TRIGGERnometry - "The System is Rigged Against the Poor" - Darren McGarvey

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Darren McGarvey is a musician, social commentator and the author of 'The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain' Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ 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

As we enter this cost of living crisis, which has been going on for people in these communities for a long time, it's only because it's beginning to affect the lower and upper middle classes, lifestyles, that it's now become a legitimate area of conversation. The problem of Britain in recent decades has been the fact that the people who run the country have absolutely no clue what's going on where you were going. The people in charge are almost like aliens in terms of the level of common ground that they have with. ordinary people. And it's interesting because politics is a curious profession where you don't have to have any prior qualifications, any specialism. Really, you just have to kind of have the ego

to put yourself forward. The politicians, the political classes are democratic structures. They're not designed to take incoming calls. But what we have now as a society that's so deeply unequal that in a representative democracy, the people who are elected to represent us are unrepresentative of us. But when you're watching an American activist talking about white privilege, and then you're running from, you know, your affluent suburb in the UK into, you know, Preston Town Centre, just accusing people of it. The first thing is, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, who the fuck are you talking to,

and privilege is a term that is loaded with centuries of connotations that people in working class communities use as an insult. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissing. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a writer, activist and performer, Darren McGarvey. Welcome to Trigonometry.

Hello, guys. Pleasure to be here. It's really great to have you. We're going to talk about your new book, The Social Distance Between Us, How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain. It's a really interesting conversation. We were just chatting before we started about the fact that it harkens back to many of the issues we started the show talking about, a class-based look at economics and the world and society, etc. But before we do, tell everybody you've had a very interesting life story. Who are you? How are you where you are? What has been your journey through life that leads

you to be sitting here talking to us? Well, I grew up in a housing scheme, housing estate in Glasgow called Pollock, which was at the top and bottom of all the wrong league tables in the 80s. And so, you know, I was kind of subjected to the usual hustle. and bustle of that sort of working class life in a so-called deprived community. Lots to take from it. Lots of character building. Quite a bit of trauma. And really that just kind of shaped my emotional nature, really,

which I think was what propelled me through my chaotic adolescence. But I always had a passion for writing. Always had a passion for expressing myself. And so I kind of fell into after realizing I couldn't go down the acting route and realising I couldn't go down the music route or the traditional musical instrument route, then I kind of fell into hip-hop, in particular rapping,

because it was a low entry level in terms of what you need to acquire before you can start doing the thing. And that's what I've seen me through, periods of homelessness and addiction and alcoholism. And then when I got sober in 2013, I studied journalism for two years and kind of fell into that,

and someone then suggested to me, have you ever thought about writing a book? and that was the first time really I had thought about it because I just thought people like me don't write books and so I wrote a book and it won the Orwell Prize in 2018 and I've been doing this professionally ever since and also it's worth noting

that is the most concise answer I think I've ever given to a really big question like tell us about your whole life and you talk about some of the difficulties but you also talked about it deprived in inverted commas why did you do that?

It's the sort of terminology that someone looking at a community from a distance would use because for people who live there, they might feel offended to be described in that way. They might not feel necessarily deprived of everything. Obviously, when you look at the socio-economic structure of the country, you understand that, and for reasons we might get into later, the system is rigged against people who are born in the wrong postcodes.

And so what they're deprived of is health equality, educational equality, and this is manifest. in all of the life outcomes that many of them will go on to experience. But also a working class community and a working class culture is a very beautiful thing. And often in our British culture and in Scotland as well, there's this idea that working class culture is a kind of infantile culture that's just waiting to kind of go through some sort of puberty phase to become middle class.

And actually, in working class communities, we have our own way of seeing things, we have our own way of expressing things. We have different thresholds and sensitivities from traditionally middle class people. Give us some examples. Well, I mean, if you, if you, we're living an age just now

while, you know, lived experience and trauma are big discussion points, right? And I think that's important, you know, because there are things that we carry with us in life that if unaddressed can lead to us making poor decisions or having negative experiences. But someone who grows, up in a pretty affluent background, their threshold for what they consider traumatic or what

they consider shocking is a bit different because they've been exposed to different material conditions. And so if the worst thing that's happened to someone in their life is that a pet has died, then that genuinely, for their threshold and baseline of trauma is a painful event. But if you grow up in a poorer community, you've been excluded from school, you grew up at a time where teachers were just slapping kids around and people are dying left, right and centre all the time because of convergent health crises and inequalities, then your threshold for what you consider traumatic

or shockings is almost hilariously high. And so you might find something funny that someone on the other side of the train tracks finds really, really shocking or insensitive. And I'm always fascinated as a writer and that rub, that point of friction between the two because I see it as part of my role as a writer to do what other people have done for me, which is describe those points of friction and try to articulate it in a way that both sides can

understand, which for me is an exciting thing to sit down and try and do, but that's just one area, I think, where class differences are very obvious. It's such a powerful point you made there, because what you're trying to do is make the point that both sides can hear. Yet in our culture, we very rarely do that. we see the other side or the people who disagree with us as our enemies. We dehumanise them, and I'm certainly guilty of this, I'm not innocent of this, and as a result you just make everybody go a little bit further apart.

Yeah, and it's a hard thing to resist because it's part of our nature to think in those tribal terms. And so we have to work very hard to always try and bring ourselves back to that place of mindfulness about the kind of cul-dis-acts that we can fall into when we're trying to think about things that are complicated. And one of the things that actually helps me is the fact that because I'm in recovery from alcohol and addiction, I have to be vigilant about certain things because, you know, for me, the problem isn't necessarily the alcohol of the drugs. The problem is the emotional nature. So I have certain factory settings as a person, whether that's because of trauma, whether that's because of the environment or just cultural, generic.

chance, whatever it is, if I'm not working on myself, it's very easy for me to slip into selfishness, dishonesty, fear, resentment, which obviously will help your eyes through the ranks of a life-wing institution. But for someone who has to be, for someone who has to be very vigilant about being under that kind of emotional duress for too long until the point where I end up trying to numb the discomfort or the depression or whatever. with alcohol, then I always have to be on guard for these emotions. And so really what that brings to me as a person is when I'm having a good day, is that I try to approach most people where I set a level of good faith.

Now, not always on social media, is that possible? And you could go through my history of social media, you could find exams and go, well, what about this and what about that? But the point is that I'm always trying to get back to that place where I recognize that we're all working off of a, caricature of the other side, whether it's an individual, whether it's a whole political ideology. And, you know, you've got to be kind of, you've got to have a bit of humility about what you can truly understand as one person. And you say that people who grew up in an

African, affluent background, don't particularly understand what working class people have to go through. So let's explode some of the myths, Darren. What do working class people have to go for people who grew up in deprived backgrounds, their affluent people don't understand. Well, the first thing is that working class people by virtue of their social position are over-exposed to economic shocks, economic transitions, unemployment, social policy.

And so this means that life in a working-class community is always in a state of constant transition, which leads to people often, particularly those where there isn't a dual income household. Maybe there's a prevalence of addiction at home, some sort of dysfunction at play. This means that people are always really standing on very shaky foundations.

And as we kind of enter this cost of living crisis, which has been going on for people in these communities for a long time, it's only because it's beginning to affect the lower and upper middle classes, lifestyles, that it's now become a legitimate area of conversation. before if you were poor or before if you worked hard on your money didn't go far enough, it's because you were spending it wrong

or you were making the wrong decisions now because it's middle class people were starting to look at the systemic factors and the cost of energy and all of the contextual issues that actually put strain on households. So when you're growing up in that sort of environment then you become hardened to certain things you might become cynical of institutions

in fact you might not make much effort to discern between a teacher and a police officer and a social worker, you should begin to see this all as the man. And so, you know, I write in the book about this mantra that you have in working class communities in particular, this don't grasp mantra, this idea that any level of cooperation with law enforcement is a betrayal and something that will mark you out

as a bad one or a wronging in a certain community. And this is true in prison culture, as it is among young people, even certain criminal enterprises. And even people who aren't involved in that, there's a lot of psychosocial pressure to take that view towards institutions. And that is, I go in the book on to say,

that don't grasp mantra, it's a class-based concern. It's based on an understanding that when you look at the prison system and you look at the criminal justice system, what you see is it's full of people who look and sound like you. And so the idea that cooperating with it in any way is going to be of benefit to you, just is risable. And that's just one idea of how cultural attitudes are shaped by different material conditions, because it wasn't until very recently with the shocking crimes and the shocking

incompetence of the Met, that middle class people started coming out and getting in the face of the police, because before the police were there to serve the middle classes and the middle class of the people phoning the cops on you. There's loads and loads of things that I could go through, whether it's cultural, social or economic, whether there are really pronounced differences. But the real challenge is not necessarily noticing them and acknowledging them. The real challenge is then culturally,

how do you communicate that up the structure? Well, this is what I was going to ask you about because this is fundamental to your book and to your argument, which is that whatever people understand and know about each other, the problem of Britain in recent decades has been the fact that the people who run the country

have absolutely no clue what's going on where you were born. Yes, and people might assume, well, of course, there's always going to be a certain level of inequality and there's always going to be gaps in knowledge. But what we're talking here is almost, the people in charge are almost like aliens in terms of the level of common ground

that they have with ordinary people. And it's interesting because politics is a curious profession where you don't have to have any prior qualifications, any specialism. Really, you just have to kind of have the ego to put yourself forward. And in a way that's the way it should be because it should be accessible to everyone.

But again, because of class differences, then really since the Blair period, what we've seen is the rise of the career politician and a real drop in the percentage of people from working class areas. And so it's interesting because if you're watching the news, or you're reading a report, an investigative report,

you're not going to read an investigative report by someone who's just writing out what they think based on what they've heard, right? There's someone who's been sent out there to get quotes, to observe the same, situation, close, and same as when you get in an aeroplane. You don't want to get in an aeroplane with someone who's never flown a plane. Oh, I just finished the simulator, right? We're off to Mallorca. You'd be like, oh, no, no, no, no. It would be good if you had had some practical

experience of some sort. I would feel comfortable. But then you see how much Ryan air charge and you think, whatever, I'll take the risk. So with politics, what we have is not just politicians who don't have any real world experience but we have a whole ecosystem of advice and information which is really kind of contributed to by

people from similar backgrounds and they make very little contact with reality as it's experienced by a lot of other people and this really shows when you look at things like welfare reform I mean those reforms no one thinks the welfare state should be generous No one thinks that it should be easy to get benefits. We understand the system will be open to abuse,

but we're talking here about tens of thousands of people with disabilities attempting suicide off the back, or trying to interact with the Department of Working Pensions. And that's because the government is more interested and listen to the advice of corrupt American insurance companies than it is with people with lived experience. And that's a real problem. The system, the politicians, the political classes,

are democratic structures. They're not designed to take incoming calls. and the minute that you try to communicate stuff up the structure, you just met with tremendous resistance. And I think that this issue of proximity is a real fundamental problem for a democracy generally, but particularly in the UK right now. And that was what the MP system sort of was meant to avoid or prevent that from happening because you had your local MP, that's who you went to see, they were meant to be connected to the community. But again, they've kind of gone round, that, you see on all political parties do that. You know, they parachute MPs in who've got

no connection with the area. Wasn't Peter Mandelson MP for Hartlepool? Yeah. Well, he was one of a number of new Labour leading lights that were pretty much parachuted in there on the basis that these communities will vote Labour because they can't vote conservative. And that was true for enough time. But I think really the real vulnerability with representative democracy comes in whether the society is more equal or more unequal. You don't have a true equality and I don't think anyone would argue that that's possible or even desirable. There's some people who argue that.

I know what you mean. When you get into it, you know that there is a place for merit and there is a place for hard work even within an equitable situation. But what we have now as a society that's so deeply unequal that in a representative democracy, the people who are elected to represent us are unrepresentative of us. So this just creates natural dysfunction at every level of governance. And then obviously the further up the food chain you go, the more resilience you have in the face of accountability,

the more you can duck and dive, you can rely on your powerful social networks and connections to bail you out of problems. And so at the opposite end, you have a very punitive system where a lot of people live in fear of being pulled up by an institution for something relatively minor.

While at the top you have people engaged in all sorts, of corruption openly and we're just so desensitized to it now so it's a topsy, a survey, just them in the United Kingdom and quite peculiar, I would say. I agree with you, and France is probably even more so, but the question I was going to ask you about,

you know, when you asked us before we started, we've been doing this for four and a half years, and when we started, this was one of the things, the question I'm about to ask you, is one of the things we were trying to work out because what you're talking about is basically looking about, is basically looking at people's circumstances and going,

if you grow up in this sort of environment, these are the challenges that are going to be in front of you, and if you grow up in a different environment, these will be the challenges. And that seems to me to make a lot of sense. Where you grew up, how much money you had, whether you had two parents, did you have a stable place at home,

did you go to a good school? These are all things that will absolutely, undoubtedly, affect your life outcomes. But there was a moment when the left stopped looking at things like that, or certainly stopped listening as a lot, much to people who thought like that and started to look at people on a different basis, you know, skin color, sexual orientation, gender, etc. And the kind of conversation you were trying to encourage sort of went by the wayside. Would you agree with me on that? I would agree

at the level of culture, yes. Intersectionality really just erupted through our social media in the kind of mid-2010s around about the same time as the breast. exit folds were beginning to appear in culture. And I remember that being a really tough time. I remember that being a very tough time and a very confusing time as a lefty in his mid-20s. And somebody who has a pretty firm grasp of language and the basic intellectual concepts on the left.

What I didn't understand was the emotional attitude that I was seeing at times where people were coming with these ideas around Professor Kimberly Crenshaw's intersectionality analysis, which I think is a valid analysis, I think is an analysis that warrants study because it was created to understand how women of colour in the United States experience

is compounded by gender and that in and of itself is an important thing to understand and I don't think you're going to find too many people that would say it isn't. What happens when a bunch of white middle class people get their hands on, It's the same thing that happens when white middle class people get their hands on

most things. You know, and there's an underpinning of hysteria, there's a complete tone deafness to class dynamics, particularly around class and these thresholds for trauma that we discussed earlier. And so very, very early on as I had my first few run-ins like all of us

did on the left, particularly around really sensitive areas, around immigration, then I could see that that this had been cooked up, this cultural prong of what came to be known as the left

was actually more liberal in its overconfidence, shall we say. And it was always going to crash down and be exploited by agitators on the right who very wisely could see it was creating another reservoir of resentment that was only needing to be appropriated

for culture war resentments. and I think I came to a point where I started to understand that social media was certainly magnifying the true extent of what was going on and actually that whole time the trade union movement was still working away organising and that to me is what the left is. It's organised resistance

and understanding of collective bargaining and understanding of industrial relations being in communities, being in close proximity speaking in a language and a tone at the common man and women can understand. And that's been running completely parallel to this culture world that's really taking the centre stage.

And I think with the rise of the trade union leaders, Sharon Graham, Dempsey, Mick Lynch, what you're seeing is how captivating a working class person can be when they know what they're talking about. They're pretty sincere and they don't have this kind of conditioned reverence for media and posh politicians.

They just get in there and tell it like it is. And for me, that's the clear delineation on the left between the culture war stuff and the actual, let's organize it on material conditions. No, no, I agree with you on that. But I suppose what I'm getting at is you say the way trade unions have been working away, and I'm sure they have. But I would argue the collapse of the Red War, for example, is a direct consequence of the Labour Party being quite unsure about whether they are on the side of working people, of all races and genders and whatever. or whether these narrower concerns are where their priorities should lie. It could be a contributing factor, certainly. I think also a lot of new labor chickens came home to roost.

As I say, you're talking about Mandelson being parachuted into former mining communities and all of that. They ever seen that clip of him going to the fish and chip shop? You've ever seen this? And they offer mushy peas and it goes, no, no, I won't have the guacamole. and so, you know, that was always going to be time limited because it was based on the premise these communities will always vote Labour because the opposition is much worse for them

but then once you voted Tory once you've sort of crossed a taboo and then you become desensitised to that so then it becomes easier for them to do it again so that was always a kind of house of cards that was going to fall there was chronic underinvestment in a lot of these communities And for me and what I say in the book,

I think the true legacy of New Labour is that managerial paternalism. So it was a new kind of class war where it wasn't Thatcher sitting just basically saying, fuck the lot of you you know, I close down where you work and if you can't find another job, that's your fault. But there's a bookies and there's a chippy

and there's an off licence on your street. So if you can't get a job there, go and spend all your benefit money there, you know. That was basically her vision of an economy. And what happened with New Labour was they adopted this month. more pleasing to the ear rhetoric, which helped to sort of cloak the economics of Thatcherism, which Blair partly was elected because he'd committed to continuing them,

and a kind of red velvet glove, you know. But parallel to that, what you had was the emergence of this idea of the working class person is vulgar and infantile, and always kind of wheeling and dealing. and you know, so your Jeremy Kyle show, your Little Britain, and obviously everything is of its time and I'm not saying we go where I find tooth comb and we say, oh, that thing that felt okay at the time is immoral now.

We understand that with the passage of time, most stuff starts to look a bit dodgy on some level. I'm sure this interview will at some point. But really there was a certain kind of vindictiveness that revealed the middle class bigotiveness. the informed, sophisticated, liberal, compassionate middle classes who would be empowered by the Blair administration to get out there into working class communities

and teach people how to speak right and teach people how to dress properly and really began to hold the keys for working class advancement and you advanced by learning to conceal your working classness, you advanced by drawing in your accent by wearing a blazer instead of a hoodie. And these are things I'm described.

that any working class person watching will intuitively know even if they haven't heard that articulated before. And really that's now why you have a kind of poverty industry infrastructure, which has obviously been left to do a lot of the essential work, because the state has kind of withdrawn from many areas, but at the same time it's still a kind of class warfare in the sense that working class people are there as clients, or they're there as lived experience, people who tell their story and then go away. They don't have very little say over how these organisations are running that. That's a class-based society if you ever want to the definition. Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website? Because if you do, then EasyDNS is a company for you.

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And I used to get these very well-educated, you know, very wealthy people talking about white privilege, And you just go, what are you talking about? Do you think someone who grew up on the breadline in Middlesbrough or Sunderland is privileged in any shape or form? And then they would just have this abject horror that they didn't vote Labour. Of course they're not going to vote Labor, mate. You've been condescending them to them for the last four years. Yeah, I remember the first time I was kind of encountered some of these concepts

that came out of the arisen of intersectionality. And I think if you're sitting with someone and they're giving you a context for where this term applies and the various layers to it, then it's not a difficult concept to wrap your brain around. But what happens is if you have a young activist,

who's in the kind of prime of their campaigning life, they're setting out to change the world, they have lots of energy and they have lots of time very little responsibilities or real world experience. It's something that just feels intuitively correct to them and then they get out there and they just start throwing the term around. And sometimes they'll apply it inappropriately

or sometimes they'll apply it with a certain emotional surety and a judgmental kind of accusatory tone which actually undermines the opportunity to persuade someone of the virtue of such a concept or the validity of such a concept. And that's really the kind of what I would say is the emotionally illiterate underbelly of a lot of the activism that we did see over the last few years. It's based on conducting yourself with a certain level of certainty despite limited life experience.

Plus the term white privilege makes more sense when you're discussing it in an American context where the racial divides are more historic and more pronounced and more institutional. Not to say that there isn't elements of that here. But when you're watching an American activist, talking about white privilege and then you're running from your affluent suburb in the UK

into, you know, Preston Town Centre just accusing people of it. The first thing is, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, who the fuck are you talking to? And privilege is a term that is loaded with centuries of connotations that people in working class communities use as an insult.

So the cultural difference there is so stark that someone who says they're about equality doesn't understand that you have to factor class into an intersectional analysis even if you're just looking at it in terms of how you conveying your message, how are you campaigning? What is your strategy? And I think that this was why it was rejected because a lot of us on the left, we were too slow to respond to that. The issues were so contentious and so numerous. And then you throw immigration into the mix, which really tears the left in too because there's the commitment to anti-racism, which is obviously historic to the left, but then there's the class

solidarity part of it. You're seeing Eddie Dempsey's historic remarks being framed in certain ways that review how difficult that canyon is to bridge sometimes. So yeah, I mean, we drop the ball on that, but we always learn from these things. Look, I love how carefully you think and speak about these issues. I really, really do. Let me ask you something about, you know, it might be a challenging question, I suppose, but how much of this is about the fact that the jobs aren't really there as much for people who are quote unquote working class. There's just not that many working class jobs anymore. You know, you talked about Thatcher, the pits have been closed down, the mines, the steelworks,

the whatever, it's all been outsourced or got rid of. Is it not that much harder to build working class solidarity where you don't have the community as much as you did? And therefore, you do have a lot of unemployment. have more crime, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, obviously we are undergoing, even without a cost of living crisis and what's going on in Ukraine

and all the geopolitics of things and just an incompetent conservative government, we would still be heading into a massive economic transition because of big data and automation and technology generally. Yes. And normally this would be a great thing, wouldn't it? This idea, oh, hang on. So that means that a lot of these hard jobs

are going to be done by robots. this is going to free people up, but we haven't got the next part really figured out yet. We've got all the efficiency built in and that, all take care of itself. But what do people do when they become surplus to requirements permanently? And so what they've been floating in recent years, and you hear this, you know, from Obama's Institute and Blair's Institute and all of that, they're talking about how people will have to train and retrain and change careers multiple times. And really that's an attempt to kind of normalise precarity, you know, because they

reality is if you're, if you are working for low wages, that's hard enough. You're constantly just, one of the definitions of working class is not just a relationship to the labour market. It's how hard you have to fight just to get your basic needs met? And that's becoming, you know, a really difficult struggle for people now. So the next part of it then, you know, if you were thinking forward, you would be thinking, okay, so we need an integrated transport infrastructure that's free, like a health service, right? We need to find ways to bring down the cost. of living people so that if you're in low paid work, you're not got all these other expenses. And that's the sort of idea that just gets shut down intuitively.

That's how successful the right have been economically. That that is the sort of rantings of a mad person. This idea that trains and undergrounds, you can just walk onto them, like you can walk into a public park, you know, because the cost of transport alone is a massive strain. And people from working class communities, they have to travel further and further to their place of work.

They have to travel back. They're being told not to use cars. And so this would be the next area where they're shamed for their lifestyle choices and their economic decisions. That and eating me. He's driving a car and eating a burger in the car. It'll be like when lockdown they were following them in

parks and then going home to their big fucking gardens and their chicken huts and all that. So it's difficult and you don't really have, you have a political class that really views the world from the vantage point of corporate executives, which is

a valid vantage point to include in the mix, but the scales are tip too far. I suppose my only question on that would be, and I'm probably on economics, I'm certainly not on the left. I don't know if I'm on the right, but I probably position myself somewhere in the centre. The only question I have is,

I'm intuitively all for getting barriers out of people's ways. I just think that's really important. I think the most important thing is that people are able to succeed if they're talented. And look, you, no doubt, have had to work extra hard because of your background to be sitting here having a chat about your brilliant book.

No doubt about that. And that is a problem. It will always be around. By the way, we're never going to get rid of it entirely. But I'm all for getting the barriers out of people's ways. The difficulty is in a society like Britain where we do already pay a lot of tax. We all pay a lot of tax.

The poor pay a lot of tax. The middle class pay a lot of tax. are rich, those that can't evade and avoid tax, they also pay a lot of tax. How do we keep paying for all these things that we would like to have? So I don't know if that's about the right, or maybe I'm not reflecting the viewpoint of the right, I just wonder how we pay for these very good things that we would like to put in place. Yeah, I mean, it's a difficult question now that we've sold off all our assets, you know, because obviously this is one of the things that Scandinavian countries have tremendous foresight with.

Yeah. You know, we have this big boom, okay, let's create a fund for a rainy day. Yeah. You know, and that's why they not only have more equal societies, they have happier societies, and yeah, they pay more tax, but they understand the investment, so they understand the benefit of it. Whereas when people pay high levels of tax in this country, or they're being hit with us horror stories about the NHS,

being run into the ground and trains not being on time, so they think this money's just being poured into some kind of hole. And it's really just because of the economic mismanagement at the top level of society where people who have greater levels of wealth have greater leverage with politicians and so decisions are taken in the short term for electoral reasons

that really place one end of the country at odds with the other and then there's all the work of the centre ground to people over that with all of the unifying rhetoric while at the same time really pressing the accelerator peddle down on the economic policy that divide us and entrench things. So for example, the marketization of the English education system,

it was pitched as this is going to be an expansion of choice. This is going to lead to innovation and competition. And it did for the middle class schools, and the middle class parents would set up their own schools. But for the working classes, they go to the school that's on their doorstep, right? And so in a marketized economy, then you have parents parachuting into the catchment areas. The kids' grades inflate the house prices. The house prices inflate the kids' grades.

And this just becomes a little prosperity bubble. Meanwhile, all the people who grow up there and go to school there, they all think that it's all going well for them because they're just great people. And the people over here who not only have less money per head for the pupils, but also they have a more diverse educational culture with very specific strains on it because of the imprint that poverty and stress leaves on.

many of the pupils who are going there. And so there's just a complete lack of understanding or any attempt to account for any of that. And that's just an education. You know, you don't even get into the independent sector. I mean, these are just onshore tax savings that benefit the parents who send their kids there

as much as the kids who go there. And they just function as pipelines to the main professions. And, you know, that's just, I would just, I don't know how you could phase out or close down private education, particularly culturally in the UK but I would see it as a national security risk

I would frame it as a national security risk that you can actually just get a bunch of absolute knobbings who all went to the same school just being pumped into the country's main institutions by virtue of the fact that they went to that school despite the fact that the evidence is in that they're of no merit unless you're defining merit as just absolute ruthlessness

hard to argue against it. I mean the one way actually that you do get at these schools if you do want to get at them, is every public or private school in this country is a registered charity. So you take away their charitable status. That's why it really annoyed me about Corbyn when he was up, we're going to abolish private schools. I'm like, you're never going to do that. Shut up. That's a virtue signal. If you truly want to actually maybe attack these institutions, if that's what you want to do, then you go for the charitable status. And you ask them to justify it because many of them can't. Yeah. And I mean, I've done a lot of, I've visited many

private schools and it's another thing you know when you're you've got a kind of low resolution understanding of the other when you go to a private school you meet teachers who understand perfectly well the inherent problem of such an institution they often go there because they get discounts for their own children yeah and they know that they'll give their kids a great opportunity to get the best possible education what you'll find in the private school sector also is almost compared to state schooling a kind of utopian scenario where the career is designed around the child's opportunities and experiences being optimized to the furthest most point. So even just how a day is planned out, leisure activities, these are

always sat in the grounds of, surrounded by green space, windows with natural light coming in, there are environments which optimise human potential. And there's a lot that the state could learn from how to design a school and design a curriculum. Well, quite. As someone who did go to a private school for part of my education, I'm totally support getting rid of the charitable status, by the way, to the extent that I understand that issue. But equally, I think we need to make the rest of the schools better

rather than tearing things down. That makes more sense to me. Oh, absolutely, because if parents with a bit more money thought that they could save 20, 30, 40 grand a year by going to a state school, which is performing just as well, then it would be a no-brainer for them. I mean, I'm not sitting here saying everyone

who goes to private school as a multi-multi-millionaire. I know many parents take a big, big hit, but they see that as a long-term investment in their children and their family as a structure. Well, and as you say, in a country where 7% of pupils end up making up 50% of the top jobs,

it is a long-term investment. There's no question about it. Oh, definitely. And that's when you're just looking at the kind of cold-hard economics of it. Of course, it makes a lot of sense. from that perspective. But the long-term damage

that that level of inequality does to a country's culture and politics and economy is just undeniable at this point. And for me, the big difficulty, obviously, is just culturally the needle has moved so far in terms of the right

and a free society for the rich to just do whatever they want. And in a sense, in principle, that should be right. But see, when we talk about a free press now or a free education system, what we really mean is the right of a billionaire to buy as many newspapers as they want, and push out their message

that suits their politics and suits their economics. And so sometimes I think we get confused about what a free society means. It's the balancing of everyone's freedoms and making sure that people were the most don't get to race too far ahead because then they start shaping everything in the shape of their own desires

and their own needs, and sometimes these can't be reconciled with people who live in the deprived communities. And look, you're making such a great point. Like, how can you possibly, even if, you know, with the best will in the world, even if you go into politics with the purest of intentions, but you come from a highly privileged background, how can you possibly implement policies that are going to work for working-class people? You've never met one.

How is that going to work? not. I know and the chances are the difficult conversation with whatever executive of whatever multinational corporation you have to have is someone that you know personally. So we all know what it's like. I write about it in the book, Deference. Deference is something that's really understated

in terms of class relations in this country. So I remember interviewing Sir Tom Hunter who's one of a poster boy of Scotland Entrepreneuralsam. He sold his sports division brand for 300 million and he's now a billionaire and he does a lot of philanthropy and I was doing a TV series about class and I interviewed him and I had met him before but I was interviewing him and so I was my job was

not just to hear from him my job was to scrutinise and ask questions and try and find an uncomfortable spot to put him in about the contradiction and philanthropy and and he I found it very difficult to speak for frankly, which is really odd for me. And so we did this show and we filmed that and the show ended up being about, that interaction ended up being about the one thing that we wanted it to be about,

but I came away from it thinking, no, this was about something else. And then what I realised was that he was the only contributor that we had relaxed the COVID restrictions for. The BBC's COVID restrictions were double what the government's restrictions were. So we had to have to meet a length of tape between two contributors,

who were walking an open space and this was what happened with every contributor but for some reason we just instinctively relaxed this for Tom even though he didn't want to be treated any differently so I had to walk in the mud

Tom got told to walk in the path I got moved into the shitty cold car he got moved into the big car and suddenly I went from being like the centrepiece of this TV operation to just realise him where I was in the pecking order and then when it came time to get frank with him the words came from me very very slowly

and difficult, and that's deference, you know. So when a politician sits in a room with your Jeff Bezos types, you know, and who's at the top of the society, they're going in there with their tail between the legs. They're not going in there like, listen, I have a mandate from a population, right, of hundreds of millions of people,

and we need to get a fairer deal here because I know you're offering a lot of jobs, but we're subsidising your business with our welfare state because your wages are too low. So you need to get this sorted out, Jeff. No, it's Biden going to neer, sorry about this, Jeff. Have you got any ideas about what I could do to run the American economy? Why don't you get the guys from Pfizer in?

We'll sit down, we'll bang heads, we'll come up with a new deal, you know, to make sure you all still get paid while we try to make society a bit less horrific for the poor. And that deference is a big problem. You know, you've met famous people. You know, you meet someone, you may get bit used to it. I don't get starstruck really, but it's hard to have a... Not even now, Darren. It's hard to have...

It's hard to have a frank conversation with someone who's used to being pussyfooted around and treated very delicately. And culturally that is one of the factors that means that the people who need to have truth spoken to them often never hear the truth. Well, look, with the obvious solution to all of this, because I think the way you are talking about it, you're talking about all the different things that make up the experience of people in different social strata's, and that makes perfect sense. But that would always be remedied by more representation of working class people in the political halls of power. And when the unions were really at their peak, that was happening.

But now, again, this is not because I want to jump up and down on the corpse of the Labour Party. I'm just being honest with you about what I see. You have a Labour Party now whose latest intake is all of these sort of like 24-year-old graduates from some university who I don't, with all possible respect to them, think, have any fucking idea what you're talking about, right? So it's, I, we jump up and down on the Tory party all the time on this show, but I don't see the Labour Party answering your call either, do you? No, because what Sturmer's chosen after kind of sounding vaguely original in the beginning, is reheated Blairism

to the letter. I mean, if you understand the trajectory of Blairism from its development to its execution, then you understand what Starmer's attempting here. Right now, obviously there's a new context

that has to be dealt with. But your colleagues on the left will say to you, well, to Tony Blair brought us three election victories in a row, the most successful Labour Prime Minister, all of that. Yeah, I mean, it's not that.

I wouldn't say he was the most successful, really, because, I mean, if you look at the real giants of British politics, the only remnant of Blair's legacy is the discussion about his character. So everything that New Labour achieved under Blair or did under Blair is gone, right? That's a bit unfair. What about Northern Ireland, Darren? Come on. Well, I mean, that's all pretty precarious right now, though, isn't it? What I mean is the things that he'd done, he didn't win the arguments on. so they're still contentious.

You couldn't say the same thing about the welfare state. You couldn't say the same thing about Thatcher. I mean, these were paradigm shift. I see what you're saying now. Yeah, or Churchill. So he didn't change the country permanently. He didn't bring it home. And that's why he wanted to stay on longer.

Same with immigration. That's why, exactly. So what happened was he sold the seeds of his own destruction, which all politicians do. But he didn't quite wrap it up in a nice, neat little bowl that history has found for your at least, and your Thatchers and your Churchill's. And now the debate really about Blair is,

was he a big giant of politics or did everything he do just turn to shit? No, I recognize that, you know, that that might be a kind of maybe a cynical or mischievous way to characterize it. But I just wouldn't be... No, I think you're making a fair point. I wouldn't be putting Blair in the same category.

It really remains to be seen. I think you're making a very fair point. But I interrupted you when you started talking about Kirstama, he went and blessed. Talk to us more about that, sorry. That aspect of Blairism is the centre ground where you attempt to rhetorically reconcile competing groups in society

by speaking in vague terms of values. So everyone wants equality, everyone wants fairness, everyone wants a society where hard work is rewarded. Everyone wants a wee sprinkle, not everyone, I know 5 billion people in Scotland that don't care, but everyone wants a wee sprinkle a Britishness over everything to just feel you know a wee bit maybe not

5 million, maybe 2 million, who knows but the thing about it is that actually the economic program that will be brought forward will be a commitment to the status quo which is already deeply unfair and deeply unjust so you can paper over the cracks for a while

with the comfort and rhetoric and if you can generate a wee bit of economic growth everyone will forget for a while but the minute of the shit hits the fan then the flaws and the fundamentals of the economy reveal themselves again And that's when you create, you know, the levels of resentment and apathy and skepticism that leads to massive drop out of voting, which is a gift to the privileged parties.

It leads to things like the debate around immigration that really became the momentum behind Brexit. And that all goes down to Blair economics. I see what you're saying. Correct me if I'm wrong. But what I'm hearing out of what you're saying is the economic structure now is such that when the shit hits the fan, as you say, we're not all in. it together. The rich just get richer, the comfortable just get more comfortable, and the working people get left behind. Yeah, because of the flaws in the way the system is organised. Yeah,

because they're so overexposed. So even where they're managing their household budgets reasonably well, and they're doing the deal in terms of trying to be responsible with the resources that they have, this one rise in energy is just wiping them out. Yeah. And that's the that, you know, you can't really, you'd have to be really, really confident to try and argue that this is an equitable settlement economically right now. The only silver lining of a situation like COVID and a pandemic is that it really revealed in high definition the inequalities and how overexposed working people were, not just to the virus, but to everything else that around it, the lockdowns, the inaccessibility of health, I mean, even just the mouth cancer numbers

are going through the roof now because people haven't been getting to the dentist, which is where this shit is picked up. So there's just so many ways that working class people get hit. And, and, you know, I'm not sitting here saying I have all the answers. I think part of my job or the job of people like me who have spent time on the front line is really just to try and find new ways to articulate what we see and taking account of the fact that there are people there who do want to do the right thing, but they need someone to frame it for them in terms that they understand relative to their and experience of working class communities. And that's what I try to contribute to.

Hey, Francis, if you were a member of the public, would you like the opportunity to ask incredible guests like Bill Burr, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Adam Kornis. Brett Weinstein, John Barnes, Douglas Murray, Nigel Farage and Lionel Shriver, your own questions. You bet I would. And what do you think the best way to do that would be? Probably stalking, mate. You'd have to corner them in the supermarket, probably run near like the sort of frozen food aisles, and then just bark questions at them before they can escape.

Not the American ones, as they have guns. And you'd have to be extra careful with the females, as that's how I got in trouble last time. Do you really imagine you're going to get Douglas Murray near the frozen food aisle? If you want to ask our incredible guest questions and have access to phenomenal behind the scenes content, then you have to be on our locals. That's right, for only $7 a month, you get incredible extra content, behind the scenes footage, giveaways, and also the chance to be part of an incredible community where you can meet and hang out with like-minded people.

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Dot locals.com. Only $7 a month for all that incredible content. Trigonometry.com. See you there, guys. So, Darren, moving on, you spend a large portion of the book you're talking about homelessness. And as someone who grew up in London, when I grew up in London in the 80s,

it was nowhere near as wealthy as it was now. There was a lot, you know, people weren't as wealthy. You know, there was a lot more working class people. There was a lot more working class communities in London. But there wasn't the same level of homelessness. I go and I walk around London now and it's much wealthier and you see people who are more ostentatiously rich. But the homelessness has just gone through the roof.

Yeah, it's, again, this comes down to housing policy. So we have had a situation where the social housing stock has not only been left to fall into disrepair over the last 30 or 40 years but also culturally as I mentioned earlier with Blairism there's this cult of homeownership now now the concept of home ownership

and property ownership is a good one and the idea was democratic that anyone should be able to own property not just your land and gentry if people own property they can pass something down to the next generation and this will become a little prosperity cycle and if everyone gets a fair crack at the whip

Why the hell not? The problem you have now is you can pay a thousand pound a month on rent for five years and a bank won't give you a mortgage for £400 a month because they're worried that you're irresponsible with your money. So that's topsy-turvy economics. Then you also have welfare reforms, which don't take account of the alternative family structures and dynamics in working class communities where trauma, family members in prison,

alcoholism, single-parent families, different set-ups that are adopted by households to deal with circumstances. You have a benefit system that's punitive, that's not set up really to recognise the unique circumstances that each household faces. And so the safety net that's there, when you do decide to go for the cult of homeownership and pin the whole housing economy on that, the safety net is also removed for people who don't fit that template. And an example of this would be removing child benefit for young people. No, housing benefit, sorry.

This is one of the most callous things that the Cameron Osborne administration done. Their whole idea was that this would just incentivise people into benefits at a young age. What they don't realize is, like myself, a lot of young people who grow up in poverty,

they have to leave the family home a lot younger and they don't even have their education in the bag. And so without that, benefit they end up on the street or sleeping on couches, they just become inherently residentially unstable. But you have welfare reforms which are underpinned by this assumption that really anybody who wants to get on benefits is kind of a bit dodgy in some way. And there's just so many examples of how welfare reform impacts and drives homelessness, whether it's food bank

use, this universal credit thing, where there's just this arbitrary amount of time a person has to wait before they get paid of six weeks. It's weird because when the sell employment grants were getting handed out to the middle class people to underwrite all their gym memberships and their credit cards and their, you know, dual income lifestyles. You just had to put your national insurance number into a thing and they sent the money in three days, no questions asked, as much as £3,000. That really shows you how different the government views people from different social classes, you know, because if you're in that income bracket where the government's estimating that you're losing nearly four grand from four months are not working,

and you're just getting the money, no questions asked. Whereas over here, if you're homeless, you're fleeing domestic violence. Not only you're dealing with a department of working pensions, it's retrometising you with the overbearing surveillance, the financial intimidation, the basic behaviour of a domestic abuser, but also you're getting pulled in for random compliance meetings and told to go to the food bank because you're not getting your money for six weeks. I mean, it's actually criminal, the level of inequality.

And it's the people with the most who make the decision to make it so harsh for the people with the least. And that's the thing that really, well, you can see it makes me angry. I mean, they're all very good points. Do you think looking at this homelessness situation is not just in Europe, it's not just the UK. It's in America. It just seems to be spreading everywhere.

And we don't seem to be having any idea of how to tackle it. One of the ways we've tackled it is we've created a culture where much like ancient Greece, homeless people who have just looked at is absolute down and outs that should just be driven from the public public life to the margins of society. When actually, you know, every person who is experiencing homelessness if you get down on the street with them and talk to them, you're going to find trauma, have occurred some recent tragedy,

probably addiction. And so addiction as an illness, and I know some of yours will dispute that. We'll not go down that cul-de-sac, but I know from my own experience as an illness. And so until you can get the right support for that, you're facing the stigma from society about the addiction.

And also it's driving you to behave in ways that really undermine your chances of surviving and getting on and getting a house and securing accommodation. So that's one way culturally that we deal with it. We just put it out of mind and we come up with a caricature or a stereotype of the homeless addict

because that's a story we can live with as individuals as we encounter these dead. desperate people every single day. In terms of how housing policy has affected it, we don't have enough social housing. And while we have a rights-based approach to housing and local authorities all over the country renege on their statutory obligation to provide a home or a shelter to someone who's presenting as homeless, they don't face penalties severe enough for them to get their acts together. And to be honest, their hands have been tied since austerity. So what you often see with homelessness is

it's kind of well-meaning anti-stigma campaigns or sometimes quite hostile campaigns which say don't give your money to homeless people they'll only spend it on drugs. I mean, that was a Labour Council in Nottingham that did that one and that got pulled up by advertising standards. So it just shows you the level of prejudice is widespread

and as long as that prejudice exists people won't demand answers because what the prejudice and the resentment that the vulnerable creates is an out for the political class because as long as you feel that it's the fault of these people individually, then you won't get in the faces of politicians and say,

look, we know what you've done with austerity, we know what you've done with housing policy, you better get this sorted because we are fed up seeing people begging in the street, not just because it disrupts our day and makes us feel bad seeing it, but because it's morally reprehensible. Everyone should have a right to a home. Give them a house, then we'll address what issues can't be addressed by having a house. Seems pretty simple.

Well, the problem is, and this will feed very much into your view of the world, the reason we have a housing crisis is the government cannot afford to let housing prices stop rising politically. Because then middle class people who own property like me, I mean, in my case it's not true, but most middle class people who own property will say, well, you've just made me poorer. I'm never, any government that solves the housing problem will probably never return into government for generations because the middle class people will absolutely hate them. Yeah, I say that in the book. All of the policies that you would genuinely need to consider to make a more equal society, a more cohesive society, a richer society, just culturally, never mind financially. It means looking at electorally lucrative demographics out there.

who are so looked after by both sides of the political spectrum that they don't need to get out in the streets for anything. I agree with you, man. So it's basically your house gains value because there are other people who can't even get access to housing. And by the way, the thing is, even if you're middle class, you've got to look out there and go,

well, my kid, I barely fucking made it onto the housing ladder. My kids, what are they going to do? Yeah. And, but, you know, the corruption, we've had Liam Halligan on to talk about his book. about this. Like the corruption in terms of the way housing is run, housing policy is run in this country is just, it is deep and the purpose of it is profiteering and politically preserving the status quo. I think the ultimate, and I wouldn't want to dwell on this because it's been spoken about enough,

but the ultimate tragic expression of housing inequality and the political exclusion that's in to whether you own a home or whether you're in social housing is the Grenfell fire. So there you had residents in there who had been campaigning for years to say, hey, this place is like it's going to go on fire one day, people are going to die, could you come and put a light in the stairs and maybe move these bollards out the front of the building and generally check the electrics of the building? We've seen fires in other parts of London, this panel,

we're not quite into this kind of this new frontage you've put on the building. We don't know if it's safe. years they campaigned about that, right? Years. Place goes up in flames. It goes up in flames in 20 minutes. It's beyond the expertise of the fire service. Now people talk about the safety of the building as the proximate cause, the fire, the electrics,

but it was the political exclusion. It was the politicians and the council in that area being so attuned to the interests of property developers and the middle class property owners in the surrounding area that the frontage was partially designed so that they had something a wee bit more pleasant to look at

from a distance that adds value to their homes. So fuck what the people who live in there think. And it's just diabolical. And it's amazing because they're still managing to wriggle out of it, the people that are responsible and the institutions that are responsible for that.

This Grenfell inquiry, no doubt, is going to run to 2079, you know, just with all the ducking and diving, all these people trying to get out of taking responsibility for the manslaughter. And that in itself, I think, is just, that's a very tragic example of the inequalities that stem from a basic housing inequality. There's the cultural inequalities, the political inequalities.

I hear everything you're saying, and I think you're making some really good points. And if someone's listening to this, who's been open to your argument, who maybe has influence and power and whatever, and we do have people like that who watch the show or listen to the show, what are some of the like low hanging fruit that we can use to make the situation more fair and more equitable? You need to constrain the independent school sector in some way, whether that's revoking the charitable status or something more radical. You know, trying to cross-pollinate pupils from both sides of the tracks and educational institutions so that you're getting a fairer. spread of that diversity rather than having these middle class and working class ghettos. Because there's a hell of a lot that the kids from the wealthier backgrounds could learn from

the kids and the poorer backgrounds. Let me tell you. And I'm not just talking about to study them like animals. I'm talking about, all right, hang on, you're really insightful. Oh, hang on, you're really bright. Oh, hang on, you're actually better of this than me. But I'm the one that's going to get the high paying job because I live in that other postcode. So there has to be some constraint because education of inequality is where this all starts. That's where the inequalities are cleaved and that's where they're formalised and accelerated. Then you have to look at the labour market, right? So there's lots of talk about the kind of resurgence in trade union activism,

but we have to remember that that resurgence is coming from a historic law in trade union membership and an absolute marginalisation of the language of equality. What we have to understand is that collective bargaining workers coming together and guaranteeing their safety, their pay, their conditions. as a primary driver of social equality. This is why you had the golden age of social mobility in the mid-20th century, where you had record levels of interclass marriage.

You had record levels of health equality, educational equality. It genuinely was one of the best times in Britain's social history, where the power, the economic power of the government was used to restrain unfettered capitalist interests in a way that sort of worked for both sides until Thatcher came along. So something to do with the labour market, whether it's worker representation at board level. But either way, that all has to come from the bottom.

The corporations can say, well, why don't we invite one of your shop stewards up to sit in the meeting and we'll try and co-opt him, you know, or pretend we're listening to him? The pressure's got to come from the bottom. So really that's on workers and working class people. And then the third thing I think I would symbolically, Britain could break away from its relationship with hereditary privilege by just bulldozing the House of Lords and creating a second chamber of parliament

that's comprised of ordinary people, experts in different fields, politically, philosophically diverse range of people. You could do it on a rotation basis, it could be voluntary or it could be called up like jury duty. You get the offer to do it. you don't want to do it, fine. But if you had people who, you know, women who have fleed domestic violence or people with disabilities, if they got a chance to look at some of that welfare

reform legislation and send it back to the House of Com and saying, hang on, I think some of this stuff might kill people, then that would create an opportunity for there to be more dialogue across these big, massive chasms. And so I think taking the three of these together, what you're looking at as three different policies that's trying to reduce that gap between classes. It's not saying eat the rich, guillotine, maybe guillotine for a couple of folks. But I think it's about trying to push us into spaces together where we can begin to hear each other and understand where we're coming from and what we need. And one of the problems with inequality is that it drives people apart economically and culturally

in that discussion and dialogue becomes really strained. Well, I'm really glad we had you on to have this conversation. because the more we do this, the more I start to think, you're clearly someone who thinks about things in a very complex and nuanced and sophisticated way, which is why I've really enjoyed listening to what you've had to say. But the more I do what we do, I also start to think a little bit more like that.

And one of the things I recognize is, I still have the question of how we pay for some of the things that you'd like to do. And I think that's a valid question. I really do. But I also think we can't have a conversation about how to run our society without voices like yours being part of that conversation. It doesn't mean we do everything you're suggesting, but it does mean that, you know,

the people who have wealth and power and influence don't pull the blanket all the way over to their side. Yeah. So I'm really glad we had this conversation. I really appreciate the way you've talked about this stuff. I really recommend everybody get the book. And I hope some people who are listening take on board a lot of the things that you've said. I really do.

No, thanks for the opportunity. I just thought it would be interesting to come along. give an account of myself with someone on the left. Yeah. Because, you know, there is a caricature out there of what the left is. And the only way that people on the left can beat that caricature is getting in a position where they can be heard and seen and maybe coming across a bit more reasonable than some would lead you to believe.

Absolutely. Darren, we always finish our question, our interview with the same question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Wow, I had the whole hour there to have that running in the background In terms of social issues or just generally Whatever you want, anything you want Just generally Wow, man

I mean I have to be honest see in my spare time In my spare time I love watching computer game punditry Right? Yeah Even computer game punditry that's not What games? I like, I'm watching all the punditry around the last of us remake, right? So anyway, what I wanted to recommend to people, which is completely

tangential to anything that we've discussed, if you haven't played it, right? If you have played it, then the remake's not worth the money. But if you haven't played The Last of Us on PlayStation, they've just made a remake of it, and it's available on the PS5, and it is a game that will leave the kind of imprint on you that the best albums or the best movies or, you know, admiring a beautiful sunset will leave on you. I mean, I feel emotional just talking about it. It's just this beautiful, simple story, post-apocalyptic scenario, a girl has immunity from a virus and a pandemic. Some guy she doesn't know tried to take it across the country and they form a relationship as they go. It just came to mind there, so I thought I would just

mention that rather than try to come up with some smart-ass thing. Because when I get out of here, I'm going to be going on to read the review. of it so I can pick it up myself. Yeah. It's, I haven't played that one, but there are some, this is what people don't understand, people like to shit on computer games. Some computer games are like an interactive movie, which

takes you on a beautiful journey. No, this really is that, and it has beautiful music, and the remake is such high fidelity compared to the original version. I mean, I've just been watching the video footage of it online, and I think it's worth a 70 pound, but I got a wee bit spare disposable

income. Something I might want to wait till it's But when I leave here and I'm on the train, that's what I'll be doing the whole way home. So sometimes that's an insight into people you don't get. Like, what's their guilty pleasures? What do they actually do when they're not totally absorbed in the world of politics? You know, I like watching people talk about things that they're passionate about, whether it's computer games, films or stuff like this. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on. If people want to find you online, if they want to buy your book, where's the best place to do that?

The social distance between us. Make sure you go and get it. I'm at Loki Scottish Rapp on Twitter, and that's probably the best place to get me. And then if you can stomach me long enough in there, you'll find out where all the other things are. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. And thank you for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon. We'll have a brilliant interview like this one, Or Orr Show. And of course, we will see you right now for the bonus questions with Darren on Locals.

Absolutely. So make sure to join Locals and check those out. But thank you so much for watching. and if you fancy listening to this interview and many others, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. And where are you on Doug Drug Decriminalization?