Dan Snow's History Hit - Liberalism with Ian Dunt

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

In this episode, I was joined by journalist Ian Dunt, a well known a commentator on politics and on Brexit. Ian is host of the 'Oh God What Now' podcast and editor of politics.co.uk. We discuss his recent book which makes an impassioned defence of liberalism and tells its story, from its birth in the fight against absolute monarchy to the modern-day resistance against the new populism.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History here. Turbulent times produce all sorts of new heroes and villains for us all to get involved

with. And Ian Dunt has shot to prominence in the UK as a journalist who talks about Brexit. He was the host of the Romaniacs podcast. It's now been rebranded, Oh God, What Now? He's a phenomenon on social media and he's editor of politics.co.uk. He has written a book on liberalism. He's written Impassioned Defence of Liberalism. I thought I'd get him on the show. It feels like an interesting time to hear from a passionate defender of liberalism. I hope you enjoy the chat. It was great fun to do. If you want to come and watch these live shows, don't forget we've got a live tour happening. You go to historyhit.com slash tour. It going to be awesome it's going to be in theaters this autumn we're all going to be fully vaccinated up we're going to have a lovely old time the odd

handshake maybe even not the hug it's going to be great so head over there and do that if you want to get history hit tv another bit of housekeeping i'm afraid you want to get history at tv it's like netflix for history i've got tons of people on there at the moment watching the trip around the the submarine one of the finest preserved world World War II era submarines on earth. Everyone's enjoying that documentary, so good to see you all watching that. It's still January, folks. You can use the code January, January, and you get a month for free, and you get your first three months for 80% off. January's coming to an end, everybody, and I'm going to say you need to get this done before the end of January, because the deals are drying up through the dark winter that lies ahead of us. So grab hold of your device, get a history hit.tv

and use the code January to get your sweet introductory offer. In the meantime, everyone here is the very brilliant Ian Dunt. Enjoy. Ian, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Not at all. Thanks for having me. I think I know the answer to this, buddy, but why did you feel the need to write a giant defence of liberal democracy today? Well, because we're really getting it handed to us at the moment. And you see the consequences of that. I mean, we're speaking in a week that, you know, a mob, a violent mob tried to force its way into Congress to stop the result of a democratic, legitimately conducted election. Now, that sounds like if I was to put that to you,

you know, a few years back, this is where this stuff leads to. You'd be like, well, it's a bit on the nose and you sound a little bit hysterical right now but that is where this leads to and it leads even in the more sort of innocent versions of it boris johnson is a much more innocent version of populism of an attack on liberalism than for instance donald trump is but each time you chip away at these foundations of liberalism you start pushing yourself towards that kind of event so it seemed like a worthwhile thing to do to just go through history and say where did these liberal ideas come from? What exactly are they? So we're not just talking about liberalism in a sort of nebulous, broad strokes kind of way, but in the specifics, the roots of what it actually is, and remind ourselves of those values.

Right, let's do this. Let's go for it. I mean, what is liberalism? It's a word so abused, particularly in the United States at the moment. But what's it mean, I guess, in is liberalism? It's a word so abused, particularly in the United States at the moment. But what's it mean, I guess, in a classical sense? Also, what's it mean today? I define it as the political philosophy that comes from the idea of the freedom of the individual. And you can go in a million different directions on that. You can go really quite right wing,

you know, think about you get to keep all your stuff, the government doesn't get to tax you. You can go there and be legitimately a form of liberal liberal or you can go really quite far to the left you know sort of scandinavian sort of social democracy it spans a very broad economic remit but every time it comes from this idea that the freedom of the individual is the central moral value that politics flows from and that every time you give up on that, every time you value the group over the individual, you start bludgeoning people into homogenous groups. You start stripping them of what makes them human. You take away their freedoms. You take away their

ability to operate at their highest sphere of human endeavour. And that needs to be knocked down at all times. You see it in various ways, right? So right now in the Brexit debate, we'll constantly hear people talk about the will of the people, as if people are not just individuals with various eccentricities and interests, but actually they are just this homogenous bloc that all has one will, which is of course encapsulated by whoever's leading them. That's a fairly sort of light version of it. At the most extreme then, you get sort of the Soviet regime, the Nazi regime, you get elements of what happened in the French Revolution, where again, the group takes precedence over the individual, and individual human beings can be sacrificed to the greater

needs of the group. Yeah, I guess what I always think about groups is so many of them are imagined anyway. So many of them are defined by someone with ambition, someone on the make. Yeah, that's true. You still have categories of group. So for instance, the nation state creates a set group because that's the polity that you're operating in. There's also groups that exist by virtue of the oppression that they face, right? So you could say women. Women all face similar restrictions on their actions on the basis of sort of sexism, let's say workplace harassment or reproductive rights. That makes them a group by virtue of the infringements that they face because of a shared characteristic. So groups do exist in these various ways.

What groups don't have and where you get into very dangerous territory is where you say that they all have one will, that they're essentially homogenous with each other that's what you see for instance with race and fascism that's what you see on the class with communism that's what you see in populism with this idea of the people all want one thing and donald trump or whoever else or bolsonaro um or orban are best suited to channel that will but it's's also, by the way, what you see on the left. So what you see on the left with identity politics is this idea where people will talk about a group on the basis of ethnicity or sexuality or gender as if they can stand as the sort of guard for what that group wants, as if that group has one homogenous will. Each and every time you see

this kind of language, you're leading to a very, very very dark place let's go back to the beginning long suffering listeners of the podcast will know that i'm a i'm an 18th century fanatic i'm maybe going to take us all the way back to that fascinating long 18th century or pretty more near enough anyway where does the journey where does the liberal journey begin it's born really with with science with the scientific revolution you know you that's a very broad suite but for me like in the book i put it with with It's born really with science, with the scientific revolution. That's a very broad sweep. But for me, like in the book, I put it with Descartes in this moment that he starts saying, I can't be certain of the things that I'm told.

What I can be certain of is that I think therefore I am, that I exist. He grounds his idea in empirical study, in actually looking at the world and doing tests upon it, coming up with hypotheses. As soon as you do that, you come up with two units. Number one, the individual, and number two, reason, you know, logic, experiments, the attributes of science. And that's really the birthplace. But politically, it doesn't really take root until much later. You see the opening political ideas in the English Civil War, but much more fully you see it in the American Revolution and the French Revolution. And that's the point that sort of classic liberalism, the sort of core components of liberalism, stutter into life. This idea of some sort of democratic element of consent in government, this idea that there is a sphere of individual freedom that no government and no group of people

are entitled to interfere with. And then that really, that early prototype form of liberalism takes on full form in the Victorian period, Benjamin Constant in France, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor and even starting to put it with the kind of level of sophistication that it eventually takes on. So you sort of have those three stages, birth, prototype, and then maturity in the Victorian period. In the 20th century, liberalism obviously faces some gigantic challenges from both fascism, communism, I suppose imperialism as well.

Why and how does liberalism survive? There's this extraordinary thing in liberal history that all of its most visceral, most impressive moments come just after it nearly goes extinct. And that happens in the most pronounced way, rather obviously, into the late 30s and early 1940s, where people look and they see the consequence of giving up on the individual. people look and they see the consequence of giving up on the individual. They see the Holocaust. They see the creation in German society of a completely homogenous match, just bludgeoned into homogeneity.

They see the same thing in Stalin's Russia. And of course, in Ukraine from the famine, this attempt to just, on the basis of kulak, or identity, I mean, kulak doesn't really mean anything except that stalin was about to try and kill you and on those bases you suddenly get this resurgence from 1945 onwards where liberals just say look that cannot happen again like we cannot allow ourselves to go into that position and suddenly you get this burst of extraordinary creativity in liberal theory and part of that is Keynesianism this that more left-wing economic view of liberalism which is to say the state needs to intervene in

the economy that people's material lives are a core component of what it is to be free that we have to create stable economic societies and we have to do that on an international basis they did it there through the GATT the general General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which later turns into the WTO. And a little bit later through the EU, which starts doing the same thing in terms of melding economies together, in terms of using trade as a way of preventing war. And the third element of that is human rights law. That's the creation internationally, partly through the UN, then through the European Convention, of the set of rights that the individual has, which are not contingent on the state. Until then, right, so you have like the French, the rights of man during the French Revolution, and you know, you're offered all these rights. But the state, which is the greatest threat

to those rights, is the one that is tasked with enforcing them. Obviously, it's a pretty significant conflict of interest. So what you get later in the 20th century is this idea of, no, it exists independently of the state. There will be a court, for instance, in Strasbourg, where the individual can take their case that has power over the state that is potentially infringing on their freedoms. And those elements of creating international cooperation, of coming up with a material idea of liberty, which is spread to as many people as possible, and with international human rights law, composes the liberal answer to nearly going extinct in the 30s and the 40s. Let's come to the 1990s. You and I were there,

man. You were there, man. I was doing my politics A-level, and it all felt a bit kind of Hegelian, right? It all felt, it was all over. Liberalism had won. The wall had come down. Even China was liberalizing. Russia was an imperfect, deep imperfect liberal democracy. But it felt like liberalism was the only game in town. I was also doing history, so I should probably have a bit of a word with myself. You know, history doesn't just reach ultimate synthesis. But anyway, what happened? You know, 20 years later, you're writing an impassioned defense of liberalism like what why yeah that's true right but i think that's because something dangerous happened in that period and really it's from the late 70s

onwards which is a seduction in liberalism by its right wing by its laissez-faire wing the laissez-faire wing has been that all the way through i mean you see the origins in the english civil war and the debates that took place among sort of the levellers and the new model army about what kind of society they wanted to create. And it was essentially to say, look, you don't mess with property. What everyone gets, they keep to themselves. The economy works best if the state stays out of it. Then it's its peak efficiency. It'll regulate itself. Just leave the market alone. That's always been a wing. It's the right wing of liberalism. And during stagflation, late 70s onwards, that really took

hold. And most of those sort of Keynesian dreams of the post-war period got left behind. Once you got to the 90s, the crucial aspect that took place was that the left signed up to it. So, you know, Tony Blair in the UK, Bill Clinton in the US, basically accepted it. They were not the same as conservatives. They basically said, look, we're going to leave the market to do what it does. We will redistribute on the back end with the revenue that we gained from that, but the market knows best.

Now, every time that experiment has been tried, to say the market knows best, you don't really need to regulate it, it's a catastrophe. And it was a catastrophe in the end, because it took us to 2008 to the financial crash, where you had banks dealing in assets that they just simply, truly, genuinely did not understand, looked over by credit rating agencies who were paid by the banks to give them the credit rating. I mean, a massive conflict of interest, which was ignored, because people thought the market knows best, the market can regulate itself. And that financial crash, look, what we're seeing right now with populism is not just about economics. It's also

about identity and people's need for a sense of belonging, which have been questions that liberalism has struggled to answer. But without the financial crash and the austerity that followed, I mean, that right there was the start of the period in which we now find ourselves, of the rise of populism, of people asking, why don't liberals have the answers? And at the heart of that problem was really liberalism being seduced by its laissez-faire women. Well, that's that sorted. Got it. Thanks, mate. Succinct. I guess what I find very interesting is that there isn't a kind of coherent competing ism at the moment. People like Farage, Trump, some of the other wannabe strongmen around the world, they feel like they don't have an alternative. They feel like they actually emerged from a kind of, I guess, right-wing liberal economic worldview. I don't think they're right-wing liberals.

The way that they talk is fundamentally not about the individual. It's about the group. And that plays out all the way through. In their case, it's usually about the national identity, which, especially in Trump's case, is an ethno-national identity. And I think arguably for Farage, that's much more subtle with most of the Brexit leaders in the UK. You saw very little of that kind of more racialized language being used by Theresa May or Boris Johnson, although it's still there occasionally. So mostly they're dealing with the group over the individual. And on that basis, that is like sort of rule one, line one for what it is to be a liberal. As soon as you start talking that way, you're not a liberal. We can be expansive

in the definition of liberalism in the other direction. Like I said, on economics, you can go across pretty much the full range of economic opinions still being a liberal but on that crucial question are you for the individual or are you for the group that is really the definition of what it is to be a liberal and on that category even though they succeeded within liberal climates people like farage and trump just don't even get a look in really yeah you're totally right about that but what else is on offer right now what is what is populism right fascism islamism they've got radical agendas what is the alternative to liberalism or what is liberalism corrupting into yeah i think that's that's crucial to it that it got lazy and it

started to fossilize you know one of the crucial ideas in liberalism is you always challenge ideas right you've got to have blood pumping through ideas or else they fossilize and they disintegrate away and liberalism just didn disintegrate away. And liberalism just didn't have that. I mean, liberalism for decades just became really kind of overstuffed and complacent and wasn't asking itself crucial questions. Some of those questions are about economic matters. And the answer that a new liberalism has to have, a radical liberalism, is about giving people more control over their economic life, is about having a much more aggressive, intrusive sense of what economic justice is than the one that we've seen over the last few decades.

But the other one, and this is the really sticky, mucky, difficult stuff, is about identity. It's about people's need to belong, to have a sense of place, not just on the right, you know, what we think of as the right with usually the nation state, but also on the left, where people think that way about the various groups that they're part of, whether it's some ethnicity or gender or anything else. And this is the thing. People will form those loyalties. They will have that need to belong where the liberals have something to say about it or not. OK, that that that is the direction that all of human history demonstrates that that is the case. So liberals need something to say about it. And what they should be saying, you know, on the right and the left is that belonging is healthy and natural, that it needs to be mediated through the freedom of the individual. Belonging matters because it matters to the individual.

And the moment that it stops mattering to the individual, the moment that it's an oppression on the individual, the moment it tries to force the individual into a given shape, then it becomes a threat to the very notions that gave rise to it in the first place. So liberalism's radical future is about economic change, but it's also about actually listening to people who've been marginalized in economics, you know, left behind towns in the US and in the UK, just left behind by laissez-faire without any help. But listening to people about the kind of oppression they face because of their race, because of the colour of their skin, because of their gender, their sexuality, and saying, we will fight these battles with you, because that is a battle for human freedom. To rejuvenate it,

liberalism needs to rediscover its radicalism. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm on with Ian Dunt, more coming up Land a Viking longship on island shores Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt And avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence Each week on Echoes of History We uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai

warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity.

Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. I accept that right now it doesn't feel like we're in a great place. It feels bleak. It feels dark. But I see around me all the time, whether it's Black Lives Matter we're in a great place it feels bleak it feels dark but i see around me all the time whether it's black lives matters protests in the us whether it's the people that were going to protest in their local towns when boris johnson prorogued parliament and unlawfully that i see this great proper need this recognition that something is terribly terribly wrong with the way that our society is going and that they want to stand up and fight for it so the anger is there

the feelings are there we just need more of the kind of vehicles in which to promote these political ideas. Yeah, the brave people of Minsk are now of Russia who are braving sub-zero temperatures and appalling violence to demand our self-same liberal values. Okay, well, so listen, that's the populist threat. What about the other threat to liberalism? I guess Chinese-style, digitally enhanced authoritarianism. What do people call it? Surveillance, sort of surveillance capitalism. I detect kind of nervousness around at the moment. What if John Locke was right until now? What if authoritarian states, he argued, were not able to maintain order because they were just fundamentally illegitimate, and therefore there were the seeds of destruction within it? What if the internet allows authoritarian states to control populations and seemingly improve living standards?

What if the internet squared the circle? Yeah, I mean, I can't put them on. I'm not going to try and quantify it, but I agree. The rise of China. Less so with Russia. I mean, Russia is kind put them on. I'm not going to try and quantify it, but I agree. The rise of China, less so with Russia. I mean, Russia is kind of this gangster state that has a disproportionate sense of influence by the mucky games it plays online to what it really has in terms of its core components as a state. But especially with China, it's probably concerning. The thing that gives me hope is it's in Karl Popper.

Karl Popper is great, a 20th century liberal philosopher, especially in the philosophy of science. One of his things with liberalism, he calls it the open society mostly, is that it is not just the most moral society, the most decent society, it's also the most efficient society. And the reason for that is every time you put forward a policy, the policy is going to have effects that you did not foresee in the first place, right? Even if it's just about changing the make of the video cameras that you use at traffic stops, you will have inadvertent consequences to that. Now, societies that try to clamp down on dissent, that clamp down on critical voices, keep on being overwhelmed by the consequences of these inadvertent effects because they never bothered to try and find out what they were. Open societies that keep on looking to speak to their critics, that keep on poking away at what the powers that be are doing, find that they start to operate at a much higher level of efficiency

because they're thinking through the problems of implementation. Now you have got a case study of this right now in the UK where we have a government that is simply not listening to critical voices, that is an echo chamber around Downing Street. So what you see when you look at the coronavirus response is the same mistakes happening again and again and again. You know, Boris Johnson making the same mistake last March as he's currently making in this period of doing too little, too late, over and over in the country, gradually getting overwhelmed by that. Now, that is an example of what happens when you move away from engaging with critical voices. Now, on the grand scale, you can see periods where countries like China will be doing better. And we are in that period right now. But ultimately, only open societies function on a level of efficiency.

And those that try to close themselves off from information are ultimately burying their own graves. What about the history? What have you learned that's inspired you, that has convinced you? What makes you so sure that liberalism is the future? You know, one of them was the power of a stubborn individual. You know, throughout the story, what you've got is just these men and women who just will not do what they're told. And they're all weird. I mean, they're all very weird individuals, very cantankerous, extremely eccentric, mostly extremely unpopular. I mean, hardly any of them would you want to go for a pint with. I've got to be honest. But they're just so stubborn. They just will not let it go.

And they fight and they fight and they write and they campaign and they demonstrate. And most of the time they fail in their life. I'm not going to lie about that. Most of the time in their lifespan, they're a failure. But these ideas just bubble away and grow and are built on by others and then just start sweeping the world. I mean, you get that, you know, all the way through. You look at the American Revolution, you mentioned John Locke. John Locke was, I mean, he himself was, you know, obviously went into hiding during the Glorious Revolution. But he was building on the work of, you know, the English Civil War radicals, you know, the Levellers, people like John Lilburn, people like Richard

Overton, William Warwin, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough. These ideas of these guys that mostly, you know, got killed or had to flee into exile when Cromwell took power. But those ideas found their way into Locke. And from Locke, they established themselves in the American Constitution. So these ideas, you constantly have that sense of just these guys that won't give up, that are properly committed to these values. In the end, they triumph. And I still feel that these are properly committed to these values, in the end they triumph. And I still feel that these are the principles that operate today, that it's not like, it's not that liberalism succeeds because it has some kind of vested power interest behind it or anything like that. It succeeds because it deals in truth. It deals in truth and liberty.

And truth and liberty still matter to people. And even though they can give up for a while dwelling on the past or wanting this sense of sort of protection that comes from dealing with categorised groups, they eventually ultimately come back to these values. The values sustain themselves. They triumph over time. So for that, I know this sounds a bit like these are the stories you have to tell yourself in the middle of lockdown, when all of your politics is falling apart in order to not lose hope but ultimately that is the stuff that gives me hope that we will triumph in the end yeah what about that future i mean i'm struck by the 18th and 19th century it's easy to point out things that liberals specifically wanted right they wanted kind of legal uh qualities gender equality uh the franchise what are those equivalents now is it universal basic income is it Is it digital voting?

Like, what is it? So with all of the things I'm about to say, I mean, what you want is a proper program of being willing and radical and adventurous enough to test them to see if they work. And that's particularly the case with universal basic income. You have these ideas that you think of them and you think suddenly of the degree of human freedom that they could provide like i mean we think of you know think of the universal basic income like imagine someone who parents weren't very well off you know as soon as they're out of school they had to be making money in order to support the family so the cold question of what kind of a career do you want which is the ultimate privilege right the middle class people get oh you

can have three years in university and you can dwell on it. Maybe you go traveling for a year, come back and you decide if you want to be a lawyer or this or that. Most people don't have that kind of privilege. They don't have that kind of freedom. They just have to be making money immediately. And when you have to make money immediately, it's much, much harder to get to the position where you can invest in time, et cetera, to get to the kind of profession that you might ideally want if we have a set amount of money coming in for someone each month that frees them up from the immediate material concerns and allows them to think what might i actually want to do what expresses my

individuality best they might even just think that with hobbies it doesn't even need to be a professional career that idea is so profoundly attractive of just ridding people from the restrictions that come with material need as much as possible. And that any liberal should be attracted to it, but we need to look at how it operates in practice. We need to have governments that are prepared to do pilots that really look at what are the effects, what are the kind of inadvertent consequences that Popper would be thinking about that might stem from doing this? Might it make us really anti-immigration to follow that policy? Because we suddenly have the state giving money to everyone, so suddenly we become more restrictive of other people coming into the country. You'd have the same with most

kind of constitutional reform, especially in this country. I haven't met someone for years on any part of the political spectrum who thinks that our current constitutional arrangements with the House of Lords, with first-past-the-post voting systems, or let alone devolution and the various nations of the UK, are in any way fit for purpose. But we just don't have governments that have the ambition and the sense of historical responsibility to start recognising the severity of the instance and how quickly we need to repair it. So with all of these things, you want proper radical change on electoral reform, on constitutional movements, on the whole economic life that we have, on addressing the kind of

restrictions that marginalized groups face in society. But what we need in each case is for governments to be liberal, not just about the ideas themselves, but how they seek to explore them, whether they look at whether they could have unintended consequences, following them through in a scientific, empirical kind of way. That's the kind of thing that we'd be looking for from a successful party. And I'm not going to lie, I don't see much evidence of people proposing it, either from oppositions or from governments at the moment. Dude, I would add evidence-led policymaking. It's the new radical underground. It's super exciting.

It's on my banner. It's cool again. Yeah, that's the thing. It's completely batting fashion. I mean, we know things now because we've collected data that people didn't know 200 years ago. Things like education, criminal justice, climate. People call them intractable problems,

but we actually have the solutions, right? Early intervention, aggressive early intervention with kids the minute they're born works my wife work is a criminal justice advocate the answers are there like people have built incredible compassionate criminal justice systems that satisfy the victims and work with criminals to make sure they commit less crimes i mean we know this stuff now right and yet politicians say yeah we're just going to build we're going to build more prisons it's so true true. And, you know, there's almost no area more than criminal justice where the absolute absence of evidence based policymaking is more obvious. Like you say, we know what works. We know that maintaining family contact for the prisoner.

We know that building up their educational capabilities, their mental health, so that they can hold down jobs, basically rooting them in a community and providing the basis upon which that can be done, works. We have the evidence over and over again. Instead, government after government comes in, promises to be tough on crime, goes in and usually dismantles many of the institutions in prisons, which might achieve the kind of rehabilitation which they say they care about. And on and on the cycle goes again and it's particularly pressing in criminal justice because it's a part of policy making that people just don't care about right they care about schools

they send their kids there they care about hospitals because they might end up there they're not intending on going to prison so they don't really care and that's what happens when journalism stops doing its job when When journalism stops really showing the reality of how things proceed, you get governments that are able to just go in there and vandalise the kind of things that we know work. So part of this problem absolutely is with governments not following evidence-based policy. The other half is with journalists who just aren't telling the stories, who are too reticent about going into areas they think readers aren't interested in. And so we never get the kind of information that forces political change from government in the first place let's end up i want

to ask you about journalism um you've risen to prominence during brexit here in the uk you were a leading light of the romana movement uh i don't know what it's called now let's just call it the sad the sad but what's it like as a? We hear about all the challenges facing your industry, the enormous threats. Your industry is getting hammered by politicians, by technological change. What's going on? What's it like in there? I mean, I can't pretend it's that bad. I mean, what it really involves is just opening up Twitter every day and having an awful lot of people say very, very dreadful things to you. But it doesn't, you know, on left and right, but it doesn't have a big bearing. It doesn't, you know, on left and right, but it doesn't have a big bearing. And, you know, I'm a white heterosexual bloke, so I'm not getting it anywhere near as hard as my female colleagues or really anyone from any kind of marginalized identity gets it. They get it in a brutal, personal way that would send shivers up my spine if I was ever to see it directed towards me.

So it's pretty easy in that way. me so it's pretty easy in that way it's also pretty easy in the you know you look in the us what my colleagues were putting up with when they're going you know to report on trump rallies where they i mean you know we've seen the violence now directed towards policing we've seen the disgusting videos this week of what was metered out to the police trying to defend congress and last wednesday i mean ultimately this was the threat of violence that journalists were facing in those rallies when they were being called enemies of the people. And so for that, you know, it's a much easier life than they than they have there. And there is, I have to say right now, a feeling of like a surge of interest of people who want decent journalism that actually tells truths about the world.

Now, you can have that as I write it, like, this is where I'm coming from. It's perfectly obvious what my sympathies are in this matter. But the work that I'm putting out there can be independently verified by you, and I stand by the quality of it, regardless of where you're coming from politically. And there is an appetite for that. And I hope the more that people start thinking of themselves

as people who believe in truth, who reject post-truth, who want an empirical basis for what they read, that they will look at this kind of quality journalism for different policy areas and support it, support it financially, but support it through their clicks. Every time someone clicks on something online, what you're doing is saying, I want more of this. And I think it's worthwhile thinking about that.

Next time there's some debate about people getting terribly angry over whether they're going to do the last night of the proms or all these kind of wedge cultural identity issues that really are just a bunch of noise with no content. And we're not reading the stuff of what's going on in policy areas in this country, the details of what is happening in other countries. But at the moment, I feel that that demand is there. I feel the urge is there. And maybe the Internet just opened us up to having that kind of audience. So it's actually quite rewarding in that way, even though overall, we're in a losing position. You do get that sense that there's a drive towards people wanting proper, honest journalism that tells them something real about the world. Well, thank you very much. I congratulate you on the book and everything you're doing at the moment. Just tell us, what's the book called? The book is called

How to Be a Liberal. Thanks, man. Just go and buy it, everybody. Cheers, Ben. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history,

our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished and liquidated. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go,

bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome,

but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.