Why our political system is broken and what it costs us

23:28Just show me the numbers, you know, okay? Because that's the reality of where we're going. You can see, you know, evidence of this. Do you remember like during the Brexit period, you would always have, because Sunak was a Brexiter, he would never want to mention Brexit in the budget. It got to this most preposterous point. It really didn't matter whether you were a leaver or a remainer. It was literally, I think it was like two dozen days away from Brexit happening. And he did a budget where he didn't mention it. And you're just like, you need to mention it. It's obviously an effect here. So as if it didn't exist, and you open up the OBR document, the OBR document was like, okay, we're going to have a problem here, by the way.

24:01We're going to have a problem with investment, with trading, with all of this. This is how we calculate it. So you get a dose of reality into the fantasy unicorn land of government communication. Yeah, where they can just ignore the biggest change in the way the economy is going to be structured in a lifetime. Whereas the OBR will come out and go, this thing right here is a big concern. There's loads of uncertainty within the economy, blah, blah, blah. Exactly. Which is why they now want to get rid of it, right? Like SUNAC started briefing against it after exactly that budget. Then you had Liz Truss come in.

24:28Liz Truss, of course, completely sidelined it. Well, they ignored the OBR report, didn't they, for the mini budget. They said, we don't want it. They just wouldn't involve them in the process at all, which is part of the reason the markets panicked so badly. because they're like, well, you're marking your own homework all of a sudden, and you look like you're a lunatic. You know, so like you more than anyone, we want to have someone marking your homework. And now you see the attacks again, like you see it from Jacob Rees-Mogg, you see it from conservative backbenchers going, the OBR, and actually Liz Truss doing her speeches in the US, the OBR is kind of part of the deep state, the blob, this kind of bizarre Tory conspiracy, where it's like, well, they're restraining the will of the people, whatever.

25:01These attacks are because people that have had power and have power typically hate it when that power is restrained. And generally speaking, the extent to which they are attacking it is an indication of the fact that it's working pretty well. Yeah. We should champion these organizations that will say, no, this is the ramifications of whatever you're saying. I'm going to organize like the most boring demonstrations on the street of all time. Be like, what do we want? Proper scrutiny by the Office of Budget Responsibility. When do we want it? When do we want it? Now. Every quarter.

25:33Yeah. And then you talk of the Treasury as an organisation that kind of was that, but kind of might not be now. And I think for this topic and this podcast and the money and the tax, that's where we should have a look. So did it used to be that and now it isn't? Yeah, Treasury is a beast of a thing. It's an incredible department. I mean, it's certainly the most powerful restraint on the Prime Minister that exists in our system. Okay, so much more powerful, obviously, than the monarchy, much more powerful, much more powerful than parliament. I mean, much more important and much more of a restraining force than the prime minister than parliament.

26:08And arguably, you could say certainly it's sometimes more powerful than the prime minister themselves. And you see that in the kind of people that you get around the prime minister. So May changed this. She went for security people. But until Theresa May, every time you had like the cabinet secretary, the most senior position in the cabinet, that was selected by the treasury. They pick who goes there. And you get the principal secretary in Downing Street, that's the person who literally the human being, including their family, who spends the most time with the prime minister, that person was selected by the treasury.

26:36They would basically have Downing Street in a headlock. Why? Because they've got the money. And whoever has the money ultimately has the power. That has been the story of British politics throughout. It's how we became a democracy because parliament had control over taxes and the king didn't. And that's now transferred to the treasury. And inside of that really bullish, strong culture was also the fact that they told the other departments what to do. They don't just come up with the financial policy for themselves. Other departments, whether they have one project or for their yearly spending limits, go to the treasury to get sign-off.

27:06So the chief secretary to the treasury, that second minister there, is the one that sits there for bilaterals. One of the former people in the treasury role said that their job was basically to beat up their colleagues, leaving, quote, the minimum visible bruising. That's the process of just being like, no, no, show me how this makes sense financially. So they're incredibly powerful. And inside of the Treasury, you have this, even now, although less so than before, really vivacious intellectual culture of the sort that you barely see in British politics, where it's a lot of conformist, quite obedient types who don't know much.

27:41In the Treasury, you get people who knew considerably more, and they'd be willing to have big, fiery debates in front of their minister. That would be the way it was with Norman Le Mans. That would be the way that it was with King Clark. these really big beast old Tory chancellors. And really that only changed when Gordon Brown went into the treasury. Don't you think that this is a bit ridiculous because we have some of the, I just can't get my head around it. We've got some of the best universities in the world. Like we've got Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, we've got great schools. How do we not have geniuses in parliament?

28:09Like how can there be an excuse that, oh, I don't have experience to this or we're not smart enough to figure this out. Like we have a choice of some of the most highly educated people in the world. Why are they not all politicians? The funny thing is, we do have really smart people as long as they studied humanities. Where we lose out is hard sciences. And we have had that problem really since... In 1968, there was a report, particularly in the civil service, called the Fulton Report. Basically said, this is the issue that we have. And we have exactly the same problem now. Now, you look at the people that secured the vaccine during COVID.

28:38The reports that came out from them are exactly the same. They're just like, we just really lack any kind of deep domain knowledge. We've got humanities students, we don't have maths and sciences, we don't have statistics. The reason for that is primarily financial. So if you're a humanities, and I say this as a humanities student, right? Like, you know, if you're a humanities student, you won't necessarily make that much more money than you would in the civil service out of uni. But if you want to go into the financial sector, you will make a lot more money. If you're an economist or something like that, you can have millions.

29:05And even if you're a moderately successful person in the financial sector, you're going make more probably than a permanent secretary at the absolute height of a department in the civil service. So we have a major financial counter incentive when it comes to higher times with students that we have failed to address over and over. And the way to address it is money. Pay more people. Pay more people, yeah. And there's different ways of doing that. There's different ways of rewarding. You can reduce head count, but ultimately you need it. And there is a recognition actually with labor now, because they're basically all civil servants in labor.

29:36It's basically, we're about to get a civil service government that we have a problem there we have a lack of institutional knowledge when it comes to contract negotiation when it comes to any kind of negotiation with the private sector we're gonna have to try and bring those skills in-house rather than contracting them out to consultants eye-watering day rates to a way that's basically just completely shafted the taxpayer for the last 20 30 years let's talk about that then because i've got a friend who's a doctor um and he was in hospitals when covid happened and he said that he got a 19 year old person from one of the big four accountancy firms placed with him on a day rate of 400 a day just following him around to gauge you know what needed to be part of the app basically so and he said every hospital in the country had one of these guys in them and you know there's billions and billions of money spent on the app and things like this and these figures we get thrown around a lot of it's on this consultants and there was a report that said that we had like a we were like addicted to consultancy within why is that the case why why do we lean so hard on because we lost the institutional knowledge of how to do this stuff and we just thought well we just get it on a day rate we thought that that was cheaper and it isn't the funny thing is the the accountancy for all of these firms are consultancy firms they hire from the same talent pool as the civil service it's basically bright young things out of university it's what we used to do with the fast track scheme for for the civil service you think well you look really smart do some tests do well, okay, we're going to see how quickly we can get you through the departments.

31:01The thing is that they take them and instead of turning them into amateurs, instead of setting a sort of system that says, well, you've got to move as quickly as possible. They say, well, no, I'm going to turn you into a specialist in this really tiny kind of thing. Whether it's, so to say, like rail franchise negotiation or something, or project management. And project management was so weak on project management and civil service. It's unbelievable. So they just say, right, so we're going to train them up there and then we just lease them back to the government for three to four times what it would cost for the same amount of time to have someone who was just permanent staff.

31:29But you don't only pay four times as much, you also lose out. Because every time we hire these people, we do not have the skills in-house. We lose it for the future. So now at this point, I mean, there are reports basically say, like the UK government is just, it's not an intelligent customer. It cannot deal with any kind of private sector initiative, which it must, whether it's for sort of apps or whether it's for, you know, negotiating on transport networks. You need to have that kind of institutional knowledge and we have hemorrhaged it by lack of long-term strategy. So I got an example of that on the ground level.

31:59One of my mates is a tree surgeon and for HS2, he just basically said, we just charged them four times the market rate. And he said, yes. And he's like, every single person on the project is doing that. And they were just like, yep. And he's like, you know, we just, they just ripped, you just ripped the government off. But that's wild. Like surely like. And no one checked, what's the market rate for a tree surgeon? Tell him, he called upon another phone I want my tree cutting down, but you don't think what's the price? That's what I'm thinking. I know, I'm the government, I've got lots of money and I would like a tree cut down, please.

32:29Like anything you look at, you're like, okay, let me get some quotes, let me compare the market, let me see what's going to be the best service at the best price. So why doesn't the government do what everyone else does? If you're going to buy a car, you don't just go, oh, I'll buy that car. You look, you can look around, you compare, you're like, oh, this model, benefits, features. So why are they just paying four times the amount instead of doing a bit of due diligence like everyone else does? They should get it at a better price because they've got work at scale. They should be like, we can give you work for five years.

32:53Exactly. They have that process. I mean, you actually have to sort of put forward your business case for why you're doing it. So somewhere along the line, something went wrong with that process. The trouble is that you're constrained in a way that a normal customer isn't. Like if I decide that I'm going to get the tree chopped down, I can basically do it. I don't have to do it. I can decide, okay, fine. So I'm going to not do it right now because the prices are too high or I can go look for other people. If you're a government that said, we are about to do an HS2 line, You do have to do it. Like it has to take place.

33:21So you then lose - Well, it doesn't. So what? Is it? Right. Until you change your policy pointlessly in the middle of a conference for no reason at all. It has to be done. And at that point, you basically lose some of the maneuverability you have as a customer. So some of that is hard to prevent, but the rest of it is due to lack of institutional knowledge. Don't you feel that all the decisions be made in the treasury in London for the whole country? They don't really like look at the whole country. They don't have, might not have experience in Manchester, Durham, like other parts of the country.

33:50So is that part of the problem? It is. The treasury has a very specific problem when it comes to investment outside of London, which is, it's basically what is a cost benefit analysis? Like you look at a cost, but this is one of the very few podcasts I'm allowed to talk about this stuff, by the way. You guys have made a terrible mistake here. I mean, like, you know, usually everyone, as soon as I say the treasury, they're like, oh Christ, here it comes. We're all over that. Where about the money? If you have a cost benefit analysis, what are you going to do? If someone talks about building a new road or broadband resources or rail or whatever, you're going to say, well, okay, so where's the area with the most productivity?

34:25Because that's where you're going to get the most benefit by facilitating transport, facilitating communications. If that's your only calculation, what do you do? You put all the money into London, because that's where there's the most existing productivity. For you to say, right, we want to build outside of London, for instance, actually, as we were doing with HS2 until Sunak scrapped the whole thing. You have to have a different calculation, which is not, okay, cost benefit is not the ultimate decider. We want to have an industrial strategy, a national communication strategy, basically a leveling up strategy that says these things matter, these areas matter in their own terms and our economy will do better overall once we start investing in them.

35:00So their problem really was that the treasury for years, for decades actually, had a very, very narrow view of the basis upon which you would do investment. And it's only recently they've got a new green book to guide civil servants it's only recently that they've improved but even though the treasury has now improved the politicians aren't really taking any opportunities that have been given to them yeah i live up north and i can tell you that nothing's improved in that sense like there is certain investment and you see certain bits but i come down here and i'll see projects that are going on and i'm thinking you know they've basically taken something that was fine and made it a little bit more fine down here and probably spent a billion okay and then how much does the system suffer from a short-term perspective oh god i mean it defines what it does because what else can you do if you if you have ministers there for two years there's a point when they did universal credit um which is in sort of the parliament between 2010 and 2015 it was coalition government um and there's loads of warnings about universal credit they're basically just like look you're you're a bunch of people that are used to having a regular income each month and you're a rational sort of economic actor and lots of the people that you're dealing with do not have those advantages like they can't afford.

36:04For instance, if you say, we're going to wait for another two weeks before the payment, those two weeks will just destroy them. Everything is hand to mouth a bit at a time, and they're not great at evaluating their finances. So you're going to mess this up, and you need to consult much more widely. And again, just like grayling with probation, all of the warnings came exactly to pass. During that period, Lord Freud said he was in charge of part of it. And he just looked around and he thought like, hang on a minute, I have become the institutional knowledge of this project. Like you were having civil servants that move through that project about once, you know, every nine months go on to something else.

36:38The whole thing took, you know, years took like up to seven years. So he was basically just looking at like the seventh, the eighth person that was in charge of the project. And he was just like, no, of course, the whole thing's falling apart because nobody knows anything. There was one person there who had actually been following the whole thing from beginning to end. That's obviously completely short-termist. You would never have an organization to say that we're encouraging people to leave projects before they're done. Actually encouraging it to happen rather than tolerating it from happening.

37:05And that kind of basis gives you these very short-term outcomes. What is this massive red button doing? Is that just... Is it like if I say something wrong? No, we don't know what you're on about. I think you're doing well. Okay, that's good. I did want to hit it for... What's an OCB? OBR. OBR, there you go. Yeah, I was going to hit it for them, but you guys are deep, deep in... What is an OBR? Office of Budget Responsibility. Thank you. But you were just deep in it. So I was like, if I hit it, he's going to get scared. Yeah. So there was a good example of this that I saw on Netflix about American policy and the relationship they have with China.

37:40And they had a government that was focused on building a positive relationship with China. They did that over a long period of time. China is about relationships. I mean, the world is about them, but they made a lot of headway. And then a new political party came in and they were like, do you want to talk about the Chinese relationship? And they were like, fuck that. We don't want to talk. We don't want to know anything. So they walked into the room with China. And the thing about China is because of their setup, they have very consistent leadership, very consistent. You know, they know the room.

38:07Whereas these new guys walk in who've not even had a handover and go, what's all this about then? And the Chinese were just like, oh, forget this. We can't be bothered. So that short-termism and almost the fact that they're pitted against each other means that they don't transfer. They're incentivized to not pass information over to the other side because they want them to look bad. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, there's some truth to that. So it's least pertinent for us anyway. It's different with the Americans, but in foreign policy. Because Labour and the Tories, I mean, they like to pretend that they have very different foreign policies, but it's pretty similar, really, like overall.

38:39One of them is not going to come along and say, I feel differently about Putin. The Americans don't get that thing because apparently one of the parties has now become pro-Putin. So that's a whole other problem for them to deal with right now. But in Britain, that's not the situation that we're in, thank Christ. When it comes to national projects, I mean, HS2 is that classic example of it, really. Although even in HS2, it's not a good example because that's basically the Tories cancelling a project that they had spent 13 years on themselves. So it's not even the perfect example. What you often get is people swapping the policy out between parties.

39:08And that is a problem for democracies in general. That is an issue that it's quite hard to get past. One of your solutions for it is a really good civil service that is just there to try and make sure there's consistency between the parties, especially on infrastructure, especially on infrastructure spending, because you just don't want to start cancelling bridges halfway through. And the rest of the time, you will see changes. And one of the people in the book talks about in teaching, it's basically when the question was asked, what would be the ideal thing? This is a teacher. What would be the ideal thing for you in schools?

39:42They're just like, just leave it alone. I'm just begging you for once, just for like five years, just leave it alone and just let everything settle. Start reforming constantly. Start reforming, yeah. Especially because the ministers don't really know what they're doing. So they'll come in and they're reforming, not really because they believe it needs to be done, but because they want to make a name for themselves. So they'll be promoted at the next reshuffle. So they want to do it very fast. It means they don't really want to listen to much criticism. They don't want to run any pilot projects.

40:10Just get it done. We saw that with sort of part privatization of the NHS and the early part of the coalition. We see it with project after project after project. And that's where the really, really quite dangerous lack of long-term strategy takes over. Last time we recorded, Tomei, and you were having some real dramas with your accountant. So how's that been going, mate? They're sacked. So drama sorted. They're a big corporate firm. They didn't really reply to my emails very quickly, like took a week or two at times. And they charged me way too much. I mean, I've got pretty simple taxes. And yeah, they were charging me thousands.

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43:01They cancelled HS2 and Rishi stands there and goes, I'm going to take the money, I'm going to invest it in the north. And then he starts listing off all these places going to build train stations. And everyone in the north side, you've said you're going to build that five times and you've cancelled it. I think it was either Bradford or Bolton who had the same train station to them, promised five times and it's being scrapped five times. Why can they lie? Why can a politician lie? That's a journalism question. Because ultimately the consequence of a politician lying has to sit with journalists.

43:30It can't be. We can talk about how we'll bring in the police. It's never going to work that way. And it can't really. It has to be journalists. and journalism has some really severe failures at the moment that are at least as bad as what goes on in politics or in the civil service part of it is just not properly holding them to account part of it is just really short-term memory and the rest of it is the fact that we there's a very difficult situation when it comes to sources you know and you i think the clearest example of this came when dominant cummings had uh you know his barnard castle thing in the middle of covid and you saw if you look at the first few days of that story you saw very prominent journalists just holding back.

44:09And the reason they were holding back was because they got lots of their stories from Dominic Cummings. So there's a real danger. Your personal journalistic integrity has to be about making sure that you do not allow yourself to be seduced by your requirement and by the depth of your contact with that source. But very often that is not what happens. People are dependent on particular sources and they don't want to go on the attack. And part of that can mean that we don't properly scrutinize people when they are lying. That's why I love YouTube, because they invited me down and they're like, would you like to do more of this?

44:39And what they're basically saying is we give you access, but you need to send the videos to us to review. And I did it once and a load of creators did it once and all the creators are just like, no, I'm all right now. Like, I can say what I want in my own platform and you can't control it. And a million people a month watch my YouTube channel. So that's a big outlet. And I might not be first to the post. I might not be the best journalist in the world, but I can call out anyone and they can't do anything about it. And I think that's powerful. you know and I hope that improves journalism in your book you said um where with the probation issue out of all the stories in that time written about probation some of them were like Lindsay Lohan in America doing something like those are the stories of press were writing but they weren't writing about what was going on in England do you think that still goes on as well like it's oh it's not it's a sexy story uh they canceled this I don't want to talk about it because it's not going to get me clicks or it's not going to get me yeah attention is that going on we're obsessed with like a, the new thing, like whatever the new policy is, you know?

45:37So for instance, like take immigration. I mean, we've had so many failed immigration policies, but if you just take Rwanda, we talk a lot about the Rwanda policy right now, because it's a new thing that they pass. Once that thing passes, people will just try and forget about it. It's as if it never happened. So you could go back, like just 18 months ago, we had the Illegal Migration Act. Before that, we had another act. These things have completely catastrophically failed when it came to a sign, but no one even talks about it. If it's in the past, it's as if it never took place. Then there's all the areas that we just don't bother to look at.

46:05Probation is classic. If you're walking home and someone mugs you for your wallet, that was not just some chance event that took place. That is a failure, typically, of probation of the prison system. It affects us. But we act like it doesn't. We act like when journalists sit down and think, what do people care about? They think they care about schools and the NHS and police. These are the things that they care about. And you talk about probation, no one knows what probation is. No one cares. And even if we want to talk about what's happening in it, We first of all need to explain how it works.

46:32And you would often, you know, if I sit there, I've had it with news editors and I've had it with producers in studios on radio and TV programs. So they're just like, don't like this word. What is this word? Probation. It's just like, that's not what we really want to talk about in a politics show. We want to talk about, you know, this Tory MP, Lee Anson said something unbelievably goddamn stupid over here. So now we're going to have a row. And then someone, Gary Lineker tweeted that he's an idiot. And now we're going to talk, everyone knows that. That's colorful and it's quick and it doesn't require and in research, we're basically like sugar rush children in journalism.

47:03We just want the sugar rush of the now and the immediate and the personal and the brightly colored. And the stuff that actually matters to people's lives in this country goes largely undiscussed. Are you not scared that we're heading towards where America is, where it's all about sensationalism and the characters in the politics and Trump said this and, oh, I can't believe he said that and all these like rumors and gossip and news. Superficial, very superficial things. I think the answer is definitely yes. No one in this country that I'm aware of is as bad as Trump, I don't think. Like I wouldn't even say, you know, like Farage or Richard Tice, basically the guys running reform on the closest comparison.

47:41They're just not as bad as him, as venal, I think, or as dangerous. But in general, you look at someone like Leansom, or you look at like Nadine Dorries, who was, I mean, she was media secretary, for God's sake, like a few years ago. She's now writing books about made-up conspiracies, which are being like, which are really not even a step removed from just lizard people gibberish. Like, I mean, just absolute conspiracy theory madness. So on that basis, like you look at Leanssen and Nadine Doris, they are no more stupid than your average sort of like mugger, you know, hat wearing lunatic American politician.

48:14We're basically operating in a pretty similar intellectual level. The thing is we just don't have a talisman that's quite as appalling as Donald Trump. So we had Paul Johnson sit there. Oh, brilliant. Yeah. He's very good. He's a great guy. You should have just got him back, not on that meeting. No, no, no. He wasted time. No, I think your side of the debate's important because he said that he didn't think within the political system or within the tax system that there's enough waste that's meaningful. As in, yes, there's some waste, but it's not really going to move the needle if we stop that waste.

48:45Oh, for reforming? Basically, politicians aren't spunking that much money away in terms of, you know, but I think he deals in the Bs and Ts, like billions and trillions, you know, and maybe to him the numbers aren't that massive. But, you know, you talk about one man wasting 2.7 billion. Do you think there is large levels of waste within government? So basically our decision making basis for when we do spending is quite badly flawed. Now, this is supposed to be the thing that the Treasury does more than anything. Just say yay or nay to individual projects, right? So you look at probation, like how in the name of God does it get past the Treasury?

49:21Like how? But it does. And yet there's other areas where they crack down on stuff that you just think like, why would anyone be cracking down on this? Like, I mean, for instance, like when it comes to like lost schooling during COVID, like we have really good data on what that means. We have it from other countries on teacher strikes, on extreme weather events. We can almost calculate in terms of test scores, like not only how much lower the test score will be per pupil by each day lost in school. We can almost calculate to the pound how much lower their lifetime salaries will be by virtue of what they lost in school.

49:58Someone like a kid that lost half a year because of COVID in school will probably over the course of their life earn£40 ,000 less. And once you add up, especially to what that costs to the country. Time to buy a few million kids. Yeah, it's a lot. Well, exactly. Because by the time that we get to 2030, anyone in their 20s will have lost education during that period. You know, we're talking about like a massive cohort that will work their way through the economic system. So every country realized that they had the data to address it. Countries like the Netherlands spent 2 ,500 per kid. The US, I think, spent 1 ,800.

50:31Red warning flag on that, but it was around that level. We spent 500 quid. And it was just basically, again, you get all the experts. They will tell you we have the data. We need to do the spending here. And the Treasury just basically did nothing where it does where it just goes, well, we just don't really believe that this works. And we're going to keep the purse strings tight. so the funny thing is with the treasury decision making is sometimes they make the right call like furlough it's the right call you know it had to be done at the time but very often what you find is like the probation on one hand and catch up schooling you know budget on the other just being like you seem to be authorizing stuff that doesn't make sense and keeping too tight on things that really is has a very strong evidential base and you in your book you talk about like this reliance on gut feeling amongst key decision makers and that just seems like a terrible idea especially those guys yeah yeah yeah kind of it kind of uh like i said at the start it makes you so angry reading your book but it's very validating because you do sit there as a joe public and go does anyone know what the hell's going on here and i mean is the people that know what's going on is there some hope in this system nobody knows what's going on that really matters like i really do you know we have a british thing of just somewhere we just think there's someone in a double-breasted suit who's just someone's taking care of someone's exactly yeah they are not do Do you think it's like imposter syndrome?

51:45Do you think a lot of politicians are like, I can't believe I'm a politician. Like, how did I get here? And they're like, oh, well, back to work. And then they literally don't know what they're doing. There's like a really good quote, actually, even if I say it myself, from Nick Clegg in that book, where he's basically just like, it's just crazy. He's like, now I'm deputy prime minister and I'm just doing this stuff. And then it just kind of happens, you know? It would be like, oh, there's a change in the welfare system now. I think most politicians have that sort of thing. They're just like, I just can't understand how I'm being left to do this stuff.

52:11But they are. You spoke about the pandemic a second ago. Can we come back to that? And what did the pandemic show you about, you know, government spending? You mentioned furlough was done well, or you've agreed with it, but... Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. It basically had to be done. I mean, whoever was in charge, they would have done the same thing. And look, when you look at PFI, I don't like it as a case study, and I don't... Right, I beg your pardon. And you know what? I even used the wrong words anyway. Oh, there you go. I knew it. That's why I was like, I should know what this is. It's not a private finance initiative.

52:42That's not what I'm talking about. So when you look at like the commissioning of the equipment that we used in the health service, you know, the masks and the gowns and the blah, blah, blah. I don't really like using it as an example because it was really badly done and we wasted a lot of money. Was it corrupt? There was an element of intimacy. And the reason I'm being quite political about this is - There's a good word for this. Right. Because in that situation, this is why. It's an emergency situation. You're having to move quickly. And I do kind of get that there would have been scenarios in that where you're like, would you know someone who does this stuff and can get it up to scale in time?

53:19And once that happens, you're messed up. The reason I'm trying to stay away from the word corrupt is because there's an element of intent. You know what I mean? Of like, you're really going in there. So some of the business people were undoubtedly unable to provide and were charging anyway. From the political angle, I think it was comparatively rare that you had someone just thinking, this is a great, get rich, quick thing for my mates. although I'm not going to rule out that some of that took place. So look, it was not a great example, but I have to say COVID always seems like the least fair example for me to use in any number of ways, just because it was such an emergency high octane situation.

53:54The point where the COVID thing becomes more difficult is when you get into like 2021, you know, and the decisions that are being made, you know, 18 months into the pandemic, which really hadn't improved in terms of how we passed laws in terms of the commercial decisions that we made and in terms of school catch-up. That's the bit that I think is harder to forgive rather than the first six months, 12 months. Okay. How about Brexit then as a decision that was brought to the public and the management of that? Yeah. Well, it was unbelievably badly managed. I mean, it would have been hard for any government, any government at all, but it was very, very badly managed throughout.

54:27And what it resulted in really was actually this sort of active de-skilling of the civil service. It's quite a mad effect that Brexit had. No one really talks about it. We talk about the bit, and we should do, where it completely destroyed our economy and our sort of state in the world. All of that took place. But something else weird happened in the civil service, which is basically like after austerity, we froze the headcount and we said, well, the only way for you to get more money is for you to get a promotion. We're not going to just start giving anyone pay rises. So you couldn't hire anyone in from outside.

54:55And the only way to get a pay rise was to move within the service. And then we did Brexit. Brexit basically meant we need to massively level up government capacity. The only real leveling up that followed Brexit was in the civil service, because you had to just create new departments. You had to create the department for leaving Europe. You had to look at DEFRA, the environment department. Basically, that thing hardly had anyone in it, because Europe did all of that stuff. Now we're like, oh, Christ, we're going to do the environmental regulation, so we'd better hire a bunch of people. But you couldn't.

55:23So instead, they just had all the people that were in the civil service, and they just put them into the most senior positions imaginable when they were about 21 years old, really young. So speaking, one person in the treasury was basically going in for a conversation with an incredibly senior figure in the Department for Leaving the EU. And they were just like, well, this is a child. You've put me in a room with an actual child right now. But they had to do it because of the impact of Brexit and austerity before it. So one of the weird elements of Brexit that we don't really talk about is the fact that our civil service was deprofessionalized even more severely than it had been in the years leading up to it.

55:58And, you know, just the decision to bring Brexit to the country and David Cameron's motives and that, what do you think about that? Yeah, so that was, I mean, he made that decision on the basis of a local election campaign that none of us can even remember now. And that's the funny thing. You know, he had a threat from UKIP on his right flank. He thought, well, okay, so I'll make this, you know, this promise to my backbenchers, try to stop them defecting over to Nigel Farage's party. And we can't even remember that local election. I literally can't even remember what the results were in the local election that concerned him.

56:27And then he makes the speech. And what the result of that speech is, he, you know, less importantly, destroyed his own career. That part was actually quite enjoyable. Well, even he's back now. He's back now. I mean, it's like literally like a plumbing system that simply will not work. And then our country kind of gets debilitated, not just economically, but I think also politically, we entered into a kind of tribal mania that has largely ended now. But for a while, we just all really, really hated each other. Oh, yeah. Which is not helpful. Definitely. And on the basis of what? So one guy making a calculation on his own electoral tactics.

57:00Like, why allow a prime minister to even have that much power in the first place? But over and over again, we do. You know, the crucial pact is we act like the prime minister is quite a modest figure compared to the US. But the US president can barely do anything. They are massively restrained by the electoral cycle and by Congress in the US. Probably over-restrained, to be honest. In Britain, they can do whatever they damn well please. The reason for that is our electoral system. You take that first pass the post electoral system, it just, whoever wins, it hands them a massive majority in the Commons.

57:31So who can stop them? They will bring forward a legislation and we will talk about it and the news will go on about it and MPs will do big speeches. It doesn't make a blind bit of difference because if you have a majority in the Commons, you can pass whatever legislation you want. They can act without scrutiny. They can act with impunity. And when they can do that, they tend to behave in the way David Cameron did when he called that referendum and thinking, this happens to be useful for me in the short term, bugger the consequences. And it turns out that the consequences were very severe indeed.

57:56Yeah. And what do you think the solution to that is? The solution is going to come through a Labour government and it's going to be very slow and it's not going to make anyone particularly happy and it's not going to be theatrical, but it will be real. So we've already heard from Labour. I mean, Remainers, like myself and my colleagues and my friends and British everyone I know, like the parody of myself that I am in North London, thinks, you know, well, we want you to be this big Romani fighter. That's what we want from Stammer. And he's never going to be that because he's got to keep an electoral coalition together.

58:23However, he has said things that are much more radical than people really realize. He says, we want alignment on agriculture. And even they're saying on industrial goods, what alignment means, it sounds technical, but it isn't. It's like, well, we're going to share law and rules, which is kind of the beating heart of the whole question, really. We can make our own rules, but we're just going to take their rules. Because they're going to make us take theirs. We're not going to dictate that. You know what I mean? It's like we tow their line. Of course, because they're bigger. That's how it works.

58:50We gave up our seat at the negotiating table. So the alternative is either get poorer or accept that those are the rules that people trade on. Because surprise, surprise, you know, if the EU says you have to have USB-C sockets on mobile phones and Britain says, oh, actually, we want original USB, then manufacturers are going to make it for the European market because there's more of them there. It's as simple as that. But then there's another weird bit to this, which is that Starmer is bringing forward Biden's economic policy, which is a kind of America first policy. It was basically to say, Biden's thing was essentially, what if Trump, but progressive?

59:24So we're going to build things in the US. The things that we want to build are like electric vehicles, the kind of things that liberals like - Chips. Exactly, yeah. But you make it in the US and countries that the US has a free trade agreement with. So made in America for progressive products. Now Starmer wants to emulate that. The difference between the UK and the US is you can't build a car in the UK. It's based on a continental construction and manufacturing model. What does that mean? Well, suddenly, given that that's where the world is right now, it's not really a free trade world. It's a, we'll make it for us, please.

59:56That pushes you towards Europe because you can make a car in Europe and Britain is a very firm part of the construction process around Europe. So all of the geopolitical influences and all of Starmer's stated preferences push towards a much, much closer relationship with Europe. Not single market membership, not customs union membership, and not EU membership, at least for the first term, but an infinitely closer relationship than the one that we've seen over the last five years. So we do all of that and then we just end up scooching back over to them. Of course, it was always going to be that way.

1:00:27Yeah. This is completely insane. We're a medium-sized power. You know, like we're at the top of the mediums, as you could maybe put us at the very bottom of the top tiers of countries, but that's where we are. And you don't get to set the rules of trade if you're a country of our size. You wield influence, as we had been doing very successfully, through the EU. We were really good at that. We gave all of that up. So now we're in the position we're in where we're going to be a rule taker until we decide to rejoin, which I think will probably happen in about 10 years. But you say in your book that Labour Party's a mess.

1:00:59The infighting was quite clear from your book. And I don't want this to come across like we're saying the Conservatives are bad and, you know, the Labour side is perfect. Don't all of the same issues that you're describing around short termism, people wanting to make an impact, not knowing what the hell's going on. And plus the infighting within Labour, isn't that all still there? Isn't that all going to be a problem? That's exactly right. So one of the dangers for us, I think now, is that we think, oh, you change the government, everything will be fine. and it won't because the problems are structural, right?

1:01:26I mean, obviously, so towards the end of a government, after a 13 year, you had the same, you know, in 97 and arguably kind of the same sort of around like 2008, 2010, but to nothing like the same extent, is you just get kind of the fag end of the human condition. You just get like really poor examples of humanity right at the top positions, you know, chancellor, but also right down to the sort of, you know, the special advisors or the junior ministers. There was a reason they weren't given a job 13 years ago. Because everyone's left. Is that what you're saying? Exactly. Like basically everyone's quit and now we've just got the bottom of the barrel.

1:01:58Yeah, the good guys have come in, they've got chucked out or they left with their own accord. And you just get people who've just been sat there on the back benches for ages being like, well, someone please give me a job. And so finally, it's basically like I was in school being picked for the football team. You know, the only moment that's going to happen is like if everyone else is injured. And that's the exact situation that you get with governance right now. And that's how you get someone like, I mean, even Sunak, if you look at him, he's not massively inept. He's just in a sane system, he would have been a junior minister.

1:02:23You know, that's about the level that you would expect that guy to get to. And he's the prime minister, which gives you an indication of how badly things have gone in terms of individuals. But that's only part of the explanation. When we talk about the civil service, when we talk about legislation, when we talk about lack of long-term strategy, those are structural problems that require structural responses, big, radical proposals to fix them. And just by getting labor in doesn't mean that they're going to go away. and actually kind of worse that actually the Tories right now are doing so badly.

1:02:50Like the polling today was, I mean, if you were a Tory, it would just be like being repeatedly stabbed in the face. It was horrific polling. Like there was a, there's polling by generally quite sympathetic pollsters, actually, who tend to put them higher. There was giving them about 60 MPs in the next election. So you think we could have an even bigger problem of so much, too much labor? The majority. Yeah. The size of the majority could just be so immense. So then they have a huge mandate as they see it. Like they could do whatever the hell they want. I mean, nothing could solve. No, I mean, You can barely stop someone on an 80 seat majority as the government had before they hemorrhaged MPs through a variety of either sexual or financial scandals.

1:03:24But now, if you go for a majority of what? It's just absurd. You are basically like the king of the world. You can do what you like. That carries with it all sorts of the same problems that we've already seen, lack of scrutiny, lack of accountability. Do you think they're going to do good things with that? I think governance will be better, predominantly because of their civil service background. Like Keir Starmer is a civil servant. He used to run basically a government department of prosecutions. He's essentially a permanent secretary. Sue Gray, who he put in as his chief of staff, is a former civil servant.

1:03:53She's spent ages right next to the cabinet secretary, that really senior position. You look at the people like even writing the manifesto, the policy leads, the foreign policy leads, people like Muneer Alula. Over and over again, you see civil servants. If you look at the partners of people in labor, like Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, her husband is also a civil servant. It is basically kind of a civil service government that's about to happen. So they'll be much better at the act of governance. But I don't think they'll reform any of these key areas that really need fixing. And when you say governance, can you just add some context to that?

1:04:25What do you think we'll see improve? Brilliant, yeah. So for instance, when I talk about the levers, like the prime ministers in Downing Street, they want shorter NHS waiting times and they pull a lever and what happens? Either something or nothing is a good communication with the Department of Health. Are the Treasury on board with where they need to put money? Have you got someone coming up with viable benchmarks for what you're trying to achieve and making sure that you're insulated against the distraction of daily political firefighting? That's pulling the lever and making sure something comes out at the end.

1:04:52We've just had at least five, really, frankly, more like eight years of people pulling levers and nothing happening. I think when Labour get in there, they'll come up with a much more rational strategy in Downing Street. So they're already talking about basically replacing cabinet and getting a quad system of just four people delivering a project, trying to make sure that day by day in a really boring way, you're fulfilling the things that you said that you were going to do. So we will probably see improvements in the NHS. The thing that really handicaps a labour response is money, that they're not going to have any money and that they've written themselves into a corner by saying we're not going to borrow any money and we're not going to put up any taxes.

1:05:30And as soon as you do that, you're basically a poverty stricken government. That is what you're going to be. So that is a massive, massive problem for them. They're likely to focus on areas like planning, like labor markets, which you can kind of do for free. You know what I mean? You can change the planning system. It doesn't actually cost you any money to do that. You can fix unregulated kind of zero hours labor markets. It doesn't really cost you any money to do that. Those are the areas we're going to see much more radical action. Yeah, because bringing down waiting times in the NHS is costly, right?

1:06:00That would be something that would be expensive. Well, the thing is you can also do that by managing the resources and by having a really thorough plan, delivering on long-term aims by short-term benchmarks. You can do that for less money. I mean, you can massively rationalize the system. So I mean, your problems, for instance, are like, if you have a heart attack in a kitchen and no ambulance comes free at hours, why did that happen? It happened because the ambulance that should have been coming to get you, it's picked up someone else and it went to the A &E and it couldn't deposit or discharge that patient onto A &E because it was full.

1:06:36And why was A &E full? Because there were people using up all the beds on the wards. Why were all the beds in the wards full? Because they're unable to discharge people into social care. So the NHS is kind of this massively complex web of relations in a health service that goes from social care on the one hand to someone having a heart attack in their kitchen on the other. Now, if you're going to fix that, yes, there's money there. But also, to be fair, both parties have promised a moderate increase in funding for the NHS. But the problem also has to be about being able to look at that on a systems level, recognise the complexity and working towards your goals day by day.

1:07:09And on that front, a Keir Starmer, it's not really a Labour Tory thing, it's more of a Keir Starmer versus Boris Johnson as a personality type. Keir Starmer administration is very likely to be more effective at that than the ones that we've seen recently. If like Labour improve the train waiting times, improve the NHS and make things like, you know, fix some potholes, I think most people would be like, yeah, that's pretty good. I mean, I think people will be like, oh, it feels a little bit better in this place. I agree. The thing that I don't know about is how much patience they'll have. When you look back to sort of the stuff around the Blair's first term, it took like four years before things even remotely started to improve.

1:07:44And we're in a worse situation now than we were there. So I agree. I think what they'll say to themselves is, as long as things are improving by the time we get to the next election, 2030, which seems like a really long time away, then we're going to be all right. But in the meantime, I can imagine people running out of patience with labor pretty quickly unless they see improvements and they're not going to. It's going to be a while. You can obviously see it happening because, you know, they seem to, their whole thing is like, we're not them. And I think people want strong leadership. They want someone to be like, we've got a plan and this is what it is.

1:08:14and the kind of, the Labour message seems to lack that a bit. And also, the one initiative they bring forward, they've now said, oh yeah, we're not going to do that. Yeah, yeah. The 28 billion. It's going to take a while, we've not got much money. They seem to be teeing it up for that, you know, like what you're saying. Because they're terrified. Because they're terrified of the Tory attack and that has led them to come up with an extremely conservative fiscal policy that they don't really need to have. Like, you can afford to be much more daring when it comes to borrowing to invest than Labour are right now.

1:08:41Like, that is, It's not crazy economics at all. It's just basic center, kind of not even really center left economics. It's just basic center of economics. And they can afford to be more daring as well on taxes. I mean, the problem really with taxes is that no politician in any of the parties is prepared to say the actual truth, which is that you have two choices in life. You can have American public services and American levels of taxation, or you can have European public services and European levels of taxation. But if you want to have the European levels of taxation, a bigger part of the public services, you really do have to pay more tax.

1:09:15And since Thatcher, at least, we have not been prepared to have an adult conversation about tax in this country. We keep on acting like everything's going to improve, health service, education, whatever. But every time you hear from us about economics, we're going to be cutting taxes. These two things cannot be true at the same time. We need to have an adult conversation about it. I'm sorry to say that Labour isn't the party that's going to start that one. And certainly none of the parties that have come beforehand have either. No, well, I was doing some research on tax recently. and some of the traps that exist and just how ridiculously complicated the system is.

1:09:45And there was a time where Labour promised not to increase income taxes, so they jacked up NI when they came in. It's that common... It's like NI is just a second income tax, really. It should be merged for simplicity. There's a lot of arguments as to why. It would just remove a lot of administration for everyone. But it's politically suitable to have this other lever that they can pull, to use your term, that isn't understood. Because when I ask someone in the street, what's your tax rate? they go 20 % 40 % they don't whack on the NI exactly do you know what I mean so like you say the the tax system is complicated and it suits politics and they that there's no adult conversation they're like inheritance tax there's no adult conversation about inheritance tax they just use it as a political tool I mean there's a point where Bulls and Brown Ed Bulls and Gordon Brown are chatting because they know they have to raise tax somewhere someone mentions VAT and they're like no no no that's never going to work and then they mention income tax and they're like that doesn't work because it's really unpopular But when they mentioned raising national insurance, most of the public at that point thought that meant they got more stuff.

1:10:46Patriotic. They're like, that pays for the NHS. No, exactly. I mean, they thought it was a better... If you started talking about cutting national insurance, the public thought that they were losing something at that stage. It was actually a damaging towards them. It's just the words national insurance have just been poisonously good branding. It's done a lot of damage how good that branding is. It's a bit like Greenbelt. Greenbelt is really good branding and it's completely ruined us as a country. So it means we don't build anything in areas that are not that green. So over and over again, you get that problem.

1:11:15I think now that's changed with national insurance. I get the sense that people kind of do recognize what it means and its implications. But yeah, I think so. Yeah, like there is no pot for state pension. It's a Ponzi scheme, essentially. National insurance is not like funding this thing. There is no pot anyway. It's just a tax. That is what it is. It is a tax. In general, like you saw with our last budget of like the budget is the most insane conceivable way to pass tax policy. Just it's madness. Like you should pass policy in any normal way just by doing a ministerial statement or publishing legislation.

1:11:49And we talk about it like we were talking about anything else. Instead, we turn it into this bizarre act of theater where, you know, the chancellor comes out now twice a year. So it's double the problem that we had when he was just doing it once a year. there's all of this political pressure on a really acute political pressure for the party, but also for his own personal political advancement. And out of that situation, you create a tax system. It's just like an incredible way to go about things. And that's where you get your insanely complex, where you have a marginal rate that once you earn over 50 ,000 spikes into infinity and then goes down and then you earn 100 ,000, it goes up.

1:12:24But if you're paying 130 ,000, you're paying less than someone is paying. It just makes no sense. And it doesn't even make no sense in a purposeful ideological way. It is literally not the result of anyone sitting down and asking themselves, what is this system for? And what is it trying to achieve? A long time in my life, I would sit and I went, you know, your sort of tax statement comes in, I would just sort of look and just be like, I can't, am I just like adulting very badly, but I just can't make head or tail of this. It's so impenetrable. And then I realized this is not my fault. It's their fault.

1:12:56It's always the same realization I come to in my life. It's not my fault but it really is their fault it's too complex can they not reform the tax system or just simplify it is that not is that if the labor came and said we're going to fix the taxes in the uk make a lot more simple wouldn't everyone be like yeah that's a great idea no one has the bravery for that i'll do it i'll step up why can't politicians be brave look i'm not gonna lie i'm gonna be straight up about this there would be if i was in that position i'm not sure that i would either because you just think like there's only two ways to do it because you're going to have to change all the...

1:13:29Imagine what happened to Theresa May, right, with the social care tax during the 2017 election, where she just basically bottomed out. Like her whole campaign fell apart on the basis of that one tax. And you see that over and over again. Same thing happened to Gordon Brown, where he talked about getting rid of the basic rate on income tax. It can destroy you. And what you're going to have to do is change everything to a certain extent all at once, from council tax to income, to derivatives, to assets. And there's going to be a lot of losers. There's going to be winners too, especially on council tax.

1:14:01And most of the time you think that person deserves to win. Council tax is an obscene tax at the moment, given how daily it is, how archaic the basis is that we evaluate it. But the people that lose are going to scream loudest. And that is going to be a political nightmare. The only two ways of doing it is by trying to balance the losses and the wins, but that's going to be so complex, it'll probably blow up in your face. Or by just reducing the overall tax yield, that's probably the most realistic way to do it, while you simplify the system. But no government comes into it, especially not like a new Labour government in the middle of stagnation and inflation goes, we're going to reduce the overall tax yield to simplify things.

1:14:40They just - When you've got a 200 seat majority, that is the time to do it. When you've got the most credit or whatever built up, that's when you you be brave but also you think like for for a labor person the funny thing is i believe in tax simplification and i'm you know basically classic london lefty but for most labor people their heart you know if you think what are we going to try and do with this brief flicker of a moment that comes every sort of 15 30 years it's not tax simplification that's not what it is you know that's just not what it is what is it then usually it's going to be like giving people a head start in marginalized and forgotten communities and that's i think the kind of that they're going to do pretty well.

1:15:17Like I think the labor policy that they have, labor market policy, it's really strong. Like it's a good policy. You know, that's basically where the action is. But to be honest, you know, like I say on the finances, they're going to have a really hard time, partly because the government, because the country has no money and partly because they've decided that they're not going to give themselves any extra money through borrowing or taxes. Are you certain that labor are going to win? Yeah, 100%. Well, like why are you so certain? Other numbers, it's the numbers. Okay. So for a start, you usually see change by now.

1:15:49I will 100 % say this. I expect the polls to narrow from where they are now. Okay. And you're currently looking at like an average 24-point lead for the Labour Party. I would expect them to narrow. And if you look at, for instance, YouGov versus Savannah polling, you see different results. It can go from like 24 to 13-point Labour lead, depending on the extent to which you ask undecided voters how else they might vote. So there's stuff there. The trouble is, even if Labour's got a 13-point lead, the Conservatives are completely buggered. Like at this point, we would expect things to narrow. They are not narrowing.

1:16:21I've seen Tories on 20%. That is so bizarre. So like a year ago, I would go and do speeches and things and I'll just try and push this case, especially to like business people and just be like, I'm telling you, Labour is going to win and you need to start preparing for that and seeing where you can operate and blah, blah, blah. Now I feel like people have got the kind of message loud and clear that Labour's going to win. What I don't think they've comprehended is just the scale of what we're looking at in the polling, like the biblical level of what we're discussing. I'm not saying this is going to happen because something must change.

1:16:51But if you look at the polling released this morning, you are looking at double digits, MPs, Tory MPs in the Commons, like literally 50, 60, 70 MPs. That is an insane place to be. And people like me, commentators, and all of us say the same thing. We're all like, it'll change, it'll narrow, this can't happen. But we should also remember two things. At the moment, the data points towards that being the outcome. And number two, that we've spent a lot of the last few years, whether it's Brexit or Trump or whatever else going, that can't happen, that can't happen, that can't happen. And then the thing does happen.

1:17:25So actually it can. And at the moment, the data points towards the fact that it really could. Yeah, and anecdotally, which I know doesn't mean much, but I think it is important to speak to people on the ground as well. I'm getting a haircut off my barber and he's like you know I've never voted before but I'm going to vote Labour this time and I think there's like this kind of mass movement among the younger generation to probably I reckon we'll see a lot more younger people voting than we have before which has traditionally been an issue hasn't it you know younger people don't vote and maybe they would be more left and they you know they're not represented how long do you think it will last for this so people are talking about you know the Conservatives are dead for a generation and all of this and do you think that's the case or do you think four years time they could be right back again?

1:18:09So there's basically two ways of looking at that, right? I mean, the first thing is publics are extremely volatile at the moment. None of this should be happening. You shouldn't be able to have like an 80 seat majority in 2019 and then be looking at the kind of numbers that I'm talking about here just four, five years later. That just typically doesn't happen. The public's really volatile. They've lost their traditional sense of loyalty towards the parties, which is part of the reason that Boris Johnson could win those Labour seats in the red wall. That was never possible before. Because you just have people that always voted the way their parents did.

1:18:38And now people are much more almost consumers. You know, like they make a judgment themselves. So that makes everything much harder to predict. The weird thing that we're seeing, though, is the way that the young behave. And not even really the young. Like there's hardly, there's no group under the age of 65 where the Tories have majority support. It's basically only the over 65s that are still Tory. Why is this happening? For a reason that is basically quite intimately connected to what you guys do here. which is that it's really hard to have capitalist voters when they don't have any capital.

1:19:06They've got no assets. Exactly. Yeah, you need people to, people, once they buy a house, they go right because they want to protect it. They've got something to preserve. Exactly. Well, they don't have that. And look, a lot of millennials and Gen Z will inherit their parents' home. Part of the delayed reaction that we have to that is the fact that because people live so much longer now, they actually haven't started inheriting, you know, as a millennial level. Yeah, it's too late. Yeah, but once that starts happening, maybe they'll have more of a thing to protect because they'll get the stuff from their parents.

1:19:33They won't be earning that money themselves, right? It'll be that. But nevertheless, that is a fundamental change to what we saw before. Before we would see people move into the conservative support in their 30s, their 40s, their 50s, because they're becoming more successful, they had an asset. Now they don't. So therefore they're actually much more immune to a conservative economic message. And then when things talk about culture, culture war debates about statues, about race, about gender, about sexuality, blah, blah, blah. That's very different. People don't change with age. Your cultural views as a human being tend to be set at about 18.

1:20:05And at that point, they kind of stay the same until you're 70 years old. So, you know, someone that's 70 years old now would have been, you know, obviously like in the 60s, part of everything would have had views about it's okay to divorce and blah, blah, blah. That's the view they have now in their 70s, right? If we went back 40 years, people in their 70s would have been like, it is not okay to divorce, a view that you kind of never hear now. If you have a cultural view on liberal issues, basically, you will keep that view from the age of 18 onwards. And so on that part, the conservatives are also alienating younger voters.

1:20:34So in the long term, when you look at conservative support, the thing to give them hope is that it's much more elastic, it's much more volatile, voters change. But in terms of the structure, both economically and on cultural politics, the Tories look like they're really in quite a severe degree of bother. And like you talk about this, the whole, this conversation is about how they don't know what they're doing. And maybe one core fundamental thing of like the Conservatives was they knew what they were doing with the economy. And Liz Truss probably shattered that in a second, didn't they? You know, this like, oh God, these guys really don't know what they're doing.

1:21:03Which is kind of ironic because it's not even really like, A, they showed that they didn't know what they were doing with the Brexit ordeal, which is just like, and again, you could even be for Brexit, but the manner in which they were doing it and the degree of kind of at best naivety and at worst like willful ignorance of the consequences of their policies, when it came to especially the border, it was just like, if you care about small businesses in Britain, you will not do this. You know what I mean? You will think more deeply. So actually, they'd already shown how catastrophically inept they were with economic matters.

1:21:33Then trust comes along. Trust was really bad. I mean, obviously bad. But lots of the things that the government's currently blamed for are blamed on basically by virtue of trust. And it's just not really fair. When it comes to a lot of inflation, when it comes to the war in Ukraine, lots of these issues, these are massive issues that would have happened no matter how competent the person was. Yeah. So it's a sort of weird fairy story where they got away with way too much before trust. And now I sort of feel like they're blamed for too much after her. But nevertheless, the sum result is you get a Liz Trust moment.

1:22:04It's a big primary color EastEnders moment. Everyone clocks it. They get a narrative from that. And the narrative are they don't know what they're doing with the economy. They've cocked it up. And then all of of the economic experiences that they have, the price of soup in the supermarket, gets hooked onto that narrative, the Liz Trust, their responsible narrative. And at that point, that is game over. If there's a big narrative event like that, that the public actually paid attention to, that they can immediately comprehend that their individual financial woes are interpreted through that event, you are absolutely game over.

1:22:38And it's not going to change until after you've been defeated at a general election. And you'll fast forward 40 years and you'll have like an older person sat there going, and I don't vote conservative because they don't know what they're doing really. And Liz Truss is a lettuce. She's a dry lunch. Do you think then okay to finish this off? Because you know, at points you've said, you've openly said, you don't think anyone knows what they're doing. Do you think there's reason to be optimistic about the future of the UK, its political system and the direction that we're heading in? That's a no.

1:23:08See you later guys. See you next week. As we track the country burning. I want to be optimistic. And my natural disposition is optimism. I think that things to a certain extent will improve under Labour as I outlined. But the truth is, yeah, and just basic competence in governance as individuals. But the truth is that they have set themselves some really severe traps. And the state of the country economically is really, really very bad indeed. will need a mixture of luck and skill to get us out of it. So things are going to get better after the election. Whether they can get better to the extent that I could actually act like an optimistic person, I'm not so sure about that.

1:23:57If you want a bullet point summary of this episode, you can sign up to our newsletter using the link in the description. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review. It really makes a difference and lets us know that we're doing a good job. I'm Damo. I'm T. This episode was recorded by Jack Hobbs. Music is by Felix Taylor. It was produced and edited by Ruth Edwards. Johnny Hunter is in charge of marketing. And it's all brought together by Will Stollerman.