Knowledge and Nostalgia: Why a University Education Should Be Free (Louisa Munch)

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2:28Hello, it's Amol here. Welcome to Radical Conversations about the deep global trends changing our world and offering you some pretty radical ideas for the future. This week, what is the point of going to university? Is it for everyone? Who should go and how should it be paid for? Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, Tony Blair, remember him, was a Labour leader who said half of young adults should go into higher education. And you know what? By 2016, that year of Brexit and Trump, they basically hit that target. But Keir Starmer, a very different Labour leader, thinks that that target is no longer right for our times.

3:06He wants a much greater focus and emphasis on technical qualifications and apprenticeships. And of course, all of this, as listeners to Radical will know, is rather salient in the age of AI, given it's certain. In fact, we can already see that artificial intelligence is replacing lots of entry-level white-collar jobs. But in terms of politics, this is a really big and significant shift in tone from a Labour prime minister because it puts more emphasis on equipping people with the necessary skills for work, whatever those skills may be. However, my guest today, who is on the left of politics, who is a fascinating thinker and who has grown a really big following on social media, thinks that people should be encouraged to go to university, not because it might get them a job, but because it will give them the intellectual and theoretical skills which they need to apply in the world.

3:58It will give them a sense of agency and power over their lives. She is Louisa Munch, a young academic based at Warwick University, a social media influencer in the intellectual sense of that term, who's built a big following by applying critical theory. And by the way, if you don't know what that is, don't worry, We're going to explain it very, very shortly to the political issues of the day. I think you're going to enjoy this. Thank you so much for coming in. I thought we should start, right, by me, A, confessing that I've spent more time looking at videos of you talking about critical theory than almost anything else that I've done in my life for the past month since you said yes to coming on this podcast.

4:36but also with your with what you think about higher education because people tuning into this will be aware because I've told them that you are an academic and you really believe in university at a time when some people don't why do you believe in university I think it's one of like the very few spaces that we have left that's like protected for questioning power like there's not a lot of places I think that is left where we can do that and the university is somewhere, it's about ideas, it's about thinking of something new. I think one of the biggest problems we have in society is imagining something different, you know, everybody knows something's not quite right but we can't think of an alternative and I think, you know, the university is a place where that's what it's all about I always tell my students like I don't care what you get in the essay like you know if you if you come out with 100 if you come out with 50 whatever like what I care about is they go into the world and they can act upon the world you know they feel like they have some sort of power they can call agency exactly exactly it's all about agency and you equip them with that power through something called critical theory yeah what is critical theory um well if to put it in like i don't know the dictionary definition it's like the critique of ideology so what i think of it more as is like the critique of power so calling uh power into question ideology is a way of thinking that aims at power yeah yeah and it's it's not like a passive thing critical theory i I think people think of theory as this like, you know, it's a passive sort of everybody's like philosophers sat around in rooms just like mulling over things and feeling smart.

6:26Like it's about change. It's about creating social change. You know, it has a very sort of it has a goal. And I think that's what I find really empowering about it. And so you want more people to go to university or you want more people to be engaged with critical theory at least or to learn the art of critical thinking. Yeah, critical thinking. that's what your social media content which is very addictive is about do you think university should be free absolutely i think it's ridiculous that you have to pay for it like i always say in my videos we can't have a democracy without informed citizens we can't have a democracy if you don't have citizens that can critically think you know and like we're in the bbc you know this is about journalism the whole thing recently has been about um you know not having a bias isn't it and to give people like objective information assumes they can think critically about it but this is not something that we're teaching people so we have to think of you know something I think universities are the one place where you are taught to think critically I know that's where I learned it and it's kind of weird I felt like before I'd been to university I was living in kind of like the Truman Show you know what you mean because we take so much um for granted we don't question a lot of things and I didn't seem to question a lot of things I think one module in particular I went to Liverpool um John Moores University and and you're now based at Warwick I should say yeah and um in my final year uh I was kind of I didn't know what to do I was working in marketing in Manchester.

8:06I was a copywriter. I like writing. I like creating things. But there was just some sort of like feeling that I got that was like, I don't think I can do this forever. And I did a module called Capital and the Markets. And I was like, oh, my God, I can't stay in marketing anymore. I need to change something. Yeah, it really is that. And I think a lot of people will talk about university in that way, you know this sort of awakening and especially when you come from like kind of a working class background or you don't have like you don't grow up in a political household as such or you know you don't grow up in a household where you talk about i don't know philosophers or literature and things like that then it's it is really life-changing experience there is so much i want to talk to you about it right what was the nature of that awakening so there's louisa munch how old were you when you do this capitalism in the markets module um i must have been it was just for covid so like 20 so you're 20 years old you're reading this stuff about capitalism and markets did you have this sudden feeling that kind of like everything sort of made sense it fitted into place or this sort of sudden realization that maybe what you've been told or grew up believing grew up believing was a lie yeah it wasn't um the fact that everything made sense it was everything doesn't make sense exactly nothing makes sense like what do you mean i'm on a planet where you work 40 hours a week until you're 70 just to buy things and then you die like put me somewhere else I thought I can't do this you know I just it was like so invigorating I read um one of the books that was on the module was Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism and that is it was such a life-changing text for me he's got the idea it's easier to to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.

10:00Yeah. And that idea changed my life. I thought, why can't we imagine an alternative to this? I'm not enjoying myself, you know. So before we get into that alternative, what it might look like, the munch. Are you going to go into politics one day, by the way? I am in politics. You are in politics. Educating the people. Would you go into democratic politics, legislative politics? You mean like party politics? I don't know. I don't know. I love educating. I love teaching. There's nothing I enjoy more than speaking to people and teaching them. And I think with the state that politics is in now, it's not a productive state.

10:38Not particularly attractive, yeah. And there's other downsides, like it completely destroys your family and private life and all of that sort of thing, or so I'm told. Just on education, right? So we should acknowledge the fact that in Scotland, higher education is free. It's subsidised by the general taxpayer. And what you're saying about it being universally available, It's amazing to think that even 25, 30 years ago in this country, it was free. It was funded through general taxation. And then something changed. It happened a bit, I think, started under the Blair government. And it's amazing.

11:07Do you know, last year, tuition fees in England and Wales rose. They were raised really quite substantially. And I wondered, we've had Nick Clegg on this podcast. And Nick Clegg, way back in 2010-11, there were literally riots where people, when tuition fees were going up. And that was partly because Nick Clegg had said before that he was against a rise in tuition fees and there was this feeling that he'd sold out. And when tuition fees rose under the coalition government, people gave him a lot of hard time. I wondered what Nick Clegg would have made of the fact that, you know, the Labour government rose, you know, gave, made tuition fees even higher.

11:40And there was kind of not a pip of protest. So the idea of university being free is actually quite radical now, isn't it? It's actually quite a kind of no one's really advocating that. Maybe the Greens are. I don't know what Zach Polanski thinks. But the idea that university should be free is not where the consensus is in British politics. I think it's crazy. Like, I've sort of always grown up, I felt like on the fringes of something. So obviously my dad's Danish. I've spent a lot of time in Denmark where it is, it's not just free, it's funded. You get paid to go to university. Even when I go to conferences in Europe, like, people cannot believe that we pay.

12:17You know, when I say I'm doing a PhD and I've paid for just the PhD alone, 30 grand, people are like, you're paying to research on behalf of the university? And I'm like, yeah, you know, it's all made into this personal investment. And I think you really see it in the students as well, because they really take on this idea that their education is a personal investment. They're customers. Exactly. And they want, you know, the most out of their product. but the product isn't you know and the way that they care so much about the grade as well worries me so much because that's not what it's about it's like this not to use these sort of terms but like the neoliberalization of university you know it's a financial the financialization of it it's something that you buy and you get uh sort of an equity from or whatever and i think that's a huge problem because that is not what education is about.

13:13What is education about? Freedom. It's about freedom. It's about being able to have an impact on the world, feeling empowered, calling things into question. And we have school. We think it's morally right to send all children to school, but why does education then end at 18 or whatever? When you say you are sceptical about why people are obsessed with a grade, Isn't there something quite admirable about being obsessed with grades and standards and trying to be the best, trying to get a 2-1 instead of a 2-2 or trying to get a first instead of a 2-1? Isn't there something important about children aspiring to higher standards or young people, not just children?

13:54I think this age of like competitiveness isn't helpful. And it also, you know, I've never known classism until I've got to university. There is such a stark contrast between those students that have grown up in households that have had this kind of ability to think critically. They've sat around the table and been asked political questions and asked what they really think about something and made to feel like, you know, their opinion really matters. And then the kids that haven't had that. and I think this idea of like education is a meritocracy and that you know if you just work hard you'll do well like it isn't helpful and it just pits other students against each other and I just in the classroom I always say like I'm not above you you know I might have read more than you but if you want to challenge my view please do like we can have a debate and I think that's the most important thing about you know university is it's a space for debate it's a space for challenge it's not a space for competition and you know getting some sort of number on a page at the end of it do you think universities are in a healthy place on that front because there's two there's a lot of people and i'm obsessed with universities i'm married to an academic i present a program that's got the word university in it uh university changed my life there's a lot of people say we've got two big big challenges one is there's a bunch of very specific financial challenges facing a lot of institutions that are basically about to go under some of them have gone under whole departments, whole universities have shut in recent years.

15:27And there's another, which is there's a feeling that a kind of spirit of intolerance or censorship has spread across campuses in this country and maybe on the other side of the Atlantic, and the culture wars have come for university, and it's harder to have that kind of open, critical thought and debate than it used to be. What's your sense on that? To be honest, I'm quite lucky I haven't experienced that kind of... Warwick is really good for allowing like a very wide range of opinions. I know, you know, probably more like conservative leading academics. I know people who are more left wing than me.

16:01So I think a lot of the wokeism of university and the culture wars is a lot to do with the media and a lot. It's a story kind of like, you know, this is the reason why you don't want to get into it. it's it's too cutthroat and it's too uh critical but i mean critical theory and critical thinking is about critique it's about challenge it's about question it's about holding you know ideas to account and i've you know you can change your mind again and again and again and like there's no shame in that like i've changed my viewpoints over and over again my student might say something i'll be like oh my god i never thought of that that's so true and and actually that's something that's wonderful it's wonderful changing your mind yeah and if you could just have the courage to forego and forfeit something you thought of before to let go of it and to be open to challenge actually that's one of the wonderful things because you don't know all the answers right and it's nice to be it's nice to be challenged on your thing about education being free i wonder what the argument against education being free is if the benefit of going first of all if you've got a time of tight finances huge strain on lots and lots of different public services and where you spend your money, the government spends around a trillion pounds a year.

17:16Those are choices that you make as a society and as a government, which is democratically elected. If the benefit of university goes primarily to the people who receive that education, why should the general taxpayer, why should the people you grew up with in Rochdale fund a benefit, fund through public taxation, a benefit which is mostly privatised? Because it doesn't just benefit the person that gets the degree. Doesn't it primarily benefit them? Well, what is benefit? You know, you have to define what benefit is here. Is it the job that they're going to get? Because there isn't a graduate premium anymore.

17:50We know that. So even that idea is like, right, so there's no economic benefit necessarily. You probably, the only people I know, my age have bought houses that haven't inherited money are people who've had apprenticeships from being 14 years old. So there isn't really an economic benefit here the benefit is about democracy it's about having ideas about thinking it's about autonomy it's about agency you know i look at like places like france where you know they protest if like anything happens don't they they're out on the streets not the bins aren't getting taken if like the government says right we're pushing the pension age up six months no you're not you know because that sort of agency that people have you know we're not going to lie down and let this happen we have control and i think that is one of the most important benefits of education it's about our public domain isn't it's about having it's about the social value that accrues to everyone for the fact that a lot a lot of people have intellectual confidence and the ability to really participate in a democracy it's so interesting you said it because if there's also this you also mentioned the decline in graduate premium and what i think is quite interesting and kind of counterintuitive dare i say it radical about what you say about education is a lot of people are going to university because they think it will help them get a particular job and the graduate premium which is that the increase in the amount of salary you might earn because you went to university has been falling very steadily for a long time it's now almost completely disappeared it has disappeared from lots of different courses and so increasingly people are thinking maybe i should a not go to university or b do an apprenticeship instead what do you think because you said earlier you think it's good for lots of people to go to university would you defend the idea of going to university to people listening to this now even if it meant they got into lots of debt because it gives them through critical thought the kind of mental intellectual equipment with which to have agency in the world well i'm living example of this you know i'm in a hundred grand's worth of student debt you're in a hundred grand yeah yeah and it's still going up because i've still got another six months to pay so yeah I'm saddled with that and I have no regrets you're in a hundred grand of debt yeah yeah and I'll probably never pay that back realistically um but I don't see it as a debt like I would make it you know I'd be happy for it to be 200 grand or a million pounds because what I've gained from it is is priceless you know and I think the feeling that you know we can change things and that you have you know autonomy and that's what it's about it's it's having a language in which to name things you know name oppression name what you can see is happening because so many people now are like there is there is so much noise there's so much conversation especially from you know like the far right people want to know people want to know why everything feels rubbish and why we're on the edge of something but we don't quite know what it is how do you feel about because this gets us into nostalgia which is one of your great interests and is what your phd was about how do you feel about the fact that 25 30 years ago so yeah the blink of an eye in the history of a society people who were you know the younger louisa munches from rochdale who went to university who grew up without a huge amount of money but were really interested in ideas could do what you've done and not have any debt and yet here you are this public figure this academic someone with huge cognitive credentials and you're in over 100 grand of debt don't you think that's a bit sort of doesn't that make you dare I say it nostalgic it makes me angry makes you angry yeah it makes me incredibly unfair yeah it's frustrating because like you know I inhabit two completely different worlds.

21:40I go to Warwick and I teach these incredible students, have so many ideas and, you know, it's great. I love it. And I come home and like there are roundabouts with flags all over the street at the end, you know, where we live. And it's just like this huge gap in knowledge and in the feeling of power. You know, the feeling of power at Warwick is being able to challenge ideas and understand and ask the next question and ask the next question and ask the next question in Rochdale the power is about blaming someone and I think it's so frustrating to me because I think you know that feeling is the feeling is correct people who do want to blame immigrants or you know like endorse Nigel Farage and stuff like that and they feel angry about that we're getting poorer and that those are all things they should be angry about it's just the way of thinking is the issue you know and that's that's what I what I'm trying to give people is a way of thinking critically a lot of people who have these kind of dual existences between kind of where they grew up and where they may be you know they achieve a certain credential and they achieve a certain status and they they leave to go to a residential university or they teach somewhere else a lot of people have quite mixed emotions about it because they feel perhaps caught between two very different identities or they feel a sense of betrayal.

23:11How do you navigate the fact that you've got this life in Rochdale and then you've also got this life in Warwick? How do you kind of cope with that? Oh, my God. If you asked anybody, like my family, they would know how much I struggle with this. Even my supervisor, I've said, I can't. There's been so many times where I've thought, I can't do this anymore. I can't do this anymore. What can't you do? I can't go between these worlds. I can't exist in both worlds. it's it's so fragment it's so fragmenting it's so alienating and that road that m6 i travel up and down twice a week it feels like i'm traveling from one end of the universe to the other it really does and it's and that's the reality of it and like that's how it feels inside me a lot of the time is like i am having to get myself like i've had two weeks off and now i'm like right okay come Bon Louisa, academic mode, you know, start using big words again.

24:09Because at home, I'm not going to do that. It becomes very, very lonely if you can't find a language to speak to these two different worlds. But it's interesting you'd call it a struggle because it is like two very different. It's not you're the same person, but you bring, you kind of almost elevate different aspects of yourself in these two different places. But you don't, yeah, you don't at all feel when you go back to Rochdale, God, I want to get out of this place. you know in both spaces I I've realized I can't just exist in one anymore either you know I can't go home and and stay in Rochdale and just have you know go back to the marketing job I knew that when I finished university I can't do that but I know when I spend enough time in Warwick I can't stay here and needs to go home and he's uh you know sit in a pub and talk about the football or something because you know I think one thing about the whole idea of like selling out it's I think the problem with that that happens there when people do inhabit like a different world and go home they don't look across they look down you know I I think that is such a big issue like if you do have some sort of social mobility a lot of people will return and look down on the people that they've left behind and I'd like I can't do that I just you know these people aren't I don't even like to talk about education as making you smarter to be honest because it's not about intelligence in this way that we think of it it's it's just more of like the critique you know the the the questioning you mentioned the idea of meritocracy earlier and one of the big kind of um kind of intellectual movements of recent years is to say the reason we had brexit the reason we had trump is because the idea of the meritocracy kind of overreached and i've mentioned before in this podcast that meritocracy is an incredibly interesting idea because the guy who coined it a guy called michael young who wrote the labor manifesto in 1945 and he founded the open university he meant he invented he didn't invent the word but he used it as a in a satirical sense to warn against the meritocracy.

26:22He said that, and it's amazing, if you read The Rise of the Meritocracy, which I think was published in 1957, I think, he warns about how by the year 2030, there'll be these people called the populists. And he says it's a terrible idea to split society in two between the clever people and the not-so-clever people. And to say to the not-so-clever people, you deserve your place at the bottom. And there's been lots of very interesting, actually, ironically, very intellectual kind of critiques of meritocracy. Would you go along with that idea that the problem with meritocracy is not so much that it didn't deliver what it set out to, which is a society based on merit, but that it's intrinsically dangerous to split society according to clever and not clever and make the bottom half feel stupid.

27:06Yeah, I think that's a massive issue. You know, that's why we have people that, you know, like Donald Trump, he has said, I love the uneducated. I think that's the most important words he ever said. Not make America good great again but I love uneducated people yeah because what does that say you know he he loves the thing is when you don't have like the ability or the tools to think critically about political issues uh but you know that there's something wrong you know then you will go towards leaders and if you feel weak you'll go towards leaders that just simply make you feel strong you know That's why we've got this big wave of strongman leaders.

27:49And I think that's a huge problem because they are just filling in for another emotion. They're not actually going to do anything. They're not going to change anything because why would they? They exploit grievances rather than actually provide answers to them. Let's talk about your ideas then and those flags. Why did you do a PhD on the idea of nostalgia? um well during brexit once again i felt this like huge sort of split because i'm half danish and i thought i was really confused by the fact that uh i was half in and half out you know i was just enough but not quite enough and it it was a personal experience it felt like a personal attack Did Watchdale vote Brexit, sir?

28:36I forgot. I can't remember. Yeah, I'm not sure, to be honest. Okay, okay. So go on, yeah. And all this narrative about taking back our borders, you know. Take back control. Take back control, yeah. And I'm thinking, like, what is this, like, return? What is wrong with the future? You know, that is the politics of nostalgia. Like, if you can't think of a decent future ahead of you, you're going to return to the past. It is an interesting fact about nostalgia in the past, isn't it? That the power of the past has been more, has tended to be deployed pretty effectively by people on the right and particularly the nationalist right.

29:18So take back control was a kind of Dominic Cummings idea, which is very, very powerful. Make America great again is Donald Trump. It's also with Vladimir Putin. It's amazing. There's a guy called Timothy Snyder, who's the world's kind of expert on Ukraine. and he's written lots and lots of books on Ukraine. He wrote an essay for the FT Weekend a few weeks ago about how Putin's entire narrative about Ukraine is based on these sort of ancient mythical texts. He read almost as if they were literal history, but in fact they're mythical texts about how Ukraine, the ancestral lands of Ukraine are actually part of Russia.

29:52And if you ever had the misfortune to watch this excruciating three-hour exchange between a guy called Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin, when Tucker Carlson left Fox, He went and sat, I think, in the Kremlin with Putin. And it was just the weirdest experience because in Russian, Putin just lectured him about history. Why is it? Why is it that the power of nostalgia has tended to be more effectively deployed by the right? Why is it? Why is the right so good at effecting that for electoral purposes? Well, I mean, nostalgia has always been used by fascist leaders. Always. It's like the one tool that seems to work.

30:30Hitler, blood and soil, return to the fatherland. You know, it's always a mythical return. And I think it works particularly for the right because it's a return to a kind of harmony, you know, of this, of some sort of racial purity or, you know, it's... That social order. Yeah, exactly. and when people feel weak and they feel unstable the economy feels unstable then it's it's a natural emotion if you feel you know vulnerable to look back on the past you know even childhood everybody seemed you know we we look back with rose tinted glasses and the thing is with nostalgia it's a fantasy you know that's that's the main problem with it is you know it's it's not a true remembering of history it's a um it's the lost home but it's not real it's not real it comes from the greek nostalgia from homesickness doesn't it it's a sense that you kind of you literally and it's interesting because a lot of the people in fact one of the earliest um guests that we had on this podcast was a guy called james or who's one of the big sort of intellectual figures in the in the nationalist conservative right um he's a sort of advisor i think to reform runs out called the Centre for a Better Britain.

31:46And he said that his politics was about a politics of home. And actually, that's one of Kemi Badenock's big lines, which is she says that a country is a home, not a hotel. Somehow this feeling of a homesickness, it's just been a fundamental aspect of nationalist conservatism for a while, hasn't it? But also, isn't nostalgia bittersweet? And the danger is that you get the sweetness for something that's gone, but you just feel bitter about the fact that it's gone and not here now. Yeah, and that's why it works so well. You know, it encompasses both of those emotions. It encompasses the feeling of, you know, hatred towards another group.

32:23That's the bitterness, the loss. You know, you can channel that somewhere and then you can use that sweetness of the idea of home. You know, I think it's so... My PhD isn't just about nostalgia in this, like, really theoretical way. It's actually called neo-nostalgia because it's about neoliberalism and nostalgia. It's about why now? Why do we feel like this now? And it's about loss. You know, that's exactly what nostalgia comes from. It's loss. But isn't... This is what I wanted to say. if I could, in the spirit of your Warwick seminars, which you feel kind of slightly torn between your Rochdale self and your Warwick self there, I just wanted to challenge that for a second because isn't there a sense in which nostalgia is rational?

33:10In this country, so I feel really conflicted about this because I've watched your videos and I was so persuaded by and compelled by a lot of what they said. But I've also got this particular thing. I'll just be really transparent about it. One of the enormous pleasures and privileges of my working life at the Beeb is that I've interviewed a lot of kind of icons who are people in their 70s now who came of age in the 1960s. And when I read about the 60s, which I wasn't around for because I was born in 1983, I sort of think, what a time to be young in Britain. And obviously, obviously, obviously, there was a huge amount of terrible stuff going on in the 60s.

33:46You know, by the way, homosexuality was illegal until I think 1967. Lots of people who were poor and lived terrible, terrible lives, completely forgotten by mainstream culture. But you know what? In other ways, the 1960s, maybe 70s, maybe 1980s were pretty cool. They had 3 % growth. They had six or seven workers per retiree. They had incredible music and the Beatles. If you were poor in the 1960s, you belonged to the working class. And the working class had certain compensations. I'm not saying this in a patronising way, but compensations and consolations, which the modern poor don't have. They had trade union membership, membership of great institutions that loved them for who they are.

34:24They had roots. and by the way, they had social mobility, which we don't have anymore. Isn't it true that nostalgia in Britain, when we've had two lost decades, and when you think about what happened in this country in the 60s, 70s and 80s, isn't nostalgia rational? Because there has been a sense of loss. Yeah, of course it's rational. Oh, damn. I thought you were going to say no, it's irrational and we shouldn't have it. No, because at this time, there was also a 95 % tax rate. You know, we can look at it, we can say, oh, the past was better. okay why yeah so we need to ask what the next question is we can't just say okay the past was better because there was more white people that's the problem you know you can it's called historical materialism in in theory you know you you look at the past in a way that is about remembering and it's about critique we are always in this gap between the future and the past and you are you have to stand steadfast in this ability to call things into question you have to constantly be asking and recontextualising the moment.

35:26You know, that's why we see people like pull down statues and all that kind of stuff. You know, that is kind of like historical materialism. It's like, okay, this doesn't belong in our present time. Let's change it. And that is how we need to look at the past. Why has the left in this country today been, I think I can say this impartially, been less than effective at really articulating an exciting vision of the future? I think it's well we've had like the left actually do you know what just before I let you answer sorry I should caveat that because the left is not one thing I'm really talking about sorry do you know what I should be specific I'm talking about Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour Party because there's other parts of the left Jeremy Corbyn's got a new party I think Zach Polanski's got the Greens they would say they're big on the future so I'm really talking about the Labour Party here sorry well I think it's interesting that you rephrased that because like you said, it's all fragmented.

36:24And what does Nigel Farage do? He unifies the anger. He funnels it the same way that Donald Trump will say he's speaking for the working class. All he's done is get hold of that anger. We call it in psychoanalysis and theory, like the death drive, this feeling of oppression that needs some place to get out. And it will always take the path of least resistance. it's like a current you know so it will if you say oh it's this person over there that doesn't look like you and doesn't speak like you doesn't wear clothes like you it will go to that that's a very easy jump to me it's a lot harder to think critically and ask questions and ask questions because that takes time it takes effort it takes somebody to teach you how to do that and that's a lot of things people don't have these days you know isn't it also about telling a story about where you want to get to, right?

37:15If I think of the three, I think, I mean, not quite in my lifetime, but the three most electorally successful figures in America or Britain on the left that I can remember. In this country, it was Wilson and then Blair. In America, it was Obama. Wilson gave a speech at the Labour Party conference, I think in Scarborough, I can't remember the year, 63 maybe, where he talked about the white heat of technology. He evoked this idea that there was this incredible moment in modern history and that Britain should be on the right side of it. Tony Blair was all about, you know, a new dawn has broken, has it not?

37:46Obama, hope and change. I remember, you know, as a 25-year-old being so interested in the Obama phenomenon that I went out to Chicago to watch him get elected on election night. I can't, it does feel to me like the great hole in British politics, though maybe some people would say Nigel Farage is filling it, I don't think you would, some people say Zach Polanski is filling it, it does seem to me like the hopey-changey stuff, as Sarah Palin called it, is the great vacancy. Why is there not, why is no one talking more excitedly about the future? Because we live in like an age of disenchantment, you know, we live in this age of like nihilism, I think.

38:20If you talk to like most people my age, you know, I'm Gen Z, so we have this, there's all sorts of like cultural wording for it, like quiet quitting, you know. People going to work and doing nothing because like, what's the point, you know. and there is there's no real hope in like social mobility everybody knows everything's rubbish and you know nothing no one no one is going anywhere and it feels like there is a kind of I don't know like a giving up of of something and I think it's that comes down to this inability to understand what's going on you know if you can't point to the oppression or point to the problem you can't do anything about it and all those emotions all those feelings just sort of move around and they get you know placed on blame and all these other places and i think that's the problem with sort of like the economy is so mystified for people we need to demystify these sort of things because that's where empowerment comes from is being able to understand it and question it so where do you think we are as a country you say gen z what does that mean for people who don't know what that means how old are you if you don't mind me i'm 26 so where do you think we are as a country what kind of if you if historians look back on this moment post financial crash pre something else what what what do you think sort of defines the zeitgeist and where britain is in the year 2026 well i think you know in we've had this age of neoliberalism since like the 1970s since margaret thatcher we live in the age of margaret thatcher and in 2008 neoliberalism crashed it died you know it was over and everybody knew it you know and even i remember like feeling like some i was eight years old at this point but i knew in my house there was something not right like we were having conversations about well mum can't shop at tesco anymore she's gonna have to go aldi and like we were having assemblies in school about what a credit crunch meant and why we might not get many presents at Christmas and things like that.