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Chapter 1: What evidence suggests that the UK's political system is broken?
I don't think I'm alone in the feeling that politics just isn't working, that the system we have at the minute is broken. We don't normally do political interviews, but right now felt like the right time to do one. We spoke to political journalist Ian Dunt two years ago before Labour came into power, and he correctly predicted the situation we have today. And now we've got him back on.
Democracy doesn't work unless you can show that the things you say will happen will happen. If it's not done now, and by now I mean in the next three years in this country, very, very bad things will follow. Welcome back. Thank you very much. Yeah, love having you back. Thank you. Your table hasn't got any larger. It still feels extremely intimate in your podcast.
It is. That's how we like it.
Yeah, like to put a bit of footsie under the table with the guests.
We fought for years just to get better chairs, and a better chair is a wicker chair.
Congratulations.
Because that thing is, like, oppressive.
No, you're really going places. I can see when I look at your wicker chair that it's all up for you.
Yeah, my prediction is it's not going to improve as well by the next time you come back in two years, potentially. But speaking of predictions, the last time you were on was before we had an election, before Labour came into power. And you said at the time that they would be better at governing than the Conservatives, but that Britain's problems were structural and they wouldn't disappear. So...
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Chapter 2: How did Ian Dunt's predictions about Labour's governance turn out?
What do you mean by information ecosystem? So over the last two years, things have become very extreme in the information space. And processes that were already taking place have now become much more severe. So, I mean, for instance, you take what's happened with X, the Elon Musk social media website that used to be Twitter.
Most people that were sort of on the center, on the center left and on the center right, came off that in one swing, basically around the time of the inauguration, when we saw Elon Musk do the Nazi salute. However, most journalists and the far left and the far right stayed on that site at that point and started just churning it up.
So if you look at like someone who's a TV producer, right, so daytime TV, no one ever talks about daytime TV in politics. Daytime TV in politics has like an absolutely crucial role. It goes out to a lot more people than will pay attention to political broadcasting.
They tend to take something from Twitter and just turn it into a, you know, I don't know, can a woman have a penis, like a binary sort of debate that doesn't really do anything for nuance. Those guys are still on X.
They're still taking all of their information from a site that has been purposefully rigged by its algorithm to try and boost the far right and that is otherwise populated by the far left with almost no one from the centre in between.
So suddenly what you see on TV, on really quite benign programmes, on daytime television programmes, is a really quite vicious, very extreme political debate, which has now just reached like explicit racial discussions of immigration. That's the point that that is in on that subject. And that is primarily to do with our information ecosystem.
X is not the only problem there, but it's one of the problems, and you can see that happening across the whole landscape.
And do you think this is kind of like... Is this American tech influence or do you think that that was something that was going to happen? If you remove X from that, is this something that was just waiting to happen? Or do you think X has created that polarisation?
X is particularly damaging because it doesn't have a big mainstream following. Most normal people, when you chat to them, aren't really using that site. They're using Instagram and Facebook. So why is it a problem then if most people aren't? because of journalists and opinion formers.
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Chapter 3: What are the structural problems facing the UK government?
This happens all the time in government. Usually it's easier to deal with because the MOD has public support. When it comes to benefits or something, there is no public support. So the Treasury just tramples over them and defeats them. MOD does have public support. So they start elevating their concerns into the public sphere. Someone has to step in and make that decision.
Someone has to say, OK, fine, so it's the MOD or it's the Treasury or this is the compromise. Now, that is just simply that individual has simply not been there. That leadership that you would expect of the prime minister is simply not there. He keeps on defaulting to be like, why can't my ministers just sort it out? OK, fine.
But when they are not sorting it out, you have to step in and make a call and be prepared to make that call. That absence of leadership on contested issues within government has kept us in a form of stasis. So then when you go for things that are even more controversial, I mean, something like what do we do about social care? Obviously, there's nothing that's going to happen on social care.
Everyone knows that means the tax is going to have to go up in some way if we're going to deal with it. But if you have someone who's scared of making decisions, scared of making the call, that can never come. That decision point can just never come.
Chapter 4: How has the information ecosystem changed political discourse?
And you keep on kicking the ball down the road over and over. And that's basically where we've ended up.
But why do you think he's scared? Because I mean, you sign up for the job. Your job is to make tough decisions. And he's not even making the like semi-tough decisions, let alone the tough ones.
You know, that's a very good question. And I can add it to the list of things that I think will always baffle me about his failures. Like another one is just like, also, why does someone who basically isn't really interested in politics decide that he wants to become prime minister? But where is it? There is no real interest in politics there either.
Like he doesn't, you know, when people come to him with policy ideas, he doesn't really seem very interested. He doesn't really like policy. He likes talking about process a bit, but, you know, you can do that anywhere. He doesn't really have any ideological conviction. You know, he's pretty, he's pretty much a blank page, to be honest.
And psychologically, it's sort of interesting as to how he found himself in this position. But I've just put it to the back of the list of things that I want to ask. Well, how do we get ourselves out of this position?
Yeah.
So, I mean, you know, he has proved, I think, incredibly disappointing. A lot of that came down to who he had around him. Like before the election, there were two figures around him. There was Morgan McSweeney.
That was the political mind, the person that wins elections, that, you know, figures out what you're going to do with your different voting groups, how to appeal to them, what the messaging is. And then you had Sue Gray and she was the civil service one. She was supposed to be chief of staff initially. She was supposed to be there. It's like, this is how we're going to make the whole system work.
This is how we keep the treasury involved in discussions. Here are a series of long-term goals that we're trying to achieve. Here are the short-term benchmarks by which we do them. That could be in health. That could be in education. It could be in transport. It could be from anything to your nuclear deterrent to potholes on the street.
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Chapter 5: What leadership issues are impacting Keir Starmer's effectiveness?
None. No government can tell you that they can control for these events because they manifestly cannot do that. OK. And each time the cost of energy has rocketed up because we are completely reliant on a handful of absolute bastards around like to a man, like the worst human beings on Earth. And those are the guys we're dependent on for our energy.
Obviously, we're talking about like Middle East sort of petro states and Russia. Our way of dealing with that is to create energy security at home, while also it's kind of a nice secondary impact to have is like save the planet, you know, so make sure that actually kids can live on the planet and we're not all going to die.
So on that basis, it seems like a very effective portfolio for someone who's idealistic and pragmatic to take hold of. And he's managed to deliver with gusto also, by the way, economically for us. If you look at the report that came out last week by the CVI economics team, something worth over $100 billion to us right now.
And the jobs that it creates are much better paid than the jobs that we usually have. So for average wages, you're looking at the upper $30,000. You're looking in the lower to mid $40,000 for jobs in net zero. So it's not just putting up the wind farms. It's also the supplies, the technical expertise. that whole area of the economy has proved to be extremely valuable.
And there were some estimates that were putting it, you know, in sort of like the low single digits for its contribution to our economy. So even if someone doesn't agree and thinks that it's all a bit arbitrary, which by the way, it isn't, it's all based on like peer reviewed science accepted at the highest possible levels of international summits.
Some of the most impressive international intellectual projects that have ever been undertaken by the human species. But even if you weren't to think that, economically, it's one of those core areas of growth in our economy. So really, I mean, I think that's a pretty comprehensive case for it. And I think really it's very, very hard for opponents to put up a fight against it.
Is net zero the same as energy independence? Or is net zero potentially like the NHS where you could just move numbers around and be like, oh, we're now, we've struck the balance. It's kind of like carbon credits, which you used to miss sell in the past.
Yeah.
Allegedly. Do you know what I mean? Why don't they just call it energy independence? Because that's a better brand than net zero. Net zero feels like it could. Do you know what I'm saying?
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Chapter 6: How does the current tax system affect public perception of politicians?
They're mostly both correct, which makes it very hard for the two tribes to stop going to war in that the left, the right, the... The left are correct that the right are paranoid control freaks that will try to extract them from the party any chance they get. And the right are correct that the left make Labour completely unelectable and destroy any chance for progressive government in Britain.
And because they're both fundamentally correct, there is really no limitation on what they will do to each other. So that is simply always going to be the case. I don't think the problems, though, that we face are fundamentally about the Labour Party. I think when people are raising questions about Keir Starmer in the Labour Party, they're doing it because the public don't like him.
If he had really high approval ratings, you think anyone in the Labour Party would be saying, let's get rid of Keir Starmer, no matter how many Mandelson appointments he did? Of course not. No one really... It's not about Mandelson at all. It's about the fact that you're unpopular. In the same way that we then told ourselves with Boris Johnson, oh, you know, the Tories got rid of him.
They chucked him out of Downing Street because of Partygate. They didn't. They got rid of him because he was unpopular. Like...
party gate made him unpopular and then there was a reason the only reason any party ever gets rid of a leader in paris because they're unpopular that's the reality of it so it's actually with the public you know that this all originates it's not their fault because i think they're basically correcting the judgment that they've come to on him although i have to admit one thing i do find it a bit hard to understand how strongly people feel about it like how much they hate him and i sort of think i don't really understand how anyone can bring up any meaningful emotions i don't
I don't think hate's the right word. I think it's just kind of like, just sick of it.
And disappointed, because I think everyone wanted change, and we're like, oh, Labour, we're going to have some changes, all these promises, and then it's like, not even more of the same. It's like literally, not inept, like, just nothing. So nothing to get excited about, nothing to get angry about, just like nothing's really happening. It seems to be exactly the same.
And why are none of you human? Why are Keir Starmer and Rachel, why are you like this? Why do you sound like robots? I get more out of an AI chatbot than any of these people, you know, in terms of, I think that's kind of why Andy Burnham, people might like him because when he speaks, they think, oh, I feel like I could meet a person like this in real life.
I don't feel like I would ever meet a Keir Starmer in real life.
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