Sinister and uncanny: Burnham is the ‘TikTok PM’ we can see right through

0:02The Telegraph.

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1:47Uncanny and sinister. The TikTok Prime Minister thinks that he's winning hearts and minds, but some of us can see right through it. He wants to solve Britain's benefits problems by forcing kids to pick litter. but it was his own party that created the unemployment crisis in the first place. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Poppy Coburn.

2:15I'm joined today and all of this week by Poppy Coburn. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for having me. You're normally on with Michael Deacon on Saturdays, but Camilla Tomini is away. I won't say where in case it becomes a stalker's charter. Poppy, I spent Sunday morning in bed with our new Prime Minister. Lucky man. Watching. Lovely long eyelashes. Get to the back of that queue because I watched some clips from his BBC interview with Laura Kunzberg. Now, some in the media are a bit irritated that he gave his first powwow with the BBC. But come on, it is the national broadcaster. It gave us such treasures as, I don't know, Rolf Harris's Cartoon Club or Jim Will Fix It.

2:55Got glitter on top of the pot. Right, exactly. So he sat down with Laura and they released some clips on a Sunday morning. And just one alone, I think, nicely sums up the character of our new prime minister. This is him answering a question about Donald Trump. Well, I've had one phone call and I always treat people as I find them. And it was a good exchange. I will judge as I find. And I found him to be really warm on Monday. but obviously we will continue to build the relationship as we go forward. But as things stand, you're not sure at this stage that you can place your trust in him as a fellow user.

3:35It's a changing world, isn't it? And you just have to obviously call things as they develop. And I can't at any point say that I won't take a different opinion from him, that I will need to voice a different opinion that is right for Britain. And I will do that. My strength always is in remaining close to people, close to the public. That will not change. I just want to say for people who are listening rather than looking, he appeared very nervous to me. He's doing that thing of tapping his knees with his hands, looking down at the ground. He swallows his words quite a lot. It threw my mind back to when he entered number 10 and seemed to walk very slowly down the crowd of well-wishers as if he wanted to put off giving the speech for as long as possible.

4:21What's really remarkable about, I agree with you, by the way, I think he does look nervous, is that that is probably the easiest question that Andy Burnham is going to get. And it's easy for one reason. There is no way that he's not going to be asked about Donald Trump. I mean, it's so obvious. It's so easy to prepare for. And yet his answer was, I mean, there's a political art about dodging the question. Politicians are very, very good at this. You can see the ones that have been media trained. They talk a lot of guff, but you don't actually get anything out. Special relationship. That is it.

4:48NATO and World War II. When a prime minister is asked about America, they will say they're our closest ally. We have our historical special relationship. I will always work closely with the American presidents for our mutual goals, etc, etc, etc. That is not what Andy Burnham has just said there. You know, it's hard to make out from the various ums and ahs and nervous tics. He actually seems to suggest that he's not going to be quite as friendly to America, or at least slightly ambivalent towards Trump. He will at least try and strive to have a relationship with Donald Trump. He may not always agree with him on certain issues, thank you Captain Obvious, but he will at times perhaps call him out as if he's a naughty schoolchild.

5:26I mean, that is not the answer you would get from a prime minister. I have had one phone call, is the first thing he says, a reminder that until a few weeks ago he was just the mayor of Manchester, not a figure on the international stage. I take people as I find them. Sort of thing my mum says about foreigners. something you might say in a pub, not something you expect a prime minister to say. Look, you win some, you lose some. And I found him to be warm. So what if he had called Donald Trump and Trump was having an off day and he was grouchy and distant and weird? Would we be at war with America by that afternoon?

6:03Because I found him to be unpleasant that day. I will always remain close to the public. What's that got to do with the special relationship? So if you have some kind of row with America, OK, you're going to do a walkabout in Dartford? No, but this is proper Andy Burnham. We are already beginning to get a glimpse of what Andy Burnham actually is. For one, he's deeply, deeply parochial. For all his talk about rejoining the European Union and potentially being a more outward-facing country, that is not the kind of politics that he represents at all. He's about localism. He's about having a smaller frame of mind.

6:39That was a very easy question. I would love to know what Andy Burnham's answer is to, should we send troops to the South China Sea if China decides to blockade Taiwan? Actually, what's our renewable strategy when China is dumping electric vehicles into the European market? How would we actually rejoin the European Union, given all that's currently happening with the Central Commission over immigration disputes? Any of these questions, I would put these to Andy Burnham. And I think he would just say, I love Oasis. They're a fantastic band. And I would invite Vladimir Putin to come to Manchester and see what a great thing we've got going on here.

7:11I take people as I find them. I take people as I find them. What a banal and a name thing to say. I'm willing to go to Taipei and meet the people. That is your Northern accent. That's my generic Northern accent. His default position, it seems, from the past week is, I am just like you. Now, the question I have is, if you are just like me, then what makes a prime minister different? And I think, so I'm developing a postmodern theory of politics that, like Baudrillard said, the Gulf War never really happened. He didn't mean it literally didn't occur as an event in history. He meant that what really happened was disguised by the way in which it was presented to us.

7:54And likewise, I don't really think there's been a change at the top of the Labour Party. I think this is the same regime as there was under Keir Starmer, just under a new personality. And so what we're seeing now is the politics entirely of presentation, more divorced than ever before from the reality of what people live in this country today. I think that's absolutely spot on, Tim. We have been hearing for the last couple of weeks about how much of a breath of fresh air Andy Burnham is compared to sorry old Starmer. I'm sorry, but I've been watching these comms videos, these supposedly slick and charismatic presentations that Andy Burnham has.

8:31And as far as I can tell, he's a football fan that has a big soft spot for bands in the 1980s, doesn't really have any strong political affiliations beyond certain platitudes about regions of the country that he likes. Wears a lot of black. Yeah, wears a lot of black. Very, very, very good. Very astute point. Yeah. Seems to be quite uncomfortable when he goes outside of the safety realm of Oasis and his favourite football team. Yeah. Doesn't actually seem to fit within any radical faction within the Labour Party. He's an unholy mix between the Labour right and the soft left. So far, all of his big ticket policies have actually been things that are not really that significant to the overall direction of the country.

9:09and I imagine in a few weeks' time will crash and burn and be absolutely despised in the exact same way that his political doppelganger Keir Starmer did. He's identical to Keir Starmer. Yeah, another man in black obsessed with football, obsessed with 1980s music. And the money, things like capping bus fares at£2, a little bit of money off your energy bill, this is very much in keeping with Rachel Reeves doing things like knocking some money off visits to museums or kids on buses. You know, I'm not totally against it and I don't believe it's Marxism quite yet. We're not there yet. But it is very small fry cost of living stuff, which is in keeping with what came before.

9:52I think what's going on here is this coup was about making Labour feel better about itself and if Labour having had a string of terrible boyfriends showed up to your wedding with Andy Burnham you'd look at him dancing on the dance floor or leading us all in a chorus of some song by the Smiths and you'd think well he's not my taste you've settled but I can see why you went for him because he presses all of the emotional sweet spots for Labour. He is from the North. He likes the music they like. He is social democratic without being too scarily left-wing. OK, I'll do something about defence. We'll get on to what that will mean in a second.

10:32So he's just so far ticking every single psychological box for them. And how it feels for the rest of us who are not into this, well, the videos to me look uncanny and sinister because it's a man saying, it's as if he's won a prize. I'm just sat in an office. I'm having a laugh. I'm singing songs. I'm doing a dance. And he's got this weird now then lad kind of smile about him. It feels living in Britain today, like, I don't know if you know the series, The Prisoner with Patrick McGurn, right? Where he wakes up in a strange town in Wales, surrounded by sci-fi characters who try and persuade him that he is somewhere perfectly normal when in fact it's very clearly a fantasy land and that's what it feels like to live in Britain today I'm living in the imagination of Labour MPs and every year the walls of this fantasy land get closer and closer as their imagination shrinks into Manchester yes the The whole of Britain is Manchester.

11:34But this is the end result of have a normal one politics. This is actually the brain of the normie politician. Whereas it's not actually what they authentically like. And you could see this so often with Keir Starmer because Keir Starmer was not actually the person that he was presenting himself as. I at least imagine he had some kind of hinterland at one point in his life. You can see it's been sanded away. And why is that? What is normal? how can I be a normal person Andy Burnham is trying really really hard to appeal to an idea in his mind of what the average British person is like and it's so insulting when you actually see it right there in front of you because they think you are a dribbling idiotic football lout who likes rubbish stadium music bands from before I was even born.

12:22That is actually what they think you deserve. Who do lesbians who like opera in Bristol vote for now? Yeah, where is the liberal elite? I would love to meet the liberal elite. They seem to have gone walker-byes 10 years ago. That's actually what's being represented to you as the establishment. That is establishment politics. And the funny thing about this, they've betrayed themselves for nothing because people hate it. They will hate Andy Burnham. I'm willing to stake whatever money I have left in my checking account on this. Andy Burnham will be just as hated as Keir Starmer is because he represents the exact same thing, which is we're not going to change anything.

12:55We like the status quo. We don't understand why you people don't like it, but we like it and we don't really want to change anything. So we'll rearrange some deck chairs. We'll put some money towards homelessness. Maybe we can do something about that issue. Yes, we'll make bus fares cheaper. But the fundamental model of the British economy, we are going to keep it exactly the same. He is not a rupture with neoliberalism. He can't even define what neoliberalism is. He doesn't know what it is. He represents the eternal now, the eternal present. And it's terrible. People hate it. Okay, we'll break down some of those policies in a moment.

13:26But just on the point about his popularity, I'm struck by the absence thus far of a massive Burnham bounce. As someone wittily pointed out, at this point in Keir Starmer's tenure, i.e. week one of being in government, people were writing columns about how they'd like to have sex with him, right? That was the honeymoon period, right? But as for Burnham, we're in very early stages, so it's difficult to make a judgment. Polls indicate some movement. there was one that put reform and labour even at 28 there was one that put reform still ahead by one point despite all the donation stuff there is as we speak a more in common poll has been released which puts labour on 28 reform on 24 and the conservatives on 22 i still don't feel that that is the kind of bounce i might have expected for someone who i'm constantly being told by my social media feeds is a really cool guy.

14:26And if Labour is up four points, it's worth noting that the Greens are down three. Yes. So the Greens have just had their worst polling results since Sapolansky took over its leader. So you're seeing a totally divided right and a left that for now, because I do not think this situation is going to last much longer, does seem to be united behind Andy Burnham. But I do think if that's the best they can do, the strategy that has been mooted by some people, which is Andy Burnham will call an early election, see off the threat from reform, consolidate his own position and then come forward with these radical policies that he's yet to be forthcoming about what they actually are.

15:03That will be the way forward for Labour. Now, I'm sorry, I don't see that happening. They currently have a massive majority in Parliament that was brought by Keir Starmer's election victory against the Conservative Party, having to tell at least 100 MPs you are going to lose your jobs, even if the polling is correct and they are having a slight burn and bounce, that is not enough to call an early election. And we don't know what's going to happen in the next couple of months. International situation aside, it's not looking like there's going to be any particularly windfall that's coming forward for Burnham.

15:32That will make him more popular. We didn't win the World Cup, so he's lost that bet. Maybe that would have brought him into the 40s, but it didn't. And so I just don't really see a situation where things get any better for Andy Burnham than they are currently. And if that is the case, then is that not the thesis that he is continuity Starmer made slightly stronger? These are Starmer polling results. Well, I don't know if it's him, but someone does keep floating pretty big changes. And so, for example, some of the reforms we've heard discussed are a potential reform of council tax, reform of care, replacing inheritance tax with basically a flat tax that everyone pays when they die, and reform of welfare, which we're going to devote the second half to.

16:15These are pretty big things which have not received scrutiny from the press because it's not had a proper press conference with him yet. Crucially, it's also not received scrutiny from Parliament, which is normally where you're supposed to announce big policies, but all this is coming out in the summer instead. But I noted from the bits of the Laura Kunzberg interview where he was asked about things, he would say things like, I don't have a timetable on there. Or this is really about principles. I'm laying out my approach. Now, should a man who's been planning for prime minister since the age of eight, should he not have a timetable yet on these sorts of things?

16:52Should he not have a better grasp of what he's going to do? Well, yes, of course he should. I mean, I can't help but feel that this is, again, I'm bringing about that point about him being similar to Keir Starmer. At least one of those policies is something the Treasury has been knocking about for years. They're obsessed with this idea of a land value tax to replace the admittedly very outdated system of council taxation. Explain that to us. So the reason that no politician has actually gone forward with reforming council tax is because the way that property has inflated from somewhere that you would live in into your major asset that you have in life that you have to protect at all costs, or you will be the least popular leader this country has ever had.

17:28if you were to do some kind of equalisation and modernisation of land values, it would mean that every single person living in a property in the south-east of England or in London would have to pay such a ridiculously high rate of tax. They would never, ever, ever, ever vote for your party again. So you'd be paying tax on the basis of the value of your house. Exactly. Right. I mean, of course it's changed to an extraordinary amount since Thatcher was prime minister. but it is something that people stay away from because they know how radical and transformative it really would be. It's been knocked around for years.

18:02It will never happen. And that really reminds me of when Keir Starmer did the Winterfuel Alliance Cut, which has also been muted by every single new chancellor that comes in. The Treasury will come to them and say, well, if you want to save some money, you could always do this Winterfuel Cut. That will save us a couple of billion pounds. And they never do it because it doesn't make any political sense. But Keir Starmer did it because he didn't have any ideas and no policies. So he picked up on what the civil service were telling him. That's why Andy Burnham is quite dangerous. I don't actually think he is a radical.

18:29I don't think he fits within the radical tradition of the Labour Party. But because he has no ideas, he might pick up the ideas of other people around him and tries to pass them off as his own. And that could end up in quite a nasty situation if you're a taxpayer in this country. Yes, that's interesting. Of course, these things also require parliamentary time and political capital. I mean, he's clearly determined to prove that where he's different from Keir Starmer is he's willing to think big and he's proving that things can be done in that first week with, as I said, things like cutting your energy bills.

18:59This is pretty low hanging fruit stuff and it costs relatively small amounts of money, but it does give the impression that this is a far more energetic government that is aware of what's affecting people and is willing to act now. I think you're absolutely right. That creates a space for people to propose policies to him that he follows through that because he hasn't really thought about might end up proving very radical and damaging. But it's also some of his skills in presentation, which, as I say, I don't see it myself. I mean, the whole thing about David Brent is he was a bad boss. It's very funny.

19:32And we all kind of came to love him in the end. But the joke is he's terrible at being a boss because he confused being your friend with being your boss. And everyone was laughing at him. Anyway, someone hasn't sort of explained it to Andy Burnham, what the joke was. But nonetheless, some of his skills, which are there, means he could be a better salesman than Keir Starmer for what Keir Starmer was failing to get done. Right? So one of the things I admired about Keir Starmer was he was terrible at lying. There was like 5 % of him which knew he was lying. And therefore, he couldn't quite sell it to you.

20:10Whereas someone who is just daft enough to maybe believe that after a walkabout in Chichester, he can radically transform social care in this country. It's possible he is able to sell some of these bad ideas, at least through his party, which in our elected oligarchy is what matters. It's possible he could start to get some things done, which in the long run do significant damage. There's a reason that Andy Burnham goes to Manchester. You know, he is actually a Westminster man. People forget this. He was an MP at the age of 31. By the age of 37, he's in the cabinet. That is a glittering career by any standard.

20:50And then he moves into this Manchester role, the Manchester mayor role. Being a mayor in this country is a fantastic job. You actually can take credit for a lot of really fantastic things. Andy Burnham got to benefit from George Osborne's Northern Powerhouse scheme, which did actually pump quite a lot of money into the north of England and pulled out a deregulatory agenda, which meant the property boom that Andy Burnham then benefited from as Manchester mayor wasn't put in place by him because he didn't really have any powers to do it. So you don't really have any responsibility for difficult things, but you can be the man that shakes everyone's hand, knocks on everyone's door, has a personal relationship with people in the community.

21:25And by all accounts, he was very, very good at that job. I think that's why he won the Makerfield by election. He literally knocked on every single door in the constituency and went, oh, hello, I'm Andy. I'm a very pleasant person you can imagine having a pint with and that did cut through to people he can't do that if he's going to be the leader of Britain he can't do that in Westminster which is perhaps why he said I've given up with Westminster already and I'm going to open a fake office of number 10 in Manchester which I've now considered to be the cipher for all of the rest of Britain yes but it just happens to be his local area that he has been a politician in for quite a long time yes and it's very very bizarre he is this small town politician who has somehow ended up as the leader of britain and doesn't seem to have any interest in it this is heron house who i would just add uh is also used as a registry office and there are wedding parties there and a bride complained on social media that because of police presence she was worried that her big day was going to get ruined well that's the real crime it is and annie burnham replied by saying something like noted has he not got other things to do i mean again what he thinks is attractive and which for the moment may well appear novel, will in some time in the future be very irritating.

22:33What if we're in a thermonuclear war with China for control of Taiwan and he's replying to people's gardening tips on Twitter? It's going to become silly. But if you look at number 10 north itself, and again with the Kunzberg interview, we finally got to see the inside of it. And I was very, very disappointed. Here is your chance to represent the best of northern culture in a building. and it looks like a Habitat showrooms. Yeah, it's like a WeWork office. Right. You know, even you can see the stuff he's stuck on the wall, which just shows you, again, he's Keir Starmer, he's Keir Starmer. It's a framed picture of people playing football that I think is signed by some football manager.

23:15It's a gold disc. Gold disc from the Smiths. Yeah. Some random reference to Oasis, that god-awful chair with a B on it and something saying that we're all together in Manchester and we all love you. is so tacky and stupid and small and parochial. And it's like, I'm sorry to the great city of Manchester. It really is a great night out. But if that's the alternative to the Westminster system, then I think I'll stick to the old way of doing things. Even though that itself clearly seems to not be working for the rest of the country, I have seen no evidence whatsoever that the solution to problems that are caused by politicians not being able to exert power in an ever more complex society be to outsource said problems to local councillors who everybody seems to hate and despise because they also can't do their job properly.

24:01But that's Burnhamism. That's what Burnham represents. Burnham represents saying, I'm going to wash my hands of this. That sounds quite complicated and difficult. I don't really want to get involved in that. But I do like the bit where I have a natter with my nan. That's Burnham's politics. And as you say, I think that's going to be great during the parliamentary recess. But when winter comes, is that really what you're going to want to hear? It has also been pointed out that if you're going to relocate number 10 to the north, go to Northumberland, where you have hundreds of castles in fantastic condition.

24:32Do it in Annick Castle. Imagine if Donald Trump's visiting and you're going to take him to Annick Castle, which is where Harry Potter is filmed. That would really wow. That would really wow a president. Instead, we get this building and this room, which really could be an office space in Heathrow Airport. There's this strange thing of, this is one of the frustrating things about the left, and I think it's a post-Brexit thing. They thought the public hates us. We've got to go local and we've got to go historic. We've got to lay new roots. But their imagination is so limited that their vision of the past and the locale is, as I say, an office space in Heathrow Airport.

25:14So it becomes somewhere that could be anywhere. But because it's number 10 Manchester, that's enough of a stamp of tradition and authenticity on it for them without realising how antiseptic it looks. It has, hanging from the ceiling, two TV screens with number 10 on them. You know what Ashley You've just jogged my memory of what it reminded me of When I was watching it and it's why I felt so Kind of uncomfortable There's a great scene in Adam Curtis' film Supernormalisation Where it's reminiscing about the creation of the Millennium Dome Oh yes Which Peter Manderson was involved in I think I remember He remembers Peter Manderson And they're really really struggling Because they're coming up with this idea of Well it should represent modern Britain and Britain's values And what we stand for as a country And then there's this very comedic scene where people all sat around this room, probably very high paid PR executives, former politicians and the like, and they can't come up with anything because they don't really know what they like.

26:14Well, there's the past, but the past is bad and a bit scary. So we can't really do that. And then there's the future, but we kind of don't know what we want the future to be. It probably involves a lot of schoolchildren holding hands and singing Kumbaya. But how do we represent that with a big dome? That's Burnhamism. It's got a real whiff of new labour kind of moral optimism to it that doesn't actually seem to represent anything at all. It's anti-politics. We can do the show right here. The fact of building the dome is proof in and of itself that we've got something done. Something's finally been accomplished.

26:47He was caught on video singing Morris is this charming man. And what is the line? If a 10 ton truck crashes into us, then to die by your side, well, the pleasure and the honour would be mine. nothing else appropriating the minstrel of urban alienation for what is essentially an urban renewal project i find very strange but i was amused that he of course went to number 10 north on a plane not on a train he went on a plane from glasgow and it caused me in my mind to rewrite the lyrics if a late airbus were to crash into us well then the pleasure and the honor would be mine Isn't it so charming that Andy Burnham hasn't even bothered to explain why number 10 North is going to be better for the country?

27:35It just is. We're just doing it. We're just going to do it. No one actually believes that it's going to make the delivery of government any better. But I want to do it. So I will. It's very much this is the mayor coming out of him. It's that kind of like localism of this kind of petty tyrannical. I don't have to explain myself to the public. I'm just going to throw things towards my favoured voters and everyone else can go pee off. I just don't think it's going to work on a national stage. Well, nothing is working and people aren't working. And coming up next, we're going to talk about the crisis of young people and work.

28:12Nirav Modi was a billionaire diamond tycoon whose jewellery was worn by Hollywood stars like Kate Winslet. But in 2018, he was accused of masterminding one of the world's biggest ever bank frauds. And he disappeared. This is the extraordinary story of the rise and fall of Nirav Modi and of how we caught him. He was in the news all the time. Where is Nirav Modi? Why can we not find him? He's one of the most sought after criminal in India. You owe a lot of people a lot of money, Mr. Modi, who would very much like to know where you are. Sorry, no comment. The Indians will think we're a laughing stock.

28:53Here we are seven years later still speaking about this case. They think it's a sham. The Diamond King, a new podcast from The Telegraph. With me, Mick Brown. And me, Robert Mendick. Out now.

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31:07Well, we will get to Andy Burnham's big youth unemployment bonanza, but first I wanted to ask you quite a personal question, Tim. What was your teenage job? See, this is why I can never go into politics, because you have to give an answer like I worked in McDonald's or down a coal mine. whereas my answer is I taught piano. Of course you did. Of course you taught piano. How rarefied and precious is that? How much money did you make teaching piano? I got five pounds for 30 minutes which was actually quite good money back then but I often went over and I really enjoyed doing it. What was your first job?

31:43I think my first job which is I'm now realising saying it out loud was definitely legal but I was working Well, I was working as a barmaid at a time when I couldn't legally drink alcohol. So my first job at 16 was pulling pints for other people. I think I lasted in that job for about three months. I spent most of my time working as a customer service assistant in a local Tuscotes. Right, okay. And what did those teach you? What skills for life did those things give you? Hatred. They taught me how to hate. They taught me how to hate the general public. This is why I also can't go into politics because I'm such a bitter, misanthrotic person.

32:19So you get paid, you know, a somewhat decent salary at the time. And the money is the only reason you would do that job. You wouldn't do it out of the kindness of your heart because it's rubbish. It's either really, really tedious and boring or actively quite frightening when a customer tries to, you know, climb over a barrier dividing you because you won't sell them cigarettes or like. It's pretty rubbish. Most people don't like doing work like that when they're young, but they do it because you get an allowance, which then promises you independence, which is why I'm not particularly surprised by Britain's so-called youth unemployment crisis.

32:53So-called. OK, well, Andy Burnham has said that young people will face being stripped of their benefits unless they agree to do training or voluntary work. And this is part of an effort to reduce the country's extraordinary£333 billion welfare bill. Currently, more than 430 ,000 people aged 16 to 24 are claiming sickness benefits. And this is driven in large part by a large jump since COVID of people claiming for mental health concerns such as anxiety, autism and ADHD. So it's driven by, if you like, medical and societal factors. But we have to also add that figures published on Sunday show that almost 75 ,000 roles, potential jobs for people aged 16 to 18 have been lost since labour came to power.

33:42So it's people going to the doctor or whatever and saying, I want to go on welfare, but it's also that actually opportunities are shrinking. Now, labour is thinking of copying a scheme done in the Netherlands, where recipients of welfare are required to join community projects such as picking litter or repairing playgrounds or spending time with the elderly. And it does seem to work because their rate of NEETs, that's not in education or training, is much lower than ours. They have 4.9 % of their young people as NEETs, whereas we have closer to 13 % of young people as NEETs. So is this a problem and is compelling people to do voluntary work the solution?

34:28Well, I'm going to have to stick up for young people. I'm still just about within the qualification of being a young person. So the humiliations of being a teenager are still very fresh in my mind. I mean, I think this is probably the wrong approach for multiple reasons. So you got into the fact that actually there have been quite a few losses of roles, those entry level jobs that people would have. In part, that's because of longer term trends that have been brought on by the Conservative Party. But also, it's quite directly related to some of the economic policies made by Rachel Reeves and the Keir Starmer government.

34:58The first of those is the national insurance tax rise and the other is the equalization of minimum wage for young people. Now, if you are an employer, why would you want to hire, let's say, a young Poppy Coburn who will turn up to work hungover, will not actually like doing this menial job because it is humiliating and boring, when you could hire, per se, one of the many, many low-skilled migrants that have entered the UK who will do the job properly, will not complain about wages, will probably engage in overtime for you, which you can see if you walk around any local town now, a lot of supermarket jobs that once would have been filled by teenagers are now actually filled by adults, most of whom I think would have arrived in the country quite recently.

35:37And you can see that by data about where jobs are going to in the United Kingdom. A lot of them are actually not going to British citizens. So there's one aspect of the work. The other is a perverse incentive structure that has been created by welfare. If you are 16 or 17 years old, you can actually claim personal independence payment, PIP. Right. So you can say if you are 16 or 17 years old, that you have ADHD or anxiety or depression, or I think failure to thrive was one of those fantastic medical categories. Seriously. You can get a car for that. And now you could also get several hundred pounds every month through personal independence payments.

36:14Now that will net you more money than you would make, even in the equalized minimum wage job that you're doing, when it will have during term time, you'll have a legal limit of how many hours you can work for perfectly understandable reasons. So you can make quite a lot of money by sitting at home doing nothing versus doing a job that is not pleasant for all Tory politicians who like to tell you in videos that they love their teenage jobs. They're not. They're rubbish. That's why they stop doing them. They go to university. Why would you not do that? So unless you fix that aspect of the job, rather than just hitting people with a stick and saying we're going to punish you by making you do volunteering work, you actually have to fix the supply side problem that has been created by the Labour government that makes young people basically quite unattractive hires and not really worth doing when there's an easier way to doss money from the government.

37:07So until the Labour Party actually does anything about those two problems, this just seems very performative cruelty towards young people for me. It's very social democratic, isn't it, in instinct that if there is a problem, we need a new government program to direct people to fix their lives. When, as you're suggesting, you could just remove certain carrots and sticks or you could remove some carrots and apply some sticks. And the result is people would have just no choice but to go out and get the job. But as a representative of the younger generation, and I'm pretty close to your age myself, but I'm out of touch, I guess.

37:41how much of young people not working and how much of young people claiming mental anxiety etc is a rational choice as an economic actor of people saying i just don't want to work so i'm going to fake it and how much is actually a cultural phenomenon of young people really do think i can't work i think it's both i really i really really strongly do think it's both um i think it's possible both for people to have convinced themselves that they have mental health issues because of various bad incentive structures and also governance failures, COVID pandemic for one, and then for people to actually feel active distress about the foundation that their life is currently standing upon.

38:20I think there are lots of young people who are suffering from conditions like depression and anxiety and perhaps their idea of what ADHD will be. What's interesting is you haven't seen a commensurate rise in things like psychosis, schizophrenia, the kind of harder end of mental health. The ones that require actual diagnosis. Diagnosis, medication, potentially been withdrawn from society so i think people do feel quite strong negative emotions yeah i think they've been pathologized because there is a reason a totally rational economic reason to pathologize bad emotions that all teenagers feel because that is now a valid life path for people so it probably would make people feel much better in the long term to free them from this kind of self-imposed misery that they place themselves in because if you're a neat it is rubbish it's terrible to be a neat it's not actually pleasant to sit at home by yourself all day we had that during the covid pandemic well maybe you had a good time but i remember it as the worst time in my life it feels like you are failing to flourish or thrive or be happy that is being stolen from you yes um but when people are telling you that that option is there it's like at university if all your essays were optional then you probably wouldn't hand them in but at the end of it you'd graduate and think i've learned nothing here i'm speaking from personal experience you actually do need someone to at some point say sorry but this isn't how you live your life I'm going to have to take this support away from you because it's making you totally fail to be resilient and fail to actually grow up into an adult and until the Labour government can actually turn around and do something like that in a kind of frank field model of welfare reform removing welfare because you think it will help people's welfare in the long term they will always just be putting out fires in this quite performative way they're not actually fixing the underlying problem of why young people are unhappy.

40:05See, there's a debate, isn't there, between those like Jonathan Haidt who say that actually being young is changing as a phenomenon and that's being driven by technology and social conditions. So in other words, it's harder to be young because they have all this audio visual stuff going on around them. And those like, I don't know, I'm increasingly coming around to the view that actually human nature hasn't greatly changed. That very often when I speak to younger people who have these various conditions, I recognise myself in them and I know exactly what they're going through because I went through all those things when I was 16, 17, 18 as well the difference is that at some point I got to kick up the backside because I just had no choice because eventually my father just said get a job or you're leaving the house It wasn't an identity No it wasn't It is now an identity phenomenon There's been a trans rights march this week and a lot of people had pointed out that many of the people there seem to be walking around with walking sticks and having big badges saying that they were disabled.

41:04Yes, I've seen the footage. It's extraordinary. The sheer numbers of people who are, I'm just going to say it, overweight, physically disabled and with gender nonconformity. It's remarkable. So many in one place. But it's an identity thing that now gives people meaning in the same way that perhaps going to a church would have given you meaning. Now walking around with a walking stick, despite being a perfectly healthy 16-year-old girl, is an identity that you have. Being neurodivergent is an identity that you have. You would have a community that you would engage with. This is why PIP is now becoming a serious problem for the government.

41:38People are identifying as benefit claimants. That is actually something they see themselves as rather than just someone who has fallen on hard times. No, no, no. That is their identity. Their identity is that there is something wrong with them. And how do you actually fix that as a government without doing a kind of shock therapy of saying there's something that's gone really seriously wrong in this country we have to totally dismantle the systems that currently exist because you are now incubating a generation of people for whom that behavior is not only normal but rewarded yes and you want to say to those sorts of people life will change you will feel different in five ten years time because your life will be materially different but also your brain will have changed instead we seem to be creating a system which encourages people not to change and jobs however horrible they might be or however low paid they might be, are part of the process of growing up.

42:29Yes. You know, I'm a classic adult in the sense that I think about all the things that made me really unhappy when I was young. And now I think every young person should go through that. Yeah. Well, how about it? I hated rugby. You should all play rugby. Because if I went through it, you should have to go through it. But also, it made me the miserable, screwed up person I am now. And it's just part of human development. Working in that pub and even having that horrible argument with someone because you won't sell them cigarettes, it's part of human development. The alternative is that you stay at home and live in a bubble and you don't encounter conflict and you don't develop as a personality.

43:04And that is very easy to then label as a mental health condition or a personality disorder because that's what not growing up is. Not growing up is a form of personality disorder. The condition that people are actually suffering from is arrested development. I would be really, really miserable if at the age of 26 I was still living like a 16-year-old. Yes. Because it's not very pleasant to do that. Yes. People work for money. They work for money because money can buy them a different life. It can buy them freedom. It can buy them community. It can buy them friends, housing, all those things that make life worth living as an adult.

43:35You don't just go into work because you love doing work, at least not for 99 % of the population. The problem is if you don't give people that sense that you will move up at some point, your life will open up. You will have freedom that comes from having money, having a career, having a job, then why would you engage in that system? Everyone will perpetually be a teenager. But now we've got a lot of teenagers that have grey hair. And I think that's a pretty worrying situation to have in this country, where if you look at what young people are like at this current stage of life, okay, it's easy to laugh at them because they are literally wearing their mental problems on their sleeve as a badge of pride.

44:10But it's not just them. It's the people who are coming after them. And it's also the generation ahead of them that's having the exact same pathologies in their heads because it's circulating around their social sphere. And so that is the problem that's coming down the line in the United Kingdom. Welfarism is now identity. And that brings me to perhaps a place to finish, which is the phenomenon of the dancing politician. I'm fascinated by how our culture represents things like adulthood, marriage, relationships, because I don't think it does. I don't think it does it very well. It has lost its sense of Jungian ideals, or at least its ideals are all wrong.

44:47I mean, one of our culture's ideals is perpetual youth, right? People are literally draining the blood of their sons to try and look 10 years younger, right? So when you have dancing politicians, what message does that send us about what adulthood and leadership looks like? I'm not against politicians having a good time Heaven knows Are you? Okay You want them to live in a box under a bridge Yes Right But you see my point That when Andy does the dance Or Zach does the dance I'm thinking about that If people are able to imagine development And imagine growing up And they're being sent the message by politicians That actually Growing up is not growing up You don't have to grow up You can still dance And be totally irresponsible And live on a canal boat You can be David Brent You can be a friend of everybody.

45:35You can just be kicking it back. You can be playing your acoustic guitar. You don't have to be serious. Why would you want to be serious? Then ask yourself, well, then of course people aren't going to be serious. You're telling them that they don't have to. There's no standards to uphold. And so why not just become a fat slob that lives at home and doesn't do anything? I mean, why not? Well, from dancing politicians to sunbathing politicians, tomorrow we go to Clacton to speak to Nigel Farage, who talks to us about why he loves the constituency, why he's going to win the by-election, And the one thing this will surprise everyone, that he does agree with Andy Burnham about.

46:08That's tomorrow at 5pm.

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