Andy Burnham’s first big test is around the corner

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1:02We live in an age of shock therapy as politics. Burnham will prevail if he really goes hard in the paint. Anything that has even a whiff of steady as she goes worries me. The question is, to me, the more he appeals to solving the NEATS problem, the more he disaffects an older voter who is feeling protective about their pension. These are the classic trade-offs, aren't they, in deciding policy? when you live in an age in which you know you have people like trump and farage and victor orban and le pen and putin and god knows who firing lies and falsehoods into the system it is so tempting to come back with counter narratives that aren't necessarily based in fact but you You have to.

2:03You have to be the disciplined side. Hello and happy Thursday, everybody. Happy Thursday, one and all. Weird thing today, Matt. Rain. I know. In London. The cult sang it first and best. Here comes the rain. I know. Yeah, indeed. Much, much relief. Comedically, much of the country is still technically in a drought, which is going to confuse a lot of people. Well, it'll go on for some time. I was up in Scotland for much of last week, had a wonderful time at the Lorna gathering. So thank you to everybody up in Aberdeenshire, which was just absolutely magnificent. It's the sort of Highland games that Billy Connolly used to be involved in because he lived down the road, but had so much fun.

2:50But I have to say it was great. I don't know whether the Scots will thank me for saying this, but it was great to be in a climate that felt a little bit more British than the sort of desert climate we've been living with. Scotland's going to become the destination of choice, quite so. I hope so. I hope so. Magnificent country, magnificent people. Right. Well, so it has been, it feels like it's been an endless summer, doesn't it? It does. And it's interesting because although, I mean, it's funny, I was just totting it up and it's only day 39 of Andy Burnham's premiership today. Yeah. It's very strange to reflect upon.

3:29And I think, you know, I get the sense that we're not turning a corner exactly. But, you know, I stand by the view that he's performed well so far. I'm glad he went to Ukraine this week. Delighted that he announced 10 ,000 more work placements for young people. Excellent. We'll talk about that in a minute. Steady pulse of retail offers. And obviously, from our point of view at The New World, good to see he was talking in the FT yesterday about adding percentage points in his words to Britain's growth rate by building closer ties with the EU and there'll be a summit in November so we'll see but that's all good and I think in the what I'm going to say I don't a difference with Starmer is that I wasn't always confident Starmer knew this but I'm absolutely confident Burnham knows that it's about to get really hard okay you know i i don't you know this is you know he's he knows all of this um the polls show level pegging you know with starmer it was down to 16 to 20 to labor which was really alarming now i was looking at yougov 23rd 24th of august reform on 23 labor on 22 so it's a toss-up at the moment you know and and that's not great but it's much better um parliament's back on tuesday then there's a conference break until october the 12th and then as we were talking about earlier about this sort of series of things start to get quite you know the rubber hits the road i mean we learned this week that there's going to be higher prices energy prices on the first of october which will wipe off wipe out the the the the bonus that burnham announced um on energy bills so that's going to be tough um you know he's dropped his support for capping political donate i mean there are lots of things that that that is very interesting it is isn't it moment because that was something he was quite clear about and quite forthright about and also made a lot of noises about it being critical to the democratic health of the nation and he has he stepped back from it so i mean you're absolutely right matt i mean there's still so much going on i thought i just put andy burnham into google news and yeah this is what's happening what's very interesting is is that it's not 10 stories all about the same thing it's 10 stories all about different things you know so the the velocity of action is is is incredibly fast-paced.

6:11So we've got UK politics. Burnham announces plan for 10 ,000 work experience placements for young people. Andy Burnham calls National Economic Council Summit with UK nations. Andy Burnham, I want wealth creators to stay in Britain. Burnham's energy challenge, getting more UK households off gas. Burnham urged to rein in big tech over child harm over the£12 billion bombshell settlement. burnham risks trade war with trump over israel sanctions burnham to host macron in london as part of a diplomatic push and then perhaps most accurately and to our theme reuters burnham's summer reprieve gives way to a reckoning over his spending plans yes well that's that's exactly right as you as you so accurately put it um the rubber is now hitting the road and we get into the meat of this government.

7:03Yeah, I mean, and we're heading to, I mean, there are two big things coming up, there are lots of big things, but at the end of next month, he will be in Liverpool, lucky him, for the party conference with his speech on the 29th, which will be a big moment. And then the budget on October the 28th, which may sound like a long way away, but actually in terms of planning and getting it run past the OBR and everything is tomorrow. It's nothing. It's nothing. So and I think that budget, I mean, to scroll back slightly, you gave what to me was a very, very plausible, if saddening account of why the glorious Kelly plan for an early election may not actually happen, which, as you know, infuriates me.

7:57But I thought what you said was, you know, plausible and indeed accords with things he said and things I've heard since you revealed all that. And so the pressure on this budget grows accordingly. It has to be. And I actually don't know how they're going to pull it off because it has to be consistent with the fiscal rules in the manifesto, because he's promised to do that. And John Healy, the chancellor, has promised to do that. But it also, I think, has to take some pretty big swings if his kind of last chance saloon strategy is going to work, because what you describe in calling up Google News is kind of tactic number one, which I think we both endorsed, which was get on the front foot, introduce yourself to the public, make it clear that there's lots of kinetic energy.

8:46And I really do stand by my belief that was a good thing to do. But obviously you can't do that forever. At some point you have to turn tactics into a strategy that putting these a theme. And that's the challenge now. Yes, that's right. That's right. I mean, we moaned, well, relentlessly and with all due cause, I think, about the lack of theme present in Stormer's government. Now, Andy Burnham, you know, his first mantra to his cabinet was that everything had to be looked at through the cost of living. And that's fine. But as we know with Joe Biden in 2022, you know, the economy can tick over quite nicely.

9:31But people still feel discontent and fed up with what they see as legacy mainstream politics. And that's, I think, what, I think we've both felt that Burnham was a much better chance to defy that than Starmer was, for sure. But it's still an uphill fight. I mean, I've been working, Matt, on the basis that, frankly, if he stays level pegging, when push comes to shove, and this is my theory, and it might be completely wrong, when push comes to shove, enough people will back off from what they see as an extreme option in Nigel Farage that will give Labour another go for another administration but that might be completely wrong I might be completely misreading it and the nation I don't I don't I don't know I mean the nation might need something much more substantial than just well he's doing a decent job I feel nowadays um that we live and this is not necessarily well it isn't a good thing actually we live in an age of shock therapy as politics and that burnham will prevail if he really goes hard in the paint i worry about anything that anything that he's not starmer and he's not going to be a sort of technocrat so one can kind of put that aside but anything that has even a whiff of steady as she goes worries me um and i agree with you i think that reforms debacles plural in the last couple of months and they really have been quite something not just the by-election but zeer yusuf and goodness knows what you know will will encourage people to to think twice and and i think we can assume a level of that but i don't think we can assume i think we can take it for granted because you know there's a resilience about farage that always troubles me and a tendency amongst his opponents and i've been terribly guilty of this in the past to be complacent about him i mean yeah you know i i've been badly burnt by that um yeah and uh and maybe maybe i've over corrected but i i do think that uh he is get he burnham and i don't think this is just about beating reform as much as that's mission number one it's also about you know getting the country back on its feet he has to I think you're right the economic piece is obviously you know necessary but it's not sufficient so one of the reasons I think we both enthused about the politics of place idea that has been at the center of his leadership and now premiership is that it kind of is a way of dealing with belonging and identity and meaning which isn't intoxified by ethno-nationalism or anything horrific like that and that and that's great but it also brings it in things like immigration the sort of loose ends of the trans debate the whole question of where he goes on the early release route because on October the 1st albeit in tranches 500 prisoners are going to start coming out and some of them are not all but some are going to be violent offenders.

12:40And I saw it saw that more than 100 organisations led by Women's Aid have said, you know, what are you doing? That's going to be a thing. And I think that he's there are going to be I wouldn't say clause four moments exactly, but there are going to have to be some moments. And he's more than capable of doing this where he he does annoy some people in order to move the party and the government forward. That's right. The question really is when. I mean, if I was him, I would do quite a bit of it in the Labour conference speech. He may feel he needs to do something more uniting, more tribal. I don't know.

13:18But that and the budget are the two big kind of set piece moments. I couldn't agree more. And, you know, the suspicion, the accusation. And by the way, I still get it to this day from people who know inside Labour much more than I do. And people who, by the way, are, well, they're close to us, but they're also close to Labour and they want Labour and they want Burnham to succeed. But they have said to me directly, I don't think he's got what it takes. But I think there are the people around him. John Healy's name keeps coming up a lot. There are the people around him who will push through these hard decisions.

14:02And the suspicion being that innately Andy Burnham's a great front-facing politician because he does please people. But when push comes to shove, point to the decisions he's taken that have made him unpopular and they're very few and far between. you know so is it are we talking about a man who has this hidden capacity to to take those big swings or a man whose talent actually is more presentational but this time around he's got a team behind him who understand the gravity of this not not only his political situation but the national situation well i exactly i mean and as you know the great biographer of lyndon johnson Robert Caro says power reveals you know yes yes we're going to find out I mean I it may be that he even he doesn't really know you know in the sense that um you know I think Blair didn't really know until he was leader and and then did clause four and everything else that followed I mean I think that I wouldn't say surprised himself but I think that you until you're there you don't know whether you're capable of confronting the difficult things and and so he's got to so I mean to take an obvious example um the right uh are and the right-wing media are pressing him very very hard on welfare reform now i'm sure he'll do some welfare reform and you know the welfare always needs to be reformed but the likelihood of let's be honest of of him slashing the welfare bill um especially with an aging population and so on is very small um yeah so therefore unless he's going to borrow change the fiscal rules or find loopholes to borrow loads which i very much doubt i mean he may borrow a bit more he's going to have to raise taxes right and that's going to be very unpopular with certain people and certain people who have loud platforms in the media so that i and i personally i think the sooner the better because you know he he needs to make you need to pitch roll these cases you don't want to sort of sort of rush rush them you need to say look this is a real crisis a fiscal crisis that is not just the product of many many years of neglect it's also the the context the context in which we live in the 2020s as do many other nations you know and um we all have to bite the bullet and i think that you know that on wealth and on on how far he's going to tax business and indeed how far he's going to tax earnings and all these kind of issues he's got to have obviously policy will feed into the budget but there's also got to be a story that you speak to the public and says this is why i'm doing this yeah so where would you put that story matt where where do you think because there was no story with Starmo and the Andy Burnham has promised a story where would you what should be the theme do you think I think it can be both very uplifting but also very practical which is I've always thought look what are the questions you ask at a particular time so in 79 Thatcher was asking some questions in Blair in 1997 he was asking different questions 2026 is a totally different situation and the problems we're facing be it social care being the need to take water back into public control be it climate change be it the need for a much more sort of interventionist approach to technology and so on and so on and so on just do need more government activity we're in one of those phases in human history when that's the case Now, there are two kinds of statism on offer.

17:51One is what I would call liberal statism, which I hope he is sort of personifies. And the other is authoritarian statism, which is your Trump's and your Farage's and Le Pen's and so on. And I know which I prefer. But you have to make the case. You can't you can't on the one hand say, as Burnham does, 40 years of neoliberalism, you know, and then but then kind of try to appease the neoliberal settlement. You have to make you actually have to make that break. And it's not easy. It's hard because that he's right to the extent that the sort of neoliberal assumptions of low regulation, low tax and all that stuff.

18:33Privatisation always being better, which it isn't, has held sway for 40 years. And breaking with it is going to be a big task, you know, and not just a big task in terms of policy, but in terms of public diplomacy. yeah the the focus i think on um appealing to a younger demographic yeah through you know is is good and clever and telling you know the all of the 10 000 apprenticeships it's a lot but it's not going to solve britain's kind of unemployment crisis among among the needs because because there's a million of them you know looking at a factor of of of a hundred so the question is to me will uh the more he appeals to solving the needs problem the more he disaffects as kind of more an older voter who is feeling protective about their pension these are these are the classic trade-offs aren't they in in deciding policy and it will get it'll get revealed in the budget i guess and i think he will come for welfare in in a way that will probably i think he i think he will i think he has to i think he i only purely because if he's not going to cause call a general election early he's going to he cannot afford to carry on on the trajectory that they go for mathematical reasons but then of course you get into the whole thing about well what's labour for and what's it about then if it's not for for that and also to be honest to make the kind of cuts that would be needed you have to do some pretty unpleasant things i mean yeah you know i remember when you know peter lily no man of the left was social security secretary um and everyone was saying cut cut cut and he would say okay which million people do you want me to take a thousand quid from that's right you know it and he was a real thatcherite you know it's it's welfare reform is difficult for a reason you know it's not unless you sort of buy into the whole oh they're all scroungers which is silliness um so so it is difficult um i mean on the neat i think that there's a first of all i mean we go back to the brilliant uh report that our friends peter hyman and Schwab Gummer did in May and we ran a extract in the new world which everyone should should read if they haven't already um and I think that you know you said at the time this is this is a huge issue and so it has proved I mean but I would also I see the neat issue as nestling within a much bigger issue I mean it is the sort of five of five bell alarm um but there is a big question over jobs generally for the young i mean there was a this really scary figure um the graduate vacancies have fallen 50 year on year amazing now that's that's there are lots of reasons why that's alarming um i mean obviously it's alarming on a human level but there's another sort of and i don't want to get too apocalyptic but but it is worth taking seriously that if you look at history revolutions or great dislocations in politics come about when you get mass hardship but also disillusionment in the elite that's what turned weimar into nazism now i'm not just to be of course not yeah yeah i'm not saying nazism is around the corner yeah i am saying however that if you have a whole generation where you have the needs as we call them you know coming out of disadvantaged deprived backgrounds who have many of them perhaps most feel they have no prospects and then you have people who are going off to university 50 percent of young people going off to university and a lot of them coming out with 60 grand's worth of debt suddenly discover they've got no prospects that is a very very dangerous convergence yeah and so just in terms of social cohesion you know let alone justice you know that's a scary convergence it really it is it is all right well listen let's take a let's take a quick break and come back and talk about another kind of troubling um set of circumstances around well whether anybody cares about facts anymore whether we've lost whether we've lost sense completely of of the importance of truth in an age where everyone talks about it, but very few people seem to go searching for it.

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24:18Welcome back, dear listeners. This is the Two Mats Podcast brought to you by the wonderful subscribers of the New World magazine. Obviously, you know, the enormous story of the summer has been the tragic death of Jason Arday. Yeah, very much so. which you know we've talked about to some degree um and i still hold my position that there's too much talk around it at the moment to be honest with you and it seems to be driving people into corners that um seem madder by by the hour but um leaving that to one side the release of his um autobiography or well that that's a contentious word all of a sudden the is his record of his life, Great and Unfortunate Things, is released today by Simon and Schuster in the UK, as is well, quite grimly, the audiobook where he himself narrates it.

25:19I have to say, I've only listened to the four minutes of preview that are available on Audible and it is a grim experience listening to this. Yes, it is. Listening to this poor guy reading out a story about you know his his acceptance into Cambridge is the first opening moment but putting putting this specific to one side there was a fascinating debate on Radio 4 this morning or an interview on Radio 4 with the what was she was she the publisher the managing director well actually yeah I mean just first of all just in parentheses on Jason I think that it's a good plan right now for people to hold off.

26:01Right, exactly. Because the inquest is now underway and Cambridge is working on, and I'm pleased to see it's an independent inquiry into the whole thing. I hope it's terms of reference abroad, but we'll see. So my sort of plan is really to kind of, you know, not to say anything very much. Can I just add to that by flagging up something that you pointed me towards this morning, which I just thought was excellent. If people do want a sort of in-depth, considered article on where we've got to on this story. Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. Yeah, it's very good. Writing about the whole Jason Arde event and how people have reacted to it.

26:49And I would just say to me, that was a very powerful position. It was a very good and measured sit rep. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. On the Today programme this morning was actually a very distinguished publisher, Alexandra Pringle, who used to be editor and was, I think, for two decades, editor in chief of Bloomsbury. and although she was responding the peg was the publication of Jason Arde's memoirs she got into something much broader which I think is what brought us both to this question which is you know she said something which absolutely you know made me as they say metaphorically drop my toast which is on the question of whether it mattered whether or not there were you know errors of fact or fabulisms in this um let's leave aside whether there are or not but just in terms of the point the principle of it yeah yeah she said people can make up their own minds questions of truth and accuracy and memoir are very very blurred and i thought are they and then she said subjective accounts of a bit of somebody's life a memoir is not an autobiography now this was a new distinction on me but okay and then but then she went even further she said that a memoir a memoir is quote a work of literature that is verging on fiction and you cannot expect necessarily expect a memoir to be a factual day by day or year by year account now maybe i've been missing something all these years and i know that memoirs sometimes have illusions and anonymizations and and so on but yeah i do assume that they're essentially rooted in well in fact i was astonished to hear this because one and i'm not suggesting that this is what she was trying to do but it seemed like a construct to to excuse the publishing of something that might well be littered with errors and factual errors and you know again putting that to one side the i you know i thought what it was okay what is the difference between an autobiography and a memoir because like you i conflated the two things and i think it's a fairly reasonable thing to do to be honest i think they're synonymous but i saw i put it into chat gpt and said well what are the differences and and chat gpt came back with i thought quite a good answer which is that the expectation within an autobiography is that it will it will be chronologically true to events it will be right it will be completely um grounded in fact whereas the the nuance with a memoir is that it's an emotional recollection of events and and it need not be chronological but but but it is it's an it's an emotional telling of somebody's life's experiences and i immediately thought as i mentioned to you i immediately thought of my favorite memoir which which is A Moveable Feast by Hemingway about his time.

29:50Writing actually was published posthumously and heavily edited by Mary Welsh, his fourth wife. But it was a recollection of something that happened 40 years previously and was told in a romantic fashion. And I'm sure all the details of him strangling pigeons in the Luxembourg gardens and all of this business were exaggerated. but it was a it was it was a kind of romanticized version of something that happened a long time ago that's not what we're dealing with here no no i mean what what she said i mean what alexandra pringle said was that there is not just a that difference which you described that which i think is absolutely fine and you know we i think we all know that a book like that um you know it's magic is not necessarily that every single detail is correct it's the right you know um But she says she said on the Today programme this morning, Alexandra Pringle, what are you going to do?

30:50Sit down and fact check everything. And then she said, and this was kind of like the kind of wow moment. She said fact checking doesn't apply. Memoir is not a historical account. Now, that to me takes leaps across a partition from, you know, look, it's not the autobiography of a former chancellor. It's a memoir of a, you know, written from a personal perspective of a person who's been through great traumas and difficulties and so on to, you know, if you're stupid enough to buy a memoir and expect it to be based in truth, then, you know, caveat emptor. And I thought, yeah, this is and this is comes back to a sort of worry I have, which is that it is becoming possible to say anything about anything.

31:34now matt you and i first interacted properly when on the publication of your fantastic book post truth what year was that that was well i mean seven or eight years ago oh no no it was back in 2017 and in fact that's how i first nine years ago yeah uh our brilliant political editor james board who also had a book out everyone was writing books called post truth yeah but you see what was what was interesting and i've talked to james about this um you know what maybe what we should do next year if anything i don't know but i think both of us kind of felt that and we came at it from different angles but um this was you know in in the year after trump had come into office and it was okay what's the liberal response to all this and and and point one was we need to have a common agreement of evidence and facts and truth in order to proceed with a liberal response to populism that seemed to both of us i think a kind of almost did barely needed stating you know the post-truth was not a good thing um and um it was you know mostly coming from the the the populist right and and should be resisted and there was a nascent fact checking industry then and and and there was talk of uh god how long ago that seems moderation by the social media platforms to ensure that you know absolute lies didn't necessarily get through or if they did that they were taken down so yeah i mean how naive i feel saying all that but anyway that was that was that that no but i mean that was that was it was very early days it was first mine so and i look back i mean i look back at it the other day and it it to be honest about it reads like a book written in about 1943 right because no but i mean it's so distant from where we are now i mean it is only nine years ago which in fact is not that long ago but it feels like a sort of message in a bottle from a different era amazing amazing and i i do worry and what The reason this sort of resonates with what we both sort of experienced listening to Alexandra Pringle on the Today programme was that what I hadn't expected was progressives and liberals to join in in their own version.

33:57Totally right. Trumpite truthiness. Right. Which is basically if it feels good, say it. Matt, this is where I think, you know, this awful spectacle of how the debate has raged around Jason Arday is actually relevant. Where you've got, because one of the responses that I've almost sent to you was, imagine if newspapers acted like this. And then I thought, you idiot. They do. You know, they do all the time. This is the problem. and and you know hearing um people who i've got quite a degree of respect for going all out in certainty on certain versions of an event and it feels like and again i might be totally maligning them but it feels like it's got more to do with their position than it has to do with anything to do with reality and that to me is where we really enter a dangerous space because or you know we've talked for a long time about how polarizing social media is in all of this business actually i think the truth is that there's a human an innate human desire to be right and and never to lose face and it expresses itself in outrageous certitude about things that nobody can have any certainty about right now but they are being people are fighting verbal wars right now over things that are utterly unknowable and i find that distressing and dangerous no i completely agree and i think that one of the big problems with this is that um we underestimate the extent to which the natural default position of human beings is just to look for ways of of reaffirming what they already believe okay and that the the great achievement of the enlightenment and of um liberalism and the scientific revolution and all of these great things was to say well no actually there has to be a common ground of uh of evidence and um facts and this was the sort of basis of of the modern press i mean as you say god knows it has been you know breached as much as it's been honoured and and and you know we we write about that a lot in the new world and rightly so but what what what what concerns me is that at least in theory when people lie or just talk about their emotions rather than the facts up until very recently that was regarded as pathological right it was a kind of it was a deviation from a norm which is hey let's get the facts right guys before we talk about what we feel but now you have i mean again alexandra pringle is a really distinguished publisher i mean she published uh kitchen confidential and eat pray love and all these great books i mean she's good and she was very important in virago i mean she's one of the big publishing figures of post-war britain this is not you know it's just to clarify to people this is not some you know this is not someone who's just walked in off off campus this is a very very big heavyweight publisher saying ah you know it's only a memoir it's like fiction you know well the actually bourdain thing is it's a very interesting contrast you know because on your advice i went to see tony really great film loved it um now obviously in kitchen confidential which is a i think it's a terrific read and really entertaining book there i wouldn't go back and say well did you do a line of coke in that restaurant on that evening i mean but the point is he did do lines of coke in restaurants on on those evenings you know yeah and obviously facts get conflated but if somebody said to me well do you know tony bourdain was never actually a chef then that yes exactly that destroys everything everything you know and and this is this is this is where it gets so dangerous that people because you just said an interesting thing that we used to establish the facts before we'd start working out what we thought at least at least that was what we claimed to do i'm sure we yeah time doing we didn't but you know i think i think evidently we've moved into an era an age where what we try and do now is establish what we feel about things and then we go then we go and gather the facts to support those feelings and Correct.

38:34That is that's upside down. You know, I think it's rational thinking. It's extremely dangerous. I mean, first of all, you're playing the populist right as a game at which it is very good. Yeah. Rather than saying that's just not true. You know, now saying it's not true is not enough. I agree because we now live in a world where you do have to have persuasive narratives and you do have to have things that are emotionally adhesive. but we shouldn't confuse that we're just playing fast and loose with truth because i i like i mean one of the reasons that i like what we do at the new world is it is you know and you ensure this and steve anglesey ensures this you know it's really and i can't believe i'm saying this because obviously in a way it's it's it's of course you do you know you insist that what we write is true right yeah yeah um but actually just to put that but matt it's very interesting we're coming up to our 500th edition and i i think i'm right in saying this we've never had to publish a factual correction on on anything we've written because it's all checked and and we expect people to to write with accuracy yeah rightly so i mean you know but that's because you you you come from a you know a very uh distinguished newspaper background and and i think this is just part of your DNA right right but actually it's not necessarily now as culturally embedded as it was and this troubles me enormously because it's a very very easy uh habit to get into I mean you know the book to read is the righteous mind by Jonathan Haidt and he says look we all think that we're terribly rational but actually uses the metaphor of the the rider on the elephant he says we're the rider on the elephant and the elephant is our emotion and we're the rider pretending to be rational right and we have to keep make sure that we're aware that it's an elephant right and i think that there's been a tendency to forget that and i understand why it's happened because when you live in an age in which you know you have people like trump and farage and victor orban and le pen and putin and god knows who firing lies and falsehoods into the system it is so tempting to come back with counter narratives that aren't necessarily based in fact but you have to you have to yeah you have to be the disciplined side yeah and i i do worry that if we just become it just becomes two forms of fantasy they will win yeah that's right a hundred percent a hundred percent because we are crippled with the desire to do the right thing and in a way yeah exactly you know and if you're you know i mean let's assume i mean let's assume that the trumpism continues to unravel as it appears to be at pace it would be a great mistake of the democrats in america to come up with a sort of an answer to that which is just as fantastical yeah as maga okay i mean what what they need to do i'm not saying they need to be technocratic or just Biden 2-0 but they need they need to say guys you know populism hasn't worked for you here's a new story for America that does and Matt that by the way that brings us full circle to the depth and the breadth of the challenge facing Andy Burnham because exactly he is operating against agents that that do not have the same regard or even the same obligation in in the Well, in the environment you've just outlined, they feel no obligation to have even a passing relationship with reality until they get power.

42:19And that's what we're up against. No, exactly. And of course, you know, we haven't yet seen what sort of foreign interventions there will be, both in terms of cyber warfare and perhaps covert or over political expenditure. You know, I mean, I'm still haunted by, you know, Elon Musk being beamed into the Tommy Robinson rally last September. You know, it was only one moment, but it sort of felt like, you know, I'm not sure I'm comfortable. Well, I'm obviously not comfortable with this, the world's first trillionaire taking such a great interest in the future of this country. And and I think Burnham is up against it.

43:01Now, I do think he understood most. I think he would sign up to everything we've just said, by the way. Yeah. And I don't think he's a person who plays fast and loose with the truth. I don't. No, not at all. No, no. I think that, but that, as much as it's a strength, that could be in the short term weakness if he's. Well, and it comes back, you know, to go full circle, it comes back to, does he, you know, and this is the exact sort of analog to the to the alexander pringle way of doing things is does he have the political spine to confront people with unpalatable truths right you know like one of which is and i just think this is true whether one likes it or not we're gonna have to pay more tax and it should be progressive and people who earn more or live in bigger properties or whatever you know we'll have to pay more but that's kind of just a truth irrespective of who's in number 10 the question is how soon we recognize that um because if we don't write quick this country and other countries like it are going to fall into you know serious social disarray very fast great okay well that's an uplifting note on which to end this podcast On a Thursday, in preparation for a relaxing weekend, I'd like to say something cheerful, a pocket full of happiness, right?

44:27Thank you for that. Wonderful. I hope you've enjoyed the conversation, dear listeners. We're approaching, I might have mentioned, we're approaching our 500th edition on the New World magazine, which we're all very proud of. And subscriber numbers keep growing. So people who get it love it. And if you like this podcast, I can guarantee you'll love the New World magazine. And you can get a fantastic subscription offer when you sign up now. You can get a copy of Paul Mason's absolutely stunning new history of communism called Reds. And if that sounds politically nerdy, it's not at all. I'm halfway through and it is absolutely, it is an amazing telling of an amazing movement in our world.

45:18And, you know, we must get Paul onto the show to talk about it. Yes, we should. At some length sooner than later. But you can get a free copy of Reds when you sign up to The New World. Go to thenewworld.co.uk forward slash 2mats. That's the number 2, M-A-T-T-S. send in your questions your observations your thoughts if you're angry with us over something tell us if you're delighted tell us that too just send in an email to twomats at tnepublishing.com that's the number two m-a-t-t-s at t-n-e publishing.com thank you as ever to the third Matt Matt with us for producing the show thanks Matt and until Sunday's Q &A it's goodbye from me it's goodbye from him goodbye Bye.