Enraged or Engaged? Angela Rayner on The Gen Z Story

33:12And they are. They are, but they also feel that some of the decisions that our government has made are not speaking to our values. And that's pretty clear. You can see that with what's happened in the war in Gaza. They feel that we've not stuck to our values on that. I think Gen Z in particular feel pretty strongly about that. I think the public, it's not a sense of, are you one side or another? It's are you right or wrong? Are you standing up for our principles of international law? And they feel quite passionate about that. And that's blown us off course. And it's created a serious amount of damage for us because you've got to have passion.

33:46You've got to have a heart as well as a head. And you've got to take people with you on that. And I think that that is the challenge for us, that we failed at this moment in time. We've been failing to meet that challenge. It's interesting because it's not just the housing ladder that's collapsed, right? It is the career ladder. But how do you package up what you are doing to speak to young people? Because one thing, I mean, I was laughing about it with our Gen Z producer, but Drake memes to explain the Renters' Rights Act. The Drake meme is really out of date. I remember that being a thing like three years ago.

34:19and that was coming out of government calls. It's so out of date, you're going to have to tell them what it is. It's just a meme of Drake. Doing what? It's just Drake going like this. Doing his like... It's a renter's rights. Okay. Yeah. Is that what the government used? Yeah, to publicise it. Right. But it felt like, it felt quite patronising. Yeah, my lad, my 16-year-old says, if you can't do a decent video, don't bother mum. It's like, really, it's many of your colleagues, he's like, this is just cringe. It's like, it's so painful that you're not actually getting your message across. You're just showing your inability to try and get down with the kids.

34:53So if you're not with the kids, you might as well be what you are. At least don't try and be something you're not. But you've got to speak to them. You've got to speak to them. But he's saying like, I think he's got a point, is you've got to lean into what you are, you know, and then try and, you know, take a listen and try and respond to that. Don't try and be down with the kids if you're not down with the kids because that's just a bit cringy. There's a danger we're really patronising this generation as well, right? because they are the most indebted generation in history if they went to university.

35:21They are graduating with an average of£50 ,000 worth of debt,£9 ,000 a year. I paid three, you paid. Zero. Zero, there we go. And, you know, it's a huge amount of money. Then they're looking at interest. And it's the psychology of that. So, because I talk about, like, in my household, you'd be frightened of debt. So, even though people say, well, if you don't earn enough, you won't pay it back, or some people will never pay it back. But it's the psychology of that hanging around your neck at the same time as the insecurity of can I find a job and is there a job security for us going forward. It's why.

35:57So an example is there is a lot of kickback to the living wage going up, the minimum wage and my employment rights act. I make no apology. People should be able to know if they're going to get guaranteed hours because you can't get a mortgage. you can't have security about whether you're going to raise a family if you're on a zero-hour contract or if your pay is meaning you're having to visit a food bank even though you're working and that is the reality for people at the moment young people in particular are starting out in jobs and the money that they're earning is not enough for them even to pay the basics and and that is the real challenge for us at the moment it's that point I made before around wages not keeping up with the cost.

36:41And there's two things you need to do. Of course, you need to create the environment for business. That's why I say about infrastructure and some of the other changes that we could make. But also, you've got to do the long-term investment in housing and etc. because that's how you bring down the supply problem because we have a supply problem in this country. And I think this is also choking off the economy as well because it's a vicious circle. If people haven't got money to spend or people don't have job security, then that's going to impact on the everyday economy because people are going to say actually it's unpredictable not sure I'm not going to stretch myself to buy that I'm not going to stretch myself to have a child because I don't know if I'm going to be able to afford the child so it really has a choking effect so therefore giving the confidence and creating the environments where people can feel I just get really upset about you know people in work having to get handouts or having to go to food banks or because it takes away, it strips away your dignity.

37:41And that psychology of that, like I was so proud of myself when I was able to provide a home for my son. Like my parents were never able to do that for me. That sense of pride of me going out to work and my wages being able to help provide for my family gave me a sense of self-worth that my mum had choked away from her because she didn't have those opportunities. And the psychology of that, I think, holds the nation back when people feel that they are pushed down, punched down, and they are in this trap of poverty, a system that feels rigged against them, and they feel that nothing changes for them.

38:24And that's why I'm always trying to fight them, because I believe politics does change people's lives. It changed my life. It doesn't happen overnight, but it does make a difference. And these things we can do and the activism of young people saying I'm not having this I expect this to change and being part of that change not expecting someone else to go hey I'm going to do it for you but actually being part of that delivery of change I think will make a huge difference it will make a difference to the confidence of the economy it'll make a difference to the psychology of the nation. Did you know about one in three people with plaque psoriasis may also develop psoriatic arthritis, which causes joint pain, stiffness, and swelling.

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40:33We asked the Gen Z audience, the rest of politics to describe themselves. And the words that came up the most have really, really stayed with me. Misunderstood, resilient, lost, unlucky, anxious and fucked. Yeah, that's savage. That's how they're feeling, right? And I think if you've gone to uni, you've taken on all that debt, you are now learning what rpi is because it's the interest rate on your loan which they've been capped at six percent but still six percent on a fifty thousand seventy thousand pound loan that is a lot of money every month in interest hundreds of pounds and then you're having to use a food bank or you're working multiple jobs i think i'd feel quite fucked too but you're also seeing a level of wealth yeah amongst other people including their own generation the kids of the wealthy and all that stuff that they're seeing so i think it's the fact that we haven't addressed and it's not just this government you know but when we're not addressing the the core inequality in the way that's widening and i think the reason people are so scared of the tech revolution is because they think that's going to widen it rather than help it yeah especially with the sort of characters we've got in charge of it you know if you've got elon musk and bezos and these guys as the big drivers of technological change don't expect it to that's why we've got to have Let me play you Luke on this because he's got stuff to say about what's going on with tech.

41:59So Luke is from Ipswich. He's not living at home. Hi, my name is Luke. I'm 27. I live in Ipswich and I am a video editor. I think that one of the things that young people specifically have it really quite difficult with is this very easy parallel that you can draw to previous generations where men back then could support whole families off of a single income in a way that I can't. And I don't think many other young men can. And it's not necessarily unique to Gen Z in that sense. I think that's a very millennial thing too. But this is all in congruence with the internet having quite greatly developed and, in my opinion, worsened.

42:37You can just so transparently see a lot of the world problems at an arm's distance now. And that can really compound a lot of the anxieties and concerns and stresses and frustrations that young people are facing. But I think young men especially are really quite susceptible to things like the manosphere and things that want to take these ideas and manipulate and weaponize them as well. I agree. But this comes back to that psychology. It comes back to your point you made before when you surveyed the Gen Z and some of the adjectives that they described themselves as. It's this feeling of powerless.

43:13It's this feeling that the frustration of them not being able to get beyond the rigged system or that things are against them. And it comes back to that psychology then. Whereas actually, you know, coming back to the lady from Ilford, it's like we need to have a psychology in Britain that says we're confident. We're confident as a country. Yes, these hard challenges, these global challenges that we face and these challenges that are unique to us. now we can be frustrated and thinking nothing's ever going to change you can pull try and pull a populist lever and say I'll just break glass and hope that something happens that's good or you could actually say here's the path of how we get there and this is how we're going to do it together and that's the path that I'm choosing because I know how that affected my life and I'm really passionate about it and actually you know the people in Alistair's government at the time when he was there, they didn't know how much their policies were affecting girls like me.

44:12It wasn't just about the fact that the tax credits or going back to free education, adult education in the evening. It wasn't just a fact of those policies. It was the psychology. My mum stayed in a marriage that was not good for her. I don't have to do that. I was a single mum. the state the generation before me if you had a child at my age and you tried to raise your child forget it they were put up for adoption the state enabled me to be a mother and to have the tools to support myself and the psychology of that I can't measure it for you apart from I became deputy prime minister of the country off a council estate that that's what we need to do we need to inject that level of confidence in our economy, in our people, that people feel like, yeah, we can do this together.

45:06And these people on my side fighting for it. I want my kids to feel, you know, my 29 year old, he doesn't live at home anymore. I'm a guarantor for his rent because he needs a guarantor. He's a renter. He's got no opportunity at the moment to buy a property. he works really long hours he provides for his family he's on a very low income it's really difficult for him you know he had a problem with his teeth he had to ask me to borrow to get his teeth done so he could he was in a hell of a lot of pain he's trying to work trying to raise his family he can't even afford a dentist you know these everyday things that people are challenged with at the moment my point is it's the psychology of that it's the psychology of my son having to come to me when he's working, when he's an absolute brilliant dad, he's looking after his family, but the psychology of him having to come to his mum or ask somebody else for help, that's not a system that we should be enduring at the moment.

46:03That is not a system that the Gen Z should have to accept because I think that is the long drag on the economy. I think it's a long drag on our well-being as a country is when we push and punch people down and they feel that no matter how hard they work, the system is going to be rigged against them. I suppose there is an argument that 2008 changed a lot, right? It did change before that. Wages were going up, the economy was growing, it gets called the nice era. And I graduated in 2010 and into a recession. So I remember how much things changed. And psychology is everything, right? Like the word, sorry to keep swearing on your podcast Alistair but the word we never do that normally the word that Gen Z keep you know used to describe themselves as fucked and I remember growing up under new labor getting a maintenance grant not alone to go to university because at the time my family weren't doing very well if I had done that now I'd just have double the amount of debt as one of my richer fellow students but the psychology of that and what it must feel like exactly to to know like oh well because i haven't got rich parents everything's just going to be harder for me but we've let this fester because i've been covering it since i started out as a journalist starting to feel like i'm screaming into the void we've let it fester for 20 years and now it's so serious that you've got someone with a first from cambridge living at home working two jobs and the other thing that vicky went through the words there that jenny said says about themselves Vicky was showing me earlier, the word that our generations say about Gen Z is entitled as the number one.

47:41I don't see that because you can see the inequality that exists. And, you know, I speak to the older generation and even the argument around the triple lock, so that gets raised quite a lot. When I speak to the older generation, they're like, well, okay, you want to take the triple lock off us. That's all right if it was going direct to that younger generation. I can see it. You want it to go in a black hole because incompetence of politicians. They don't see that intergenerational. They're like, you want us to take a hit? Okay, I'm happy to do that for my grandkids and for the next generation.

48:14But I'm not certain that that's what's going to happen. We're going to take a hit and they're still going to be screwed. So there is this argument around being able to see government that can be effective at changing people's lives. I think that there is... We did do Sure Start and it benefited you. We did do the EMAs and it benefited Vicky. We do, and that's why I keep screaming about it. That's why I said we need to do more of those things. And I think that people could see that. And the system does feel rigged. That's why I was impatient for the change in my department in particular that I had ownership of, including the Employment Rights Bill.

48:49It was faced with huge opposition. Still is. You know, how am I having to argue in a modern economy that treating people on zero-hour contracts where they don't know from one minute to the next if they're going to have the hours to provide for their kids. And that's having a knock-on effect on your generation that are saying, well, actually, can I have a kid? Because I don't know if I'm going to have the income to provide for it. I think that's a legitimate thing for a politician to intervene and say, actually, as a state, we think that there is a fairness. Of course, there'll always be seasonal workers and everything.

49:22But actually, the balance at the moment is for the birds. It's hopeless for young people. So I make no apologies for saying that. I make no apologies for saying that it's a fleece hold system. It's a rigged system. People, you know, buying freeholders, nothing at all delivered for it. Up in it, it's kept people trapped in flats that they can't sell. Now it's having an adverse effect on the housing market. It's a rip off. People can see it. I've interviewed people who bought leasehold flats because that is your starter home, right? Like that's what I bought. And they've not been able to have children because they can't sell the flat because the flats are so toxic.

49:59that is also impacting it's like remediation they're all crying oh i've got to pay for the what we've got to remediate a building that we sold someone that's a pop you won't go curries and buy a dishwasher that blows up and then say well actually we're doing nothing about the fact that we sold you a good dishwasher actually i'll come and get a washing machine from you you wouldn't go there again would you if you bought a faulty product from somebody you wouldn't go back to them again and say i'm actually i'm going to buy the product again from the same people and that is this rigged system at the moment and i don't think those things are controversial to say like actually it's it's these are low as i call it these are low-hanging political fruit right because it's so obviously wrong and we should be able to so obviously fix it and if we're not doing that then what are we for we look like part of the problem rather than part of the solution listen can i just press down a bit on this social media stuff because i don't understand why the government isn't just doing it in relation to the, you know, stopping social media until you're 16.

51:02One of our great heroes on the rest of his politics is the South Australian Premier Peter Marlowskis, who's the first one to do it. He did it in South Australia, it's now across Australia. It's spreading around the world. I think the country's kind of decided on this, and yet we've just got this bloody, seemingly never-ending process going on. Yeah, I think, again, that just makes people feel that. Just make a decision and do it. that sense of, as I say, the low-hanging political fruit. Why can you not just make a decision when it seems so clear that that's what you need to do? This active state, which I talked about, is exactly what we need to be.

51:39Three-quarters of the people we surveyed or that responded want it done. You know, the wild west of social media where everyone gets to see things that are absolutely abhorrent and shouldn't be seen. You know, the way in which the internet works, It's not real life almost. And therefore, people behave in a way that if you were in a conversation like this, you just wouldn't behave in that way. But it reminds me of football. You go into football and then you become like, oh, I'm on my team. And then you're swearing and you're saying the most out of it. I mean, my lads are county fans, right? They don't like Wrexham.

52:13I reckon that there's some choice words that my lads say if they're at a match between Wrexham and county or other teams. Which county? Stockport County. Okay. So my lads are massive Stockport County fans. No, no, no, no. They're Stockport County fans and they have been die-eye supporters. But you know what I mean? If you're a football fan, you're going through the turnstiles and you behave in a way, Alistair, that when you're not at that football match, you would not behave like that. You would not use that language in that way. And I think the internet at the moment is just like the Wild West.

52:43But that's not an excuse for people sending you death threats. It's not an excuse for that. But what I'm saying is the protections for people need to be there. We need to obviously look at how we protect young people but i think there is also a wider conversation about how in how the internet um how the internet is a place that is basically anything goes i think we're going to look back on it like smoking and the fact that so many thousands of 14 to 29 year olds wrote into us to say that they don't think social media is necessarily a good thing you know that they think it makes them more isolated 80 said that that tells you something about this generation that have grown up on it they're not they're not the guinea pig generation like my lot millennials were they're saying wait a minute actually i don't think this is good so we've got aisha who's 17 who you'd expect to be pro tiktok instagram social media generation but what she had to say i thought was on the money.

53:41Hi, I'm Aisha. I'm 17. And I feel like social media has influenced me to not have much trust in politics, particularly because of the way that politicians use social media to try and engage with Gen Z. Soundbite politics, silly memes that aren't really that funny on political parties, TikTok and Instagram pages feels very much targeted at us but not hearing any of our policy concerns and feeling like that is all we care about which is very infantilising and very ridiculous. Yeah she just described what my Jimmy says so as I said earlier you know my Jimmy says the exact same he's nearly 17 he's 17 next month around that and I think there's something in that but certainly as they've got older I see the way in which they use social media is completely changed and they know it's quite talk they know it's not just because obviously I'm their mum but they know it's a toxic place so they generally tend to use it in the way they want and what worries me is with it being a toxic place as well is that you get validation that you're not okay so if you're a young person whose well-being is you know your your fit because as teenagers right we all feel like i didn't want to be tall i didn't want to be a certain way i didn't feel right and you know and and then if you're looking for invalidation or validation you can you can find the invalidation very very quickly and and i i worry about those things and i think that's why we need to put more safeguards in place and i think the younger generation are really cottoning on to that i think the thing that's really come out through doing this right is gen z are talking to us and particularly the rest is politics gen z audience have really spoken to us they've said they're not happy they've said what they want and hearing you both talk today i think everybody gets it but somehow we're missing how we actually say to them we've got you it's going to be okay we see you we're listening it's going to get sorted out and in the meanwhile the vacuum is being filled by populist charlatans populist politicians on the left and the right and that is going to change our politics we've heard about young men going towards reform some of some of that data was maybe a bit exaggerated but there was definitely a swing we've heard more and more we're hearing about young women going to the greens and it is going to change in the same way that all the issues we've discussed have already changed our society fallen birth rates more people living at home, huge amounts of student debt that most of them are never going to pay off.

56:23It is now fundamentally changing our politics. We don't have two-party politics anymore. But that's why we've got to show we're on their side. And you've got to show that passion for it. And you've got to make those changes. And you've got to make the argument. The art of debate has to be there. And we're all part of it. Are we part of the problem or part of the solution? Are we going to continue to allow this spiral of decline? Are we going to continue with a media that doesn't appreciate the issues that are affecting the next generation? Are we going to accept politicians that, you know, you can't scratch beneath the surface?

56:56You're trying, you said. You met Zach Polanski and you asked him the questions around the economy and there was nothing beneath the surface. And Farage is the same. You know, we've got to drive that change forward. We're custodians for a period of time of our positions that we hold and the honour and the privilege of doing it. So therefore, we've got to be that. We've got to exemplify that in what we do as well and giving hope to that generation and saying, I'm fighting for you. And, you know, when I do speak to that generation, the one thing that they've always said about me is that I'm authentic and they get that I'm fighting.

57:33They like that passion. They like that from us. And instead of sanitizing that, we need to go out there and deliver and make sure that people can see that. I think it'd also be a lot of good if you actually listened to what younger people are saying about Brexit. It's bloody clear what they're saying to me and we're not really moving on that. Yeah. And scratch beneath it, Alistair, because I agree that in particular, people will say Brexit was a mistake. And, you know, I was saying at the time, let's have a debate. I was on question time, me and Ken Livingston. And it was just after the Brexit had happened, but we hadn't triggered the process.

58:06and when we were saying Ken Livingston was making a very reasonable point about when when you trigger because you need to sort out the arrest warrants and things like that we literally got shouted down it was an audience in Hartlepool saying if you don't like it and I defended Ken Livingston saying well he's actually right we should actually discuss what this actually means and we got shouted down by a load of people in the audience saying you're just trying to frustrate Brexit and it's like no no we're just actually pragmatically going through what that means and this is the same now Alistair because you can't go back what you can do is say what are the practical steps now that will is this a benefit for the UK can we discuss it what are the pros and cons and make a decision on that and scratch beneath the not you were this way then and you of course you're going to say that they were that way then of course they're going to say actually have a discussion about well what does it mean can we go back into the European Union and what terms would we be going back on into the European Union what does that mean for other trade deals what does that mean for our standing globally?

59:05What does that mean for our defence? I think these are genuine journalistic questions that we should be holding people to account. They are political questions, but they're questions that we should be holding people to account. The political debate is slowly coming into view, but it's been so slow. We are looking at a generation that are coming of age with the economic settlement that this country has after 2008 and everything that that meant for our economy and after Brexit and now they're looking around and saying what was what's going to be done for us who's going to help us so I think let's let's hear from one more of them and hear what they have to say.

59:41Hi my name is Afzal and I'm a 21 year old graduate from a working class background the university was sold to me as a golden ticket for socioeconomic mobility it would allow me to enter well-paid employment own my own home and have a higher standard of living for me and my future family however since graduating from UCL with a law degree I have found that promise to be untrue. I've applied to around 30 or 40 different roles in the legal and policy sector and I've received either automated responses or none at all. These applications take hours to complete and they include aptitude tests and around three to four questions averaging a thousand words in total.

1:00:13But it isn't just me. Around a million graduates are on state benefits and applying for jobs to hear no response has become exhausting for us. I also find myself in£70 ,000 of student debt that will accrue at a 6 % interest rate. Extortionate rental prices mean that I will likely have to stay at home for the foreseeable future and massively inflated house prices have pushed home ownership out of the picture for my wealthier peers however the story isn't the same they have parents able to pay for their education fees and eventually help them onto the housing ladder i and millions of others have done everything as we should have done and yet we have gotten nowhere and it seems as though we were conditioned to enter a system which has delivered no benefit to us but has given us a debt that we will likely be paying for our entire working life Exactly.

1:00:54Sums up the inequality that you talked about, Alistair, before. And that is acute. It also sums up the rig system. That's why I was unapologetic about us creating the industries of the future, because the investment that the state is putting in, huge sums of investment, which the Chancellor has criticised for, for putting that investment in. I think it's the right thing to do because that's how you drive investment into the industries of the future. So those jobs are created because those jobs are just not there for the graduates. And they feel that that system is going to get worse with AI. We've got to have an active state on how you redistribute because that's going to have a challenge for us.

1:01:31How do we adapt the workplace? How do we give people that sense of security that there is a safety net? What more can we do now on student loans? Or do you think we've stuck with it? Well, student loans, again, I think that, you know, the challenge really is the way in which it's scored. And this was because when I was shadow education secretary, this was really frustrating for me because a lot of things, if they don't belong to the government, even though it is the government, but your arm's length it, it goes off the score chart, right? But actually, in reality, a lot of it is never going to be repaid or over a period of time, it doesn't exist.

1:02:05So the way in which the accountancy and treasury scores it makes it really difficult at the moment for us to make big changes. But we have to do something at the moment, especially for those who do need maintenance allowance, maintenance grants, which I know that's something that we've been working on. But there are challenges that we need to be honest about the pragmatism of the reality and then fix it. Because at the moment, the psychology is that people are being really disadvantaged and it's having a perverse impact on their ability to go forward or even to choose to go to university. Most kids now are competing for the top level apprenticeships.

1:02:47They're avoiding university. So the kids that never used to go to university, they're now competing with what would have been university kids because they're saying, actually, don't go to university. Get yourself an apprenticeship because you'll start earning money straight away. You'll get yourself a good job in a good industry. and then you can fly. So they're choosing not and that's having an impact on our world-renowned universities. That's going to help in years to come. But what about, I mean, it's millions of people on Plan 2 loans, right? They've capped the interest at 6%. But if you're paying 9 % of what you earn above 25K, 29K, depending which plan you're on, that is a lot of money and you're still, 6 % interest is still a lot.

1:03:26And I tell you what doesn't get talked about. And I experienced this myself. I paid off my student loan a couple of years ago. I went when fees were much lower so I've been lucky enough to do that every time I applied to remortgage my house my flat they asked me what my student loan was we were told we would never be asked yeah so and it's having an impact now even to this day and the other thing is that on the plan two kids from poorer families end up having to pay a lot more because you do and those that came up with the system have said that the plan two was never as it was envisaged so it's starting to have a real impact.

1:03:59So I do think it's a conversation that we need to have and we need to actively. But it's part of a wider conversation, I think, as well about how we create opportunities for jobs and how we protect and have a safety net, because I think the world of work is changing dramatically. So we need people to look at lifelong education. We need it to be, you know, an advancement for people that you could see tertiary education or apprenticeships as as valuable as higher education, but that higher education has got value to it as well. And therefore, that is a real sort of rewiring about how we see education, which is what I try to do.

1:04:35When I plug again, when I was a shadow education secretary with the National Education Service. And I think that we do need to look at cradle to grave, an education system that delivers for people, that encourages people to see education as a positive, that is not going to saddle them with a huge amount of debt. And that is going to deliver for the changing nature of work that we're going to have in the UK. And that will help our economy going forward as well. Otherwise, we're going to be choking off again the challenges we face because we're seeing that business will say, it's not my P &O, get rid of all these workers.

1:05:08They're all then put onto the state. It's the state's problem. We see mass redundancies in areas where world of work is changing. And yet we're not seeing the ability to be agile enough to deliver for those people. You know, we're talking about net zero. We're talking about the change to move to renewables. It's the right thing to do. But there's a lot of concern around people who are in the oil industry saying, well, where's my job going to be and where's the transition? And that is going to happen at the moment we talk about it in particular industries. But that's going to happen by a whole swathes of the economy.

1:05:45And therefore, we need an active state that looks at lifelong learning. And I believe that's part of the wider conversation that we need to be having. In my day job, I travel around this country interviewing people from all walks of life. More and more, I'm meeting people in their 30s and their 20s who do not have the lives they thought they would have, right? That is what people say to me over and over and over again. I never thought my life would look like this. I thought I'd have kids. I didn't think I'd be living at home. I knew I'd be in debt. I thought I'd be able to repay it. And we've heard from your audience as well.

1:06:14There's this phrase that's kept coming up. Missold. I was missold. I was missold a future. I was missold a student loan and we don't have time to get into it but I really do think there is a bit of a case of misselling with student loans if a bank kept changing the interest on your credit card or your loan you know like people people would would be making claims and if that happened with your mortgage and you weren't on a variable rate you'd be able to make a claim it's it's not allowed but it has happened with student loans I do think I do think we're in a bit of a crisis. What I don't understand is why when you've delivered on giving them the vote, there hasn't been alongside it an education strategy and also a whole stack of policy aimed at you.

1:06:57Well, in fairness, I think... But we have got a stack of policy, we're just not packaging it in the way we should. But it's not being sold, right? I think the renter's rights, I think, leasehold, employment rights, and obviously employers have got their criticisms of it, and some of that is true, especially combined with the national insurance contribution Yeah, which I've raised all the costs. You know, we said we'd do the business rates review, the national insurance contributions, you know, energy costs have gone up. We said that energy costs wouldn't go up. We've had the war in Ukraine. We've now got the war in Iran, which has all had a knock on effect.

1:07:27They're not interested in excuses. All they see is that it's made it even more difficult. But out of all of them, I'm going to defend the Employment Rights Act and put in money in working people's pockets and increasing the minimum wage because we don't want them to feel like There's no hope for them to be able to get out of the challenges. And you're right, we have done the things that do affect and will affect the Gen Z generation and will make the country better off. And we need to be talking about those things and we need to be proud of those things. And we need to go out there and fight for them.

1:07:56Because if you're fighting for them, then you're showing the people that are in that circumstance at the moment that you're fighting for them and that there is opportunity for them. And I think that that is what's missing. And part of the reason that that's missing is it's so much easier for mainstream media and for others to just make it all about personalities or make it all about like a 30-second clip. Well, thank you for coming. I think you're now our second guest who's been on twice. Yeah. Because she came on before. I think Mark Carney's the only one who's been on twice, I think. Well, I'm in good company if it's me and Mark Carney.

1:08:29And he might be coming on for a third time quite soon. Yeah, he didn't pull his punches. He's brilliant. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks. Thank you.

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