TRIGGERnometry - "The Left Should Concentrate on What Matters To Ordinary People" - David Swift

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

David Swift is the Kreitman post-doctoral fellow at Ben Gurion University and the author of A Left for Itself: Left-wing Hobbyists and Performative Radicalism. Buy it here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Left-Itself-Left-wing-Performative-Radicalism/dp/1789040736 Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Get started today at IPVanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy with IPVANNish. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissing. And this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our guest today is the author of a left for itself. David Swift, welcome to Trigonometry. Hi, lads. Thanks for having me on. It's an absolute pleasure. Listen, it's a fantastic book. Thank you so much for sending it to us. We've really enjoyed reading it. before we get into it, just tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are? What has been the journey that brings you sitting here with a massive backdrop of books behind you,

so giving you lots of authority there. We've just got a blank canvas behind us, which is an accurate reflection of the state of our minds. Yeah, so I suppose I did a PhD a few years ago in history. My old background academically has been history. And yeah, like a lot of people, a lot of young struggling academics, I'm on the sort of job market and it's not looking great exactly. You know, there's a real surplus of people with PhDs and not enough jobs to go around. So my sort of second interest, if you like, was thinking, could I be a sort of more popular

writer, you know, who wrote sort of scholarly books, but with a more sort of popular focus or popular audience anyway. And yeah, you know, I'm from Liverpool originally. Don't necessarily sound like it that much nowadays, actually, but there we are. And, you know, something that struck me a lot when I was growing up is the sort of the disconnect between, say, the left-wing politics of many people in Liverpool, many working-class people in Liverpool, and say the left-wing politics of, say, the contemporary Labour Party, right? So when I went to university, for example, everyone was very left-wing there, but usually in quite a different way from the sort of people that I grew up around. So that's the sort of thing really that sparked my interest in the sort of the difference between the modern left, as it is in Britain and America and Western democracies, and the sort of people that the modern left is actually fighting for, or at least it says that it's fighting for. And when you say the modern left, let's just clarify that, because when people use the word left, invariably it means a million different things, just as when people use the term the right.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm using it in quite an open sense, right? So for me, left is anyone really sort of including Tony Blair, right, up and two, way past Jeremy Corbyn to sort of people who think Jeremy Corbyn was a Blair right, I'd sell out. I'm saying people who, exactly. So I don't just mean liberals, by the way, right? You know, in a sort of sense of being, you know, a sort of, I don't know, small state personal freedom type person, Nick Clegg, David Laws, you know, Orange Book liberal. I don't really mean liberals. I mean sort of socialist left, economic left. And again, I include or I assume that when we're talking about socialist left, I mean people who are also left wing on, say, race and gender and LGBT and all that stuff. And what has been the chart the evolution for us, David, over the, you know, particularly in the second half of the 20th century in Britain and the United States, in terms of the transformation of the left, because I would put it to you based on our conversations with past guests, people like Paul Embry, William Clouston, others on the left. The

or what you might call the left, I don't know if William Cleland Cluistons on left. But anyway, my point is the sort of people that used to vote for the Labour Party, actually France is probably a good example of this as well, don't seem to be the sort of people that are driving those parties that are choosing their candidates

that are forming the bulk of their support at the moment. So the word has stayed the same, but the meaning seems to have changed quite dramatically. So talk to us about the evolution because there's a little interesting tidbit in your book about how actually women used to to overwhelmingly vote conservative, something that now would be difficult to imagine. Yeah. Well, I suppose there's a few different things going on, right?

So one of these processes, I mean, maybe I'm different to Paul Embry in this regard, but one of these processes actually thinks a good thing, right? So the left or the Labour Party, both in the UK and also actually in the US since like the New Deal, Roosevelt era has shifted from being about a certain kind of white working class man, right? And not just any working class person, but somebody who works in heavy industry, somebody's in a trade union, right? That's what the left used to be 70 years ago. It didn't have much to say about women. It didn't have much to say about black people in the US or immigrants in the UK, or in fact, actually different kinds of working class men

who weren't in unions or did other kinds of jobs, like, I don't know, taxi drivers or being self-employed or whatever. And so actually, I think that this evolution now where the left is genuinely paying attention to all of these other very important things, which I think are important, like race and gender and so on, is actually a good thing. However, at the same time, there's been a sort of concomitting process whereby, firstly, these sort of people, as you say, who are behind, say, people who get nominated to stand for elections, behind people who make decisions, at the leadership of the left, the public face on politics and talk shows and

so on, that has changed very much. And that has actually gone to people who are, you know, very unrepresentative of anyone of themselves, right? It's not necessarily that, you know, your average black or American Britain, you know, is on the talk shows or writing the leader columns or even wielding power at the top of the Labour Party. So it's actually given rise to a very specific kind of people who really don't represent anyone. And this is almost where the title of the book comes from, a left for itself. Like they're there for themselves and their own specifically with people. And I think the problem here is that the sort of site of radicalization, if you like,

which is it's no longer the shop floor of a factory. It's no longer necessarily people who have been overtly discriminated against themselves. It's actually people who are acting out of altruism and sympathy with other people, right? The site of radicalization now is the university campus. And in a way it's fine, you know, I've got nothing against altruism. I've got nothing against people. selflessly trying to act to help people less fortunate themselves. That's all right.

But the problem is when the sort of, you know, the majority of left-winged activists, the majority of left Twitter, the hellholder is left Twitter, when the majority of these people are not trans people or black people or white working class people, when the majority of them are, you know, fairly well-to-do middle-class white people, then I think this is where the problem comes in, right? Because there's a real disconnect between the actual foot soldiers

and activists on the one hand and the sort of people they claim to be fighting for on the other. And do you think that actually, and maybe this is me and my own prejudice coming to the full, but don't you feel that when, you know, somebody who comes from a very well-off, privately educated background, you know, tend to be white and upper middle class, and they start to say that they speak for minorities, isn't this quite patronising, to be brutally honest? Oh, yeah, I mean, 100%. that when someone says that they speak for minorities,

et cetera, and, you know, it's almost like the taking other people's struggle to make themselves seem more interesting or even to empower themselves, really,

you know, to give themselves, I don't know, media coverage, to give themselves kudos or whatever, even to get themselves tweet, you know, retweets and likes and whatever.

When someone's doing it in that sense, yeah, I think that's wrong in any sense. However, if somebody wants to, you know, be an ally, as the phrases,

you know, be a foot soldier in a movement, for other people. I don't think that that's necessarily wrong. I mean, if you look at Black Lives Matter in the US, irrespective of what you think of Black Lives Matter in the US, at least it's led by Black people, right? So I think if white people want to help Black Lives Matter in the US, then, you know, all power to them, right?

I mean, you might disagree with the objectives or whatever, but I don't think that that is necessarily patronising. I think it is patronising if white people want to, yeah, as you say, sort of like, speak for black people, you know what I mean, and sort of like act as their sort of representatives, and like the warriors for them rather than taking a backseat and being foot soldiers, you know, to their political.

David, and how has this happened? Because this process of transformation, which has led in your assessment to a group of people who only represent themselves, being the public voice of the left increasingly. So people like Owen Jones, Ash Sarka, Aaron Bastani, Pustani, etc., in this country, certainly. I mean, I think Owen Jones probably arguably does represent a, a sentiment of people on the left.

But, you know, Dasakas and Aaron Bustanis, people like that, in particular, if they represent no one, how have they come to the position that they're in? I mean, it's not so much that they represent no one. It's that they definitely represent a group of people.

I would say it's quite a specific group of people, though, and not the people that they perhaps think they're speaking on behalf of, or they think that they're representing. I mean, I think what's happened here is there's all sorts of forces going on. On the one hand, you've got the decline of, you know, traditional industries, the decline of trade unionism, particularly private

sector trade unionism, you know, that's one thing by itself. At the other hand, you have this massive proliferation, excuse me, of university education. And also, unfortunately, at the same time, a decline in the prestige of a university degree and also in the decline of university quality jobs, right? You have this surplus, as I was saying before, but, you know, there's so many PhDs, not enough academic positions. And at the same time, we have so many people with BAs, with MAs, who aren't able to get the sort of job commensurate with that kind of degree, the sort of job they thought they would get. So they're a bit sort of stuck, really. And they all have internet access and they all have social media accounts. And this is where you get

this particular kind of left coming from, I think. And they seem to me that they wield an almost disproportionate power when you look at the, you know, the people who agree with them and who they represent. How has this been allowed to happen? Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world. So let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being, rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers. You're spending a third of your life on the thing. And most people have no idea, what's actually in it. Avocado green mattress is different. Their mattresses are certified

organic, built from natural materials, designed to actually support your body properly rather than just hold you in one position until morning. The craftsmanship is real. These are mass-produced objects. Someone has put thought into them. I'll be honest. I'm not the person who thinks carefully about where he sleeps. My dating history will tell you that. I'm the person who's been on the same mattress for eight years and called it fine. But the older I get, the more I know, notice that fine isn't actually fine. Your body tells you if you're going to invest in anything for your home, your bed is the one that pays you back every single night. Avocado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort

and support. Go to avocado green mattress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattresses.com slash trigger. Avacardo green mattress.com slash trigger. Well, I mean, it's interesting, right? So there's this quota used in the book by this sociologist Manuel Castel. So Manuel Castell said, when people can't control the world around them, they shrink the world to the size of their world, to something they can control. Or Timon the meerkat from the Lion King, put it more succinctly.

When he said, when the world turns it's back on you, you turn your back on the world. And this is what's happened with a certain section of the left, because they're actually completely shut out of power, aren't you know? I mean, even the mainstream sort of new Labour Party hasn't won an election in this country in 10 years. And obviously, many of the sort of people I'm talking about in the book very much reject new labor. Again, in the US, you know, if Bernie Sanders wins, sorry, if Joe Biden wins in November, okay, great for the Democrats. Again, this is very sort of mainstream Democrats and, you know, they're still shut out in many lower levels of power in the Senate, you know, state governorship, state congresses. etc, et cetera, et cetera. In terms of the board, you know, in terms of actual real economic change,

right? So you could say, you know, woke capitalism and the boardrooms of major companies evolving on certain issues, but not real, you know, it's stylistic, aesthetic things that they're saying. They're not going to give away all their wealth, you know, to the poor or anything like that, right? So in many ways, it's because, I think, on the one hand, the left, however you want to constitute it, right, the broader left or quite an hour left, because it has so little power in real life. It has so little political power, has so little economic power, that in the very few spheres in which it does have influence, such as social media, such as academia, it then tries to, you know, exercise complete power, right? Because that's the one, that's the one

thing it can do, you know, I don't know of you're a football fan, but I remember years and years ago when Pep Guardiola and Josie Marino were at Barcelona and Real Madrid, respectively. And Pep Guardiol going on a rant in a press conference saying, you know, in this room, he's the fucking chief. You know, this is his, this is where he's the master actually, not in the football field, but in the press room. And I think it's a similar thing happening with the left in a way, you know, it's because they don't have any real power that they try to, uh, sort of monopolize power in these very specific fears of social media in the media. But I'll see a question as to how that happened. I think a problem is that so many people are, um, they, they are really in

of being outflanked to their left, right? Because so many people, and in a country like the UK, where I think like almost 90% of the UK is white, right? So likewise, the left, academia, media and so on are overwhelmingly white people, overwhelming middle class people. And so we're in, you know, we're not black. We're not trans.

We're not Palestinian. Speak for yourself, Mike. It needs exactly. Yeah. I mean, if you listen to our fans, Francis has got some potential lesbianism going on just by his appearance. Good stuff.

So diplomatic. Just skip over that, that problematic joke and move on to something else. Fantastic. Yeah. So, I mean,

you may need this in a certain way to entitle you to speak on certain issues. Yeah. I have to say, listen, I am a lesbian. And soon enough you may be able to self-define as a lesbian and unfortunately,

people might have to just exactly go along with it soon. Never know. So it's because of this, right? It's because so many of us, we don't have the almost credibility that actually being black or Asian or trans or Palestinian or being gay or being dead poor would grant us. So we're terrified of some of the left or being outflank to the left.

So we don't feel as though we can stand up to these people. We don't feel as though we can say to, you know, the Sarkas or Bastani's or Joneses. You're talking shite, actually. You know, you don't speak for anyone because we don't necessarily feel that we have the sort of demographic credibility to say that. Do you think there's a kind of morality gap there? Because, you know, as I think many people have articulated in the past, the rights view of the left is that the left are stupid and naive.

And the left's view of the right is that the right is evil. And so there is this kind of accepted dogma, I suppose, that if you want to become more moral, you move to the left. If you want to become more pragmatic, you move to the right. and therefore to be outflanked to your left is to kind of concede that you are a less moral person. And we've all kind of brought into this. Is that part of it? I think there's something to that, yeah.

I think definitely, and this is more true on some issues than others, for example. Like immigration, which I'm not sure it will come up later. But, you know, I would be much more comfortable, I'd say an academic conference saying that I wanted to abolish the NHS. and basically abolish income tax as well, right? Because whilst virtually everyone in the audience or everyone there would disagree with me, they would at least think that was a legitimate political position for a right winger to put across.

I mean, I don't want to do these things, by the way, but there we are. But I wouldn't feel comfortable saying, I think we should have no immigration, right? Which, again, I definitely don't think, by the way. That's not the way we're going to clip it, Dave. I just want to make it clear to you now. That's going to be the headline of it.

That's going to be the title, mate. David Swift, no immigration. No NHS. No NHS, no immigration, no income tax. A perfect world according to David Swift. That's it. But this is it, right? So, you know, unlike, say, taxation or health and welfare spending,

immigration restrictions is not even seen as a legitimate issue for many people on the left. And so, yeah, I think there's a certain thing to that about morality and about how it may be perceived actually as being immoral to have certain opinions rather than just political opinions that you can agree or disagree with and people are entitled to have them even if you don't agree with them. Having said that at the same time, you know, it's so easy for the right to just to ape these opinions without actually following it through by doing anything

and get away with it. You know, you look at the way mainstream Tory MPs now talk about all sorts of issues from, I don't know, gay marriage to the environment, to even Black Lives Matter, to immigration, to crime and punishment. but it's very easy for them actually to adopt such many of the language of the left on these issues without doing a damn thing about it.

I mean, you do have certainly with Boris Johnson's cabinet because he has to sort of, you know, he doesn't have many people to choose from, so he has had to give births to the likes of Pretty Battelle and Jacob Bussmog, who do actually go against this and do actually say things that most career-minded Tory MPs wouldn't say necessarily.

But I think this is a thing as well, actually, that the right can just, and this is a problem with the state, at the left that it's just so easy for the right to adopt this language and say the right thing and use the right buzzwords and not do a damn thing to actually help anyone. And so this is the problem when it becomes more about morality than actual change. It's an interesting point that you're making because if you look at, you know, Priti Patel considered to be very hard line by people, treated as almost like some kind of, you know,

evil witch by many. And, you know, considered to have a very strong person. position in immigration, but actually, you talk about being outflank to the left, she's being outflank to the right at this moment in time because you have the illegal crossings, people coming into this country. And, you know, Nigel Farage is going, why is Priti Patel putting these people up in hotels and allowing this to happen? So it's almost like he's been, he's calling the bluff that the conservatives have been putting up by parroting some of what you might call more left-wing positions. Yeah. Well, I think there's, you know, the old Marxist idea of the base and the superstructure, right? That you have like a sort of objective material base which has this political, cultural superstructure attached to it. I think in many, in politics nowadays are similar things going on. In that you have the actual reality, right? You have real life. You have people's opinion on, say, the death penalty or immigration. And then at the same time, you have sort of what is permissible to.

to say, you know, the mainstream of politics, the mainstream of policy. And the connection between the two is very interesting and often very tenuous, right? So, you know, the death penalty was abolished in the UK, well, 1967, I think, or 65 possibly. And yet for the next sort of 50 plus years, the vast majority of public, or at least the slender majority of public opinion, wanted to have the death penalty, wants to have capital punishment. But it didn't matter, right? Because there was no connection between that sort of material desire for capital punishment and and what was actually going to happen in politics. And again, with immigration, you know, for nearly all of the past 70 years,

I mean, as long as there's been records, as far as I'm aware, there's been a disconnect between public opinion on immigration and what the politicians were willing to even consider what you would even discuss in polite society. So, and I think the exact same thing's happening here, right? So, yes, there are these illegal crossings going on, people landing in Britain illegally not going through the, you know, legal immigration channels.

And yes, Nigel Farage, and many people, you know, much worse than Nigel Farage, are going to make hay out of this to a certain extent. But who cares? It's not going to make any difference. That's the sort of reality in the base. But actually there's this sort of political superstructure in the top, which is decided that it's just, it's not really a priority. It's not enough of a priority to actually make the, you know, the mainstream politicians in the Tory party change their opinion or do anything about it.

Right. And this is the thing. I think, I mean, people say this about, you know, before the Brexit referendum, and then actually when the Brexit referendum happened, it suddenly gave that opportunity, right, for this sort of frustration or movement on the base to actually affect the political superstructure. But I'm not sure if anything like that's going to happen again, especially with First Past the Post.

You know, if we lived in a different system with PR, you can imagine Farage or a Tommy Robinson figure or whoever, actually really feeding on this, like the AFD in German, really feeding on this and winning seats and stuff, but with First Past the Post, they can't see that happen. And Dave, we've been talking now about the left. And is it especially that type of the left? They're so interested in being moral.

They're so interested in being right that really they don't seem particularly interested in winning elections. Is that fair? Yeah, I think, I mean, they would say, oh, we are actually. It's just, you know, either the way we want to win it, you don't think it's what's going to win, but we will, we will win. We follow this advice. Or, yes, we want to win. but not at any cost, right?

And I think this is the problem because, you know, it's not a binary, right? You don't need a phrase that I saw a lot in January and, you know, when after Corbyn was going away and Kier Stama looked like he was storming to victory in the Labour leadership election. The phrase I often saw was throwing X under the bus, right? Throwing Palestinians under the bus, throwing trans people under the bus, whatever, you know. You don't have to do that. Like, you don't have to actually compromise on your values to win elections.

you just need to be a bit savvy about it. I mean, look at the Tories, you know, the Tories don't go, the Tories don't literally say, listen, you know, we don't really believe in the NHS and actually we're going to, you know, underfund it or whatever. And in fact, you know, they might not. They say, oh, we love the NHS. Oh, you can trust us with the NHS. You know, they don't go and make Jacob Rees-Mogg leader the way Labor made Jeremy Corbyn leader.

You know, they make sure during election time that Jacob Rees-Mogg was nowhere to be seen. You know, see, this is the thing, right? you don't act, and I'm not saying you need to deceive the electorate, although arguably that's what the Tory party does, but Labour doesn't have to say we're going to do all these radical things on, say, I don't know, trans rights or whatever, we're going to have a much more critical position of Israel. You don't actually have to go out and make your whole campaign about that, right? You can actually campaign on issues that people care about on issues where Labour's position is quite popular, like on the NHS, for example, or on, say, taxation policy or nationalisation. Well, economics. I mean, Labor's economic policies were incredibly popular. It's almost a tremendous achievement that they managed to lose the last election

while offering a manifesto that was incredibly popular with people. I mean, this is the difficulty, yeah. And I think one of the, I mean, obviously there's Brexit and all that, and there's having Corbyn as your leader when somebody is so unpopular, and you have this guy's the figurehead. So there's that. But the problem is also the Tories can just pick and choose bits. You know, the Tories shifted to the left. you know, Boris Johnson said he's going to build all these new hospitals,

he's going to spend so much money. And then actually there's not enough difference between them economically, but the Tories have much more popular cultural policies or at least, you know, Labour are shooting themselves in the foot with some of these policies, which turn people off. So I don't necessarily think there's this like binary or dichotomy between, on the one hand, stick and true to your values and your moral positions and winning elections.

You can actually do them both. You just have to be savvy about it. And the fact that so many of these hobbyists, left people, as I call them, are just unwilling to do that. Like, they're not even willing to just keep quiet for a few months, win power and then change things, shows you that for them it does seem to about, like, the identity itself. Like, that actually for them, just keeping quiet about trans and Palestinian rights

for six months to win elections and then do lots of radical stuff on trans and panaceans and they think, oh, no, that would defy the whole point. The whole point is to identify ourselves with these issues. So that does make me think that they're not interested in winning elections. actions. David, I think you'd have to confiscate their smartphones if you were going to do that

to be brutally honest with you. Yeah, their whole point is, you know, in the same way that, you know, people who were rarely into drum and bass or people who were really into classical music

or, you know, whatever, or people who were massive Liverpool fans or Arsenal fans, they're not going to, you know, stop supporting their team

or their hobby just because it's, it's impractical for them or just because the team suddenly gone a bit crap. You know, that's who they are. That's the whole point, right? It's a massive part of their carefully created existence, right? So, indeed, just because it might seem a bit obnoxious, it might be counterproductive, it might not be

effective. It doesn't mean they're going to stop doing it because it's a part of who they are rather than trying to win elections. I've noticed with these hobbyists lefts, and please feel through to correct me if it's just me with my chip on my shoulder, but these people do seem to be contemptuous of white working class people. Is that a fair assumption to make or am I being unnecessarily harsh? Come on, May, that's unfair. We all are. So I think there's a couple of things there, right? I mean, firstly, there are plenty of white working class people who are really left-wing, right? You know what I mean? But they do exist, right? So plenty of white working class people are really radical on, say, I don't know, race, gender, sexuality, whatever. So firstly,

those people exist. Secondly, I think absolutely some of these people, people are. Some of these people are openly contemptuous and hatred of white working past people. As we saw in Bristol with the thing that was put up after the Colson statue was taken down, right? This big fat guy in a vest in a bin

clearly reeks of sort of class hatred and a particular kind of class hatred as well. So those people do exist. But also there are people who steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that there is a correlation between class and education and certain

political views and in fact the broader culture. There are plenty of people who say, how dare you imply that lots of white working class men, you know, a skeptic of immigration. Actually, you know, I grew up in the arse, it becomes like that Monty Python, like, free auction schedule, for however many

auction it was. You know, I grew up in the arse end of nowhere, you know, and my dad told me about how much he loved immigrants and how much he hated capital punishment and four pedophiles should be, go to, you know, special education centers, so you have this almost like, Dutch auction of, you know, I came from nowhere, I'm dead working class me,

and yet my whole family loving it. So you also have that section as well. And I think they're the real problem, actually. They are the real problem because they can't seem to admit that just because some people who have impeccable working class credentials are indeed very radical on all these issues, as I say. And just because their family may have been like that doesn't mean that's what most people are like. And despite, you know, several, you know, not just opinion polls and, you know, the best-selling newspapers and all the rest of it, were constant election results seeming to tell them, no, this is not how it is actually. They can't seem to just accept or concede, okay, sure, you know, some people with impeccable working class routes are very politically radical. Most aren't on these issues. Fine. We'll find a way around that to win elections anyway and implement our stuff anyway. They just refuse to concede it.

David, and I want to ask before we move on to maybe talking about what a positive vision of the left might look like. Just in terms of where are you coming out of from? Where are you politically? Yeah, I mean, I'm, you know, probably unlike most of the people you have on the show, I'm pretty consistently left-wing on all sorts of issues, actually. Yeah, I'm not happy with the smear at all, mate. We get lots of left-wingers on the show, just not woke people. And the only reason for that is that they won't come on the show because they don't like debating their ideas. But yeah, anyway, carry on.

Yeah, that's fair enough. I mean, it depends what you mean by woke, right? But for me, I would say woke is this like hobbyist idea, right? It's where identity itself rather than actual policies that you believe. So, yeah, I'm pretty left wing across the board, obviously on economics, but also on, you know, I don't know, race, immigration, gender, LGBT, all this stuff. But I recognize that this is because of my privilege to use a word that you might not like, you know. I recognize that this is, you know, look at all the fucking books behind me. I recognize this is because I went to a certain university and I have a PhD and I have this fancy pants life in London and all the rest of it.

Okay, sure, I haven't got a full-time job. But, you know, I'm doing pretty well for myself. And I'm never going to be, you know, so many of these issues which might cause people to be more skeptical on these issues. For example, you know, many feminists who genuinely are worried about, you know, not trans women, but men, basically, men pretending to be trans women to get access to their. changing rooms or something like that. You know, plenty of these women have these beliefs, you know, completely genuinely, and they're not bigots, they're not transphobe.

They honestly have these beliefs, right? Now, that's not something that's ever going to affect me, right? It will literally never affect me as a man. Likewise, I don't, you know, what happens with Israel and Palestine, literally, I mean, my wife's Israeli, actually, so it does no way. But, you know, me personally, you know, it has no effect on me, right? Again, you know, I probably could live and work anywhere in the world, frankly.

so I don't care about immigration. You know, I'm going to be the immigrant, right? So this is the thing, even though I'm very left-wing on all these issues, I at least have the sort of self-awareness to recognize why I'm so consistent left-women all these issues. It's because I don't have to worry about them. It's because I've got a really good education. It's because I have a fairly fancy pants lifestyle in London.

And I think this is the thing. So many people who are like me politically don't seem to have this sort of self-awareness to realize, you know, this is why I have these opinions, because it's perfectly safe for me to have them. I have no skin in the game, as it were. That's a really curious thing, though, because I'm just interested in terms of your own psychology just to get my head around it.

So you say you recognize that your opinions are based on having the privilege of not having to, essentially to deal with the consequences, right? Is that fair or is that unfair? See, it's not so much to deal with the consequences because I don't know what the consequences would be, right? Well, I mean, you say your left wing on that, let's just take the trans issue, for example, right?

So you are on the kind of new left of that issue? Is that? Yeah, it's difficult, right? I mean, definitely I'm, you know, I think, you know, third play, trans women are women, trans men and men, etc. Where I stand on self-ID is a bit difficult because, you know, if someone can literally say, without having had, you know, any hormone treatment, any operations,

without having had, you know, anything from a doctor or anything to say, yes, I am a man or I am a woman. That's very difficult for me to endorse that. But again, as a man, as a cis man, it's never going to affect me. You know what I mean? So it's almost like I don't have a dog in that fight. I don't have skin in the game. So on the one hand, it's difficult for me to have a concrete opinion on it.

All right. I don't want to delve into the specifics of that issue. I'm not trying to pin you to the wall anything. I'm just trying to understand. So let's take the immigration issue, for example. Because of who you are and how you live, the impact of immigration is likely to be positive on your life or have no effect at all, right? I think that would be fair to say. But equally, you recognize that there are lots of people for whom that isn't true.

Yeah. Right. So does that not affect your position in immigration? Because I suppose the truth is that it's also true for me. Like more immigration into Britain doesn't make my life particularly worse. and maybe in some ways it benefits my life, right? But I am quite firm on immigration personally because I recognize the impact and has on the country as a whole.

And I recognize that there are some people whose lives are very, very badly affected by uncontrolled mass immigration. Communities are destroyed. There's a lot of displacement. People feel like society changes faster than they can cope with. It's something that they feel they've had no input in, et cetera, right? So while my position is that I personally am not affected or if I'm affected positively,

I can see that the consequences, which is why I take the overall view that we need to control immigration quite carefully. So what's the difference between you and I? I'm just genuinely curious trying to understand. Well, see, the thing is that in terms of the immigration question, you know, the numbers are behind the more immigration skeptical route, right? I mean, you know, obviously you saw with the Brexit referendum, okay, certain disingenuous Brexiteers like Daniel Hannan or whatever said,

you know, we're not anti-immigration. We're just going to replace Europeans or like Indians and people like that and think, yeah, let's see what happens of so many Brexit voters if that happens, right? You know, the numbers are there with the immigration. I mean, we've had, you know, 10 years of conservative governments, almost, you know, six years or sorry, the last four of those years have been someone who's become prime minister because they're riding this sort of, you know, Brexit-y anti-immigration wave. So that's an issue where I don't think people need my help or my

defence, right? You know, the numbers are there with the sort of anti-immigration camp. So, yeah, there are absolutely plenty of people who feel either through economic reasons or cultural reasons or whatever, that immigration is difficult for the life and has consequences for their life. And fortunately for them, they've got, you know, a conservative government that is, you know, willing to listen to them to a certain degree anyway, right? They have numerical clout. right, they have democratic clout. The people who don't have any democratic clout are the people who are saying, like, let's abolish borders,

let's just have no borders. The problem is, these are souls who say, let's have no borders. Whilst they have so little clout and don't really represent anyone, they do sort of have a lot of clout specifically on the left, right? And they do create this image on the left

for the ordinary person, oh, that's what the left's about, right? So, you know, I think on so many issues, sort of small, C, conservative issues, That's where the vast majority of the population are, not least, by the way, plenty of, you know, black and Asian Britons who are very, you know, small, see conservative on so many issues. So I don't really think that those people need my help, if you like. You know, I think there's a perfectly good conservative party for that. And, you know, there's also, like, the possibility of a new Brexit party style startup. So I don't think they need my help.

So just to go back to your early question, I think there's two different things which might explain maybe, like, the slight disconnect between, you know, know, how I actually feel and what I might advocate, right? So on the one hand, it is consequences, yeah. It is because because I don't have skin in the game on certain issues, I can afford to have a more abstract, theoretical, you know, university seminar review on these things. But it's not just that. I think it's also, because, you know, I also feel this way in many ways

on things where there are no consequences one way or the other, like patriotism, for example, right? Now, you know, you remember years ago, Emily Formby, and she tweeted that picture from Rochester. I mean, horrific things, and also such a stupid thing for any politician to do, right? Does you not think there might be consequences to this? And then poor old Ed Miliband got asked, you know, what do you think when you see the England flag and you have to go pride? You know, you would never be seen dead draping an England flag from your house or your van.

You know, it does not make you feel pride. And that's fine. Do you reckon Ed Milibat has got a van? Exactly. I don't think he's ever been near a bad, mate. Me self the idea. I'd love to see him just driving around with his copy of the sun,

there's bacon. He can't eat a bacon sandwich, mate, let alone drive a van. Exactly, yeah, exactly. So this is it, you know what I mean? So there's no way I'd Melbourne, but I'd have you seen dead, you know, with England on the house.

And, you know, fair play, right? That's completely fine. He doesn't have to, really, he's the labour leader. So, but on that issue, again, you know, me, I mean, I'm from Liverpool and lots of people from Liverpool have real difficulties with English nationalism and English patriotism as well.

And that's a sort of thing, that doesn't really necessarily, have any consequences. But I only realize that I have these opinions, the way I would never have an England flag from my house, is because, well, firstly, I'm from Liverpool and that's a thing as well. But also, yeah, because of my education and because of my, you know, my sort of position and stuff like that, right? So it's not necessarily just on issues where there might be consequences for other people and not for me. But, you know, it's also things where I am maybe demographically different from your average Britain. And therefore, I recognize that I will have views that I

different from your average Britain. But I appreciate that and I can come to terms of it. And I think a huge problem is that so many people on the left like me with my sort of, you know, background in terms of education and position right now, just refuse to admit this. Like, refuse to consider that they are not representative of the average person. And doesn't the 2019 election give them any kind of message? You'd think that wouldn't yet. You would really think that, you know, but this is it. There's no, if you look back at just history, right? Because even things that went on the very, very, I mean, Labor before Tony Blair had only ever won two working majorities, right?

1945 and 1966. It won a few of our elections in addition to them, but were very slender majorities of like under 10 or around 12, something like that. So if you look at history, Laban hardly ever, ever, ever, ever wins. when Labour has won, like in 45 and 66 in Tony Blair's time, it's done, it's been very careful. It's worked really hard to deal with these negative images that people have of left wing politics. It's been very sophisticated in its messaging. It's rowed, you know, the Second World War, like in 1945, and it's used that to its advantage. And none of that has ever made certain people on the left think, hmm, maybe our ideas aren't popular.

So I was really thinking that one good thing that might have come out of the 2019 election is that maybe for some people on the left, they would wake up to the fact that, okay, sure, some of our economic ideas are popular great, but all the other stuff really isn't. And actually, if you want to implement some of this other stuff, we just need to be a bit quiet about it and be a bit less obnoxious. But, you know, not a bit of it, right? They didn't even draw breath. No sooner had the so-called Red War fallen. Instead of actually this leading certain people on the left to think, you know what, maybe the northern working class aren't the sort of, you know, hipsters in Hackney that we imagine him to be.

No sooner had that happened, you have the likes of Navarra saying, these people aren't the real working class, you know, the real working class, the MA students in Brighton and Hackney and, you know, so this is the problem, right? You know, they didn't even miss a beat. I think, I mean, I didn't watch it, but I believe after the exit poll came out on election night, the likes of Ashar Kar and Amber Stani were having this podcast or whatever or something like that

where they were, you know, talking about what's going on next. And again, they didn't have this sort of period of shit, you know, maybe everything can believe is bollocks. You know, they didn't have this period of, you know, quiet contemplation. They were straight on the air talking nonsense. And again, you know, the argument has been

that actually these people who, you know, voted Tory aren't really working class, you know. The real work. working class are the people who already vote Labor. So I don't think there will ever be a sort of empirical way of causing these people to ever think, oh no, maybe we should just try another attack. And Dave, I mean, let's cut to the chase here, right? We've been talking about, you know, this faction of the left, the fact that Labor haven't won for 10 years, even though you look at the government under Theresa May, who were pretty much useless, one of the most hated prime

ministers there's ever been. Is the Labour Party fit for purpose? Because I don't think it is any more from being brutally honest. I mean, it's really difficult to say, isn't it? I think definitely, no matter who, and this is what so many people have been saying, you know, anti-Starma people on the Labour Party. Oh, why isn't Starma, why isn't Labor doing better than the polls? It's always been really difficult for Labour to win elections in this country and get into power, always, like for the 120 years of its history. It's much more difficult now, given what's happened Scotland, etc. given what's happened in England, actually,

over the past sort of 15 years with the Labour vote. It depends what you mean to be for purpose, right? So if we consider its first purpose to be close one of the Labour constitution, which is to get into power, right? To apply political power in Parliament. It's trying to be, under Starmer. You know, they are trying now to go back down that route and actually giving a damn about where most people are

and what actually might win elections. whereas yeah, clearly for the previous sort of four years, it didn't seem to give much of a damn about that. Well, yeah, it's going to really struggle. But just because it's going to really struggle, this doesn't necessarily mean that it's not fit for purpose. I completely take the point that many of, I mean, when we consider what the Labor Party was founded to do

and what it was meant to represent, in many ways it doesn't necessarily represent that. But of course, you know, demographics have changed, people have changed, right? So I've read a brilliant book recently by Claire Ainsland. called the new working class. I believe Claire Ainsley is, I think, Avaich, Kea Starram's chief of staff, or someone pretty high up in his operation. And she makes the point that, you know,

the working class very much still exists. It looks slightly different to what it was 70 years ago. But interest, and you might hear some like, you know, Corbynistas going, yeah, you tell them, Claire. But actually, the point is they care about the same things that the traditional working class cared about. You know, they care about family. They care about their community.

They care about patriotism. their country, right, whether they be white, brown, black, whatever. They care about these issues. So, yeah, the Labour Party can still have a role to play, and I think definitely on the key of Starmer, it's coming back to that role. Whether it can win elections or whether, yeah, that's definitely a difficult thing to say. I've got no idea that can, because right now it doesn't look as though that's going to happen anytime soon.

But isn't that fundamentally dangerous for democracy, that we effectively have a one-party state where it's a conservative? is winning time and time and time again. And it doesn't matter how crap and useless they are. Like Boris Johnson, we can all accept now, is crap. He doesn't have the ideas. He's absolutely bungled the last few months. But it doesn't matter because Stama isn't going to win.

So what's the point? Sorry, I'm getting angry. No, it's fair enough. This is a, you know, infuriating situation, especially given all the stuff you've just been talking about, right? The Tory's recording government over the past 10 years, they're handing or bundling, bungling rather than having of this pandemic. Yeah, it's infuriating both in terms of what they've done, what they've been able to get away with,

and the way it looks as though there's no end in sight. And absolutely, I think that is a problem for democracy, but it's not necessarily a problem of the Labour Party's creation, at least not the current Labor Party. So it's other things. It's things like the Fix Term Parliament Act, right, which says there's not going to be an election for another four years. It's things like first past the post, which means that actually, which means, sorry, that, you know, it's not really even about the numbers that you get necessarily. It's about where the voters are, right? It's about things like the media. Again, you know, the fact that so much of the print media is ridiculously hostile to any Labour leader, even if they're quite anodyne one like Tony Blair or even poor old Ed Miliband, you know. So, yeah, I think there's a huge problem here. Again, if you look at so much of the media, and I I include Sky News and to a certain extent the BBC as well. When you look at their coverage of Boris Johnson and his handling of the pandemic,

I think there you can say they need to get the tongue out of his ass, really. They need to be more critical, especially, as you say, when the Tories have been in power for 10 years, and it doesn't look as there was any serious threat of the opposition taken over. Maybe the media could do better to, you know, to criticise the Tories. So, yeah, I completely take the point about Labor weakness being a problem for democracy in this country, but there's many other problems, such as the voting system, you know, and the media and so on. Well, it's interesting. The media thing always comes up whenever I talk to people on the left,

and they always have the perception, I think, that, you know, the institutions of the media are in hock with the conservative establishment. Whereas I think a lot of people on the right field, hashtag defund the BBC, it's gone super woke. you know, it's been so diversity obsessed, everyone from minority backgrounds now actually overrepresented there. You know, I appear on the BBC quite regularly. My experience of it is that it's super woke, right? So, and I'm not even on the right. And it's interesting, you know, I find it really...

That's not what everybody says, mate. Well, and actually, that was the point that I was just going to make, because I'm really enjoying this conversation with you, David, because you made the suggestion that a lot of our guests are right of sense. center. And I would argue that you are precisely the sort of person that is actually quite common on our show. I mean, you know, you're probably to the left of people like Andrew Doyle in the sense of your position on trans or whatever. But you're exactly the sort of person that says the left needs to do better. And then the far left goes, well, this guy is on the right. He's got an Israeli wife.

Case closed. He's an Nazi. Right. So this is, I think, one of the problems. is that our definition of what's on the left is changed a lot. You know, Andrew's a socialist, for example. I don't know if you're familiar with Andrew Doyle, right, but people say that he's on the right. People say that Francis is on the right. People say that I'm on the right. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of kind of,

I think both sides are tempted to say the media is on the other team's side. You know, anyone who's not with us is against us. do you find that as you make the critique of the left that you've made that a lot of people want to just dismiss you because of your wife's background or whatever else it might be? I mean, yeah, it's more that I'm critiquing the left and, you know, I can treat you from the left. Why don't you talk about the rights? Well, there's plenty of people doing that, right? You know, there's no shortage of talking heads and journalists and academics who are going to lay into Boris Johnson and Trump. And great, you know, I hate Trump, I hate Johnson, but who cares?

I mean, it amazes me the way so many people simply want to read opinions which they already have or see opinions that they already have given straight back to them, right? You know, I owe anything that Johnson and Trump are tosses. The question is, what can we do about it? Like, can we actually do anything about it? Why do people vote for them? You know, how can we get rid of them? These are the questions that I'm interested in.

And this is, you know, what I'm about. But it seems that so many people on the left think that if you're asking those questions, rather than just saying that a hundredth time Trump and Johnson are scum. dumb. That, yeah, you're some kind of traitor, really, you know, and that's a problem. But when it comes to the media, I suppose it depends, right? So obviously, the BBC, through the nature of the sort of people who work at the BBC, right, you know, from the top down, being, you know, overwhelmingly university graduates and fairly elite university graduates at that, being overwhelmingly white, being overwhelming middle class, obviously they're going to have certain opinions,

which on cultural issues are going to skew left, absolutely. But on other issues, like, I don't know, the economy, for example, or, you know, what should a prime minister, what is prime ministerial, you know, what is confidence? Then actually on those issues, they might be either pretty centrist or pretty right wing, right? And again, definitely social media, what depends on where you look on social media, but certain elements of social media are completely dominated by the left, but so what? Who cares? You know, it's completely powerless. It doesn't do anything. So is this, and this is a big problem for left, actually, and it seems that in certain areas, the left or wokeness of the left, like is dominant, but really these areas aren't powerful and it doesn't have much of an effect.

It's an interesting point you make about the BBC because I suppose given the nature of our show, what we have focused on at the moment is primarily what you might call the culture war. So if you look at the BBC through the prism of the culture war, you go, well, on the cultural issues, the BBC is massively left wing, whereas as you point out, maybe on economics that isn't quite as true. So I see what you're saying. But look, we've got about 10, 15 minutes left. And I've really, really genuinely enjoyed our conversation.

I have to say, and Francis is nodding as well. It's really a pleasure to talk to someone who's, you know, you are certainly more to the left than many of our guests, I would say. At least it seems that way, which is great. It's fantastic. We love to have these conversations. So let's use the last 10, 15 minutes to talk about a positive vision of what the left might be. Because I'll give you this example. We were sitting around having dinner the other day with me, Francis, Anton, our producer, and a few of our friends.

And we were talking about Paul Embry, who we mentioned, who is a socialist, trade union member, but pro-Brexit, who we've had on the show a couple of times. And we were all saying that if he was the Labour leader, the chances are that all seven of us around that table would vote for Labor. Right. So how does Labor get back to a position, and the left more broadly, perhaps, get back to a position where it can attract the votes of amazing people like us? IP vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV. If it connects to the internet, it should be protected. IP vanish encrypts your connection and masks your IP address, helping keep your browsing private at home and on public Wi-Fi. And with no device limits, one account covers everything.

Stream with added privacy. Browse securely. Connect with confidence. Right now, save 83% off the two-year plan. Get started today at IPvanish.com and take control of your privacy with IPVanish. Well, this is the thing. I mean, I've got nothing necessarily against Paul Embry,

but I know that lots of people, not that many people in the great scheme of things, of course. Well, certain people would not vote later if Paul Embry was in charge. Sure. I mean, these people are numerically very small, actually. Every single one that's got a Twitter account. Every single one of them uses it with a vengeance.

But, you know, nationwide, the small people. But they do exist. So, I mean, an example I always like to use is the Harold Wilson administration of the 1960. Right. So from 1964 to 1970, won two elections. And in that period, Roy Jenkins is the Home Secretary. They abolished a death penalty. They legalized abortion.

They relaxed the divorce rules. They stopped flogging in prisons, which used to be a thing until the 60s. You've lost content in May. You've lost me, mate. That's where all went wrong. Bring back the birch. Exactly. You know, they decriminalise homosexuality.

They did all of these, they also passed race relations legislation as well. They did all of these great liberal, you know, culturally left-wing, non-economic things. But of course, none of this was in the manifesto, apart from the race relations thing, was. You know, they didn't, they didn't, you know, they weren't idiots, right? They didn't actually say, knowing full well what they're voting. were like as well. They didn't say, oh, we're going to say in our 64 or 66 manifesto, yeah, we're going to legalize being gay, we're going to legalize abortion, we're going to abolish the death penalty. They didn't say that at all. It wasn't even official government policy, right?

They just gave time for most of it anyway. They gave time to private members bills. They allowed backbenchers to sponsor this legislation. The government gave a time, and they got it through. And I think that's a fine example of the sort of savviness, if you like, of what the left needs to do. The left needs to realize that, you know, aside from the state of the people who've been in power for the past 10 years, aside from all sorts of existential challenges in terms of the economy in terms of climate change, stuff like that, aside from all of the great stuff that the left wants to do on various kinds of issues, economic and non-economic, if it wants to actually do that and put this stuff into practice, it's really tough, right? It's really tough to win

elections, it's really tough to get into power. So it needs to just have no sort of false assumptions. It needs to have no illusions about what the electorate is like and what they need to do to get into power. David, hold on. I'm sorry to interrupt, but if I just put my, like, if I pretend to be on the right for the purposes of this question, right, then what I'm hearing, and this is, I appreciate it's putting an uncharitable spin on what you've said, but this is what people will hear, no doubt, is we need to lie to the electorate and trick them into accepting policies that they don't like. So I would say not at all, right?

So it's not as though you need to lie in that you literally say in the manifesto, we're going to do X, Y, and Z, and then do the opposite. Okay. Put in the manifesto, we're going to do X, Y, and Z and then do it, right? Although obviously politicians could be accused to do and stuff like that quite often. It's more a case of don't focus on unpopular shit, right? So, for example, Israel, Palestine is not an issue that most people care about one way or the other. but if you obsess over Israel, Palestine,

then you will attract loads of anti-Semites to your cause, of course. And, you know, you will look as though maybe you're not an anti-Semite, but maybe as though you are unduly concerned with this very, very, very small part of the world that doesn't appear to have much to do with the UK. Likewise, considering how few trans people are in the population, if you're always banging on about trans rights, that people don't really care one way or the other, right?

So you could move, I mean, you know, the Tory is nearly introduced self-ID, I think in Theresa May's government and stuff like that. So it's the sort of thing whereby these aren't necessarily issues that elicit passions really necessarily amongst a general population. They elicit passions amongst the very small group of people on both sides. But it's not really the sort of thing that people care about. If you had a Labour government which was doing important things on the economy, on the NHS, on education, on housing, for God say, you know,

If you had a Labour government which was achieving results in all of these spheres, very, very, very few people would give a damn if you also try to advance some of the more niche concerns of, you know, eccentrics on university campuses and on Twitter. And it wouldn't really be about lying to the electorate. In the same way that the Wilson governments didn't lie to the electorate, you know, they had cross-party consensus for what they were doing. And I'm slightly contradicting what I said earlier about, you know, how for 50 or 60 years, years after the death penalty was abolished, there was actually majoritarian support in favor of the death penalty. But clearly, not enough people actually cared about this, right? Yeah.

Not enough people actually cared about this issue to make the Tories, for example, shift to the right. Yeah, like if you ask them, they'll say they're in favor of the death penalty, but they're not going to go on a march to execute people. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense.

So basically what you're saying is, if the left focused on big issues that most people care about if they had economic policies that were front and center of their agenda, and they were not sidelined by marginal issues, which seemed crazy to most people. So if they delivered on that, they could afford then to slip in a few little things like, you know, being tough on Jews and tough on the causes of Jews, of whatever else it might be. They could afford on, say, to reevaluate Britain's foreign policy priorities, right? So in terms of, you know, our relationship with America, which is not been very good for Britain or for, you know, Iraq or Afghanistan and stuff like this. And things like that, for example, right? Things that lots of people will support.

I mean, sorry to, you know, go off on a little tangent here, but one of the things about Corbyn, which, you know, makes me think this is, he's emblematic of this hobbyist left tendency, is, you know, how hard would it have been for him to sing along gustily at the cenotaph, you know, and how hard would it have been for him in the aftermath of the Scripal poisonings to say, yeah, Russia of a scumbag. To just go through with this almost performative, you know, being a politician, going along with a going year, and then actually if you got into power,

then you could defund the monarchy, say, or whatever, you know, or you can try to sort of have anti-monarchical policies that you could get away with. Then you could actually, you wanted to, you know, reorientate Britain's foreign policy, you know, away from maybe a sort of instinctively sort of anti-Russian pro-American stance. But this is it. he just couldn't even, he wouldn't even do that.

You know, he wouldn't even go through the motions of singing in, save the queen, you know, and just being sort of, oh yeah, the Russians are clear behind his poisoning. So this is the thing. I'm not saying that this would actually win Labour elections, but at least we'd have a fighting chance if we, you know, could do these things. And definitely, I think, you know, this country needs a Labour government, I would say so. But, you know, even Francis would say, whether it needs a Labour government or not,

it definitely needs opposition, right? it definitely needs them to be a credible, you know, opposition. And Dave, you say all these things and you're talking. I mean, look, we've been talking about the left for what, 55 minutes, the first time we've even mentioned the housing crisis. To me, that is absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. It's ridiculous.

And this is the thing that, you know, compared to say, sort of political debates programs of like 40, 50 years ago, right? And you look on YouTube of debates in the 70s, it's all about like trade union rights, it's all about taxation. It's all about these sorts of issues. And okay, yeah, sure, they talk about foreign policy and sort of cultural stuff as well. But it's about the great economic issues of the day.

And this is the thing. You know, it's almost as though, on the one hand, there's obviously far more consensus now on economic issues than they used to be decades ago. And this included when Corbyn was Labour leader, by the way. There was still more consensus on economic issues than it had been in the past. But also, because of the sort of people who were on the left now, you know, the sort of people who are really at the sharp end of the housing crisis, say, and I don't mean people like me who have to pay through the nose for flats that they can't really afford. I mean people on the streets.

I mean families who are forced to stay in B&Bs, right? I mean, those sorts of people. They're not on the left. You know, they're not going to CLP meetings. They're not going on marches. They're not, you know, on social media making assholes of themselves. So this is the thing, right? It's not only that there seems to be economic issues seem to have faded to abeyance to

certain extent, that there's much more of a consensus than they used to be. But there's also that the sort of people on the left has completely shifted. It's not the people who really need economic change now, who are the loudest voices and the most prominent people on the left. It's people who are actually doing pretty all right, actually. I mean, you talk about these things, and like I said, we talk about how it's the first time we've talked about it in an hour's interview, which again, is ridiculous. And you talk about this need for the left to embrace these ideas, take on these challenges, fundamentally changed its outlook. And I'm sitting here and I'm going, you know what, that sounds great, but it ain't going to fucking happen. Why is that?

Well, this is it. Because you're cynical bastard. That's why. Believe. Believe. Anything is possible for answers. If you looked at what, as you said before, like, you know, the December 2019 general election, you'd think that for certain people this will be a wake-up call, but not a bit of it, right? But I think under Kirstama, I'm not just, I mean, you know, not just him, but some of the people behind them as well, like Claire Rainsley, who I mentioned earlier, a lot of these people are very sensible. By sensible, I mean people like, they care about winning elections and they're concerned with that. They're concerned with what is possible, with what they should present to the public. So I honestly do think that the Stama regime, whilst it quite sensibly makes all kinds of gestures one way or the other.

So, for example, Stama and Angela Raina both took a knee for Black Lives Matter. And again, horrific photo op, I thought, really pathetic. But again, this is the sort of left-wing performativity that can be good, actually, right? Because Starrma doing that then gives him breathing space to say, I didn't approve of, whilst the Colson statue should have come down, I didn't approve of the manner in which you happen, which, of course, is where most people are, by the way. So this is it. I think Starrma is shown really good promise in that he knows what to do in terms of symbolism,

and in terms of performativity to keep certain groups happy, but he's also got his eyes firmly on the prize and hopefully knows what it takes to win elections. Well, he's certainly better, better than his predecessor. You can definitely say that. And look, the thing that I get from our conversation is that actually, there's so many issues.

I mean, Francis brings up the housing crisis. Him and I talk about every time we meet in London, we look around us and we go, there's something seriously wrong with this country. because the streets are full of people. We were in Trafalgar Square a couple of weeks ago, and they're accused of hundreds of people just standing there to get food. In Trafalgar Square, in the center of our capital,

one of the biggest and most wealthy cities in the world. There are people, they're basically tents springing up all over the streets of London for homeless people. There's a problem. And I don't believe that the majority of the people of this country are content with that. I think that there's an overwhelming majority of people in this country who don't want that to be the case and who would want those people to be helped and who would want them to be looked after, whether it's mental health support, whether it's housing, whatever it might be. I think there is a consensus for all those things. But the problem is that, you know, the left has to get a shit together, which is one of the reasons that you've been criticizing them, I imagine. and this is one of the reasons that we've been talking to people who are critical because we want them to do better.

It's not to say that I'm in the center. I've voted for pretty much every party within the mainstream throughout my life. I used to vote Lib Dem for God's sake, right? You're pulling a face of me. You vote Labor mate. But no, actually, I voted for Corbyn at some point. So my point is I suspect most of the countries about. where I am, which is bang in the centre.

And if people in the Labour Party were to get their shit together, they might find that even with the loss of Scotland, which is a problem, of course, they could win the country back over if they just stop focusing on all this stupid stuff that's very divisive. And frankly, where the country is absolutely not with them. Yeah, fair enough. I mean, this is absolutely the message in my book.

And, you know, someone said to me once, oh, why don't you write a book about the rights? I think, well, the rights doing pretty well for itself, frankly. You know, I mean, the right doesn't need any, you know, critique or criticism or help now. It's been doing pretty well for the past 10 years at least. So, yeah, I completely agree with that, you know. The thing, the, I mean, you know, I remember that those of us who were alive, you know,

15, 20 years ago, we can literally remember having seen with our own eyes. The streets did not look like that. No. The way you do now in London and Liverpool and Manchester in any big cities, the proliferation of homeless people, the existence of food banks, you know, didn't really exist at all 10 years ago, as far as I'm aware. People can see the evidence of this with their own eyes. And this is again a problem, I think, in that, you know,

the left used to be about common sense, right? The left used to be saying it is not right that some people are extremely rich and other people go hungry and have no home. It is not right that, you know, white people have to these things, but some people don't because of the colour of their skin. That was really simple and sort of feed it off people's common sense. Now lots of people on the left say, ah,

but common sense is a social construct, you know, haven't you read Gramsci? And yeah, common senses of social constructs. But what relevance does that have to politics, right? It doesn't, you know,

that is an academic seminar room observation to say that common sense is a social construct. We need to, okay, say, fine, we can agree with that, but how is that going to affect

our election strategy, right? So this is it. Absolutely people are fed up and angry, and I think also this whole A-level fiasco is another nail, maybe not in the Tory's coffin, but definitely in the Johnson government's coffin. This is going to be a big problem for them further down the line, I think, in the same way that the coronavirus death toll and possible depression might be. So there's definitely an appetite for change, absolutely 100%.

And I honestly think that whilst Labour has all sorts of disadvantages at election time, if the last Labour election campaign was led by somebody who didn't have all a Corbyn's baggage and didn't have all of this sort of, you know, voter repellent ideology on so many issues, you know, the poll done immediately afterwards for people who didn't vote Labor, why didn't you vote Labor, right? Number one by a country mile, Corbyn, the leader. Number two, Brexit. And then only number three, there are no policies on a manifesto or something like that.

Right. So I think people are desperate for change, but so many of the people who are most desperate for change up and down the country, as we saw in these red wall seats, it's not as though these red wall seats voted Tory because they've had this spage of affluence over the past 10 years. Now they're becoming all middle class, not at all, right? If anything, it's quite the opposite. So people are desperate for change, and people would vote for a party which seems to be offering this kind of change if it could just package it in a vote-of-family-family.

package. That's a really, really, really salient and brilliant point. And unfortunately, it's not going to fucking happen. But there we go. Anyway, you've been absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And thank you for being coming on and talking about the left and being a left-wing guest and trying to cleanse our reputation for being all right Nazis and all the rest of it. So thank you very much for that. It's not going to happen. He's just going to become one of us now. That's all. Absolutely, So yeah, well, you're already halfway there. You're marrying an Israeli lady, so you've got one foot in the door.

But Dave, we always end our shows with the same question, which is what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Yeah. Oh, as a society, so, ooh, yeah, so as a society, that's interesting because I don't know about as a society. I think something in politics, really, is that a lot of people say black people, Asian people, gay people, women, are often really right-wing, right? And I think this is going to be the issue in politics over the next hundred years. The way at the last election almost completed the Tories making massive inroads into the traditional

working class, I think the big political thing of the next century will be the Tories winning over loads of Asian votes, loads of black votes. They're all there doing it with British Indians. I think they're going to be doing it with them. You know, so many, say, British people from an African background. are like Norman Tebitt or Margaret Fatch's ideal people. Like they are proper, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

You know, it's all about hard graft and personal responsibility. These people are really right-wing in many ways. And if the Tory party can just shake its well-deserved reputation for racism, a lot of these people are going to be going over to the Tories in the next few decades. So not really a social thing necessarily,

more of a political thing, but I think this is one thing that nobody is talking about, you know, the left always goes on about, you know, these groups of like women. gays, disabled people. God knows why do you think disabled people are so left-wing, you know, by the way, you know, but whatever. So I think this is the thing that we're going to see over the next few decades. Lots of people from these groups that the left is trying to put into this rainbow coalition are going to become more and more right-wing.

Fascinating stuff. David, listen, I have to say, we genuinely really, really enjoyed the conversation. We'd love to get you back at some point as well to chat more about this sort of stuff. Thank you so much for coming on. The book is absolutely fantastic. I recommend that everybody gets a left for itself. And where should people follow your ramblings online if there is such an opportunity? I'm on Twitter at David Swift 87. Perfect. Thank you so much.

Although I've got to be honest to you, whenever I talk about the left, I get just really angry. Anyway, it's fine. Mate, you just haven't eaten for about 45 minutes. That's all that's happened. We'll get a burger. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I can't, I can't talk. They just get me so angry.

Anyway, I'm going to shut up. We're going to let's end the episode so I can go and kick something. All right, fantastic stuff. Guys, thank you so much for watching. Make sure you get the book. It's absolutely brilliant. A left for itself. And we'll see you very soon with another live stream or another interview.

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