Dan Snow's History Hit - 100 Years of British Political Nightmares

Episode Date: August 21, 2022

Over Britain’s first century of mass democracy, from the Great Depression to the pandemic, politics has lurched from crisis to crisis. How does this history of political agony illuminate our current age of upheaval?Phil Tinline is a leading producer and presenter of historical narrative documentaries for BBC Radio 4. Phil joins Dan on the podcast to reveal how politics is transformed through fear— providing answers to fascinating questions: How did the Great Depression’s spectres of fascism, bombing and mass unemployment force politicians to think the unthinkable and pave the way to post-war Britain? And, how was Thatcher’s road to victory made possible by a decade of nightmares?This episode was produced by Hannah Ward, the audio editor was Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hey folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We've got some turbulent policy debates here over in the UK,

but I've noticed, you know, US, France, elsewhere, politicians are fighting each other, everyone's yelling at each other. People wish we could return to some kind of consensus. Well, first of all, was there ever consensus? And what's that even mean? And secondly, you don't get to return to things. That's not how this mad game works. You don't get to go back and choose your own adventure, cherry picking through halcyon days of mythologized versions of the past. But anyway, it's not going to stop people trying. Phil Tinline is a leading producer,

presenter of historical narrative documentaries on BBC Radio 4. He loves mining the past. He loves talking about where history, politics, ideas and culture meet. And he's just written a new book about the death of consensus. It's a history of the last hundred years, talking about consensus-i or whatever, whatever the plural is, when they do briefly form and then they disappear again and everyone falls out. And now that's just a natural process, the ebbing and flowing of a tide. It's not to worry about, folks. It might not be that enjoyable. It doesn't mean

you're locked in an existential crisis. It was great to talk to Phil about the coming and going of brief moments of consensus and how and why they do. Enjoy. Phil, thank you very much for coming on the pod. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Do you know, whenever I hear UK and US politicians bemoaning the lack of consensus, I think Britain won the Napoleonic Wars when its leading politicians despised each other. I mean, absolutely hate each other. And there's been extraordinary antipathy within the ruling elites of political class for generations in both the countries. Was there ever in Britain when there was consensus? Well, this is the thing about the word is that there's

ironically some disagreement about what it means. There's no consensus on it. Exactly. I would argue that if by consensus, what you mean is politicians sitting in the fields and hugging each other and singing Kumbaya across the commons. Obviously, that was never the case. My argument is that consensus is something much, much more specific than that. It's a shared taboo. It's an agreement that there's something to which we must never go back. So, you know, you were talking about nostalgia the other week about mourning the past. I think there's also a kind of great fear of the future and a fear of things from the past that drives our politics.

So in the post-war period, which is often referred to sometimes as the post-war consensus, there is a consensus and that consensus is we must never go back to the mass unemployment of the 1930s. Now there are strikes, there's lots of disagreement, but that is the nub around which everything is based. And my argument is that what that does is it gives a certain concentration of power to a part of society. So at that period is the trade unions. If you are not going to have mass unemployment, that gives the trade unions really quite a lot of power compared to what they had before. Before the war, the idea we must never come off the gold standard and then we must never have big deficits gives the city and the treasury a great deal of power. And that's fine. And that is a sort of rough and ready consensus that rolls along for a while.

The problem is that when that starts to break down, it really draws attention to the concentration of power, but you can't do anything about it because you've got this shared nightmare, the shared taboo you can't allow to happen. So, you know, famously in 1972, when unemployment hits a million, Ted Heath reverses his whole economic strategy. But 10 years later, when unemployment hits 3 million, it's a sad thing that can't be helped. And what I'm writing about is the process by which you get from one to the other, which is a kind of battle of nightmares. In the end, the nightmare of inflation supersedes the nightmare of mass unemployment. And so consensus dies, breaks down, and is reborn.

That nightmare of COVID. There was consensus within Parliament around nearly all the measures taken by the Conservative government on COVID. There's quite a lot of consensus knocking around, but it's more attractive to talk about people going bonkers about trans rights, for example, which is a very small part of the wider job of our political leaders to get that bit sorted.

And so you can see politicians using small wedge issues to kind of mobilize their base, whilst actually ignoring the fact that on lots of things we do have a great degree of consensus. Yeah, and I think it's important to try and step back from all the kind of hullabaloo and try and see, you know, the longer term trends. I mean, I would argue that where we are now is that ever since the 2008 financial crash, we've been in the process of democracy messily changing its mind about what it wants to agree, mustn't be allowed to happen. And fairly obviously, that was a big part of Brexit. COVID played a role in that. We now have the cost of living crisis. But if you see a sort of rough and ready consensus after the 70s, which is we must never go back to the mass picketing and to the inflation of the 1970s,

and Thatcher inaugurates that, Blair embraces it. And that kind of rolls along until 2008, when it turns out that the bankers in the city have been taking massive risks with the economy, and it all starts to go horribly wrong. Ever since then, pay has been flatlining. Those are the big sort of arcs, on top of which all the sorts of debates you're talking about sit. But fundamentally, I think we still haven't settled where we're going. I do think we're a lot further along than we were in 2008. As you say, there are areas of consensus, look at the response to Ukraine, look at the way we're pulling back from globalisation, as you say, look at the response to COVID, and more boring things that

are quite important, like industrial strategy. You know, all three parties since the end of the noughties have basically circled an agreement that we need to intervene more in industry. So yeah, I mean, there's always going to be lots of arguments. But as you say, there are consensuses forming, consensi forming underneath the surface. And until recently, you said there's pretty interesting consensus in the UK around climate and net zero. But there's a sort of a little bit of a right wing grassroots threat to that, which we'll see how that all goes. So what we're going to do in this pod, aren't we? We're going to go back through some of the moments in the last hundred years of history where you feel what how should we describe what you feel a new consensus has emerged as a

result of a crisis as a lot of a nightmare appearing yeah as a result of a long messy process of as i say democracy changing its mind and it's not like one crisis and then everything's tickety-boo it's a an initial crisis and then a long period, as I say, of a sort of battle of nightmares, a struggle for power. So between the financial crisis in 1931 and what eventually takes shape during the Second World War. That's a 14-year process. But I think you can see that process reaching a new consensus by the 1945 general election. Before we do that, we get these kind of rolling crises in democracy, which are kind of crises, and yet actually they're just politicians struggling and using legislative tricks to try and outmanoeuvre each other and they're what democracy is about yeah and that's right that's what it's about and

then you can look at russia and china on the total and it's like oh they don't seem to be having guys but then it's like mental health you store it all up and then there's a big old fallout right so there was no crisis in communist romania there was an existential crisis, right? So isn't this messiness and noise sort of the system working? That's exactly my argument. The last two sentences of my book are, what happened in the 30s, what happened in the 70s was not the death of democracy,

which a lot of people thought it was at the time. It was democracy doing its job. To get a whole country of millions of people to change the basis around which it organizes its politics is always going to be horribly messy and humiliating and frightening. And you end up with another messy compromise. But what doesn't happen is everybody who disagrees with the people who end up winning get killed or put in prison. It's much easier to establish a new economic hegemony if you kill all your opponents. It's much quicker and more efficient on the face of it. The point is, this is us changing our mind without doing that. So, of course, it takes longer and it makes us look weak until actually you end up with something

that's durable and has buy-in from most of the population. Okay, well, let's talk about 1931, the huge financial crisis. Why do you identify this as a big turning point for the UK? Well, this is the point where one of the absolutely crucial nightmares on which the polity before that has been based starts to come under intolerable pressure. So you have this weird thing that it's easy for your eye to slip over when you're reading the history, the gold standard, sort of bit of jargon, but absolutely crucial. The idea that the pound is exchangeable for gold and is therefore sound money, and that this is not just how the British economy is secured in place, but this is basically the sort of linchpin of the world economy. This cannot be allowed to be messed up by the pound's

value being pushed downwards to the point where we have to come off gold. So the Labour government, minority Labour government, is under horrendous pressure to try and do this because the system that they thought was working is no longer working. They think that, you know, eventually you will level out at full employment if you just keep running the economy on this sort of sound basis. But actually, unemployment is going up and up and up. And that means that you have a bigger bill for benefits and it means you have less money coming in. And so investors, foreign investors, start to lose confidence in the pound. So they are faced in the end with this horrifying dilemma. These are people who've dedicated their lives to making working people's lives better.

And they have to make a decision in August 1931 between cutting the benefits for the poorest in society who are unemployed and cutting government workers' pay or letting the pound fall through the floor. And the reason they have to make that decision is because they need a big loan from American banks. And in the end, they decide that what they're going to do is cut unemployment benefit, get the loan, secure the gold standard and carry on. That is absolutely intolerable for a big chunk of cabinet and for a huge chunk of the Labour Party. And that is the point, I would argue, where you start the long, slow, messy journey to what we now think of

as the post-war consensus. Because those Labour ministers who say we cannot go along with this are saying that the nightmare of the unemployed, the nightmare that their constituents are going through is worse, even than the risk of us coming off the gold standard, of high inflation, of the economy ending up in ruins, that that is even worse. That's the point where things change. But it takes over a decade for that to come to fruition. And the new consensus emerges and is helped in one respect by another nightmare that appears on the horizon, one that unites the political class. And that's Nazism, that's the threat of a German conquest of Europe and possibly even invasion of Britain. And that also helps to move that dial, doesn't it?

Exactly, exactly. The nightmare of 3 million people being unemployed is a bearable nightmare in the 1930s. We can put up with that. It's sad, but it's unavoidable. There are plenty of politicians, including plenty of conservatives, who want something to be done about it, who want something that looks a bit more like either Keynesianism or just more government intervention. But as you say, it's not until you start to get this even more unbearable nightmare, the threat of Nazi attack coming over the horizon, that the idea of borrowing money to rearm starts to make borrowing money seem more acceptable. But there's another nightmare hovering behind all this, of course, which is the nightmare of war itself.

You have the memory of the First World War. And for many, many people, of course, in the 1930s, the idea that you'd want to go back to that is absolutely unthinkable. It's an intolerable idea, particularly as weapons have got worse. The Royal Navy will no longer protect Britain. The spectre of the bomber will always get through. There's horrendous descriptions of firebombing of people in their beds. The idea that you would go back to war is a huge nightmare that has to be overcome. And yet, and yet, as the threat of

Nazism builds, people start to realise that actually the threat of Nazi invasion is so bad that it means that they have to face down this intolerable fear of war. And as they do that, they're also facing down the fears of breaking financial probity. And so you sort of get this nightmare, sort of cancel each other out. And you get to the point where the left is saying, OK, we embrace a warfare state. And the right is saying, we embrace a big spending state. Those two things come together in this astonishing coalition, which I don't think we talk about. It's very surprising that Attlee and Churchill end up in government together. You know, this very left-wing leader

of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, this very right-wing conservative maverick, Winston Churchill, end up in coalition. And that's because they agree that we need a big state to fight the Nazis. And of course, once you've got to that point, after the war, you can have a big state to fight unemployment. And illness. Absolutely. Although I would argue that the National Health Service is one of those things that confuses the issue a little bit about the post-war consensus. Because absolutely, you know, the foundation of the National Health Service is crucial part of the post-war settlement. But there had been quite a lot of healthcare in place before it. And after 1979, contrary to the fears of people like Tony Benn,

Thatcher doesn't privatise it. So actually, there is some continuity there. I think that's why I focus in on the question of full employment, because there really is a complete switcheroo on that issue at the beginning and the end of the sort of post-war consensus period. But no, absolutely. And what's really interesting about the way that the health service is set up as well is that when Beveridge writes his report, he says that there are three assumptions on which his social security system will be based. And one of them is basically the NHS. And another is that we will have full employment. If we don't have full employment, we can't have the welfare state because we can't afford it. And so it's something that we talk about less

than we should, I think, maybe because industrial relations policy is kind of boring and complicated. But actually, the idea of full employment is absolutely at the core of what we think of as the post-war consensus. You listen to Dan Snow's History, I'm talking about consensus in politics. More coming up, maybe? Aeroplanes, spacesuits, condoms, coffee, plastic surgery, warships.

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Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. other cultural factors here like the fact these you know lots of the then emerging politicians would have served alongside each other and you know they would have met on the beaches of d-day and they they were less likely to kind of fall out and have hysterical arguments about economic policy because they'd seen just how disastrous things could get when humans stop talking to each other when politics breaks down. I mean, is that other stuff going on in the 50s and 60s? Oh, yeah. I mean, I think the memory of both what the war ended in terms of a big state, and therefore, why do we ever have to have mass

unemployment, the memory of that, and a lot of these people also saw mass unemployment in the 30s. And then the memory of some form of national unity, you know, however, sort of sentimentalised, does absolutely hold that together. And it's no coincidence that the Prime Minister who finally breaks from that is the first Prime Minister after a run of several who served in the war, either on the home front or on the battlefield, who was much younger. So no, there's absolutely a generational shift to it. But you know, it's really striking if you take somebody like Anthony Barber. Anthony Barber is the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Heath. He reverses Heath's economic policy, is blamed for the high inflation, the so-called Barber

boom, and seems like this rather weak and feeble figure looking back compared to the big, powerful figures like Thatcher and Tebbit and Nigel Lawson, who are brave enough to push through and jettison old fears about unemployment. But if you look at who Anthony Barber was, aged 19, he is leading a contingent of miners at Dunkirk. You could not have a braver individual. And so, exactly as you say, the way that's channelled is not into a sort of chess beating. It's channelled into a deep desire to try and keep looking after those people. into a deep desire to try and keep looking after those people.

And so talk to me about the 1970s, this period that is hugely debated and mythologised by both sides, but it does feel like a period in which that kind of post-war consensus is breaking down. Yes, precisely because of what we've been talking about. Until people are prepared to break from the idea that mass unemployment is intolerable, you can't really change the system. People try. People try all sorts of ways to constrain the power of the trade unions.

Barbara Castle tries it in the late 1960s, 1969, with this piece of legislation called In Place of Strife, which is pretty modest compared to what Thatcher's talking about. It's certain ways of intervening to try and sort of cool strikes off and so on. That is much less than the trade unions end up having to put up with. But at the time, it's completely intolerable. So that fails. And then Ted Heath comes in and he's going to change everything, passes an Industrial Relations Act, battle tooth and nail through Parliament, ironically resisted very aggressively by Castle, even though it's very similar to what she was trying to do. The minute that's on the statute book, basically the idea is you're going to set up courts and settle strikes through a sort of

National Industrial Relations Court. The trade unions just refuse to play ball. The government ends up with five dockers going to jail. There's a threat of a general strike, and it all just falls. It's just unworkable. While you have this idea that mass unemployment is intolerable, you can't really do anything about it.

And that's where you get this sort of despairing moment after you've had two minor strikes in 1972 and 1974. This weird despairing moment in the summer of 1974, where retired generals are coming out of the woodwork saying that they're going to set up, or that they have set up, volunteer forces to help the state keep essential services going. And one of them, Lieutenant Colonel David Sterling, is talking about flying workers from General Electric in helicopters over picket lines into power stations to kind of take over if a power station has been occupied to do God knows what to the strikers and keep the power station going. And all of that is because it's so unthinkable to end the taboo on mass unemployment

that they're ending up talking about things that are effectively not democratic. Peter Jay, the economics editor of the Times, is saying democracy will be dead by 1980 because unemployment is intolerable. And so you have this whole sort of banging of the head against the wall of this taboo. And yet, eventually, after the winter of discontent, that becomes less nightmarish. And also, actually, I think people slightly lose sight of it. Unemployment's already quite high in the second half of the 70s. And so people start to think, it can't really go any higher. And you have this extraordinary moment where in 1978, the Tories put up their famous poster, Labour isn't working. Now, if you think about that for a second, that's very audacious to take this image, which has underpinned the whole sort of

post-war period, the dole queue, and to reinvent it and turn it, instead of being this sort of image of what Keith Joseph calls the gaunt, tight-clipped men in caps and mufflers, the archetypal thing which shows that Tories are bad because look what they did in the 30s. The Tories take that and take a photograph of a queue of literally Conservative Party members from Hendon, fairly middle-class people in 1970s-type clothing in colour, and talk to the art director who did it. And he's made a deliberate point of it not looking like the past. And they repurpose that image to attack the Labour government. Now, if you can do that, then the idea that the fear of mass unemployment is going to keep Labour in power is dead in the water. And then also you pick out other events in 1972. It's a hell of a year. There's Bloody Sunday. So there's British soldiers

are shooting people on the streets of the United Kingdom. And then there's another kind of industrial dispute as well. Talk about them. Yeah. So you have this astonishing period of three weeks between the 20th of January 1972 and the 10th of February, where several absolutely extraordinary things happen. On the 20th of January, unemployment hits a million. The mass ranks of Labour MPs are screaming fascist at Ted Heath across the Commons. The Speaker has to close down PMQs for the first time in the century. Then that weekend, Heath goes off to Europe and signs the Treaty of Accession to the European Economic Community, comes back on the Monday to be yelled at again about unemployment and starts to reverse his economic policy. A week later, that Sunday is Bloody Sunday. As you say, people

shot dead in the streets in Derry, London Derry, in Northern Ireland. And then another crucial moment on the 10th of February 1972, a young, obscure trade union official from Barnsley, one Arthur Scargill, manages to shut down, and this is a very, very boring place for such a momentous event to happen, but in the sort of corner of Birmingham in a place called Saltley, there's a coking plant. Now, how much time do any of us spend thinking about coking plants? This is one of the most important events in British 20th century history. He manages to get several thousand miners, plus many, many workers from local car plants in Birmingham, to form a mass picket, five figures, in front of the gates of this coking plant to stop lorries

going in to pick up coke and actually this isn't crucial to the fate of the miners strike there was a power station in scotland which is much more important lots of other sites are more important strategically but it's symbolically absolutely crucial because it shows that the trade union movement can put a wall in front of what the state and the police want to stay an open road. They have the power to stop these lorries going in, in the direct contravention of the chief constable who is there on the spot and has told the Home Secretary that he will keep the gates open come what may. Scargill is more powerful and manages to stop that. Now that goes straight into Cabinet, the message goes straight to Reggie Maudlin, the Home Secretary in Cabinet, and there is

absolute consternation. And you can see from the way that Margaret Thatcher, the sort of obscure education secretary sitting at the end of the table, responds to this, that this is the battle that has to be fought. And so that moment, I would argue, is the sort of the great moment of the fatal wounding of the post-war consensus, because for the whole period since the war, there's been plenty of strikes, but the trade unions have kind of rubbed along with governments of Tory and Labour stripe in and out of the Ministry of Labour. This way of doing industrial action is something quite different. Scargall openly talks about it as a war and in the end it's a war he loses. So then we get Thatcher. Thatcher famously said that Tony Blair was one of her greatest legacies so talk to me about how that new consensus diverts the messy beginnings of it. This is where the winter of discontent,

which is much talked about at the moment, comes into play. So, you know, at the moment you have inflation at around about 10% and you have public sector workers being offered a pay rise of around about 5%. Pretty much the same thing happening at the end of the 1970s. But whereas what's happening now is coming from the position of the trade unions because of Thatcher's legislation being very weak, at that point, they'd been pretty strong for decades. And this is the point where some people would argue they were absolutely acting perfectly fairly and legitimately.

Other people would argue that they had too much power. But politically, it's the second one that after all the strikes of the 70s is salient. And so Thatcher is able to say to the British public, pickets have too much control. I invite you to vote for me and take back control. Just as in 1945, the Attlee offer was something similar as well. Let's take back control from the bankers. Now it's let's take back control from the trade unions.

And so Thatcher wins. Now, what's so striking to me about what's going on at that point is, given all of the memory of the 1930s and the Dole Cues and so on, that A, that image is appropriated by the Conservatives, but B, Labour don't really do very much with it. And so Thatcher wins that election. And slowly, cautiously, she's far more cautious than people tend to think, they introduce laws which basically remove the immunities, the legal immunities that trade unions have. So the kind of secondary picketing that happened at Saltly Gate is now longer possible. If trade unions break those rules, set up by Norman Tebbit, a very canny former trade unionist himself, you don't send trade unionists to prison. He even jokes with his civil servants

and said, it's absolutely vital that you make sure no picket can get into prison under my laws. What they do instead is a strange word from 1980s news reports, sequestrate. They would sequestrate the assets of the trade union. So the NUM, when the miners' strike finally happens in the mid-80s, end up doing all these sort of Byzantine tricks to try and hide their money, and it doesn't really work. But by the time of that strike, they've already been weakened in two crucial ways. Firstly, those changes in the law. And secondly, because Thatcher has let unemployment go up to the level she thinks necessary to recover the economy, that massively weakens the trade unions. Because as a former picket said to me

recently, if you've got 10 guys outside the gates waiting to take your job, you're not going to go on strike. And so by the time the miners' strike starts, which we think of as this sort of great climactic battle, actually the trade union movement has already been hobbled in these two crucial ways, both legally and because of unemployment. And the symbolic fight people have been waiting for all the way through the 70s, the great crunch between the mass ranks of the state and the mass ranks of the miners, does happen. But I would argue that the miners had almost certainly lost before they started. And that's the moment when the new consensus is really completely underlined, because what that does is it gives managers, as they would see it, the right to manage without constantly negotiating with shop stewards.

And then that's the world I then grew up in, in the late 90s and noughties. And we regarded all these post-war practices as ridiculous and old-fashioned. And we thought that we'd reached the kind of final synthesis of affairs. And then 2008 happened and destroyed the whole thing. So talk to me about that. Yeah, I mean, I grew up in the same period. I was born in 1973. You know, when I was 16, Eastern Europe is liberated. And then the Soviet Union collapses.

And we're told we're at the end of history. And the 1990s, a decade I know you're fond of, feels like, certainly looking back, but even at the time, feels like a pretty relaxed sort of time, quite a consensual period. And what's happening is that New Labour have embraced sufficient of the sort of Thatcherite model to win a huge majority. But the system that they're running is quite similar. It's predicated on a free market and a strong state underpinning that. But like any of these systems, there are certain weaknesses. And in the end, for all the

huge torrent of tax revenue that's coming in from the City of London, and that is being redistributed in large scale public spending by the Labour government, in the end, the economic powerhouse of the country is, I think we would agree now, excessively based in the southeast of England. And so you have areas of the country which are quite reliant on the public sector, on the money coming in from the city, but don't have what they once had, the sort of economic autonomy and the economic self-generated prosperity that they once had. Now, that's okay while the money's coming in from the city. But once the economy hits a wall, once the sort of financial sector hits a wall in 2008, and it turns out they've been doing all the things that they've been doing with credit default swaps and subprime mortgages and so on. When you start getting banks falling over and the government

having to nationalise them or bail them out, you then start to have an economic situation which exposes some of these inequalities and weaknesses. And ever since then, in aggregate, pay has pretty much flatlined. Now, you don't get the mass unemployment you had in the early 1980s. What you get instead is people cutting their hours, cutting their pay, taking a worse job. This is where the gig economy starts going. This is where you start getting food banks and so on. But the government's response when Osborne and Cameron come in in 2010 is to try to balance the books and to introduce austerity. And so the combination of those two things starts to make all this much more political. What they're doing, as in 1931, is trying to shore up the existing orthodoxy by

trying to, as I say, balance the books and somehow get back to the happier world of the 1980s that way. But you're left with a lot of people who are very discontented. Now, how do they express that discontent? Some people vote for UKIP, some people continue to vote for Labour, some people turn to the SNP and so on. But the moment, of course, and you'll see where I'm heading here, the moment where there is a single vote where many people can express their discontent is Brexit. Now, it's not the only reason people voted for Brexit by a long way. It may not even be the decisive thing that swung the vote. We're talking about 17 million individual decisions. But I think in terms of its political impact, the kind of radioactive elements of Brexit, I think we'll

look back and see is people in what we now call the Red Wall and the rather patronisingly called left behind areas of the country saying, I'm sorry, but we're not very happy with how things are going. And that's partly expressed through concerns about things like immigration and so on. But it's also a sort of a resentment at London, a resentment at the model that I've been describing. And so first in 2017, in a slightly botched way, and then much more successfully in 2019, the Conservatives turn under sixpence away from the Osborne model and offer those people something. What we're seeing now is them pulling back from that. And so again, it seems all to play for. So I think you're starting to see

that sort of discontent that's been bubbling away since 2008 reach some sort of democratic fruition. Exciting stuff. And then the crises will go on and on and that's all part of the fun. That's what it's meant to be like. Yeah.

Great. Thank you very much indeed, Phil. Thank you for coming. What's the book called? It's called The Death of Consensus, 100 Years of British Political Nightmares. Thank you very much. Thank you. I feel we have the history on our shoulders.

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