#49 - British Politician Katie Lam - Defeating Grooming Gangs, Stagnation & Safetyism

46:10It's a failure to look at the whole system. Yes. Which is, I guess, one of the biggest problems of our world, actually. It's just, again, lack of information. And I think the, well, courage, really, on the part usually of politicians to come to grips with complex situations and just make choices it's very easy to say oh well you know somebody's raised an issue about this so we should commission a report into that or um we also which is a whole other difficult topic uh about building uh have quite a litigious system uh where lots of things can be fought in the courts and even if they fail that adds a huge amount of time and expense to a project such that it may by the end of the court battle even if it's approved uh no longer be financially viable or worth going ahead with or the moment's passed or whatever it might be um so so you have to have politicians who are brave enough to say uh i've looked at i've looked at all of the inputs we're not going to get any more information this is the decision this is what we're going to do how do we incentivize that kind of bravery because like one of the reasons i wanted to interview you is i you appeared on my twitter feed standing up and giving an incredibly brave and hard to listen to speech about the grooming gangs oh yeah um really detailing just just and i agree that you needed to by necessity like detail just the horrificness of the types of things that were happening to these little girls um and i'm not gonna i won't repeat it here i'll i maybe slot in parts of your speech into this into this so people can hear it themselves that feels like something that has just been lacking deeply um and it's not just a uk phenomenon it's just worldwide like actual bravery of of politicians sticking their neck out and talking about the hard ugly thing and the hard trade-offs what made you feel I guess like what went through your head before giving that speech like to because you knew like presumably it was going to get about you know put you in it's going to put you on a you knew it was going to get some attention yeah uh certainly in the room yes yeah did you did you expect it to go viral like that no no oh okay uh and it it went down very badly in the House of Commons on the day.

48:45Why?

48:50Because the two other main parties who were there, so Labour, who are the party in government, and then the Liberal Democrats, who are the next opposition party after us, I'm a Conservative,

49:03attacked me for victimising one particular group and overemphasising the perpetrators, even though we know it is it is a fact that there is a particular phenomenon in this country of groups of Muslim Pakistani or Pakistani heritage men committing these crimes and they are unspeakable I mean these are some of the worst things that you can imagine a group of people could do to to a child but I almost almost naively I just think that we have to tell the truth I think the truth the truth will always out there is no you can't outrun the truth you can't outsmart the truth I also believe in the British public and I believe people know the truth when they hear it and I think the way that people respond to the truth not every single person of course but I think the way that people respond to the truth is with relief and lots of people messaged me and said um I feel so I feel so relieved now that I can talk about this honestly because because you've talked about it honestly and I can reference the things that you've said

50:27and I have come into politics because I love my country and I believe in it and I believe in what it can do and if I'm not going to tell the truth I will just do something else I mean there's there's just no point in being here but it can the truths that are uncomfortable to speak and hear are the most important ones to say. But it's not always easy. Why do you think, because these grooming-growing crimes, some people have been raising the issue of them. Tommy Robinson, various others, raised this issue 10, 15 years ago. Why has it taken so long to actually come to the forefront of the public mind?

51:17Well, I think the first cases are decades old. Andrew Norfolk, who was a journalist for The Times, wrote about them in The Times, I think, first in 2010, which is obviously now 15 years ago.

51:38And particularly a journalist called Charlie Peters, who works at GB News, has done a lot to expose that it's a much bigger problem than people thought. So the truth of it sort of trickled out. There was an acceptance that this had happened in Rotherham and in Telford, and there were some individual inquiries, but the national nature of this problem took quite a long time for people either to realise or to accept. And we know for a fact, for a documented fact, that various groups of people within the state, so social workers, police officers, other types of local officials, were reluctant to identify this phenomenon because they didn't want to be accused of being racist and i mean this is a problem in other areas as well so in the in the manchester arena attack the security guard who later gave evidence in the inquiry said that he saw the bomber and he thought that he was acting suspiciously but he didn't want to stop him because he didn't want to be accused of racial profiling and when I say that you know the uncomfortable conversations are the most important ones to have like of course uh we have to be and we should be very careful that we aren't painting everybody with the same brush that we aren't encouraging people to do that but we also have to be honest and I think it took a very long time for the truth of these crimes to come to light and we were talking earlier about hidden costs I mean the cost of that is obvious and documented which is that thousands more children were I always describe it as sexual torture because it's like

53:48you know we're talking mass regular rape on an industrial scale so the cost of worrying so much about that that you couldn't tell the truth is unspeakable like what these children have had to go through as the price of that is almost unthinkable and so it's you can see why uh you can see why people are very very angry about so many people in positions of power worrying more about being accused of racism or prejudice than they did ultimately about protecting children and that can't go on yeah it's i want to understand how because in theory, to me it's a manifestation of just extreme wokeism where it's like, wokeism to me is caring more about the appearance of looking good than actually doing good.

55:00Right. And latching onto different proxies of how you appear to look good. And you get almost this hierarchy of who are the most oppressed groups and how we can rank them. And I guess in the UK, because there are all these different axes of wokeism, it's like there are people with unusual genders, trans people. Women, once upon a time, used to be one of the protected categories. You'd think children would be a protected category. Obviously, racial minorities, protected category. But I don't know. For some reason, the manifestation of wokeism within the British government came that the greatest sin was actually going against a racial minority as opposed to female.

55:49I mean, you know, young girls. Like, was there a time, because I'm thinking about, my stepdad was a policeman in the city of London, and I remember when I was like 16 or so, so it was around year 2000, and he was working in the city of London, and him talking about, he's like, oh man we've had days and days of lectures about and you know anti-racism like like telling us we're all racist policemen and like that's like that's what's being like spoon like force-fed down our throats is just like do not get accused of racism so do you think is that roughly the time when it started there was like some kind of was there like some kind of zeitgeist moment kind of like you know like George Floyd in the US where it was like the the the problem of like you know because there is racist racism in policing of course in in and especially i think the u.s had much bigger problem with it for much longer um was there a moment like that culturally in the uk that triggered this sudden shift of like where police forces were told never ever get accused of being racist so i i don't know if it is possible to draw that kind of causality quite so literally what is true is for have you heard of non-crime hate incidents yeah so non-crime hate incidents are as the name suggests they are not criminal but they are things that happen where a person feels that they have been treated a certain way because of hatred or prejudice and those were created as a response to and part of the inquiry that looked into the Stephen Lawrence murder and so you that was in like 1990 ish or something uh later later in uh later on in the 90s um but you so you do have these moments uh and and uh again uh this is a very big sort of cultural moment in the uk but your us listeners might not be familiar with it stephen lawrence was a black teenager who was murdered by a group of white teenagers uh it goes without saying an appalling a horrible horrible crime but as part of the uh in quite the national inquiry into that the second section of that national inquiry was not actually about stephen lawrence's murder it It was about building relationships between the police and black people.

58:29And as part of that, they created this thing called non-crime hate incidents. And if you read the original report, the rationale behind this was to make black people feel like the police would have to listen to them. They couldn't dismiss them. And so as a result, there is nothing in non-crime hate incidents about intentionality. and the police are actually technically given no judgment as to whether or not it's something that they can get involved with and the point was supposed to be that you would give all of the power to the victim or the person who perceives themselves to be a victim of this happening and perhaps unsurprisingly what that has become is a completely unworkable mad frankly system where there were children as young as nine school children last year that had non-crime hate incidents filed against them in one case a girl called another girl in her class a like Polish swear word and because she said Polish this was considered to be a non-crime hate incident somebody it almost sounds too ridiculous to say somebody had some like soiled washing on a line and this was filed as a non-crime hate incident because the person felt that they were doing it to target them because they were Italian what it's there was a guy in not in my constituency but in Kent who tweeted something in response to one of the Palestine marches that was actually quite clearly in defence of Jewish people that was misread to be anti-Semitic.

1:00:25And several police officers went to his home and went through his Brexity things, is how they described it. And he had some books by some sort of right and centre right-wing authors, like academics like totally normal mainstream people uh and this is obviously very frightening for people and uh the clear is in the name these are not crimes these are not this is not criminal and 90 of crime in britain goes unsolved so uh if the question is do the police have better things to do the obvious answer is yes um but the as i say that came from uh that came from the national inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence murder and then uh you know more guidance was given from various bodies across the years um so I think there probably have been catalyzing moments but I think it's a it's a general uh trajectory yeah you what you're kind of describing is this uh at least what I've heard it described as on on Twitter where I spend way too much of my time and anico tyranny yes two tier policing is another way of I mean two tier policing relates to it right anarcho tyranny specifically which I think I went to visit some friends in the states recently and I feel like they don't use that term there but certainly here I find it very helpful essentially captures the fact that particularly as the state gets more and more invasive, it crushes and crushes the people who abide by the rules but if you don't abide by the rules you don't care so a classic example of this i think is um landlords so if you are and they absolutely exist a terrible immoral landlord you don't care about your tenants uh you let them live in moldy unsafe conditions you've stuffed a load of them into a house that can only legally take four people and there's like 12 people living there making the rules stricter is not going to touch you because you are already breaking the rules so if you make the rules harsher all you do is raise the sort of operating friction for the good people and it becomes even easier on a relative basis for the bad people and it's this sense that it is easy for the state to go after people who are fundamentally law-abiding people living their lives who might stray into a bus lane than it is to you know try and crack a serious organized crime ring which is a lot of the crime in britain now is is actually ultimately organized uh career criminals something like the stats vary year on year but at least over half 54 % of crime is committed by less than 10 % of criminals uh the the specific stats that I remember from the year that I remember is 9 % and 54 % but it's always around that order of magnitude uh and so you know the idea that the police are spending all of this time on non-crime hate incidents which are usually at most uh you know broadly law-abiding people who uh might have been a bit rude and at worst um are people like that man in kent who did absolutely nothing wrong at all uh whilst so much crime sort of runs rampant and is not tackled and is not solved um but up to the point of grooming gangs yeah and but that is just much more comfortable but i i can understand because there's this incentive for like basically police to tackle the little easy crimes or seeming trans get transgressions by the good people and therefore get like you know a tick like i did my job um while letting the really hard to crawl solve but like actual heinous crimes um those incentives presumably apply everywhere worldwide um and presumably have always applied in the UK too so why is it becoming at this issue now or are there a new set of incentives we didn't have before so the uh it actually relates I think to some of what we're talking about earlier about making the rules more and more onerous so if if you talk about planning maybe instead of crime the rules on planning have become more and more onerous and so therefore you are enforcing many more laws and this takes a lot more enforcement right that's just a harder job but we haven't we're always quite happy to increase the burden of the regulations but very rarely does that come with the enforcement power that you would actually need to make sure that this is done and because we have such a long history in this country of policing by consent which is basically saying uh we do not have enough if everybody in the country were to break the law all the time we don't have anything like enough police officers to police that but we don't need to because most people are law abiding and rule abiding and most people play by the rules most of the time but if you are going to have more and more and more rules you need more and more and more people to enforce them and we've upped the rules but we haven't upped the enforcement and so what that leaves is a fixed number of people doing enforcement over a much greater number of rules and so their incentive totally human is to go for the easiest transgressions right because if if i want to make a modification to my house because I am a law-abiding, rule-abiding person I will apply for planning permission and if I don't get it then I won't build it or if I mistakenly because I think that it is permitted add something to my house and then it turns out that that was in violation of planning rules and I apply for planning permission and retrospectively I don't get it then I'll take it down again and if I don't take it down again the council will come, the enforcement teams will come and come and come and come until I have taken it down uh if I just don't care and I build it and I don't tell anyone you'll get away longer yeah and proactively trying to find me is obviously a lot harder uh than than the parallel law-abiding version of me that says is this okay and then the answer is no following up with that is really is straightforward um so the if you are you know unsurprisingly i think this is the wrong answer but if you are going to have that many more rules you need a lot more enforcement or you could as i think we should accept that you're only ever going to have so much enforcement and so you start with enforcement capacity and say realistically what are the rules that we can enforce because otherwise it becomes very unfair and presumably you would also sort of triage it by impact of yeah of the transgression yeah and like i mean it sounds silly but like let's look at the maslow's hierarchy of needs type thing yeah being able to walk the street safely as a young child yeah it's pretty high up there should be although it's it's also i suppose the only my only challenge to that or or other thing that has to be borne in mind is it can then become very easy to dismiss petty crime, which actually makes people feel really terrible about where they live.

1:08:24So, you know, if a person every weekend goes into my local corner shop and steals a bottle of wine, it's like 10 pounds a week, what is that, 500 quid over the course of the year to find a rest, put in remand, try and imprison that person is going to cost a hell of a lot more than 500 pounds a year but that's true of every single person who does that so if you never do it then everything falls to pieces so there's a uh you definitely um should triage the rules that you have on severity but part of that can be the like cumulative cost to society uh of graffiti or shoplifting thing yeah i mean it's again it's a classic tension between like small individual incentives and and the whole um is there any space for more citizen policing because that's maybe this is just way too murky territory and i'm just spitballing here but like you know in the good old days the shopkeeper would have had the right to you know beat the shit out of the person who comes in and does that, they wouldn't be allowed to just sit.

1:09:41Well, my favorite anarcho-tyranny example came from one of my constituents who runs a lovely independent village shop in one of my villages in Kent. And he, people steal from his shop all the time, all the time. And it's - In a village shop? Yes. And it's so, for people at home, that's just so unthinkable. I grew up in a village in Kent. We had our little village shop. No one would dare. And it's a little shop. We used to have honesty boxes. Yeah. It was like my mom would leave eggs out from the chickens and people would put a pound in when they took an egg. And most people are like that. Yeah.

1:10:23But it's a little shop. It's owned. He and his family own it and they have for a couple of generations. And everything in there they have bought themselves. Like I absolutely, I also think it's completely unacceptable to steal from like tesco which is our biggest supermarket chain but you can sort of see how people could convince themselves that that's a victimless crime yes like if you steal from this guy you are stealing from him like you might as well just go into his house and take it from his fridge yeah like it's it's his stuff he's paid for it um and he showed me just the cctv recordings from the last week of all of the people who will just like go in pick up uh often it's um the higher value items which tend to be alcohol right we'll just like take a bottle of wine or spirits and just like walk out with it and uh he used to report it to the police uh and he also used to print out the pictures stills from the cctv and put them in the uh door in the glass door and say like these people still from the shop that they're not welcome here and he said the only follow-up that he ever had from the police was he was visited by a community support officer who told him, you have to take these pictures down.

1:11:39This is not compliant with our data regulation. And that is a narco tyranny in a nutshell. That makes me so fucking angry. It's crazy, right? Like, that's mad. It's insane. And that's, like, I go and see my constituents all the time and he just volunteered this story. You know, this was not, I wasn't like looking for this information. Which means it's just happening all the time. And it's also not, I said to him, you know, do you report these to the police? And he said, honestly, it is now, like even reporting online, if it takes me like 20 minutes an incident, that's like several working hours out of my week.

1:12:23And I know that nothing's ever gonna happen. What's the point? Yeah. So that's, I guess that that's the, that has to go into your triage metric too right yeah i mean this is not a uniquely uk thing like again to be clear like this is that's definitely an issue that's happening in the us a lot like you see and i mean one of the ways the stores like you now go in certainly in certain areas of like san francisco where like you you've been having you know the petty crime thing has gotten so bad that because they made it if you stole anything under the value of a thousand dollars they wouldn't the police wouldn't do anything yeah thousand dollars is a lot of money yeah but like you can just imagine how that you know there were even like big stores like walgreens were literally just closing down stores in the center of san francisco because they're like we cannot operate yeah because there are so many homeless people and they come in and just steal everything they want like we literally are going out of business we can't do this and so and that just further worsens those local areas but if this is even happening in like little nice villages in kent yeah so this this sort of breakdown in in social trust you know i think there are many reasons why it is happening whereby you know people young people you know young people have always been more likely to you know i stole a cd when i was a kid you know i know telling you know but i remember doing it and and i only did one time but it was like this stuff i was like you know it's it's a thing i wanted to try almost right so it's like this is not like a new phenomenon kids doing this but I was definitely scared of like there was this fear of being caught and also there was a social shame yeah around it and it feels like that is kind of switched whereby you know it's it's almost like a thing of pride like what did you steal today it feels like that amongst certain cultures and communities and again I'm trying to put my finger on like where this where this deviation happened um you know a lot of blame does get put on for example um you know one of the uk's things it's sort of been proud of for a long time is like we're a multicultural society but i think people haven't really thought about like what do you mean by multicultural are you are you saying multiracial um because that that is one thing that doesn't necessarily mean any issues at all but multi by culture culture is not it is a way of being it's a way of interacting with the world and if you are by saying multicultural like you know we're starting to see like pockets of the uk where um there has been no integration like was it robert jenrich was talking about um birmingham how he was was it him he was talking about yeah he was you know walking down the road he's like i didn't see any white faces at all again like that's an example of multiracial and that doesn't necessarily have to be a problem but what i think he was getting at was that actually note that there are pockets of the uk where it's an entirely different cultural set of values um and in some cases like it's it's bordering on like self-policing sharia law um do you think this is a driving force for this sort of breakdown of social trust or is it something else well the the short answer is it's it's lots and lots of different things uh and certainly the the example that i was talking about in the village in my constituency uh you know broadly the the culture there and the sort of background and makeup there has been pretty consistent basically forever um but there is a wider question about culture and and you're right that people can use a lot of this language very imprecisely so and and also a lot of these words mean multiple things so uh if you use the word culture in a kind of arts and culture context then that is material culture right it's how you dress or maybe the music that you listen to or television or theater or art what you eat and that kind of culture I think lots of people celebrate having all sorts of different types of that which doesn't mean and shouldn't mean and mustn't mean that you can't be proud of British material culture or food or whatever it might be but if when you say culture you mean the way that we live the way that we relate to one another the way that we relate to the fundamental questions of humanity society family then I can't see how it is possible for the nation state as a concept you know and particularly one uh with a tax and welfare state system you know the the the implicit understanding behind uh the government being able to steal your money is that we operate in a group we operate in a collective of people who live broadly the same way and that matters and that's important and i think it's also in this a lot of people like to talk about values and i can see why but values only have value in how they're lived you know what what is fairness or tolerance or um any of that kind of thing varies from place to place and from and from culture to culture So, you know, particularly if you come from one of the things that is, if not unique about Britain, certainly particular to, you know, Northwest Europe and the Anglophone world, is that it is a much more individual culture.

1:18:27so lots of ways of life and society around the world operate on much wider extended family structures either sort of horizontally so it's a lot about aunts and uncles and cousins or vertically you know there is a huge emphasis on loyalty to your parents and your grandparents and British culture is not like that it's much more individuated it's much more common And we're talking for hundreds of, you know, for the best part of a millennium, it has been totally normal for young people to grow up, to move away from their parents, to start their own thing. We have, outside of the aristocracy, no history of arranged marriage.

1:19:14You know, people choose their own partners. People in the UK have always married quite late. it's easy to think that you know back in uh 1500 or that people were marrying at 14 or it's it's it's actually really not true if you look even um in the 1600s uh i was reading a book recently uh that had a sort of marriage register for the 1600s and the average age of a bride i think was 24 25 what and the average age of a groom was like 26 27 so uh it is a very long-standing thing for example that men and women will have quite a small age gap in a relationship and that they'll marry quite late which is what you would expect in an individual culture when people have to prove themselves before they can form a partnership with somebody else and then have their own little unit and it also means that you have a culture of free association so So all of the things that we would think of as particularly charmingly English and British, like the PTA, the Parent Teacher Association, or the Amateur Dramatics Troupe, or the church choir that you sing in, or the Fiverr Side football team, those are things that you need in a culture that doesn't operate on an extended family structure, because you have to find a way to meet new people as you're moving around in these smaller units.

1:20:42Now all of that is so much the water that we swim in that we don't even realise that that is particular to us or in any way unusual. But actually across a lot of the world it is quite unusual and a lot of, I think, a lot of what we have been able to achieve and a lot of the ambition that this country has had over the centuries comes from this sort of structure which is much more individual and encourages people to strike out on their own and take some risk and see where they end up now if you let's say that culture then meets a more nepotistic culture within which it's completely moral and right and something that you should do to preference your family members or preference your cousins within which there is lower trust between groups of people and so cousin marriage is very common because you can only sort of trust people within your wider family that's obviously going to be a very different kind of a thing and so if you have something like a welfare system there's an implicit understanding within that that you will only draw on it if you really really need it now clearly throughout the history of the welfare system there have been people who have abused that you know you are not going to get the sort of general individual enterprising and high trust culture that you get in the UK it's not universal right like there there have always been criminals there have always been prisons but but that is your sort of baseline that's your starting assumption and so if people come to this country then then, along with all of the other smaller material things about how we live, there are fundamentally important things about the way that we interact with one another.

1:23:03Relationships between the genders, how we feel about people who are gay, how we feel about people who are different from us in general. All of those things take time to learn and to understand, and you can't teach them in a classroom and this is the danger of talking about values is it's not enough to say oh well we're a really tolerant country because if I have no frame of reference for what that means I can't learn that just by being told I have to live it I have to see it and experience it and some of the you can see in some of the awful things that some of to go back to the grooming gangs that some of the some of the disgusting things that the criminals and perpetrators have said how differently they think about sex how differently they think about childhood how differently they think about women and that is a problem and you can my view is one of the reasons that the the volume of immigration that we've had is such a problem is you can only teach so many people that at any one time because because it has to be lived right there there has to be a sort of core a core group of people into which you can integrate and if a sufficient number of people come then actually you don't need to interact with that many people who lived here before You literally just get an island of that previous country.

1:24:39Yeah, that's the risk. And we're seeing that, clearly. There was a rape of a little, I think, a 10-year-old again just the other day. The perpetrator got arrested, and he ended up getting a kind of lenient sentence because the defense argued he didn't know it wasn't okay. I think in this case it was a 16-year-old or something. But he didn't know it wasn't okay to just rape a girl. Well, there was a man recently, maybe this is the case that you're thinking of, who had come here and was staying in an asylum hotel. So it was being housed and paid for and fed, clothed by the British people, by the British taxpayer, and dragged a 15-year-old off a street in broad daylight and raped her and said exactly that.

1:25:34said it was, he blamed cultural differences for his behavior, which, you know, is obvious rubbish. And I don't think that, I don't think the judge had much truck with it either. But it's interesting that he felt that that was even something that was legitimate to say. Right. And... I mean, his defense probably told him to say it, his lawyer. Well, his defense lawyer did say it. Yeah. and uh whilst clearly you know that that is mad there are cultural differences between the different people of the world and you can observe that within you know five minutes of going to a country that's culturally different uh go walk down the street in a skimpy dress in cairo and see what happens to you yeah or it's not gonna work out well uh you know go and um be a really raucous woman in a restaurant in Tokyo or you know like there are there are all sorts of things and and it doesn't have to be sometimes it is but it doesn't have to be a value judgment uh that some are better or worse but also I think we should have the courage to say actually that some of them are better or worse or at least that we don't want them here yes no I I've I've started harring this point a lot uh on my social media it's just like it's okay to say that not all cultures are equal yeah I don't know where we got this weird like again I think it's a it's a manifestation of wokeism a it's fine to say race you know like let's all people are equal let's by we don't judge people by our I couldn't care less what you look like exactly it's about how It's how you live.

1:27:16It's how you live, exactly. It's how does your culture interact? How do you relate to other people? And there are some ways, you know, like I think we can all agree, like a culture within a murdering drug cartel, we don't like that culture. That is a culture. And we disagree with people. Exactly, is that equal to the culture of a group of charity workers? A knitting circle. Or a knitting circle. No, so like that extends onto larger scales. you know some religious like religions can be a culture like and I think it's fine to we can like look at it and that's not saying you can't do that religion but we can make a choice do we want that religion to take over our culture yeah like we we should be having this conversation and I do feel like at least at last the Overton window has opened on this in a way that I haven't seen before you know it used to be that people would be scared to even like criticize Islam or like mentioned that it like is being kind of expansionist and starting to take over different parts of the UK, you know, get infiltrated into different parts of our systems.

1:28:23So I'm grateful that like that has opened up. I think another thing as well, though, that is... Just on religion, sorry, very quickly, is I was about to say religion is tricky. I mean, the truth is all of this is tricky, right? Like having this discussion honestly is difficult because there are lots of people, including people in Britain who are British, who might not be white, might not be Christian or atheist, but they're British, who worry about where ultimately this sort of conversation and this line of thought leads to. and so it's our responsibility to reassure those people at the same time but the part of being able to do that is making sure that no one group of people is above scrutiny or criticism you know be that uh the anglican church catholics uh jews muslims you know there's no and and that's also uh even the way i say there should be no protected groups the anglican church the catholic church judaism and islam i should i should really say um rather than the individuals themselves because of course uh you can be a british muslim of course you can be a british jew of course you can be a british catholic and one of the i know we've used sort of grooming gangs as a as a as a good way into this conversation but i think it is quite a good way into this conversation you know it is totally legitimate and completely true to say the catholic church as an institution had uh and perhaps still has a terrible child abuse and safety problem big time and you can say that without that being uh any kind of proxy for attacking an individual catholic right that's that's the case similarly you can say and you should be able to say and we must be able to say our biggest national security threat is islamism uh the overwhelming it's like 99 of fatal terrorist incidents that have happened in my lifetime uh have been committed by islamists without that being a reflection on every muslim and the it's hard to do that and it's it's uncomfortable and it's subtle and uh people will always look to miscaracterize it but to what we're talking about earlier if you're not willing to have that conversation then you aren't being honest and that is a terrible problem because the truth went out in the end yeah i wonder also if it's like some kind of leftover legacy guilt from like the old Victorian colonial times because the UK at its you know height of expansionist you know we did do a bunch of sketchy stuff to other nations I think a lot of it is post-colonial and the I don't think we've had a proper balanced

1:31:38reckoning with assessment of colonialism which exactly as you say contained cruelties and and horrors but didn't only contain cruelties and horrors and one of the things I was talking about last night I went to Australia for the first time a couple of years ago I'd never been before but a family friend wasn't very well and couldn't travel and we went to her and you go to Australia or I went to Australia and I thought this is unbelievable you know that our forefathers came to this country by boat I've come here by plane and I'm knackered right but they came here by boat six months whatever and built this like that's insane like how on earth did they manage that that's incredible um without saying oh well you know britain should look to conquer every country in the world and i think there's also there's a historical context where you know until again really the second world war uh and in fact in lots of parts of the world still today land war and conquest has been a way of life essentially since the birth of human civilization uh slavery the same a horrific practice but practiced basically everywhere for all time apart from really here we we outlawed slavery in effect pretty much a millennium ago and were one of the first places to ban it completely and spent a lot of financial human political capital you know the lives of navy soldiers of navy sailors uh ending slavery around the world and somehow this has become instead uh a narrative that we have a sort of uniquely terrible relationship with slavery where actually uh we can be uniquely proud yeah of what we did in ending it we were the good guys yeah and and you know in in not in every juncture not at every juncture not in every way uh but you know throughout most of history we have been the good guys my uh my family went through a lot of uh my grandmother was german my grandfather's family were dutch jews uh had a terrible terrible experience in the second world war and what britain did uh for the country and the continent and the world then was unspeakably courageous and

1:34:20the the idea that our history contains more to be ashamed of than to be proud of I think firstly I think it's insane and secondly I think then poison so much of what comes next because if you internalize this idea that you are bad then you stop fighting for the things that make you who you are and lots of those things are wonderful you know the reason that britain in so many ways as i was saying earlier built the modern world is because our model of living our culture is incredibly successful and if we're not going to champion it then then nobody will right and also it's people who say oh you're not being respectful to immigrants coming over let's give them also some credit like if they're choosing to come here yeah like that's because there's something on offer better than their culture so then saying like we have to roll over and let their culture steamer like replace ours makes absolutely no sense and i i think that there can be i think what people might say is well um you know if people come here for for economic opportunities or why should they have to adopt our culture and the two intertwined well but also that's never how immigration has worked in this country so in the uae in dubai that is exactly how immigration works if you move to dubai they don't expect you to adopt their culture but you also cannot stay it is effectively virtually impossible to become a citizen of dubai and the same is true in Singapore and all lots of cultures that have a kind of big expat part of their economy those people are not expected to integrate but they also have to leave and so if you have the kind of immigration system that we have where actually what we've always look to do at least historically is have people come and contribute and stay those people do have to integrate they do have to assimilate because it's a very different model or we could i think um you know there would be all sorts of issues with this but you could have a singapore or dubai time model but you have to adopt all of it right you have to adopt the fact that people can't become citizens and you know if you lose your job in Dubai there's a bit of a grace period and if you don't get another job then you've got to leave even if your kids are in school even if you're you know it doesn't matter yeah I mean we're also we're just it's a classic paradox of tolerance stuff it seems like people have forgotten it but it's it holds true you you know we claim we're a tolerant nation and thus we think therefore we should be tolerant to anyone who wants to come in and change our ways but it's like that's when you if they're bringing in an intolerant lifestyle then you no longer stay a tolerant nation yes and you have to do you need to have you can be a warm welcoming rose but you need to have thorns yeah and and you uh you can't tolerate intolerance because then uh you just become intolerant yourself yes yeah that that takes over and And unfortunately, that is what we're starting to see.

1:37:45The other side of the immigration coin that I feel like is not being talked about enough in the UK is the exodus of, you know, there's a lot of emigration happening too. Frankly, I'm one of them. I'm now a dirty expat who left for greener pastures or so I thought, you know, so I feel to the USA.

1:38:09and that I feel like is compounding the problem because it's one thing to have a lot more new people arriving who maybe take a while to assimilate to the culture may not be contributing economically for a long period of time if while at the same time you're having essentially a brain drain going on of the people who were propping up the economy that's a sort of I mean that's a recipe for disaster so what are your thoughts on like what incentives can be changed to keep the keep the builders keep the the high-end sort of the people who are building companies the entrepreneurs and you know either get them to stay and build more stuff or even like inspire people like me to move back so some of that i think is is about hard incentives you know the tax system uh capital gains for people who start and build businesses um entrepreneur type relief uh but i think a lot of it is also i'm trying to come up with with something more specific than vibes but i think a lot of it is about the general atmosphere right like do you celebrate these people or do you demonize them and ultimately if the question is which which comes back to this point about do we want people to try and shoot the lights out do we want really ambitious people who are going to build things who are going to risk everything and if they are willing to put themselves on the line willing to put their capital on the line or their earning potential on the line are we going to let them reap some pretty big rewards because that's you know the relationship between risk and reward is is one of the fundamental tenets of capitalism and capitalism i believe is you know one of the driving systems behind essentially the flourishing of of humankind and i think a lot of it will be about having you know politicians cannot grow the economy they can stop the economy from growing but they cannot grow it the government cannot do that the government can't build businesses the government can't create jobs apart from the civil service which it shouldn't do there's too many of them yeah no thank you so the government can't do this they can only set a permissive and exciting environment for other people to do it and I think that I do think as well and you will obviously have a much better sense of this than me but I think that there are a lot of uh people who love this country you know patriotic people uh who've moved to the states or who might have moved to the gulf or uh who would want to come back for the right atmosphere and if it felt like you know if we could bottle up what we were doing yesterday evening and we could say to these people look uh we want you we need you uh we celebrate what you're doing we are excited for you we want you to to do everything you can to make britain uh what it was for so many hundreds of years which is the most dynamic country on the face of the globe I think I think people would want to come back for that and similarly I think that about going into government you know I think I think you could have a setup where you said to people look give me one two five years of your life and I will give you your country back I think that there are people who would be inspired by that but it has to be a genuine offer where you're saying to these sorts of uh enterprising risk-taking ambitious people yes you really can dedicate yourself to doing the biggest possible thing that you can do being as successful as you possibly can be uh and rather than resent that or look to see how we can capture it from you we'll celebrate it we we will because every society does and it's a good thing to do expect a financial contribution back to keep the whole show on the road uh but we want you to succeed like we love that yeah i mean in in its defense the uk does actually do it does give out a lot of awards you know like obe's mbe's knighthoods arguably we have a better sort of prestigious reward system from the state than certainly more than america like you don't get things like that.

1:42:52And I wonder why that isn't sufficient incentive for a lot of people. I mean, it would be nice, but I guess it doesn't overcome, for example, if you are getting taxed at a higher rate. The difference between the tax rate in the US and the UK, especially if you live in a zero state tax place like Texas, is astonishingly large. Yeah, or Dubai here or Singapore here. Exactly. And I think another difference that is neglected is it's in the U.S., for example, like, yes, you can move to a different state, but it's very, very inconvenient to actually leave the country and move to, you know, the Caribbean and so on.

1:43:34because people don't want to move away from their families generally. And so the U.S. has less competition going on, whereas geographically, the U.K., you can move to Portugal or Italy and you're within like an hour or so flight still of your family. And so the U.K. has to factor that in. There is actually more intense competition from just like nearby countries that offer a similar or even better quality of life and a better tax rate. Because the US is such a larger country and because it has a federal model, you can do that competition internally. Right. Like you can have at least certainly the narrative is you can you can correct me if this is wrong.

1:44:13But, you know, you can have Miami decide that they want loads of people to come and they can change their tax system. And so so you can do that within the country rather than, you know, basically the continent here is sort of comparable in terms of population size and variation. so in that respect the UK is is inherently playing a sort of tougher game than the US would you say that because obviously like when you're when you're like offering because it's almost like you know a country is like a package offer right of like if you assume you have the ability to relatively freely choose where to live which a lot of high state you know high earners do these days you know yes how many tax how much taxes you pay is one factor but also what goods and services do you get in return?

1:45:01You know, how safe does a country feel? Do I get these schools for my kids? Exactly. Do I get good schools and so on? It feels, you know, right now the UK as a general package offering is just, it's not doing well on any of those. If you were to sort of, you know, let's assume magic wand, you're prime minister. Which ones would you, like, where are the biggest leaks that you think need to be plugged? Is it just like public spending, the inefficiencies there? Yeah, I know it's a big question, but where would you start? Well, in a way, to draw together some of the stuff that we've been discussing, I think if you were to, within the confines of what a politician can do, if you were, because there are lots of things that are outside of the scope of politics, if you were to rewire the british state towards personal ambition personal responsibility entrepreneurialism and what that would look like in practice would be the government doing a lot less because you would remove a lot of the rules and constraints and you would operate from a default of permission right you can do something unless there's a really good reason that you can't do it.

1:46:26And if you were to combine, I mean, it would all be part of the same thing, but if you were to combine that with a celebration of hunger and drive and ambition

1:46:40and the need for people to take calculated risks and try things that haven't been done before and put themselves out there,

1:46:55then I think that you could turn things around very substantially, actually pretty fast. I mean, the talent in the UK is still exceptional. We still have our fundamental culture, which, as I say, I think is a culture that is wired for success because of this nature of the focus on the individual. And we also, you know, if you if you want the glass half full version of the stagnation that we've had means that there is a lot of potential in the UK. You know, you can get world class talent for a lot cheaper than you would have been able to do relatively here 20 years ago relative to now. And, you know, catch up growth is real.

1:47:43so you can completely imagine a world in which the uk with with uh i mean not not no effort but totally achievable effort could totally turn its fortunes around what are your thoughts on um the ai sector because again come back to san francisco that was felt like a city just spiraling into decline and then five years ago like what was three yeah four years ago that chat gpt suddenly exploded sure and uh it felt like ai hit the mainstream even though ai has actually been you know it's been a long long time coming but it hit the mainstream and there is you know they've cleaned up the city extraordinarily um in part because jive was coming to visit sure um but you know there's there's this new regenerate it truly has regenerated the the region and still got got issues but um the growth there is like the tech sector is just what's propping up the ais that's right propping up the us so much um what do you think the the uk could be doing to nurture the ai industry more well some of it i i think uh it is fair to say that under Rishi Sunak who was really genuinely very passionate about this I think it was doing, it was starting to do but the potential of this technology is massive I think that there there is a lot that as a country particularly as a country within Europe can be doing to help people understand and the excitement and the potential and the upsides rather than focusing entirely on the danger and the cost.

1:49:40Now, it's rational and reasonable to think about the danger and the cost. We shouldn't be naive about that.

1:49:49But I think my observation is the difference between people who sort of think about AI as an abstract concept and the people who are like regularly using chat GPT is massive because once you start using it you have a sense of its incredible utility like particularly in a world of uh it's a very natural arc that you have a technological development and that brings loads of great things with it and also some uh some less good things with it and then you have another technological development that sort of solves that so you could argue that some of the food technological developments that we had in the 50s and 60s have ultimately led to people being very overweight because we now produce such a surfeit of calories relative to what we need.

1:50:38And so the technological solution to that is then GLP-1 and Manjaro and all of that type of thing. The internet, I think, produces such a huge volume of just information, like data. and one of the things that AI is amazing at is processing all of that. So it's not perfect. You know, as anybody who uses AI will know you do need to check what comes out. But I think it will, it's such a powerful tool to unlock so much of the data that we have that we effectively can't process and can't use. And it looks like that will remove remove so much of basically the boring stuff of what we have to do uh and this this is this is the bull case right like in particularly um in terms of employment the bull case is what you end up with is ai doing all of your grunt work and then fewer better um well not necessarily fewer actually that's that's kind of the whole point is the jobs that go on top of that are higher quality and then there aren't necessarily fewer of them because you then free everybody up to just do higher quality work and that kind of ratchets upwards now uh we can't know nobody knows it is unknowable exactly how all of that is going to play out and almost no technological transition comes without any losers or any cost but i think if you look certainly at the way that like the European Union views AI which is just with suspicion and as something to be controlled and minimised

1:52:29there is no way that that kind of attitude will make the most of this sort of technology and I think that the UK has an amazing opportunity

1:52:45within a European context especially to be a massive AI hub if they're willing to be champions and not just scared of it. And that could be one of the big downstream advantages of Brexit that hasn't been realised yet. Completely. Well, I mean, there are lots of potential downstream advantages of Brexit that haven't been realised yet, but this is perhaps one of the most obvious ones. Do you... Are you... Because one of the things I didn't realise with Brexit that was so... because people are always like well clearly it was a failure and i'm like wait well first of all time has not not enough time has passed to know that but also people fail to remember that about you know it was like a 99th percentile unlucky event happened which was i think it was about 40 days after brexit officially occurred covid started yeah so all of the plans that were in like in place just completely went out the window with this one in a hundred you know year type catastrophe um what what are your current like what's your current status on on where we're at like what percentile are we at now in terms of like quality of outcome of brexit uh

1:54:04really difficult to put a number on it but i wouldn't put it above 20 um leaving the european union a bit like doing something like leaving the european court of human rights is is a means not an end and that I think is the thing that people sometimes get wrong is like that's that's a gating factor for all of the good stuff that you have to subsequently do like in and of itself uh it obviously has a significance but um it will give you no benefit um or minimal benefit other than a kind of attitudinal one because uh all it does is free you up to do the stuff that you subsequently have to do but of course you do subsequently have to do it uh in order to get the benefit of it so it's uh a lot of again what we were talking about earlier in terms of uh the kind of suffocating over regulation that we see now in britain uh a lot of that regulation was european regulation a lot of it was further gold plated by this country so you know this isn't this is not just the EU's fault we did also make it worse.

1:55:18The calculation I made I voted to leave the European Union was we would never be able to undo that within the EU because you'd have to agree it across too many different people all of whom totally irrationally and reasonably are advocating for their own benefit. But it does need to be undone. But leaving the EU just makes it possible to undo it. It doesn't actually undo any of it. So a lot of that regulation, I think, will have to be rolled back for the country to get motoring again. And a lot of that hasn't yet happened. And at the moment, under this government, we're going in the wrong direction.

1:56:03Yeah. Is there any glimmer that even members of the Labour Party are open to rolling back regulation or are they just digging in their heels further? I don't truthfully know enough Labour parliamentarians to be able to give you a kind of proper sense of what the lie of the land is. I think there are definitely some people in Labour who do understand that, do understand that we're just being crushed, basically, by the level of rules that we have, whether they will then, well, they haven't, vote against the Employment Rights Bill, for example, which is a new law that we have coming in here which will make it harder to employ people.

1:56:58It gives people various rights from day one and raises the cost and friction for businesses and changes the risk profile of taking somebody on, not least through making them more expensive. It's been made more expensive through other changes, but through the employment rights bill costs as well. So even if they are appraised of that need, whether they actually vote that way, generally they don't. Yeah, so how, like, is it, from the outside, it seems like politicians of any party are just very strongly discouraged from ever going against the party line. Is that your experience? Broadly, yes. And I don't, you know, if you're going to have a party system, you have to have a party line.

1:57:53Like, there's, you do need some of that. You need that coordination mechanism. just going to have uh you know 600 and not everybody takes their seat but 650 630 odd people just doing their own thing right like if you are ever going to have uh you probably actually could get away with that more in a u.s style system which separates the executive and the legislature but if you're going to have a uk style system where the prime minister and the cabinet sit in the commons and those two bodies overlap unlike in the US where the president and the cabinet are separate from Congress and the Senate then you need to have some kind of party structure and party discipline and you say you don't have much you don't get to talk you don't have much interaction with members of the opposition are you actively discouraged from having like sort of offline conversations with them?

1:58:55No, not at all. But it's more that, I can't remember how many Labour MPs there are, but it's well over 400. And so I'd need to know like a lot of them to give you a sort of aggregate picture. I guess I'm just trying to get a sense of like, what is it actually like the internal, like when you're in the Parliament building, do you guys like see each other as enemies? How... No, I mean, I don't. Anyway, I think it's... Thank you. it is unsurprisingly complicated because in some ways people who are members of other parties don't carry, you know, probably won't be close to lots of people in your own party.

1:59:39And so you can imagine a situation where if you did want to talk through something with somebody, it might be more likely not to get back to your colleagues. If you spoke to somebody from a different party, you'd have to be very close than if you spoke to somebody from your own. But I certainly am not tribal about it at all. I think some people are. My personal view is that that is more common on the left than the right because I think the left is a more... I think it's much more common for people on the left to think that people on the right are morally bad rather than how I feel about it, which is we can profoundly disagree on this, but let's put our case to the British people and they can decide.

2:00:27Instead, it's like, no, you are a bad person. and so uh of course uh you're not gonna be friends if somebody thinks you're a bad person or they certainly aren't gonna want to be friends with you um but i never feel that way and i you know being an mp uh is wonderful but it can also be quite tough and so it's it i think sometimes about um uh not unfortunately uh the members of parliament are elite tennis players uh but the that Federer and Nadal, for example, were such close friends. And then they would get on the court and smash each other to pieces. And then they would just go back to being very close friends.

2:01:06And I think part of what is behind that is only they really understood one another's lives. What it was like to be so much at the top of that sport, which is such a tough gladiatorial sport for such a long time and everything that you have to deal with that comes with that. And similarly, being an MP can be a bit of a lonely business. and the only other people who really know what it's like are other MPs. And so for me, that trumps party lines. But I'm not a particularly tribal person, and some people are. Yeah, have there been any efforts, I don't know, by whatever the mediating forces are within Parliament, to have social mixes or things to bridge this...

2:01:53because it does you know it feels like things have gotten more hostile but maybe they've always been like this i don't know that's like i guess that's one question like was maybe the you know this um the polarization was and the amount of like verbal slinging that goes on in in you know in the commons has always been like this and people you know the trend hasn't gotten worse but it feels from the outside like it has my sense is that it probably hasn't but the nature of the 24-hour news cycle on social media means that the volume is in is like unavoidably much larger right so the uh you know rewind 50 years and the only way that you could uh have a an intellectual verbal fight with another member of parliament would either be in the chamber of the commons uh or you might have a quote published in a newspaper and there was an opportunity to do that you know once every 24 hours whereas now of course um the the volume in a social media world is essentially infinite and so uh i think that does have an unavoidable like impact on the general atmosphere uh and the volume in a 24-hour news cycle world is essentially infinite as well um but there are so the the speaker of the house of commons i would say is probably the most obvious you know he holds various sort of parties and receptions and um and they are uh and and and meetings uh and they offer for sort of politicians of all stripes um but you know it's of course the people that you know best are the people in your own party uh and so it can be the case that you get sort of little groups of little groups of people that drinks grouped by party um but i definitely have uh friends and people that i like and respect a lot um across across the aisle uh well sideways and that way because we have different parties who sit both opposite us and to our left uh in every sense um But I think that is something that, particularly from people who'd been in, who'd been members of parliament for quite a long time, one of the big pieces of advice that I got was, make some good friends from outside your own party.

2:04:20And I do think that that's a really good thing to do, a really valuable thing to do. Yeah, because I wonder if there's any lessons there, because I mean, in America it's really bad, the polarization. Again, maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like Republicans and Democrats, they truly loathe each other. They don't talk. And I mean, if you look at the, there's this incredible chart, it almost like mitosis of two cells, of how sort of agreement and intermingled voting would happen back in the 30s, 40s, 50s. And then over time, it's just like Democrats and Republicans just clustered more and more around like their own side and there was very little cross um you know uh disagreement essentially um like is there any any lessons i guess like any advice you've seen of like of social things that have made that have encouraged like for example that like encourage you to go and like make friends like could there be any kind of in for like you have to spend at least you have to go for a drink once a month with three members of the other side you you you actually you could i've never really thought about it but you could imagine something like that um i i do think though or at least certainly from my experience it it really isn't like that in the uk and i think some of that is also the the nature of the differences between a public and private presentation you know there are uh there are definitely different groups and oh actually that's that's one thing that does happen is there are uh you know for various reasons if you're interested in an area or there's a parliamentary delegation or um it's it's quite common for people to travel abroad um so it might be that uh particularly i think within the commonwealth it's quite common but there might be a parliamentary delegation to a certain country where a group of MPs are asked to go over to kind of learn from them and they learn from us and to build relationships.

2:06:23And those are always cross-party. And because you have to spend several days with other people from other parties, I think that that, I haven't been on one myself, but I think that that can be a really good opportunity to meet people from other parties. But I think it does happen that some people are very tribal, but I think it's relatively unusual. um i don't find it a particularly kind of like aggressive or unpleasant place that's encouraging to hear because i mean you know ultimately like you want like i mean that's what this podcast is all about it's like what is the right mix of competition yes collaboration yeah in a in a system in order to get the best outcomes for you know in this case the british people um it would be a bad thing if everyone was such chums you know across all you know conservatives and everyone whereby everyone was just always, there was no tension.

2:07:18There was no, because then it's like, you don't actually find the sweet spots. But at the same time, it would be bad if there's so much like rivalry that you just end up in gridlock. And government, like what's happening in America? Government is shut down because they're literally in gridlock and like no one can go to a national park or people are actually going and they're just getting trashed. And the other risk of kind of just knee jerk rivalry is that you chuck out good ideas because you didn't think of them first, right? Like you don't want that. And that's one of the things that is a really delicate balance because of course it is an inherently competitive business and we want our party to win because we think it has the best model for success, right?

2:08:04Like it's not just a sort of football team. It's not that we want them to win because we're loyal to them. We're loyal to them because we think that they're right and therefore we want them to be in charge because we think that that will have the greatest net benefit to the British people. But one of the things that I personally find really interesting to navigate is what to do when you call for the government to do something and the government is obviously not of my party and then they do. So it's sometimes this is a really kind of galling U-turn because they've been absolutely trashing you for saying it five minutes ago and suddenly they're like, oh, we always thought that this was a good idea.

2:08:47And you're like, that's not true. But sometimes... But that's the same thing. You don't want to disincentivise future U-turns on a thing that matters. And sometimes it is the case that they've genuinely changed their minds and there's got to be space for that as well. So it's all quite a delicate game because in the end, the prize is the greatest country government context for the British people. And of course, where I think something would be better than what the government is trying to do, if the government changes it to be more like what I think, I celebrate that. But ultimately, I think that my party would do the whole thing better.

2:09:38and so it's all all of these things it's all just like quite finely tuned do you have an example of that where uh well there's there's a few um i mean again the the grooming gangs is is quite a good example of that where um you know the prime minister was calling this a far-right bandwagon in January, they commission a national inquiry by what, June, July? So that's a pretty rapid turnaround. And there the challenge is, ultimately, a national inquiry is the right outcome. So that's a good thing. Although it's now mired in disaster, but the fundamental premise is the right one to accept that secondly because of the nature of the issue uh it's very important not to make or to look like you are making political capital out of it because that's not what this is about this is about justice and truth for the public and for all of these little girls and some little boys

2:10:51but also it can be tricky not to personally think well when I said this you thought it was terrible and now you're saying this you think that it's okay and much more importantly than me personally in this issue is the fact that this problem was so mired by dishonesty like what what I would have really respected and appreciated and i think would have actually gone a long way to helping heal the country as if they had said and actually i think this is a really defensible position do you know what truthfully i didn't believe that this was real like if you write it down as a scenario on paper this sounds like a far-right conspiracy uh this sounds like a a confected problem to serve an agenda I now realize it is completely true and there's probably lots of people in the country who feel as I do and I want those people to understand this is real this really happened we have to have a reckoning about this we have to face up to this and we have to tell the truth about it if instead you're going to say oh well I always thought that this was a problem when you didn't that is part of the same culture it's it's a different manifestation of it but it's part of the same culture of secrecy and dishonesty that brought us to this point in the first place and so uh that's a very specific example of the kind of thing that we're talking about but navigating that is very delicate because a national inquiry is the right thing to do.

2:12:34But we also can't allow the government to pretend that they always said something when they said something different because that is so much at the heart. Of the problem in the first place. Yeah. Yeah, like, if there were any, you know, there are many like pithy quotes and like wisdoms that we can all live by. Like one of my, mine is, I have two. One is love is that which enables choice. So it's actually one around like freedom, essentially. A loving act is one which. And not controlling. Exactly. Enables the other to make the best choices for themselves. So it's a very like freedom giving thing.

2:13:16The other one is this idea of like the infinite game. Usually when we think about winning, we're like, oh yes, there's this finite goal we get to where we win a game. I win the game of chess. I beat you at poker or whatever. but actually the best games are these infinite games where um the purpose of the game is to keep the game going well a relationship is like is an infinite game exactly it's like how do we keep this going we win at the relationship if we if we actually do the until death do us part thing yeah those are two of my like key sort of like favorite aphorisms or axioms wisdoms do you have any like that that you like to live by i don't know that they would quite be in that sort of like pithy idiom state but I would say my north star in the work that I do is just tell the truth like if in the end in the end if in doubt if you're not sure what to do just tell the truth and

2:14:18I almost sort of determinately just believe that that will always be okay and

2:14:28and that I think that I think guides me in what I do um more more than anything else um but that's that's I suppose more a professional thing than it sounds like what you're talking about is kind of for for the whole of life um I'm not sure that I do have any of those kind of words to live by for the whole of my life. But in my work, I really just try always to center myself around the truth. I imagine a tension you must face as you, let's say, you know, you're in the Conservative Party, you're doing well, which you're doing by doing good things for the country. do you ever run into issues where you where you wonder or where people show you that they're worried that you're gunning for their job oh um well i haven't uh personally one thing that can happen uh is that the press assume that you are gunning for a certain job or it becomes a kind of uh a fun or an interesting narrative for them to say that that's the case which I think in some ways is quite depressing because of what it reveals about what a lot of people think about public service that it can't be possible that you're just doing things because you want to serve the common good that you must be doing something there's always a personal agenda yes exactly that you can only be doing something to further yourself rather than, you know, certainly it will come as a surprise to nobody that the Conservative Party is in a really tough place.

2:16:21We've got fewer parliamentarians essentially, you know, in the modern system than we've ever had. The general election of last year was the greatest political defeat in modern British history. The Conservative government lost more seats than any sitting government ever. and so we all all 119 of us which you know might won't won't have an obvious significance to your american listeners but is really small um for a conservative parliamentary party uh have a huge amount of work to do and also as we were talking about earlier you know the country's in a really tough spot and so all 650 of us you know all MPs have a huge amount of work to do and so

2:17:15I think that the the base assumption that lots of people make and you know I can I I can see why there's always lots of cynicism about politics but is that people must be doing things for themselves and since in politics usually not always sometimes people do worry about corruption but usually it's not about the money so it must be about the prestige you must be somehow trying to sort of put yourself forward but the

2:17:48I just find that really sad you know the the family that I grew up in I think I mentioned earlier that my grandmother was German her grandfather was a politician in in Saxony he was a left-wing politician trade union guy fiercely critical of the Nazis and was then imprisoned and the whole family was stripped of their citizenships they went to Czechoslovakia eventually they came here so this story was huge when I was you know loomed really large in my childhood when I was growing up and we got my grandma to tell it all the time in hindsight maybe in a way that was quite traumatic for her but we just thought it was like so fascinating and interesting and exciting and so I didn't grow up cynical about politics but I appreciate that lots of people are but it's I think it's really important to to counter that narrative and to be somebody who is very obviously dedicated to public service and if people do still try and claim that you're doing things for yourself it's it's a kind of disprovable theory right like you can't you can't prove that that's not true um yeah it's an unfalsifiable hypothesis yeah but you have to i think you just have to kind of put yourself forward the best that you can and hope that people see the best in you but the the conservative party has suffered so much from people putting their personal ambition ahead of the needs of the group ahead of the needs of the party ahead of the needs of the country and and maybe therefore it is a reasonable thing for people to worry about or think about or expect that everybody's going to do that but they're not like it it doesn't have to be this way it doesn't have to be like that you can just try really hard at your job as part of a really strong team and you know kemi badenock who's the leader of the party is really good on this like she's she's really big on building a strong team all pulling in the right direction who can all kind of fight together and fight for the country rather than fighting one another and I think that is completely the right direction and we need more of it awesome thank you very much my pleasure