 150 years.

52:59Demetri Kofinas:So last question for you, Sam, what might the future hold for Britain if these governance issues remain unaddressed, do you think? I fear that we are heading in some ways in the same direction as the US is at the moment. I think there is a chance, although I wouldn't say a likelihood yet, or certainly a certainty that reform will win the next election or certainly do very well at the next election here, which isn't for another four years. And that they would take advantage of a lot of the flaws in our system that I have pointed out to do some pretty dramatically unpleasant things to the country in ways that I think would be extremely destructive to our economy, to our values.

53:42And it's possible that we need that as the crisis that triggers other parties, other more some traditional conventional parties to step up and say, we need more radical reform. But I don't really want to have to go through that in order to get there. And I'm hoping that our current government can speed things up a bit and realize that if they don't start to change the way that they are governing, they are going to be in a lot of trouble in a few years' time.

54:08Demetri Kofinas:Sam, this was wonderful. I really enjoyed reading your book. It gave me, I knew very little. I mean, I still know very little about British politics, but it was a very useful primer, not only for understanding British politics, but also to draw comparisons and think in new ways about politics here in the United States. So thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you very much for having me. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces genius community.

54:43Demetri Kofinas:You can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.