Blair: “Modern Life is Rubbish”

It's happy birthday to Podmasters this month. The home of Oh God What Now, The Bunker, American Friction and all your favourite podcasts is 10 years old. And to celebrate, we're offering an extra 10% off a year's support on Patreon. Just follow the link in the show notes and help us keep at it for another 10 years. Changes in sexual performance are more common than most people realise, and support doesn't need to feel awkward. With MedExpress, everything happens privately online. Start by completing a short consultation reviewed by UK registered clinicians. If eligible, treatment is delivered discreetly to your home, with ongoing support whenever you need it. You're not alone in this. Visit medexpress.co.uk slash podcast to learn more. Hello and welcome to Oh God What Now, the politics podcast that enjoys nothing more than your old boss from 20 years ago publishing a 5,700 word essay on how everybody should be doing their job. I'm Seth Shivel. On today's show, it's give Keir Starmer advice he doesn't want to hear a week. Not only has Tony Blair reappeared to call for Labour to drop almost all of its manifesto commitments, call for a rapprochement to Donald Trump, and to lambast the party's almost infinite capacity for self delusion. But Alan Milburn's bombshell review of youth unemployment accuses the Prime Minister of lacking any cohesive strategy, and warns that without a system reset, the country risks generational, societal and economic catastrophe. Is that the case? And have we already gone past the point of no return? Plus, Robert Kenyon, Reform UK's candidate for the Makerfield by-election, faces a firestorm after a tranche of toxic social media posts resurfaced from his past. Which raises the question, with MAGA in the USA, and Reform and Restore Britain closer to home, are we living in the age of the political lout? And why do the rules seem so different for the right compared with parties on the left? And in the extra bit for Patreon supporters, our panel reveals how they find their zen in the age of June scrolling. Hello and welcome to the day's show with three veteran journalists and more importantly, Ogwen Stalwarts. We have Hannah Fern, who writes about housing and more for the iPaper, The New World and The Observer. And this week, she was the guest editor on the lead. Hello, Hannah. Hello. Ros Taylor also writes for The New World and presents the More Jam Tomorrow podcast. Hello, Ros. Hello. And New Statesman columnist John Elledge now has a publication date for his next book, Thirty-One Inventions That Built Our World, The Making of Modern Life. It's out on the 27th of August. Hello, John. I feel moved to point out I also write for The New World. At some point, someone's going to spot this and imagine a conspiracy. I don't. And hello. I'll have a word. So why don't those pesky young people want to work anymore? It's known as old as time, and of course, it's more complex than that. But this week saw the new report on youth unemployment by former health secretary Alan Milburn. Like Tony Blair's ramblingly messianic five seven hundred word essay, it argued that this government is on the wrong track. Milburn was particularly scathing about how more money was spent on benefits and on helping young jobseekers back into employment. Ros, is this just the last howl of a Blairite has been or does he have a point? He does have a very good point. It's something people have been noticing for a while now. One of the big problems is that A-levels are the gold standard in Britain. And if you're not doing A-levels, then basically you're seen as not really succeeding. So vocational options and apprenticeships are seen as very much second best and undervalued. Then we have the problem of lots of young people, especially since the pandemic, suffering from poor mental health. We don't do much to actually help them because the NHS is not geared up to help them. And, you know, if you look at us compared with comparable countries, I mean, two thirds of kids are still in education at 16 in the UK. In the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany, it's 84 percent. They manage to keep more people in formal education, which, you know, if you're if you're doing as long as they can manage and the vocational stuff is obviously a good thing. And one of the things that Alan Milburn's pointed out is that it's quite easy once you go on benefits in Britain to go on unconditional benefits and not to be asked to do anything, you know, volunteering, that kind of thing. There's also a perverse incentive to go on disability benefits, which does not mean that all people claiming disability benefits do not deserve them, but because they are so much higher than the unemployment benefit, which is incredibly low in this country, unusually. And Britain has the third highest rate of NEETs in Europe, young people not in education, employment or training. Why are we so bad with youth unemployment? One of the reasons is that the Labour government has raised the minimum wage and that has made it much more expensive to hire young people. And the government was obviously hoping that employers would carry on doing that. But their response has been, no, we'll just stop hiring them, which is unhelpful. Milburn says that Labour's individual pledges around health, education and youth guarantee are all positive, but that they lack a joined up sort of strategy. Is that just a sort of technocrats gripe or manifesto? It seems to me fair. I mean, what you're doing is not working for a whole group in society. I think you need to stop and rethink. Milburn was under pressure to be positive in this report because obviously he's a Labour grandee, and he will know how toxic the idea of making benefits more conditional is for Labour backbenchers. But right now there is a problem and we're not hearing a lot about it because young people don't have much of a voice in the media or politics. It is important that we think about it. It does need acknowledgement and it does need tackling and something has to change if we're not to have a generation of people who are out of the workforce and find it very, very difficult to get back in again, because employers don't like people who are not in work when they're thinking about who to hire. They looked very suspiciously on it. That is a big, big problem. John, the business leaders are a group who are not shy about expressing themselves, and they've argued that measures like the 25 billion increase in national insurance and the attempt to raise the minimum wage for young people have backfired. I mean, do they have a point? Maybe. I mean, we don't know. I think like the national insurance increase almost certainly has had an impact because like to avoid raising the taxes that people see in their pay packet every month, the government raised the national insurance element paid by employers. Now, there was a whole argument about that as to whether or not that was breaking the pre-election pledge. I don't think it was. I don't mean that's an increase in income tax or national insurance paid by the individual, but it clearly does increase the cost of employing someone, and if you increase the cost of something, people are going to consume less of it. So, I think that probably has depressed employment prospects a bit. I'm not so convinced on the thing about the parity of the minimum wage for young people for one reason, which is that it hasn't happened yet. It is being talked about as a future plan. The government has sort of pulled back from it slightly. It's kind of hinted it's going to delay implementation while not sort of entirely abandoning it. So, we'll see what happens there, but I am not convinced that that is the reason that businesses are not hiring young people now because the group for whom the minimum wage has previously been lower is an age range of three years. I think people age out of that quite quickly. So, I don't think that can be the reason. What I think is actually going on, leave the national insurance thing aside, I think there are a lot of structural factors affecting employment generally and the specific kinds of employment the young people are most likely to start off with specifically. So, for example, retail has moved increasingly online. Retail staff have been replaced by self-checkouts. That cuts the number of people you need. Hospitality spend is down because nobody has any bloody money. There's a general recession going on and the rule of these things is generally last in first out. I think as ever, while the business leaders do have a point on a couple of these issues, it is also that it is much easier to point to government decisions and say all the problem is you're doing things to the two left wing than it is to admit that actually the economy is changing and they are making certain decisions that are going to disadvantage young people themselves. And isn't the arrival of AI something of an elephant in a room on this? I mean a lot of what it looks at is predicated on eliminating entry-level jobs. Yeah, I mean that does feel like that's going to be a factor. We are seeing there was a case this week. I won't name the law firm in question because I'm not certain I remember it but they did say something about a quite well-known law firm. I think it might be a magic circle firm had got in trouble with a judge because it had clearly used AI to do the job of a paralegal. So it was like this document reciting a non-existent case and then in their apology and second attempt, it happened again. Like that is the sort of thing we are going to be seeing where like human beings are replaced with computers that are not yet ready to do the work. So I think probably in the next few years, we're going to see a lot of entry-level jobs stripped out but then possibly coming back. But the issue we're going to have there is that unemployment in your youth does leave a scar. Alan Milburn is not wrong about this and there is a problem that if a generation do not get started, then they are possibly going to have depressed employment and earning prospects forever and that is an extremely bad thing. And if we are focusing on government initiatives, I mean you mentioned earlier we can put the NI increase to one side but that does seem rather important. Is a lot of this just that the government stuck to this pledge that no one really expected them to keep about not increasing taxes and then found a loophole to still increase taxes but just not in a very efficient way? I mean that's clearly a fact. I do think that's the original sin of this government is not coming in and going, oh, it's worse than we thought in the books. We've got a covert war of Russia going on. The Tories trashed everything. They should have pinned it to Jeremy Hunt like the last Tory government did to Liam Byrne. They should have made sure everyone knew it was his doing that he'd made tax cuts that were unaffordable and sorry, we're going to have to put taxes up and judge us on it in five years and they didn't do that. And as well as putting taxes up, there's a flip side of that which is cuts particularly things like the welfare bill that we have. I mean that's going to be really politically difficult for this government surely. Yes, I mean we've already seen one attempt to cut the welfare bill. I was sort of expecting the Milgram review to be kind of harsher on the welfare stuff than it actually is. I thought what he wrote was actually very reasonable. He's saying like firstly he said the last attempt to cut the welfare bill screwed up by being first and foremost a cost-cutting measure rather than thinking what money people actually need and who actually needs it. And also he made a very reasonable point that as it stands if you're in the welfare system there is kind of no sort of stepped way out. There is no intermediate thing. You're either in work or on welfare and if you go into work then you lose all your entitlement to welfare and that means if that job doesn't work out you can be screwed quite quickly and that is in itself a disincentive to work. So I thought he was actually very reasonable on that. Whether that is a message that the government has the guts to try and sell to the British public at this point in history, I don't know. Hannah, on selling to the British public, I mean how big or daunting is Milburn's solution to all of this? It is quite big. I think John's right that I also was expecting it to be more critical and more of a cost-cutting type you know agenda but it isn't. One thing that Milburn said that I thought was absolutely right is that he acknowledged this is a moral issue and it is a moral issue for all the reasons that we've outlined that were you know it is a scarring experience economically but also psychologically to be unemployed for those early kind of formative years and so the fact that that is the basis of this analysis is really promising I think and he's also looking specifically at redistributing funds rather than cuts. I think the government would find that they had the strength for it if it did have a cuts analysis. This big picture upheaval, shake it all up and start again is harder to sell particularly for Starmer now because it looks like he's coming without a decent plan which is the truth but not something that you know you really want to go out and say. In terms of like the answers that the government has to come up with though and I think the thing that's missing from all of the debate here is that some of the reasons for youth unemployment or everything that's been discussed so far is critical but there's other bits that are outside either welfare or business or the wider economy that you know really impact on this and it's infrastructure essentially so transport is a massive issue. I discovered a stat this week that I nearly fell off my chair almost 60 percent of the British population live in a poor public transport areas which is where you can't easily get public transport of whatever form to a job within 45 minutes commute. That's you know the majority of the population and a lot of people who live in those areas obviously drive but young people are much less likely to drive and own a car so it's a double impact on young people that's not really discussed. The other thing is child care now I know this isn't very doesn't apply to as many very young people because the average age of first time for a first time mother now is I think 29. Actually if you statistically break out it's actually higher in London in the southeast and lower in other areas so there will be many people who are parents in their early 20s and child care is a huge problem. Another story that popped up this week was that the amount of extra add-on costs that nurseries are putting on parents in order to make up the shortfall in government funding from the funded hours package so that form of infrastructure isn't working either and if we don't fix all of these other things that are going on in the wider economy then it's still going to be very hard whatever you do to the welfare system. And even if we're discussing people in their late 20s I mean we mentioned earlier the knock-on effects of youth unemployment and what that does to your employability and your skills or through the next few years. Yeah I mean just thinking about you know the life of a young woman in perhaps one of these low public transport areas let's say you're unemployed for a whole chunk of your late teens early 20s and then you become a mom at 27 I mean and you can't afford the child care that you need to get into the workforce you're writing off a huge chunk of time there. I think that it needs to all be considered together. Does the government or even the UK as a whole have the appetite for the kind of change at scale and a pace that was needed here? I think that the government clearly does in by which I mean the wider governing Labour Party because the whole point of what's going on with Burnham is that there's an appetite for something to be different other than the current leadership so if Burnham took on some of if he does win the by there's a lot of ifs there if he does win the by-election if he does get made leader if he takes on a bunch of this in a really meaningful way with that moral prism that I was talking about then he could he might do really well to make this part of his policy platform because who knows what his platform is anyway it's a separate matter. Isn't the problem for an issue like this though that it's always suffered from being lower priority than something else I mean you know right now there's a cost of living crisis right now there's a rearmament against Russia periodically people say they're more worried about immigration than any other issue whatever it might be isn't this always priority number 17? Yes and no so that in a way that's sort of an easy get out clause for any argument isn't it a rearmament against the you know an aggressor is you know the big what if but our entire future stability in the face of all these threats that we experience you know militarily existentially it depends on improvements in the lives of those here at home the historic slowdown in living standards that we are currently living through long-term unemployment people feeling disenfranchised all of those things it leads to a dangerous political situation at home so I don't think you can really overlook the risk of allowing people to feel completely left behind. And since it's uh criticized the government's direction week what did we make of Tony Blair's essay which I have read it's um extraordinary possibly for the wrong reasons interesting he wrote it it's not ghosted I mean clearly it's not ghosted. It was more of a speech wasn't it than an essay you could almost hear him saying it you know the whole phrases were very short and you know it was very much his voice. I'm not averse as some people are I think to Tony Blair intervening and having thoughts about the future of the Labour Party because I think he has earned the right yes but Iraq but nonetheless he is Labour's most successful Prime Minister for some time and if he wants to get involved at a time when the Labour Party is trying to rethink its direction potentially then I'm happy for him to do that. I think there were some good points about he was talking about ballast and he was saying the government was blown about too much for example not sticking to to its guns which is absolutely right there were some good points on things like planning as well and slightly surprisingly on the need for electrification but I think there was a big problem with his instincts on America he seemed to think that he could make a relationship with Trump work good luck with that and I think he was all he's also mistaken about net zero. I think if the last few years have taught us anything about net zero it's that it's not just about the environment it's about being energy independent it's about not being dependent on Russia for energy and it's also about you know being able to keep costs down and so I think his net zero stance flows from his over optimism on foreign policy he also barely mentions Russia he doesn't really seem to see Russia as much of a threat at all which I also think is very much mistaken so there's a lot wrong with this but I'm always interested to hear what he's got to say. I just think he sounded ludicrously out of touch like so I mean Roz has already mentioned the net zero thing that's obviously part of it but like he was like really pushing back against a lot of Labour's measures to kind of like improve the people's feelings of economic security now those may or may not work as we've just discussed but nonetheless there is a reason that politicians have landed on that which is that there's a lot of people out there who no longer feel like they have a stake in the economy who feel shut out and Blair's solution is basically just kind of it's a Tory solution isn't it it's a it's a market fundamentalist solution it's just like let the market rip let AI in and that will sort everything out if we just have growth and he's like well if you do just let AI rip what you're saying is the tech bros will make some money and their shareholders will make some money they're not necessarily on this island of us are they it would destroy a lot of jobs it will destroy copyright by the way but there's kind of no thought given to that whatsoever and it just feels like Tony Blair has not for a moment considered how the economy has changed how economic insecurity has grown or how indeed the world has changed how the U.S. is not obviously an ally at this point it just does kind of feel like he's still trying to repeat the playbook of the 90s with a little bit of Silicon Valley covering on top and he hasn't stopped to think about how things have changed it's like if Harold Wilson had popped up to try to advise his government I think the Burnham immediate response is like a clapback basically saying and I thought this was quite astute that Blair was clearly entirely unaware of the role that inequality is playing in our current problems and I thought that was a really clever and correct way of putting it because exactly as John said it did feel like it had dropped in from 1999 and doesn't recognize how not only how people are living now and the risks that face them with AI and all kinds of things but also how everybody feels so it might be an answer for when everybody's feeling more upbeat and actually Roz you acknowledge that his optimism about foreign policy is linked to that there's this kind of underlying optimism that everything's going to be all right in the end and move in a more positive way that underpins everything he's saying and I think most of us are living in a world where the majority of people just do not feel that way so you can't run his policy agenda in that environment because everyone will just like raise their eyebrow go that that's not gonna work mate I do agree with John that it's really really unusual in fact downright weird for a PM to express themselves like this I mean you'd occasionally get a memoir is published and might have some veiled criticism in a paragraph and or maybe they've written a single issue pamphlet on something really dear to their heart on you know the environment or whatever it might be but for a former prime minister to sit down and just write a 6,000 word essay does strike me as odd true but in very recent history John Major had a good old attempt in the Boris era he didn't write it down but he did a lot of you know interventions yeah but again that that that was it was usually one paragraph of an after dinner speech and I know for a fact that on at least one occasion he was really angry about that being reported and it was something that was meant to have been under Chatham House rule it was meant to have been a private conversation and he was not intending to make headlines so it is weird for former prime ministers to have this level of I'm going to press release this and then do a media round the next day publicizing the well I mean one counterexample sort of counterexampling I believe Howard McMillan was quite critical of the Thatcher government for how it dealt with the mining yeah but again McMillan was really subtle in how he went about it you know he taught he'd use these veiled analogies like selling off the family silver and make jokes about it he wasn't actually laying into Thatcher's government and saying you're on the wrong course that's what's so weird about I mean I thought the argument for why Tony Blair is doing this is because he's not actually a politician anymore he's a think tanker and fundamentally the point of think tanks is to reports that get attention and shift the debate and he's you know he's been very successful on that level the bit where he went on to the day program on Wednesday morning basically saying he doesn't care if it's a Labour government and he thinks that actually like Rishi Sunak was far more in tune with his ideas it did kind of leave the question hanging of them why should the Labour Party listen to you at this point it does come across as a bit unhinged though I mean I agree with Roz actually there are a number of really good points in there based on his experience of governing if you've read his previous two books on governing and his memoir you sort of recognize that but then there's this weird messianic tone and I do think years of having the Tony Blair Institute run as the sort of court of Tony Blair and everybody's there to placate him has gone to his head well luckily he was so sane before that but that's not the only thing happening in the world right now and so we're going to round them up in a brand new section called yes but what about Hannah energy bills are rising as a result of the Iran war the effect of being distanced from the cause by weeks is not going to help Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves can they do much about it I mean are they going to have to face up to the fact that British governments now can't fix everything I think it's quite notable that energy was the one thing not included in Rachel Reeves measures summertime kind of relief measures last week it is probably largely because the government can't afford it because those measures will roll on for longer than actually just some holiday period and the weather being as it is this week the glorious heat wave we're all basking slash dying and uh they can get away with not having something about energy because it isn't actually at the forefront of everybody's mind this particular month but as you say the 13 rise in energy prices is coming up from July that's the price cap rise and that means that most people's bills are going to go up by 200 pounds a year and so I think this is the moment where they probably do have to front up and admit that these are geopolitical forces outside one government's control and that we are in you know a world of flux and we're going to struggle with some of these things that is a hard message especially when the government is not in a position of strong leadership I think that's the combination it would have been easier for Starmer to say that maybe two years ago at the beginning of his premiership than right now Roz there's been an unseemly row on reform with Robert Jenrick and chairman Zia Yusuf squabbling over the party's policy on immigration or deportation and Jenrick said foreign nationals would not be removed just because they live in social housing but also if they were not working or earning enough Yusuf said that was not reform policy and reform would remove foreign nationals living in social housing at taxpayer expense what is this well I like seeing reform having quarrels about their policy because it means that you know the wrongs and inadequacies of the policy can be exposed you know that when one reform politician objects to the content of immigration policy then it really must be bad detail matters in matters that we pay attention to what exactly reform are planning to do because only then will we get past the kind of the lightweight populist rhetoric about just stopping them coming here slash throwing them out one or the other and well what are you actually planning to do how are you planning to do it how much is it going to cost who is it going to affect who is it not going to affect only then will the problems be exposed to go back to Tony Blair's essay which we were just discussing there was an interesting example there where he says that you basically need to stop the boats by any means possible okay Tony well we've been trying for some years now to stop the boats if you've got a better idea now would be a good time to come up with it because we've been trying for a long time and we're all out of ideas john uh nasa have unveiled plans for a moon base really the us well that's one reaction um the us wants to land americans back on the moon before trump leaves office in 2029 and one nasa administrator told media that the us will never give up on the moon again and i think they were trying to race china to it um can you tell noted skeptic of space things ross why this is a good thing and we should all applaud it so i've tried this in the podcast before and i don't think i won the argument so i might be repeating myself you certainly didn't john i couldn't care less what goes on that empty vacuum okay so a number of things like exploration is in and of itself a good thing like we should be pushing at the boundaries of human knowledge we should be finding out more we should be pushing for them on for the next thing shared projects that kind of make the whole world feel like one are good like the moon shot the other week happened the same week as like trump threatened to nuke iran and then pretended he hadn't and like both of those were moments the whole world was watching there is definitely one of them that i would rather we were watching than the other but also it is a huge source of basic scientific research and that you know learning about how the universe works is a good thing in and of itself but it also has produced an enormous number of spin-off technologies can i ask you ross which of these technologies do you disapprove of and which didn't exist infrared thermometers memory foam pacemakers digital cameras cordless power tools scratch resistant lenses smoke detectors water purification system all of these are things that we have because of the space program are you saying that people who wear glasses should have to go around with scratches on those glasses because you don't like the moon well i can live without the memory foam i have to say that not forgetting the enormous scientific value of playing golf on the moon last week the green party candidate in the make appeal by election lasted just 12 hours he promptly quit after some of his old social media posts were dug up and then there's the reform candidate in the by-election robert kenyon his listening of posts include vaccine skepticism rants about women and comments about carol vorderman so unpleasant that she's demanded an apology yet instead of resigning he appears to revel in his unpleasantness indeed the whole by-election seems to be assuming a hostile tone count binface accepted when rachel reeves was barracked by a man in a van all the parties condemned it except reform instead farah jenrick and yusuf all encouraged it are we misreading the appeal of reform and the new right maybe for their core it's not enough to challenge the elites maybe like other populist right-wingers it's all about a license to be a hooligan in public hannah how much of this is just the usual machismo of the right like when dominic cummings was being boorish and we used to joke about classic don i actually wouldn't use the word machismo i think there's something else going on there's a sort of what i would call i suppose a freewheeling disregard for the seriousness of public office now and i think it's linked to this kind of no shame culture that's proliferated online and is part of really everybody's lives now actually it's very hard to do something that you're publicly shamed for now and i think that john ronson book about what happened with pylons online and so on that was published a few years ago feels out of date because we've moved on from that and it's partly to do with trump but it's broader than him so what we're seeing in british politics it's not just about winning elections anymore it's about this whole culture that we live in it's this it's this idea that you don't have to behave in a certain way to do a specific job or to perform a certain role in our society and i think it's really dangerous i think the most obvious example of when the shift turned was boris johnson obviously he's a man who's lived 2 000 lives in his life and doesn't really care that you know about all the dodgy things he's got up to and just fronts it out there are other people before that you could in a way you could notwithstanding the most disgusting recent you know revelations of his relationship with epstein but previously you could say that mandelson existed in this kind of space before but it's now broken out because of the attention economy because of the way online you know vote capturing works it's just become part of everything and you can say everything you can do anything and it no longer is a barrier i do wonder where it's come from because i mean you mentioned trump obviously is a very prominent example but i can remember when farage as a backbench mep was going viral from political videos where he was just being abusive and being unpleasant i don't think that trump is the reason it's happened trump has happened because of this reason that we are now so comfortable with outrage that we find what we used to find grotesque amusing and grabs our attention and is shareable it's to do with a relationship between politics and you know digital environment that's where it began trump is a product of that he's not the person who started it how much has this suffused with a particularly nasty streak of misogyny i've thought about this in some detail because i knew we were going to talk about it today so i promise not to talk 45 minutes straight without breathing but i would say that misogyny is rife throughout our politics and it's beyond the right this is not a right thing it's everywhere and the description that is often pulled out this oh it's locker room banter we've heard that from trump we've heard it from the right here before it's no excuse but it is true that what is said privately has been brought out into the open so it's not that this is this kind of language has emerged because of this relaxing space the language always existed it's now acceptable to say in public and it's true that the left destroys its own women with it you know reina has as many haters inside the labour party and the wide labour movement as she does on the right so i think what we're seeing now and why people are starting to have this conversation almost probably what one of the reasons we're having it on podcasts like this now is that men in politics are being exposed to the vitriol that women have had to deal with every week in their political careers for decades and we're starting to say this is a massive problem because it's affecting everybody and i do think that there is a difference in the the way people are especially women are treated on the left and right you know reina calling tory's scum wasn't okay but i do understand why she kind of broke and let it all hang out that week because 99 of the abuse she suffers she just deals with privately and you know she got very angry one week i simply think that we're in a place now where there is no shame and misogyny is one of the things that used to be shameful and now apparently is not and what about the ways in which we're finding new ways to argue that it's all perfectly acceptable you know our friends at the free speech union would doubtless say that we're all snowflakes just for describing this and they say it's just free speech you know you mentioned locker room banter it's all part of that same line of argument yes but i mean i disagree with that fully and that that is one line of argument and you know i think that there are sensible people who follow that line of argument i don't think it's entirely discredited my view is that the resulting breakdown of respect for public office is a massive problem and if we think that abuse and shitposting is now part of you know a reasonable environment in which we can run an economy then you know we're in trouble i think the politics needs to find a way to lean out of this rather than the argument at the moment seems to be that how can we tap into this and start to gain this attention for the left and you know there are many on the left you're getting that kind of attention it's not it's not the answer it's not about left or right it's about rebuilding a meaningful political debate rather than shitpost culture ross is part of the appeal for reform and perhaps the maggot movement they take inspiration from this freedom from consequences yeah absolutely i mean i've just been reading frank faraday's new book called in defense of populism commiserations yeah yeah well you can read the view in new world and due course so you don't have to read it too what was clear from that is that rejecting the elite's efforts to police language for them is very important and part of that is just pushing constantly pushing the boundaries it's even a substitute for violence when that violence is too personally dangerous and risky and the ironic thing is that populists thrive on on the left's protest that you know language can be a form of violence and their reaction to that is always to escalate and say watch me be violent then you know they love it yeah it's trolling essentially and does that only appeal to core reform voters or does it have a sort of mass appeal as a line of argument pushing the boundaries of what can be said is a very adolescent reflex right it's a phrase most of us go through as we try to simultaneously challenge the adult world while also wanting to be part of the adult world and it's also the reflex of these insurgents arguably not insurgents anymore in america but insurgents who as they see it want to shake up democracy but it does repel a lot of people i think it certainly repels a lot of women if you had a bit of a thought experiment and imagined if the things robert kenyon said about carol vorderman was said by a female candidate about a male celebrity i think the reaction would be rather different it would be rather more mocking and condemning rather than just a slight feeling of always just it's just bad you know as you were saying it's just banter respect as a form of respect is granted for it yes exactly which would not be tolerated if it came from a woman and i think that's important i think we have to judge men and women by the same standards when it comes to social media and what they do on it and for people who are repelled by all of this i mean we sometimes yearn for a return to civility in politics but i do wonder is is that really enough well it would be a start um they could reform could have set an example by removing kenyon it wouldn't have been the first uh by election candidate may feel clearly to be to be removed but by not doing so it is clear what reform considers to be acceptable in a candidate and so they end up just out competing each other in in an effort to be vile it is extraordinary because we have a chamber at the moment the commons chamber the laws where mps have to refer to each other as honorable honorable gentleman honorable lady and then we have this online space with politics where the language is utterly vile and of course you are never going to be able to impose those kind of rules on the online space but the gulf between the two is so huge now that's an interesting parallel because of course one of the other cornerstones in parliament is you address your comments through the chair through the speaker and that essentially forces you to be more civil some people in today's line of argument might say that that's thought control thought is actually courtesy patrol courtesy police but not necessarily a bad thing surely no i don't think it is a bad thing i think there are a number of ways in which it would be useful to helpful to shake up the house of commons and the house of lords but i don't think that is one of them john on this whole incident with rachel reeves being barracked is it worth unpacking the responses of nigel farage robert jenrick and zia yusuf because everyone was distinct and horrible in their own way not really they're all fucking disgusting i mean they were filtered through their own particular personalities and role but they didn't get anything particularly interesting so okay like farage said i'd like to buy this man a pint does anyone know how i can find him as if like he was not a giant baby man who cries whenever anyone is even slightly rude to him to such an extent they apparently needed to take five million from a crypto billionaire for his own security robert jenrick came up with something i'm just noise he sounds british to me rachel good for him this reaction explains where he rarely leaves her bunker in westminster robert jenrick by the way a man who's so little sense of humor about himself that there was viral footage this week of someone making a joke at his expense in parliament great jenrick said and where are we less than two years later and the lived mmp max wilkinson shouted you're in a different party and everyone laughed and jenry looked so uncomfortable he did not look like a man who likes being barracked if he faced that kind of abuse in the street he would not have the same response it does seem to be very fashionable to blame this on the polarization of politics but is that really enough of an explanation i mean i do i mean i lazy to be i i agree with hannah that it's downstream of something else i think it's i mean i think it's us i think it's the media i mean not in all its forms like so social media has kind of just created this entire quite important realm of many people's existence where the whole dynamic of a conversation forces you to see people it's like oh it's like those fucking guys again it's that lot because you get positive reinforcement when you mock the other side and that has all sorts of nasty effects but nonetheless it does it comes from like the creation of the tribalism does come to some extent from social media also the the diversification of media means it's easier to live in your own little bubble to only hear views that appeal to you plus everyone's just really angry because everything is really depressing at the moment no one has any hope and so everyone's looking for something to do with their rage well as a counterbalance to this i mean i'm a sad git and so my youtube feed nodes to just throw old political coverage at me and i watch it like a fool and i'm sort of struck when i watch bbc coverage of british politics from the 80s and the 90s wow they talk about policy they sort of almost cut away from the opinionated stuff and they they just want to have a forum that people compete their arguments and it's like a breath of fresh air and you think where's this been for the last 20 or 30 years yes and it is it is a more competitive media i mean like i found myself wondering the other day what is the bbc political editor for what do they imagine the job to be because they do just like the entire job is to kind of like talk about politics but they are constantly talking down to the audience at no point are they kind of like explaining what's really going on it is all just talking to us like we're children and i just don't understand why the bbc feels the need to do that what about for this particular by-election i mean i just wondered how much it's grist of the mill of by-elections being often quite dirty you know they don't get much dirtier than something like the bermondsey by-election of 1983 well yeah that one's the one where peter tatchell laterly who's the labor candidate later wrote in the guardian that he was subjected to 15 months of media smears anti-gay violence and sabotage by the right of the party but also the man he lost who was the liberal democrat simon hughes who later came out as bisexual himself so that's a nice twist so yeah there have always been these flashpoint moments the other one that came to mind wasn't a by-election it was 1964 election in the west midland seat of smethwick which was the very racially charged one with the tories campaigned on the platform if you want to for a neighbor vote labor it's horrendous isn't it um so yes there have always been these moments but i do think it's those other two elections we just mentioned they did kind of reflect the the mores and politics of the time like the early 80s was very homophobic age because of the aids crisis the 60s was a very racist stage because it was when we were first starting to see mass migration into the uk of non-white people i think this by-election is telling about our current political culture in the same way but even that election in the 60s resulted in a tory mp who was widely described as a parliamentary leper and that no one wanted to touch him because even then it was considered exceptionally racist by the standards of the day and i wonder how much we've got a sense of propriety now that we would recall well yes something i found interesting about the write-up of of that rachel reeves barricading which i thought she did bloody fantastically by the way i thought she looked yeah no i think it's her best performance i've seen her doing anything about a year exactly right she seemed extremely confident and unflustered and had an answer that was succinct enough to make a soundbite it was perfect she literally turns to the camera and says put that on television and good for her but no actually some people who expressed similar views to my surprise was her shadow mel stride in the tory party and old friend of the podcast lord hannon daniel hannon they were both very much like i disagree with a woman on policy but i think this is a disgusting way to talk about that so there it was kind of nice being reminded there are still parts of the right that do recognize the need for this civility but they're really not the bits that are in the ascendant right now are they and it's time for but your emails the part of the show where you get to write in and ask us questions can go to either our patreon page or to ogwn at podmasters.co.uk this week we have dimitri who asks i just saw the livery of great british railways for the first time when heidi alexander unveiled their first train at brighton station the look is so retro dull and obvious with red white and blue colors a boring typeface and no sense of speed or occasion it looks like a silver jubilee ham sandwich from when i was little why can't we escape from this rah rah little britain look and be more modern and adventurous was heidi frightened of the daily mail what do train lovers john and ross think and hannah i assume i'm the one from the railway family i'm actually a railway enthusiast too but anyway the thoughts i do agree it's it's pretty ugly um dimitri you're you're right i think the basic problem is it is very hard to improve on the british rail logo and yet you can't keep the british rail logo because there are too many negative associations with the 1970s and 1980s so you need a new logo but you don't want to spend too much money on it and i don't think to be fair they have spent much money on it which is which is visible because that would seem profligate at a time when you're you know you're nationalizing in order to reduce excessive expenditure i think also there's been a lot of experimentation with different railway logos since privatization with all the different companies that have sprung up and i suspect that railway logo designers are all out of ideas i'm afraid to slightly disabuse ross of her view about the british rail logo is that actually it's never gone away so the british rail logo is that logo that you see outside every train station and at the point of um yeah the arrow is going in each direction and at the point of privatization it was decided that that should never be dropped because it was the kind of symbol that people understood what a railway is and that on maps it's a great bit of design design and so actually it's never gone and yet you're right of course that every single train operating company and so on had a different branding and there's been all kinds of like virgin rail and all the people have come and gone but that's the the single thing that stayed and it still stays today and i think on the actual design of these trains i don't hate it as much as everybody else i don't love the fact that it does look like a big bit of flag waving but i also think that when you're working with that british rail design you need something that suggests a new era of something old and i think it does that in quite a cohesive way i don't hate it i can tell the person who wrote in that i am as much of a train fan as john and roger you got three train nerds around the table today uh four because you should try the swiss railways i'm from a family of railway men i suppose is the truth all the men in my family work in the railway and my dad's side of the family from crew so i've you know i was brought up on the trains we never even had a car when i was growing up because we have free rail passes because everybody worked for trail and so i actually went to see with my family the new trains design when it was laid out at london bridge station and um i wasn't sure initially but i've warmed to it i like it i'm gonna be honest guys i don't care i tried i tried to get myself worked up when i was prepping for the show i've been trying for the past five minutes where you guys have been talking it's fine it's red white and blue like so many of the world's flags because they are a collection of colors that go well together obviously they were going it's called great british railways obviously we're going to try and do a flaggy thing with it to try and make it look patriotic that's what they're trying to do that is inevitable i do however think it doesn't matter in the slightest i think like the whole nationalization agenda is like it's a sideshow it will probably improve some things yeah but it's not going to radically improve things because fundamentally the big problem is we do not have enough capacity on the rail network because we stop building railway lines my big fear about the nationalization thing is it does mean that the treasury now gets a veto of how many trains we run and the treasury fucking hates trains in a slightly irrational manner so i do fear that like all the people who think that nationalization is going to solve anything are going to be so disappointed because now there is going to be someone on whitehall who's going to be like wouldn't it just save us a few quid if we don't run that the logo and the branded does not fucking matter a damn compared to that well i think the important thing with regarding nationalization of the railways makes it far easier to do some of the connectivity things that we've been sticky issues like reopening old branch lines that are still there and would work perfectly well and yes high speed rail if someone yeah if someone gives them the money but the treasury doesn't like giving money to the railways it would rather give it to roads the oxford to cambridge one is definitely going to happen it's also about ticketing as well which they're planning to work on and things like this ludicrous refund system which is insane and which needs to be streamlined and uh under nationalization things like that will kind of improve the experience even if there aren't enough trains and i agree with you there are never enough trains john no you're you're right i'm sorry i don't want to dismiss those things you're quite right about the consumer it will make some things better i just think it is sometimes talked about as a panacea and actually the big problem is just like the attitude of the treasurer to focus on the panacea which is the logo i think the wider problem is not limited to railways we're just really bad at logos in this country and i can remember 25 years ago when we launched the royal mail as consigna and had the most hilariously asinine logo and private i spent the best part of two decades just running these consigna lookalikes showing it looked like every other corporate logo in existence so we're just poor at that yeah but i mean as hannah's already pointed out the british rail logo is one of the great bits of design or look at the work of margaret calvert who designed all the road signage for britain's road network which you can read about in an upcoming book that i'm not going to mention um but like you know we can do this stuff it's fine it's basically fine that brings us to the end of the show which means the much anticipated finale escape routes where our panel reveal the books films tv music and any other business that's been keeping them sane this week john what's uh been keeping you going apart from a certain nameless book um which is actually i've watched the first episode of a new bbc drama called two weeks in august which is about some friends going on a holiday and it being incredibly stressful and everything falling apart and jessica ray and there's this kind of like overstressed mother of two kids of a sort of chaotic husband with a thick smile on her face being like everything's fine everything's fine i'm gonna ignore these bad omens everything's absolutely fine anyway it's i've only watched the first episode and then i made the mistake of mentioning it to my partner so now i'm not allowed to watch anymore until she's caught up it bodes really well i'm going to look forward to the rest of that i have been to see the new adaptation of the stranger directed by francois ozone and it was brilliant obviously it's a classic existential narrative but um it was really beautifully done in a way that made it not as depressing as that story might be it was also on a personal note it was a chance to go to the cinema without children for two hours and watch something in a foreign language which was just a wonderful experience but i'd highly recommend it if it's still showing anyway rose how about you well you'll be surprised to hear that i went to see project hail mary last week obviously uh there was there was too much space in it didn't make me want to spend any time there but um nonetheless it had ryan gosling in which for me frankly was the main appeal and he did manage to hold the the movie together admirably particularly as he had to co-act with with a sort of a messy rock whom i found less cute perhaps than other people did but then i'm not very i don't find extraterrestrials very cute i've found et quite repellent so you're a space race yeah yeah totally uh so so there you have it yeah i recommend it but only for ryan gosling not for the space and um i've been reading a new book by david howarth called being liberal which um probably the subtitle is a better description which is about the liberal disposition in british politics it really looks at what are the traits that are shared by both politicians and voters of a liberal mindset it's not uncritical i mean it looks at the shortcomings of liberalism as well but it argues that in this day and age it's more relevant than ever uh draws on david howarth's sort of lifetime working in politics and i know it's only out at the moment as a hardback from academic press so it's not cheap but there will be a paperback out in the autumn and that's the end of the show thank you rose thank you john thank you hannah thank you and thank you for joining us listeners everything we do on this podcast is down to the generosity of backers on patreon the crowd funder where you can support the projects you love like podmasters monthly pledges from listeners like you fund our studios pay our team and mean that we can punch well above our weight amongst the well-funded big brands so if you've ever thought about supporting us on patreon now is the time to do it from just three pounds a month and you'll get every episode early and ad free plus extended episodes and merchandise and a shout out on the podcast most importantly you'll get the delightful satisfaction of supporting independent podcasting follow the link on the show notes to find out more and we'll be back on tuesday so see you then oh god what now was written and presented by seth table with ross taylor john ellidge and hannah for him the producer was james liddell with audio production by tom taylor and jade bailey artwork is by jim parrot with music by simon williams and tom taylor the managing editor is jacob jarvis the group editor is andrew harrison and oh god what now is a podmasters production hello and welcome to the extra bit your lounge of calm for our patreon backers this week we wanted to ask our panel what is your zen tell us the mindless task that clears your brain any takers podcasting you can't say that here very boring answer actually but cycling or walking uh like i i love a long walk now i have finished writing the new book my main plan for the summer is just going to be walking a lot more listen to more audio books and just kind of like exercise fresh air clear my head taking information without being like stressed about turning it into something else just kind of like refill the tanks a little bit but cycling is even better for that because you have to concentrate on not dying so like you can't be too stressed about other things because you are spending quite a lot a lot of your brain just making sure that you stay alive yeah that's that's like if i'm ever really stressed i just go for like a 10 mile that was a teaser for the bonus extra bit of this week's podcast if you'd like to hear the whole thing every week plus get every episode without ads and a day early then sign up to back us on patreon for as little as three pounds a month you'll also get access to live zooms our exclusive merchandise and most importantly the warm glow of supporting independent podcasting thanks for listening we'll see you next week