Double Take Debate: How to Save Democracy
Jon took the hot seat for this episode of award-winning comedian Robin Clyfan’s new current affairs podcast, Double Take Debate. This discussion pits the politics of deliverism, where politicians try to fix the problems of the world for us, against our vision of a more participatory democracy, where people hold the solutions to our own problems. The politics of England’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, get a mention or two along the way…
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Transcript
Today on How to Save Democracy, we're going to share an episode of another podcast that I was recently a guest on. Double Take Debate is a new current affairs podcast hosted by comedian and political commentator Robin Clavant. Each episode pits two guests with very different views against each other in front of a live audience in a cocktail bar in London. Robin and the team invited me to join a debate about how to save British democracy in the face of the increasing threat of a reform led government. I hope you enjoy. We'll be back with more episodes soon. Woah. Woah. Shit.
And the question we're asking today is how to save democracy and stop reform. Oh. Yes. So the frame woohoo. Democracy. Is that the right noise? Yeah. I'm sure. Yeah. You can respond however it feels honest to you. So according to you, Garth, if if an election was held tomorrow, we'd have a hung parliament with reform as the biggest party. According to the democracy index, only 25% of the world's countries are full and functioning democracies. They don't currently include The USA. Democracy, we maybe take for granted as a kind of predisposition of of humanity, but democracies are historically very rare. They've existed for moments in the twentieth century, although universal suffrage hasn't existed in a lot of European countries, for more than a hundred years and even for female suffrage, and a lot of European countries didn't happen to the nineteen seventies. So democracies are perhaps a lot more precarious than we assumed and a lot more historically contingent than we hoped. They are fragile. And so the urgent question we're asking is how to save them and specifically in the context of The UK, how to battle a possible threat to democracy reform. Whether or not they're a threat to democracy, we can get into, but, I'd argue they are. Joining me are two very capable guests. Please give a very warm welcome to Matthew Torbit and John Alexander. Matthew Torbit is a former adviser to the, Labour Party or a number of Labour politicians and is a political commentator who campaigns on social issues, economic redistribution, and specifically around homelessness and regenerating the North Of England. Would you say that's fair, Matthew? I think that's fair. Yeah. That's great. Thank you. Thank you for dressing so smartly. Just for you Yeah. You're gonna get your dress as we know that. We've seen his PJs before. Yeah. I appreciate the respect. And John Alexander is the author of Citizens, a campaigner for direct democracy, and is about to begin a fellowship at Harvard at the Center for Democratic Innovation.
So we're gonna have two views No noises for that. Noises. Come on. I'm pretty tough with that. Alright?
Come on. We're you know, it's the British thing. If you in America, if you go to Harvard, they're like, yes. If you do it in Britain, they're like, you posh wanker. They're like, alright. Would you like a Volavan? Yes. Great. So welcome welcome, John and Matthew. Thank you so much for joining us. Who who who who thinks democracy is genuinely in peril in this country? Put your hands in the air. Okay. So that's almost all of the room. I'd say there are a few people who are really confident about the future. Who thinks that democracy can survive in its current form in first past the post in Westminster in the current mechanics that we have? Can, democracy survive in that form? Please put your hand in the air. This is just me telling you what to do rather than, putting it voting myself. Who thinks that we need a radical rethink of the relationship between the state and people in order for it to survive? That's most of the room. Okay. And even Matthew who's arguing against that sort of agrees. So for all Yeah. He's voted for all three. Yeah. Feel seen. Yeah. And I suppose we're gonna have two distinct views here. Probably, there may well be some overlap. And we're gonna start with you, Matthew. I think there is
a short term answer and a more long term answer for the preservation of democracy regardless of whoever's in power because I think it is under threat. We've seen it in recent polls that Gen z is at third. You know, this would much rather a strong leader to get stuff done. So I think the long term plan is, economic geographical redistribution. And but where we have gone wrong for essentially forty years in prioritizing London and the Southeast, and I'm happy to bore you with the the the facts of that. And that totally plays into the fact that those that do feel left behind and I know it's a sort of Westminster cliche and all the rest of it. But those that did when they were given the opportunity to give, quote, unquote, the elites a bit of a kicking, they did so. And that should have been a wake up call to all those within Westminster and in and around Whitehall. We need to change maybe the thing the the way we've been doing things, and they haven't. And therefore, we now see the the the, I don't know, the the the sort of evil baby of Brexit now in as Nigel Farage MP, who is totally, you know, not not taking any blame for Brexit whatsoever despite being the architect for it, potentially ending up prime minister with a 22% mandate, which is not healthy for democracy at all.
Yeah. John, what would really make a difference here?
I mean, I guess the very top line is I think it's not the economy, it's the power. And the two things are related. But when you purely focus on economic policy, you leave yourself in a place where you're trying to do things for people with the and the power actually remains generally pretty centralized. The decisions are made away. And actually it's not the material conditions. The assumption that's at the heart of that is this idea that people are consumers, people are narrowly self interested materialistic creatures and you need to increase material stands of living in order to satisfy their basic humanity because that is your conception of their basic humanity. And that's fundamentally flawed. Like people are creatures who need meaning and people need to matter. One of the things I did in the research for my book is I went a little way into the QAnon conspiracy theory world. I emphasize a little way. Don't worry. So this is the conspiracy theory that led to the twenty twenty one January capital riots and and the the sort of claim. And they believe that sort of the Democrats are kind of baby eating circle of doom. Like, it's pretty nuts stuff. The entry gateway into the QAnon conspiracy theory is basically you're needed here. Here is your first task. We we we cannot save this country without you. You have a role to play. And this is an incredibly powerful invite to people who have basically been treated as if they are a problem to be managed actually. What we need in this moment is to open up our institutions so that they tap into the ideas and energy and resources of everyone. Because if we don't do that, we are telling them that we will do for them and that is pushing them into the arms of fascism. I think my my my very short headline is we open up our institutions or they die. Yeah.
And what that means to you John is citizens assemblies is putting power back into communities and there's a whole kind of system of research based mechanisms
that I'm sure you have examples of that fundamentally change how we run a democratic system and reenergize it. Yeah. I mean, if I if I give one example just to sort of illustrate, I'd I'd love to contrast the Brexit process, which we've sort of brought into the room and and kind of has to be in the room with reform. Right? Like, as you say, it's it's directly the child of where we are now is directly the child of that moment in this country at least with the Irish referendum on abortion two years later. So what happens in Brexit was that people were essentially offered two shit options that they had no real agency in shaping either of. And someone said that one was taking back control, which I think is language we should come back to. Like this idea of power is what was arguably on offer rather than it wasn't a material pitch. And they chose what many of us would argue as the worst one. And then it was just sort of that was that. It was like I would describe that actually as a kind of consumer choice. It's consumer politics. Give people a fix of options they've had no agency in creating and that's it. Whereas in Ireland, the legislative proposal to legalize access to abortion up to twelve weeks which went to referendum in May 2018 passed with 66% majority. That proposal was formed by a Citizens' assembly. So 99 randomly selected Irish citizens brought together for five weekends over five months to deliberate on the options, hear witnesses from all sides of the debate. And then when that they sort of came by consensus to that to that proposal to legalize access to abortion up to twelve weeks. When that was then put to referendum, the the process was fundamentally different. The the the nature of the conversation was fundamentally different. So a referendum process that actually brought people together and and healed an age old trauma. I get too overexcited by this and but but, like, those assemblies are one example of a process. They are not they are not the whole of this. Their interpretation of Brexit, there's this one about control. But the other argument that sometimes weaponized is people didn't feel like they were having social needs met. I I feel that we essentially live in two Englands at the moment. We have London, and then we have provincial England.
We have a model that we can follow. So 1992 when, the Berlin Wall fell and there was a reunification. Germany or West Yeah. Germany as it became repurposed what they have as the KFW, which was set up post World War two to basically, help East Germany get to the point where West Germany was. The KFW did things through a solidarity tax where the West would give part of their income to the East. For thirty years, they did this. 2022, they should have carried on for another ten years. It would have been a success. They consider it a failure because it's now 85% productivity compared to the West. That to me is is a miracle essentially in 30. Incredible. They consider it a failure. What we've done over forty years is not invest in the North, not invest in the middle. It's anywhere North Of Birmingham. And this is partly down to the treasury in the way that the treasury is essentially a Victorian level system that still sees itself as protecting
waste of taxpayers' money. Isn't there kind of an expectation problem with your argument as well in the sense that people in order to fund the projects that you're talking about, I mean, I'm presuming it's government investment, then we need to make an argument for taxation and there's not really a public appetite for that at the moment. And there's not enough bold storytelling within the Labour Party or within any progressive movement that says, hey, if we want if this is the vision we want, a shared future with jobs, with investment, then someone's going to have to pay for it and that does mean higher taxes. And at the moment, most parties are being skewered by promising too much and then under delivering. And so, I mean, the challenge with your, with your point is, like, who's gonna make that case? You are, apparently. But is that is that what you're arguing for? A party to take power that can argue the progressive case for high taxation and redistribution through infrastructure investment in the North? Not necessarily. If you look at the KFW, right, it was a it it was able to borrow at high rates because it borrowed under the auspices of the KFW, not as Germany. This should really be a Bank of England issue, by the way, not necessarily government, but neither of them wanna do it.
I don't I think what you need is better messengers. At the moment, the Labour Party, you know, I'm sure many people agree are not blessed with many good messengers. And this is not going to happen under case Darwin Rachel Reeves. Now if an Andy Burnham came into the picture, who has gone through a middling Blairite minister to going and learning a lot being mayor of Greater Manchester and through his own experience can make the case of, for me, every region in this country needs a capital. Actually, I don't think we're,
like in some ways opposed like I think I think there's a very different I want to I want a reductive binary. Productive binary. Just yeah. But I but I I think there is a very different emphasis. There's sort of power versus Yeah. Economics. Power versus economics and and and where you choose to play the place the emphasis is really significant. And and maybe just to bring this alive a bit, I kinda wanna zoom out slightly because we tend to sort of think about these conversations often happen as if The UK is the only place this shit is going down. Right? And there was a economist poll of polls across 27 European nations and and the Scandies and a a few others. I think there were like 33 nations included in there. They showed that for the first time, actually, the far right parties are polling higher than any other political grouping. And that has never happened. That didn't even happen in the 1930s. Right? And so my argument is really that there is something actually much more fundamental going on that we are in a kind of epochal moment, right? Like so end of the nineteenth so in my work, I talk about seeing the moment in time we're living in through the lens of what I call stories of self in society. So I talk about subject consumer and citizens, three stories of the individual in society. Very briefly, end of the nineteenth century, beginning of the twentieth, the dominant story is the subject. So the right thing to do, keep your head down, do as you're told. There are a God given few who know best. They will run society for the best interests of everyone and and therefore the rest of us just shut the fuck up. That story kind of fell apart end of the nineteenth century beginning of the twentieth because of industrial revolution lies in the middle of class. You just couldn't sustain that. Out of the two world wars, we then built what I call the consumer story. And this was a logic that said actually growth is good, like economics is the answer to everything. GDP was first conceived in 1937, right? Like and by the way, the guy who first conceived it said never use this as a measure of national success. But anyway, we'll come back to that. But but the consumer story is constructed out of this idea that if everyone pursues their own in their own material self interest then that will add up to the collective interest. That's how the best society will result. Milton Friedman thing, the social responsibility of businesses to maximize its profits is a moral statement. It's a statement about how the best thing happens. And that story has had us for eighty years and now it's fucked. Right? And the problem the deeper problem is you can't solve the challenges of our time from within that logic because the logic created them. You can't solve loneliness and mental health from within a story that says we're independent isolated individuals. You can't solve inequality from within a story that says that competition is what fixes everything and raises the standards. It created the crisis. And you most fundamentally, and what I when I hear some of these things about we need more airports and that kind of shit sorry. Excuse my language. But you can't solve an ecological crisis, which we, like, seriously have, right, from within logic that says that that success is material, standard living, were separate from nature. And so we the story is collapsing. And what's happening, I think, is because all of our kind of mainstream parties, all of our mainstream political logics are born out of that story, out of what's being called deliverism, which I would suggest is some of what not all of what you're talking from, but some of it. That that logic simply can't work and no one believes it anymore. And so you end up with people like the way I would argue is you're in a situation where people are being offered stick or twist where stick is manifestly fucked and twist is fascism. Twist is back to the subject story. And actually, there's a whole other thing going on and it's not just assemblies. It's it's community power. It's it's it's community land trust and community energy and can we like, it's it's people being the solutions to their own challenges at every scale and every level in a way that is not just acute exception, it's proper meaningful. And that is a logic that I think I call the citizen story. And so for that, the logic there is not keep your head down as you're told. It's not pursue self interest and that will magically add up. It's get involved. It's contribute your ideas, energy and resources to the pursuit of the best outcomes. And it's and it's open up our institutions or create new ones if we have to because there is all of us are smarter than any of us is the only logic that can actually face these challenges.
And before we kind of get back and I I wanna get some examples from you and then get to you as well, Matthew, could could I just push back a bit and say that actually the problem that you're describing, that we're in of this lack of powerlessness, etcetera, that's a problem of just the stage of capitalism that we're in. And to go back to your point, you know, the West won the Cold War, the half the world was opened up to the markets of capitalism. That meant that this kind of ravenous appetite of markets had a big burst of affluence that propelled in the West in in new labor propelled a kind of a very economically successful government riding off the back of global markets. And we've run out of things to consume. Markets have turned back in on themselves. They cannibalized them. They have assets. And what that means in a literal sense is that it's run out of any form of intellectual justification. People people no longer can defend it because it's evidently not working. But that's that's an economic question that going back to Matthew's point, that's a question about how do we redistribute wealth and and actually put money where we want to rather than a democratic question.
But but then my response to that is to go that's so disempowering. Right? Like that makes all of this a big out there thing about isms. And and and the the joy of this work, I think, is that the joy I find in my work, let me say it like that, is that actually if we just see people slightly differently,
you can do fundamentally different things. There is that innate selfish nature of humans where they need a carrot and a stick. Okay. They do. I say it as a socialist. Right? But there is that there's this innate thing where people people become apathetic and we see it born out in institute, you know, studies and everything else. So I think for communities to thrive, you have to give them a reason to. Now, direct democracy may well be it. My concern is I and maybe this is unfair, not using stats and using people I know, but it's it's it's what I know as well. Real humans, they do it. Yeah. No. I think of people like my parents. You You know, they don't vote. They hate it all. They think everyone's against them and all the rest of it. For good reason, they've grown up sixty years with this sort of shit. I I will redirect democracy for for not everything or whatever it is you might be putting forward, ends up like jury service. And you go, oh, fucking hell. I've gotta go and vote on the bins and how often there are. And that's to maybe the little side. That's not the intention. But it becomes a thing of what's the point? What what what what happens? And maybe they need to see it for themselves. I think that becomes easier if you give them them that material thing. I think also is we've got a hell of a task ahead of us to build communities back. They've been decimated by deindustrialization, and Thatcher's ghost still cast a shadow over all of us communities that have just been left to fester and therefore see, simple answers to complicated questions in people like Nigel Farage going, we're not gonna have targets because governments never hit them. And he's so he's dangerous because he's so clever and he knows exactly what he's doing. Well, we do we just feel like we're kind of in a place, both in this country and in America,
where trust in politicians is so low and so decimated that people will authenticity looks like someone who's openly satirizing the office. You know, people vote for Trump because he's almost like a joke of a president. He's someone who will, like, do a crap in the White House. Do you know what I mean? They want to openly defile the institutions and act as an avatar for their anger so that that kind of anger and the kind of, like, deliberate defilement of the institutions. I suppose that's the question we're asking, isn't it? What do we do with all the anger? How do how do we meet it? Because it's a lot of it is out there because I think that I think, actually, for a lot of people, the giving upness that you described, the kind of our politics isn't for me, that's a kind of there's anger in there as well. There's a kind of it's an internal anger. It's kind of like a defeat defeatism about the future. Right? Of course it is. Yeah. And listen, I'm angry. We will we will all be angry in this room. You have to be angry to take this sort of stuff on. I think part of it again,
not to be reductive, it comes back to messengers. How the fuck does a billionaire, 80 year old man with fake tan on come across as more real and human than all of these politicians? That's the danger. It's totally ridiculous. Dave Chappelle did a famous stand up where he said Donald Trump won because he laughed at what the elites were doing. Hillary made a whole point that he'd not paid his taxes, and he went, who pays all the taxes? And people laughed, which that thing of why would we play by the rules? And that's that's where we've got ourselves. The thing is with people like Farage, I think it'll churn him he'll win. It'll churn him it'll churn him up, spit him back out. He's an older man anyway. And there'll be a chance to try and build back. But we've gotta learn from mistakes made during Brexit, navel gazing. People have to feel like their voices are heard because they will channel their anger to a point where most people I hear now going the same as with Brexit, we can't get any worse, can it? And the danger is of people that don't have a lot materialistically go, well, I might as well gamble it because the little I've got, if I lose all that, it can't get much worse. And that's what we saw with Brexit. And the sad reality is for those that voted Brexit, it absolutely can.
I I have to come in on the human nature thing. You you can come in, John. I'm just I'm gonna give you we're just gonna after John we're gonna go to questions so if you have any fermenting in your mind or I'm building up within you Someone asked me about Taiwan. Please
please do. It's a fucking great story honestly. So yeah. John, John, you're about to tell us about human nature. So so I started my career working in the advertising industry. The advertising industry is rooted in the fundamental idea that humans are consumers and that if they are narrowed it, they are self interested. It's not true. Right? It's just not a fact. The problem is that we surround ourselves with this idea and this messaging so constantly that it primes us. Humans are by nature, I would argue, collaborative, creative, caring creatures, but we are also storytelling and story dwelling creatures. And we're surrounded so strongly by the story that we're consumers. Estimates that the average young Gen z is, exposed to something like 10,000 commercial messages a day now. When we measure success of our society through consumer confidence, that's again, like, your role is to shop. Right? When eat out to help out, Like, what the actual fuck? We are we and and then and then this is the danger because then this manifests in this thing of, like, we won't be able to do any of the power stuff until we've made sure the little people are alright. And I'm and I know I again, I we're being very nice to it. But but to demonize the argument a little bit, I think it comes down to what comes first, the power or the or the economics. Because I'm still in favor of the the redistribution, but I think the power has to come first. And just then Just just by
I know you're ready to go John. Yeah. Just tell us what you mean precisely by that. I mean you've mentioned citizens assemblies, you've mentioned community. Can you just get into like what are the mechanics of that happening? What if you're empowered would you do tomorrow to make that happen?
Let me let me take the energy. So I think probably the biggest missed opportunity has been the stuff about mission led government, which Stahl had briefly talked about and then we've heard very little. Take that energy mission, which I hinted at. Right? The if you go and you could do this for all sorts of things, but if you go right, we're going to make Britain a clean power nation. We're going to need everyone involved if we're going to do that. We're going to and I would celebrate the launch of that at the,
ambition Lawrence Weston where they build a little taller. I put loads of money behind community energy. I create a a randomly selected citizens panel as part of the accountability and governance structure of that mission. I would I would see Yeah. That that's just so because because people might not know and I just want to dig into some of those mechanisms very quickly are of like a citizens panel. So there's like there's rotation, there's random selection, and people in small groups. People in small groups consider information together and they kind of statistically come up as you mentioned with Ireland with more progressive, more nuanced conclusions. And it's a kind of antidote. Right? I think this is your argument. It's an antidote to like sometimes particularly in London, they're metropolitinally all discussing art in a basement or whatever. You can be quite you can be quite you can be quite dismissive about people. You can or or there's an idea of, oh, people read tabloids and they're populist. It can be quite, you know, patronizing. But actually, the kind of citizens assembly are an antidote to that. They say the opposite is true. When you give people power, when you take away the media lens, and when you put them in small groups, they don't become prejudiced, nasty people as as they were shown in the Brexit referendum. They actually become, more nuanced and have thoughtful decisions. So that that's kind of the thrust of the point there, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And it's happened in loads of different places. I mean, I've got examples here. Bogota, Colombia, for urban planning focus, island citizens, assemblies. We've got stuff in The Gambia, lots of things in and Taiwan as you mentioned. Paris.
Paris now has a standing citizens council as part of its government structure. 100 randomly selected people represent the city population on all key demographics as effectively like the upper the the House of Lords of Paris. They are on an eighteen month rotation. They set the theme for €100,000,000 a year of participatory budgeting. They can commission citizens inquiries into key policy areas. This like that and that is why Hidalgo has managed to transform Paris, I would argue, some of the all the car use and this kind of stuff. Because people like the response to the far right that comes from this kind of work is going, alright, you reckon that it's about, like, that you're that that the elites are fucked. Yeah. Actually. And the answer, like, are you gonna involve everyone then? Because we are. Like, we're gonna we're gonna say let's do this together rather than we'll do it for you. Can I just ask? Because I'm not against citizens assemblies, as I said.
Where does the democratic accountability come in? And there's two strands to that for me because at the moment, you can pick people that are representative. I don't know how that happens, truth be told. But at the moment, the polls would tell us a lot of those people may actually be far right. Therefore, that you may not I think they work, and they they are favorable to people like me and no doubt you when we come up with progressive policies. What about when they don't? And also, if things go wrong with that policy, who's accountable? Do you know, is it the prime minister for enacting what citizens have asked? And therefore, why is that fair? Because you lot wanted it. So what you're blaming me for now sort of thing. So I'm not I'm just trying to understand it a bit more. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the the
sorry. First point, my brain has just eroded for the second one.
What if we don't get as progressive and nice things as we would like? Because at the moment, the country may or may not be in a very progressive place. I mean, the first thing I would say on that is if you actually look at the data on the
the percentage of there was an amazing data February this year across 20 different policy issues, the percentage of people who said none of the above was more than double that for pretty much any of the parties. And if you add none of the above and don't know, it was sometimes as many as four times that for any of the parties. So most of this country is in a kind
of a plague on all warehouses including reform. Reform are just set to be the beneficiary of that plague on all their houses rather than people being anti. And in in a strange way, that kind of it comes back to kind of, Nelly the point that Nelly was making in the previous debate and the point that you make is that for bad things to happen, for fascism to happen, all that you actually need is for people to say, oh, well, I'm quite pissed off and I might try this. You know, it can be very banal. You can you can you can go down a path that seems to be incredibly ordinary. Yeah. Yeah. And I my concern is history teaches us a lot, and history tends to repeat itself. And what we always say, nineteen thirties and before, is that the far right do very well in times of economic crisis. And that's for me why the material is so important because if people feel slightly better off, they probably don't mind that that that Brown family at the end of the road moving in even less so. Whereas if there is an assumption which Nigel Farage has cultivated very well that there is some level of skipping the queue, which we had in the early noughties and David Blunkett kept going on about it and whatever else, then that resentment fosters. And therefore, you lose community as well, and that's the nightmare of it. Okay. We're gonna go to some audience questions. No. The big threats to our democracy at the moment is
politics becoming increasingly seen as entertainment and just a lack of seriousness. Like, the two sides that you're arguing don't need to be mutually exclusive. There's, like, we need to take politicians seriously as, like, intelligent political actors, and we need to have those politicians. And we also need to take ourselves seriously as people who can actively participate and and not just choose, but also but also, like, affect things through our actions in our communities.
Hear hear. I disagree. Hear hear but John disagrees. John, just give us a very quick reason why you disagree.
I mean it's the Taiwan story that Taiwan crowd sort of He's desperate to get he's interested in us. Can I go? Can I go? Can I go? Jeshenga will be quicker, John. Okay. And how excited you get? Taiwan crowd sourced their national COVID response. Right? With the three design principles and this is why it is actually an answer to your question not just a massive force. The three design principles they publicly announced were fast, fair, and fun for the national COVID response. They set challenge prizes where people could work to get tech community to create apps that attract face mask availability in case in case outbreaks and this kind of thing. But they even they also did, like, load of joyful stuff. Like, my favorite story within the story is they set up a phone line where anyone could ring in with ideas for how the country's response could be better. And a little boy rang up and said the boys in my class don't wanna wear their face mask because they're pink and they think that they're girly. So you should do something to make pink face masks cool, and I think you should work with the baseball team. Three days later, they had half the time on his baseball team, the little boy, and the president on the national televised press conference in pink face masks. This set off a wave of pink is cool memes across the country. They even brought Pink Panther back onto prime time TV.
I'm this is all fucking true. Right? John, we live in a country of Boaty McBoatface.
No but this is exactly it. If you make participation trivial
then people take the time. But isn't that are you agreeing with Polly's point in the corner then that it's about seriousness and it's about taking ourselves seriously. So are you agreeing or are you just trying to get a point in about Taiwan?
I guess what I'm saying is serious maybe but it also has to be joyful, right? Like the thing about this stuff and assemblies and these kinds of things and I'm really wary of this all being reduced back to citizens' assemblies as hopefully you can tell. They are important, but they're not the whole. But the the core principle of it has to be, like, the joy of figuring out how to do life together is huge. And we're fucking deprived of that because only a tiny proportion of people
have any agency over the decision making. I wanna give a question with a quick reference to Kenya. So Kenya in 2010 brought in a new constitution and in it, they enshrined public participation. And the courts now have to interpret what that means, and the courts come down on on local governments that don't do it properly. And there's even the County Climate Change Fund, which doesn't just consult people. It gives people the money. It says, here's a community committee. Here's a load of money. You decide what you wanna do with it to deal with climate change. But it took to get there a thousand people to get killed in riots and and and regular election cycles of of riots and people getting killed. So my question is, what's it gonna take in this country, do you think, to institutionalize public participation in that way?
Boom.
I mean, I guess I'll do the shortest answer I've done. Please do. Please do. I mean, I think it can be the work of a moment. That's why I told the story about the riots. Like, if Starmer had done the speech that fucking wrote itself, I was in tears the next morning with how he did it, then you change the story in a moment and you create the space. I I don't think it has to be. And look, remember COVID, we had we had the NHS first responder thing seven fifty that designed for 250,000 people sign up in three weeks 750 signed up in 750,000 in 36 crushed the website. Like we could we keep having these moments when we could open this up
we don't. And I do think that Britain as a country in some ways is crying out for a narrative of, like, duty and civic contribution. Like, it seems to be in our DNA. It seems to be something that Britain really likes. That's a why kind of World War two has this great reverence and this strange, you know, paradox where a time that was to your point John and maybe I don't know how you respond to this Matthew, a time of like incredible material deprivation, grief, sadness and struggle, but is mythologized because it had a collective purpose. And we kind of we think back on that as a time of meaning and a time of national story because maybe life at the moment, that the stories that we're telling are kind of old echoes of the past rather than new ones about civic duty and purpose that Britain could have. But I'm ranting and I'm the hope. Matthew, yeah, you go because I've been neglecting you. That's okay. I'm used to it. It's from Stockport. Oh.
That's how you win the crowd over. Make sure you vote later. The the the thing that worries me about things like and I know we keep coming back coming back to citizens assemblies, but any sort of attempt to direct democracies and and the seriousness aspect is we we have a deeply unserious media. So you know for a fact, the Daily Mail will troll through any fucker that's on a citizen assembly and go, there's a tenuous link because they were at university at Wikis, Star, Mister, they're clearly a Marxist. George Soros has somehow put some money in somewhere, so all of a sudden it's a conspiracy. And you can see it all now. And what you end up is with the public hating the public, which is a very dangerous situation. I've probably played my part in the unseriousness of politics to my shame because I feel that's the moment we're living in. I remember thinking feeling deeply sorry for Kamala Harris, who I think was shot on by Joe Biden and his team and given ninety days to try and run a a presidential campaign. I think she'd really in in that time for what she could do. And I remember thinking, how do you beat people like Trump? You need we need to entertain at the moment. And the best thing I could come up with is we need to put the rock up to go and I don't know how we get back to the the seriousness,
chicken and egg, isn't it? Because politics at the moment is so toxic, so violent that actually it's it's such a high bar of, thick skinnedness to get into it. And actually, it doesn't seem to be delivering on change. So it's not attracting good people who feel that they can deliver on change because it doesn't have that environment. So the the first task, I think, is to stand up for politicians. Like most politicians who get into power do it for good reasons and they just want to change the world for some benefit. And the Labour Party at the moment, as much as they may be staggering around, a lot of them have personal stories about why they're there and why they want to change the world or lift people out of poverty. So there needs to be, in some ways, some kind of robust defense of a political class. So it's an attractive thing to do rather than everyone going, well, they're a bunch of wankers and Westminster's fucked. It it's a shit job and it's a shit life. You know, me and my partner, I had political ambitions a long time ago. I think I will support her in whatever she wants to do, if that's something she wants to do eventually.
You're away from home four nights a week. This is why they all go off and have affairs and everything else. Right? You get death threats every day of the week. 50% of people on Twitter think you're a cunt. The other 50% think you're the best thing since sliced bread. I always say don't read it because you're gonna get either think you're great and you're not. You're deeply average. And or two, you're gonna wanna string yourself up because people are awful. And in a way, MPs haven't helped themselves. People where I'm from, the people who are totally disengaged with politics think all MPs are millionaires, liars, pedos, sex pests, and on the take. Now every stereotype in life has a kernel of truth and that is part of the problem. The idea of a politician's answer and not answering a question properly. That they're all on the take because we've had the expenses scandal still in living memory. So it's and actually, it's a quote which won't go down well with this vote coming up. Something Dominic Cummings said to me, who I actually think, despite his eugenicist tendencies That's a big caveat. Yes. Big caveat. A very big one.
Oh, god.
He said you all need to get out of London, and you might really know what's going on. That is absolutely true. We saw that born out with the twenty nineteen election. And the other thing he said to me the other week, I'm aiming for a coffee and I'm eager to learn from all manner of, morons and geniuses. He said, is what we needed better elites, and maybe that comes back to the series. No. Because you're not you're not you're not gonna get rid of the people in Westminster. Oh, god. That well, I've ruined that now, haven't you? Well, we're out of time.
Back could've just locked the doors and talked about Dominic coming for the next four hours. Things could've got weird. Thank you so much for your time, beautiful people. Give yourself a round of applause.
We're gonna we're gonna
we we we're gonna vote and as Matthew said, he perhaps ended on a note that would alienate you all. But remember previously he did express vulnerability as a tactic towards who gave your vote. So hold those two things in your mind. I'm gonna vote for Matthew first. Matthew is crystallizing a vision of economic redistribution across The UK. That should be our priority to save democracy. If you agree, put your hand in the air and cheer now.
It's pretty good. That'd be great.
John. John is arguing for community led citizens assemblies and other forms of direct democracy opening up the institutions so they can survive. I think John John deserves it? Matthew deserves it? Christ. That's that's too close to call. You can decide. No. It's a citizen's assembly. We're we're just gonna go to the next person. We're we're randomly Shut up, Nelly. Get get a grip, Nelly. This is why now why why can't everyone win? Okay, guys. Everyone's won apart from who's won? It's fine. No one cares. You Guys, why am I I'm I'm like a terrible political elite just kind of obsessed with trying to get a binary referendum from the people. I need to learn from you guys. Thank you so much for watching.
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