Robert Peston

It definitely had a stronger mediating function.

You know, there's those sorts of rumors that you just heard there to talk about there, John, would have been, you know, they still were far more suppressed if we had that sort of environment still.

But also in 2016, we had a less fragmented politics than we do now.

And the thing about and these two things feed into each other.

But the thing about our current political situation is that, you know, when you have sort of two or two and a half big tent party politics, it means that the leading politician of those parties and those coalitions, because they're big tents,

Their incentive is to soothe.

Their incentive is to try in the main, not always.

You do get more combative politicians sometimes like Margaret Thatcher, but their incentive generally is to try and bring people together, to bridge the divide, because your party, by definition, is a big tent.

You have to do that.

In our fractured algorithmic politics, your only incentive is to get heard.

Your only incentive is to make noise.

You're either whether it's true, whether it's not true, whether it's half true, whatever.

Your incentive is to say the thing that the relatively small, slender number of people in your smallish tent want to hear.

And as a result, you get a politics which is far, far sharper edged.

than anything that we saw before.

And what you also get is a politics which is more existential.

If I think about, again, even the last 12 months, John, I think this is quite new.

We're starting to see, and we've seen it particularly in the wake of the terrible case of Henry Nowak,

We're starting to see a politics which is starting to talk, for example, in deeply existential terms about the idea of the white majority in this country.

Again, this is very American, not something we've really seen before.