Chris Johns

It's a term of abuse.

It's about being in the middle on certain issues.

It's what you say you do, Jim, is that you try to assess each policy proposal on its merits.

You take the data, you look at the evidence, you understand uncertainty, you understand radical uncertainty.

You've studied decision-making under uncertainty in a mathematical way, if not a political way, both.

and you know how difficult it is and how complex it is if you're not and that's what centrist dad do and we're mocked for it these days which is a shame because i do think that is the right way to do things these days you have to take a position and the more extreme a position you take the more you will get noticed the attention thing that's very much out there and in order to get noticed in order to get attention you have to be ever more extreme and you have to be very simplistic

Because one of the things that I don't think our societies can handle at all, and I think they were better at this some time ago, is complexity.

And so Andy Burnham says Blair's 5,600-word essay is a complete load of tosh because he doesn't understand that the problem facing Britain is economic inequality.

Now, that's just bogus, Jim.

Just absolutely bogus.

Do you know how much inequality has changed since the late 80s, early 90s in the UK?

No.

Hardly at all.

The person that you referred to her earlier on who did increase income inequality in the UK was Margaret Thatcher.

And she really started something that nobody has pushed back on since then.

We've not pushed inequality back down to pre-Thatcherite levels, but it certainly hasn't changed for three decades or more in terms of the way that we measure these things.

And I know people are going to throw things at me now virtually, hopefully.

and say, well, of course it has.

The sting in the tail of inequality is that the one thing that has increased in the UK, Jim, is wealth inequality.

The rich have got richer, while the rest of us have stayed roughly where we are.