 Rydyn ni'n bod i'n gweithio eich bod yn cymryd gyda'r gweithio i'r gwaith yma i'r ysgol yn gweld o'r gweithio eich bywyd. Rydyn ni'n gweithio i'r gweithio eich bod yn gweithio ar gyfer y dyfodol, fyddai'n gofal eu ddweudwyr i'n gyfer eu gofyn. Rydyn ni'n gweithio i'r gweithio, Jeremy Corr, a'n gweithio ar y dyfodol 40% gydag y gyrfa yma i'r gweithio. A'r pundwydau i'r gweithio i ffordd rwy'n gyffredinol. So, why is this? Is it because politics is becoming increasingly unpredictable, because we have new unknown externalities like social media? Or is it simply because they brought their own biases to the table and they didn't want to see the facts for what they were? I'm getting a sense from what you're feeling. So, to help us answer this question, I have Ash Sarkar from Navarra Media. Matt Fawr Cwsyn, former Corbyn Spokesperson. I have Stephen Bush, special correspondent for the new statesman. Rachel Shabby, author and journalist. So, how are we going to run the session? We'll have a little opener from each of the panellists, then we'll have a bit of a chat between them. So, think of some questions as we go. So, Ash, I'd like to start with you, because one thing that I find really interesting about this conversation is we've increasingly started to blame centrist, forget it wrong, like centrist commentators or right wing commentators. They just don't understand, but a lot on the left didn't understand and not many of us predicted it. So, we are just as to blame. How do you feel about that? Oh my God, I feel like you've just like slew me. I mean, I had something to talk about and I thought I'd take this opportunity in front of 200 people to do it. So, I got it wrong. I thought that Labour would be annihilated. I went out, I campaigned for Corbyn, but I did it with this millstone round my heart. I thought that the country was, you know, kind of irrevocably right wing, xenophobic, nasty, badly dressed and that those things could only stay that way. And the reason I thought this way is that, one, I'm an anarchist, so we haven't gotten anything right since, like, 1890. And two, my political awakening was 2003. Like, I'm sure, it's the case for many of you as well, right? The Iraq War. And so, for every political movement that I've been a part of since then, whether it was protest at Operation Cast Lead, whether it was part of the anti-war movement, whether it was nuclear disarmament, whether it was campaigns against fees and cuts or police violence, it was defeat after defeat after defeat. And so, I had kind of forgotten, one, what hope felt like. I was just like, oh, God, this is kind of stirring. Like, somewhere near where my diaphragm is unsettling and I feel a bit nauseous. And I thought that the lesson to be learnt from all those things is that the statist projects, right, ones with national ambitions, were to be astewed. I thought that any movement that had scale at the forefront of its mind would have to make these completely unconscionable compromises. And I think we found that this is no longer the case. I forgot that it was possible to change people's minds and that you can do that without appealing to disposition or kind of lofty morality, but by appealing to their material conditions, I forgot in short that change was possible. So that's why I got it wrong. What are you? This isn't about me. This isn't about my father-cousin. Hello, everyone. I work for Jeremy Corbyn. I was a spokesperson for a year. And I think that obviously in that time I got to know him, got to know who he was and what a competent and capable politician he is. And also what a great campaign he is, I think the first leadership contest and the second certainly proved that to everyone. So I knew that once we got into the short campaign, that it would switch from the day-to-day grind of being leader of the opposition and into the campaigner that he's always been. And he's a very, very good campaigner. I thought the league of the manifesto got everyone interested in policy, turned the debate away from Brexit, the framing that the Tories wanted the election to be fought around. And then we started to talk about domestic policy. And the reason we started to talk about domestic policy was because the status quo is not working for a lot of people. And the assumptions of the commentators were predicated on the idea that the status quo is working for a lot of people, will ameliorate it. If you don't do that, if you don't just stand on a platform that wants to ameliorate the status quo, if you want to try and transform it, then you're going to lose. And a lot of the commentators grew up in this tradition, this political tradition from 97 onwards. I won't name names, but it's pretty much, broadly, 90% of the comment area. So Stephen, not including Stephen, I think. So I think that what we've seen then is, I think you can broadly conceptualise the commentators into two distinct camps. You've got the people that wanted it to work and didn't think it could, sort of the leftist platform that Corbyn put forward. And I'd say it was the polytoin B people. And then I'd say that there were the people that didn't want it to work, but also didn't think it could. And they were the sort of Jonathan Friedland people. And irrespective of that, what they were basing their assumptions on obviously outdated, and the context has changed and therefore I think politics has to change. Political parties have to respond to that. And the Tories were, in this election, they were fortunate in a sense that Brexit was happening because they were implementing something that would transform the country. But next time around, after Brexit, we've gone through the negotiations and there was some kind of settlement from that, they're going to have to put forward something transformative because the country's still going to go down in the direction it's been going in. So I think the transformative programme obviously broke with a lot of orthodoxies. People didn't think it could work. I think obviously Jeremy Corbyn proved him wrong. But I think that also they didn't even give Jeremy Corbyn a chance to, they didn't even try and find out why people liked him, or why the Labour electorate liked him. They just wrote them off as trots and they didn't take them seriously and they didn't realise that it was actually ordinary people joining the Labour Party to support Jeremy Corbyn because he was authentic and he had integrity. So I think there was multiple factors but that's just a few. You've definitely been keeping a good list and a bad list for this Christmas then. Stephen. I think in terms of the, didn't the left get it wrong as well, I think there's wrong and wrong isn't there. So there's kind of going, during the election I made a documentary and Matt very kindly decided to be in it and one before we were recording I was like oh yeah I think it's going quite well. I was like yeah I think he is surging. But I think it's only inside big cities. I don't think it's going to go well outside of them. Which obviously turned out not to be true. There were some people who thought it was going really well and Labour was going to surge all the way into office. That turned out not to be true. There were some people who thought Labour was surging and they correctly got it that there was going to be a hung parliament. And I think those three things are all kind of fine because you're drawing a conclusion about reality. There were a lot of people who were still on the 7th of June going no he's not surging. Campaign's very bad. Yeah it's been a terrible campaign. And it's kind of you know when you're doing like a maths GCSE you get two points for showing you're working right and only one point for the conclusion. But there's a reason for that. To take say Dan Hodges he correctly predicted the 2015 election because he said UKIP would collapse. So he got the election correct but UKIP didn't collapse. That is not why David Cameron won the 2015 election. He was completely wrong and because his working was bad that's why he's got every other political event since wrong. And I think the reason why you have kind of people who've shown they're working and people who don't is basically the problem with political journalism particularly in the United Kingdom where everything is so centralised around London is their safety in numbers. I strongly urge you if you haven't to read the very good interview Matt did with Jacob in which he talks about his experiences of coming in as Corbyn's press guy and I think turning a lot of people around in the lobby around on Corbyn. But the thing is is that it's the only place where your boss goes so what's going to happen and then the person sitting next to you their boss phones and goes what's going to happen and actually the sensible thing to do is to go like so what is going to happen because if we're both wrong and that's the thing about like when people say like oh the pundits got it wrong well there's safety in numbers isn't there. And even more so when you have a pundit class which is overwhelmingly white overwhelmingly male actually depressingly from one university like actually the establishment is even more kind of concentrated than it looks. And I think that's the main reason why people got it wrong was group think and kind of safety in numbers. Rachel? Yeah so yeah I would add to that I agree with everything that has come before but I think as well political journalism in the UK and especially lobby journalism it's just really really cynical. I mean people are just really like there's so much miserableism in that sort of section of journalism and to be fair if my sphere of journalism was covering domestic UK politics and hanging around Westminster and British MPs I would probably have all my faith in humanity sucked out of me as well. So you know you can see where it comes from but I think that just means that that kind of journalism fails to understand hope and if politics that people have got wrong over the past few years has been about anything from Brexit to Trump it's been about hope. And so when it came to Corbyn this kind of undertow of just oh it will never happen and everything's gloomy and people are awful right. It meant that everything was seen through that frame so these huge rallies during the election campaign didn't mean anything because you know there were just a bunch of Corbyn crazy nutters that weren't representative of society at large. The fact that the manifesto was so popular and those policies really resonated with the public didn't mean anything because nobody votes on the basis of politics. The fact that momentum did this incredible job of canvassing and getting people out to campaign using galvanising the kind of the numbers and the interest and the enthusiasm for Corbyn and using it to have political conversations. That didn't mean anything because all Labour was doing was piling up votes in areas where they didn't count right so none of it mattered. And I think you know if you're predisposed to being cynical then that's going to be your frame of reference. I think one of the other things that went on is that generationally a lot of the political commentators who have prominence and influence are of an age where they've quite clearly internalised the prevailing politics of the last three decades so that whole kind of centrism, unfettered free market those very narrow parameters of where politics takes place is very much internalised by commentators. You could see that during the campaign because people would take issue with things like free hospital parking and free school meals for kids with their hand on heart say that they were taking issue with these things for progressive reasons and you're like... Okay, do we have to have this conversation about how universalism isn't anti-progressive? So I think that clearly was a factor, the frame of reference. And the other thing that Stephen mentioned which I'm going to mention as well because I always do when we have conversations about media that the lack of diversity is a massive problem. It's not this idea that diversity is some kind of doing people a favour by being inclusive, it's really not about that. It's about bringing in different people from different classes and different ethnic backgrounds so that the thinking can become more diverse and I think one of the things that's happened in British political journalism in the last few decades is that it's become really, it's like an inbred village. I mean it's really just super narrow and one of the things that was, I think, a really big problem with that is that after the election you saw a lot of younger journalists say they got it wrong but actually they really wanted to support Corbyn publicly but they were laughter or they felt like it would be a really stupid thing to do. To me, one of your jobs if you're a senior journalist is to create an intellectually open culture. You want to open the conversation, you want to broaden the parameters and if people who are younger than you don't feel intellectually confident then you've got a really big problem. Although fortunately, since quite clearly all those senior political journalists did get it wrong and elders didn't know better, it's something we don't really need to worry about anymore, hopefully. So, leading on from your point about more senior journalists I'd like to maybe start off the discussion by talking about what is the role of a plundit, what is the role of a commentator because perhaps we saw during the election that it was a vanity project, a space where you projected your own biases and your own view of the world. Is that what journalism is or should we be assessing facts? Do we have a moral obligation to readers to be giving them a little bit more than just impressing our friends on Twitter? Ash, what's that with you? I think the answer to that is obviously journalists have a responsibility to dig deeper, to frame things in edifying context and actually be able to get out there and do some good work. I think that often that doesn't happen not simply because journalists are lazy or incompetent or stupid or malevolent, it's because if you're on a precarious contract or you're not on a contract at all, you're a freelancer, your bottom line is chat shit, get paid. Because if you develop a reputation for someone who's going to run stories which your editors or people who are commissioning you don't think are going to fly, how are you going to pay your rent tomorrow? So one of the problems that we have here is a structural problem in journalism and not just a cultural one. In terms of what do I think journalists should be doing, I think that there's a tendency now amongst the slightly more senior editors and commissioning editors to say, well look, what we've learned in the last two years is that expertise is now fraff. Pundits don't know what they're on about, they missed the point and the electorate is too volatile. I think that that is equally a bad journalistic practice. I think what we should be looking at is like, hang on, what are the salient historical economic and social shifts that we can contextualise these events in? Because actually Corbyn didn't come out of nowhere, Trump didn't come out of nowhere, Brexit didn't come out of nowhere, they're produced by concrete material forces and what we need to do is think about the kinds of structures that allow journalists to get into that. Because as it stands, what we have is a huge freelance pool of disempowered, often young and often female workers in journalism who are unable to locate the pulse of politics outside the corridors of power because their seniors simply don't allow it. People often talk about the blurred line between news and comment, but I think there's actually a bigger problem in political commentary, and that is the blurred line between political analysis and outriding. I have never made any secret the fact that I'm a Jeremy Corbyn supporter. I'm an outrider for him. If you've ever watched Arsenal Fan TV, I'm the equivalent of that for politics. I'm not making any secret of that. So is Danny Finkelstein, who is a Tory peer. Times columnist, but he's a Tory peer. He is a Tory supporting outrider effectively. He's a legislator. I think Stephen, I'd say, is a political analyst. He takes an objective view. He speaks to everyone. He was one of the few people who actually made an effort when he's writing trying to find out what's happening rather than got some shit on Jeremy or whatever. He's actually trying to find out from me what's actually happening. I think that's probably the main issue. There is a space for analysis, and there is a space for outriding, and I think we have to make that distinction and make that clear to the reader. I think you're right. I'm a commission editor on the opinion desk at The Independent, so it's my job essentially to be involved in this process, and we do have pieces of analysis, and then we will commission someone like Matt when we won a pro-Corban line. Actually, what was really interesting about the election was we can look at our traffic in real time, and all of the pieces, the opinion pieces that we were putting out, which were pro-Corban, Matt, Rachel's, they just went viral. The traffic on them was incredible, and it was at that point when I was like, oh, someone's happening. So the pieces are there, but I think it's not being clearer to your audience. Is that by being clearer in bylines at the end of pieces? Do we need more transparency? Yeah, I think so, but I think that there is a lack of... So there should be, I think, objective political analysis. That's what's missing right now. It's not that there are... I mean, there is a paucity of left commentators as well, particularly at the Guardian, which is most disappointing. But I think that there is a lack of objective political analysis, and I think that those that portray themselves as objective political analysts are of a time or a politics that is pretty much outdated, and there are certain commentators who are sort of from this tradition, the centrist tradition that Rachel was talking about. They have benefited very well from the status quo from what I would call kind of Blairism, neoliberalism, and they can't understand why everyone else doesn't really like what they like or isn't doing as well as they're doing, and they can't really see the world for anyone else's eyes. So I think that it's exactly right. Diversity is really important. It needs to be a lot more younger people in there as well. I think that would make a huge difference. How do you feel the situation is at the new statesome when you write... So I write the politics column, which is kind of this weekly thing, so it's a bit like when you're... So I spend this continual state either unhappy because I haven't written it yet or unhappy because it wasn't very good. But I see the function of that page, basically kind of the sort of golden idea I have in my mind, is whether if it's about the Tories or so, the Tories think that they lost because of X, as a result they're doing Y, will Y be effective, yes or no? I'm very pleased that you think I did take the time to talk to all of you, because I did definitely try. I think it's important to have both that kind of look, here's what these people want to do, here's why they think it's going to work, that kind of analysing someone on their own terms. I don't think it is actually necessarily something which is about bylines. I think the trouble is, it's very easy not to be honest with yourself about what it is you're trying to do. I think also the other problem is, the longer it is that you do something, the more of a pain it is to go, oh God, am I really going to have to spend another Monday calling people to ask them questions which they might actually find quite boring to be asked. So when the exit poll flashed up, my immediate reaction was laughing with joy. Then my second reaction was, oh thank God I'm not going to have to get to know another set of people around the Labour leader. I think part of the problem that has gone wrong with a lot of political commentary is that there were a bunch of people who when Jeremy was elected went, oh for fuck's sake, I put all of this time and effort and I found Evette Cooper's campaign interesting, right? I mean seriously, if you've ever tried to find a news line from an Evette Cooper speech, when we all had to interview all of the candidates, there was this like palpable silence of just like who wants to interview Evette Cooper. And then eventually basically I was just like, well you know, Helen you're funny, maybe you can get to do something interesting. She couldn't. It turned out then it's just impossible. But if you've put a great deal of time and effort into that, right? There were a lot of people who their basic bet was oh well the Labour Party's having a bit of a midlife crisis and then Jeremy will go away and I will just put a lot of work into these people. I think it is partly about an attitudinal change. There are just a lot of people and I think this is where the safety in numbers and the lack of diversity who don't seem to do things I would regard as core competencies of our jobs. You can see it now with this huge cottage industry of people going like oh well, I don't know if their campaign was terrible, but their campaign was terrible, Labour's campaign was great, there will never be as big a gap between the two, therefore the next election will be normal. And it's because that is like the way to have an easy life basically. So I think it is partly that people in our industry do have to kind of work a bit harder. What are those key competencies for the commentary app? I think, yeah, you sort of have to, you know, kind of whatever this sort of issue you're writing about, it's like well, you know, I mean so, actually in terms of what I'm writing, probably going to write this week, is not taking Jeremy Corbyn seriously yet. They have this weird thing where they go like I'm really worried he might win. Okay, so what's your plan to deal with this? Well, we're going to attack him on Uber. We think that's going to move a lot of votes. Really, do you? I think to write that well, you kind of have to go like well, you have to talk someone in the leaders office to find out how they think the Tories are doing attacking them. You have to talk to someone who works around Theresa May to find out how they think it's going. Someone in the Tory party who hates Theresa May. And then like, which is quite easy to be frank, that's actually the easiest part of my job now. And then you have to kind of find someone in the Conservative party who is worried about Jeremy Corbyn winning and thinks that, you know, and what they think they need to do to say, and that way you know that you have got all of the opinions, you know, all of the opinions that, and then you kind of go like well, here's what people have told me, what do I do? But it is very easy, to just phone someone and they're like, okay mate, how are you feeling, how are the kids? Brilliant, right, excellent, I'm going to file now. And I think that has been the problem with a lot of commentary, is that latter approach. It's putting the journalism back in comment journalism, rather than it being just sort of like an expression of your feelings on a given topic. Yeah, I think a lot of people do tend to create comment as kind of like retirement, almost. It's like you're like, you know, I've done 20 years of reporting, but now I have a column. And I think actually that you do have to put the same, to have the journalism in there as well as the comments. Rachel, you've written comment pieces for us at The Independent. When you write them, are you out there speaking to people? Or is it something that just comes from you? Yeah, I don't really like those hot takes where you don't get to talk to anybody. Cos, you know, when people say, can you file a piece on this in two hours and you're like, really? Don't you want me to think about it a little bit? Or maybe make a few calls? I don't know, wouldn't that be helpful? So I'm not. Imagine. Imagine. Yeah, but I think, you know, it has become, you know, the whole industry has become very much about hot takes and there's not a lot of time or resources to do the right thing, which is go and talk to everybody and come back when you know what's going on, right? That doesn't really happen so much. But I think with the pundits that we've got now, I mean, for me it was really interesting to see how quickly it went from, so after the unexpected labour surge, how quickly people went from, yeah, we got it wrong to, well, could you really have got it right? I mean, who would have got it right in these circumstances and then to, oh, we didn't get it wrong at all. He's still rubbish and everything we thought previously was right because I think there is a very sort of self-confirming culture amongst commentators and it is that lack of diversity. It is a bunch of people who do feel entitled to tell us what leadership is, what electability looks like and what it doesn't look like. I don't know if you guys remember, these were the people who were enthusing when Corbyn was just elected and they were despairing about how he was, what was it, incombatent, not a leader, unalettable. How could we forget that one, unalettable? Yeah, and then, you know, a few... What's up? Oh yeah, but those are like second degree complaints. Yeah, so a few months after that, Hilary Ben stood up and there was a Syria debate and they were all gushing about what a leader he was and how statesman-like and amazing it was but he basically just went, you know, war is bad. Death is awful, it's like, yeah mate. And that was it. It was like people who have affinities or affinities with that kind of person so leadership means coming from a particular frame, coming from a particular class, looking and acting in a certain way and I do think that the job of some of the commentary, whether they admit to it or not, is to police for us the parameters of what is acceptable in politics and what isn't. So, you know, we could do with smashing that open a bit. When we're having this discussion, we keep sort of floating back to this, almost like media ogre we created in our head where it's an evil centrist dad, one of Matt's favourites. You know, but we were all left-wing commentators. And we also can fall foul of bias and I think if we want to create a sustainable project I think we need to look at these critiques and apply them to ourselves as well as other commentators. And there is definitely a vein on the left where you can say, oh, you know, I really like the manifesto, there's one thing, and then everyone on Twitter is like, how dare you? And do we start to create the same conditions that have trapped centrists and right-wing pundits? Absolutely. And there's a word that we kind of keep skirting around and that word is ideology. The media is not just holding a mirror up to society and neither is it simply this fourth estate, checking the excesses of power. It has, as you said, a coercive function, a policing function and one of the things that it does is kind of impose limits on that which is possible. And when it comes to thinking about how we create alternative media projects, whether it's something like Navarra Media, go to support.navarramedia. I also hear there's some really great merch outside that. I mean, seriously, we've got some very sexy merch outside, like cuffing seasoners around the corner, so cop it. Or something like Jacobin, which is kind of offering these, you know, wonderful, deep dive socioeconomic analyses or it's something like the Canary, which is supposed to be like a lot more consumable, like a lot more shareable. We're trying to achieve something and in a way, we're trying to co-op some of those coercive or indeed sometimes emotionally manipulative tools for ourselves. And the reason why I'm framing it in this way, it sounds malevolent or it sounds a bit kind of dodgy, but the fact is that I'm not in this game to accurately reflect reality. I don't really care for reality. What I care about is transformation. What I care about is change. Couldn't you say that that's exactly what some centres would say? They'd say I think the Corbyn project is destructive for the UK and I'm not interested in talking about facts. I'm interested in pushing this agenda which will save the UK from the Red Terror. Absolutely, absolutely, which is why I acknowledge that fundamentally this is a question of ideology and this question of power. Who's got it, who doesn't and how do we get it? I'm not saying that you sink to the most depraved depths that are available and start doing all these personal smears because also one of the things is that you didn't create these tools and at some point they will turn back on you and you've got to think about what you can use not simply in good conscience but to build this better world that we're actually striving towards. I think in the back of your mind, you have to realise that media is the how but the horizon is something else. The horizon is not simply a more diverse world but a more equal world, a more equitable world where people feel more empowered to speak up. I think that's where simply mimicking the tools of the right or the centre won't work for us and I think that's what centres tend to be quite bad as distinguishing the horizon and the how. The horizon is, I think as you said, the status quo. The how is to just kind of bleat on at you about how everything is fine. Right now, no pun, the momentum is with us because we've got some vision and I think the most important thing is not to lose that vision and not to become complacent. I think that one of the most dangerous things is like a little taste of success because you think that the rest is simply inevitable, it's not. I think what the last two years have shown us is that the rug can be pulled out from you at any moment if you forget about grassroots movement building and I think media can play a really wonderful, powerful part in that. Thank you for your commentator and you thought that the amelioration of the status quo was kind of what was the most electable. You'd be forgiven for thinking that before 2008 but then the 2008 financial crisis happened, what the whole system was built on came crashing down and obviously we're still paying for that crisis now. Nine years later and we've had cuts to public spending the average person has got poorer and you can't then turn up, rock up with a... We're just going to change it a little bit. If the financial crisis never happened, that might have worked. I come from the view of... I think Jeremy Corbyn was necessary for the Labour Party to rejuvenate from a Labour Party perspective. If the Labour Party was going to win it needed to move to the left, someone who had integrity, it needed to depart from the past, from Blair, from Brown, from what was a kind of neoliberal agenda. As it happens, the manifesto that we put forward was radical in the sense that we've shifted so far from where we were in 2007-2008 before the financial crisis. But it doesn't... It's to achieve non-radical ends really. We just sort of want everyone to not be going to food banks and have enough teachers at school. Have you set it on now, Matt? That's a bit... Yeah. Sorry, I'll answer your question about whether I applied the critiques to myself. Yes, I would have done. If Jeremy Corbyn hadn't done as well as he did in the election, I would have gone, thanks very much. This is obviously not for me. I don't know what I'm talking about. See you later. I wouldn't have known what I was talking about and I said that all along. I said, if I'm wrong, you'll never hear from me again. Politics is clearly not my forte. But as it happens, I'm still here. But so are the other commentators who got it wrong. But if they're centrist and they're pushing a centrist agenda, then that's fine, be honest about it. But don't pretend that you're an expert. You're not, demonstrably. Stephen, do you think that there's an element of groupthink in the left? Well, everyone groupthink. I mean, we're tribal animals and our brains are wired to reward us for foregoing, yes, I agree, and making sort of agreeable noises at each other. And that is the problem. But that is the problem. Yes. And I can actually feel like a... And that's always a problem. But I think one, as a matter of fact, there is a big difference between... I think it seems like it was perfectly legitimate to look at Copland, oh God, the other by-election, I forgot where it was, Stoke, and the local elections and go, this doesn't look like it. There was a perfectly data-driven case to think that the Labour Party had a lot to do going into the election. The point was there wasn't a data-driven case at the end just to say that they hadn't done an awful lot. I think, you can sort of audit yourself. I do partly because it's like a good, fun bit of free content towards the end of the year, kind of go back and go like, what things did I get horrifically wrong this year? I briefly got really spooked in 2016 and Zach Goldsmith wouldn't be demonising Sadiq Khan if they didn't have a really good evidence that it worked. So I started being like, maybe this is a very clever move. It was not a very clever move. But I think everyone does do that. I think where I would sort of depart from, Matt, I was just like, oh, if you'd got it wrong, you should have vanished from the scene, right? If you think about lots of the mistakes that were made in the leaders office before you arrived and the kind of like getting more street-wise, I think it is important to have a culture where you can go, so what did I get wrong? What am I going to do differently? The difficulty, as Rachel said, is a lot of people basically went from going like, what did I get wrong to, well, no one could have got it right to... Did I really get it wrong at all? And it's like, well, that's not sort of like... I think everyone has got to be aware of the fact that it's always really, really sort of nice to pretend that everything is great and you didn't make any mistakes. Yeah, I mean, the lack of introspection was quite something, wasn't it? But I think actually in terms of group think on the left, I think that it's slightly different. I think the bar is much higher on the left because the bias on the right is invisible. It's neutral, it's value-neutral, right? So if you are coming at politics from the left, then you're constantly aware that you're not in the invisible politics zone, where everybody is just being objective and not at all political and therefore you have to constantly prove the weight of your analysis. So you're constantly thinking about your own confirmation bias. Am I falling into confirmation bias? Okay, let me check this. What can I see out there that supports that or doesn't support that? And I think for me one of the disappointing things about being a commentator on the left in the last two years is how little space there was for us to develop those ideas and for us to try and break out of group think and for us to progress, intellectually progress our ideas. Because nobody wanted to hear it. You'd pitched to editors and not only would they say no, but they'd tell you why you're wrong and you're like, just no, it's fine. No is the standard. We don't need to get into an ideological argument about my pitch. Just no, it's fine. So it was actually quite extraordinary the lack of opportunity to go out and do the kind of reporting and the kind of analysis that we should have been doing and I think Ash is right to talk about creating other ways of doing that because it does have to be done. We don't want to stay stuck. We want to keep developing our ideas, right? So that was one of the frustrations, I would say. One of many. And one of the other things I want to talk about tonight was one of the excuses that pundits who got it wrong give, which is politics is increasingly unpredictable because social media it's a real technique isn't it to blame tech when things go wrong it's never your fault. But is there something in that? Do you feel since we've started using social media more and indeed most newsrooms are heavily dependent upon Facebook for traffic? Social is king now in newsrooms if you're digital and most newspapers at least have a digital arm do you feel like that's changed the way you write now compared to if you wrote in the past for just print only? I mean I think it has changed the possibilities and it's changed the potential for introducing arguments but I think what Ash was saying before about the structural imbalance really applies there because yes there is more space for digital or the left in the space created by digital and it does mean that you can write differently and it does mean that you can attract audience in a different way but again we're still looking at structural imbalance where most of the people who are prominent and influential are also salaried and the rest aren't and that obviously that level of precariousness obviously creates limitations on the kind of conversation you can have regardless of whether digital has enabled things or not not to name names because apart from that we're not in that game do you feel like your relationship with editors when your picture and comment pieces has changed since the election do you feel like they give you more space they're like oh maybe Rachel was on to something how does that dynamic work for you? I mean maybe the time span was kind of you know Stephen's kind of trajectory of sorry not sorry we've got nothing to be sorry for I think there was a small moment but yeah I don't think it lasted that long really well yet your polytoinbies were like oh I got it wrong and that's good and I think those commentators have come around a bit the Jonathan Freelands have gone even if I was wrong it would be a disaster so they've kept hammering their world view and I have no objection to that in principle but I think that they should be honest about it and say this is their world view and they're not analysing from a perspective of a Labour party perspective in a sense they're analysing from a centuries perspective and if you're going to have a centuries commentator on your books that represents roughly 5% of the electorate then you should have I don't know 19 left commentators This whole thing about the volatility of the electorate I think is a really interesting thing to look at because I think if you perceive politics as just a series of set pieces and in the short term then yeah things look incredibly volatile and I think we feel things to be really volatile right like we kind of go from 2015, 2016 to 2017 and we're just like what the fuck has just happened you know you kind of feel like you've emerged from this like 6 hour club night like what's happened to me but the thing is is that history doesn't work in that short term and so if you want to say what Brexit came out of nowhere you have to deliberately ignore the tide of rising xenophobia in this country which was stoked by a new labour immigration detention was a new labour project something which was capitalised by David Cameron and something which the establishment thought it could maintain control of turns out it couldn't the monster they were feeding was so much bigger than the infrastructure that they created to contain it could ever hold on to I think that the problem with this idea of like well better journalism would fix this is that well data and better interpretation of data is just one step finding relevant historical social and economic context and I know that sounds really boring right I'm snoozing myself to death just saying it but I'm in a really privileged position because the majority of my money does not come from journalism thank fuck for that right I've got one foot in the academy where there is space to talk about these things to write about these things the only thing is is no one fucking reads it and I think we need some of those values which are nurtured in political science departments history departments even literature, social anthropology et cetera et cetera and we need to find room for that in newsrooms because otherwise everything is going to look like a surprise everything is going to look like what the fuck I'm just like read fanon it will explain it right and this might be part of the problem so in a newsroom so like my commission and cycle will be news event hits commission comment piece off the back of it and during the election that will be polls and obviously polls were inaccurate apart from you gove well done you gove but you your job isn't to say oh commentator can you please sort of just think about the last 50 years where for like social dynamics in the UK it's like talk about this stack because that is like what people so like another element to think about is social as SEO search engine optimization newsrooms commissioned around that because that's the words that people are typing into Google and they type that word in and then they click on your article so during the election they'll be like latest poll labour and so you heavily get your person to write on that topic so yeah it might be that the news the way the business dynamic of newsrooms is actually the antithesis of what we need which is why the long term perspectives. I mean really like I think key example of where this goes wrong or a misreading of data because it's been abstracted from power is looking at the 2016 American election people went well the US is on course to be majority minority by I think 2043 therefore that's you know the Democrats are eschewing from now on because people who aren't white tend to overwhelmingly vote Democrat and you can only think that if you don't understand that America has got white supremacist state apparatus at its disposal one suppress the minority vote and two to impoverish minorities so they don't want a vote and they don't feel that they're reflected in candidates that's how you can say Trump came out of nowhere is if you look at that data on his own you don't contextualise it within a history of power I think I think you're partly right about also the economy of newsrooms right for us at the NS there are two articles that if all I care about was traffic I'd write every day one was Jeremy Corbyn will win the next election which I think is actually true one is Brexit won't happen which sadly I think is not true the trick is how did you find a way of balancing both because I think the interesting thing about both about the Trump which I did not think would happen Brexit at which I did and the 2017 election which I kind of had this weird middle ground so I was wrong on that as well I'm just is that if you ignored all of in in all three of those if you ignored if you basically when I will forget who's leading these various campaigns you like will a government that has been enacting X number of cuts and it's a creditor in the EU lose a referendum on a European treaty you've gone yeah of course if in 2012 in 2012 after a bond with one you've gone oh the economy will be growing at X amount and you know and the Republicans will have won you go oh a Republican president will win but maybe Hillary Clinton's approval ratings which because at the time remember she was the most popular politician maybe that allowed them to squeak in if you went oh well her approval ratings will have collapsed you'd have gone well they're fucked then but everyone basically went oh well trends don't matter because of of these these kind of personalities I think the social media stuff does make it a little bit harder right because because we're all in this wonderful feedback loop on Facebook of people telling us things that we want to hear so I really didn't trust the fact that everyone on my Facebook was very excited about Jeremy Corbyn because everyone on my Facebook had been excited about the alternative vote and so that thing it does make it harder because you are you know and the problem for us is in our interests economically as journalists to why to you know to thicken the walls of people's comfort zones the challenge for us is how do we find ways of of fulfilling that need in a way that is actually intelligent and useful obviously the advantage with pressing the button marks Jeremy Corbyn will win the next election is there are really good structural reasons why that's probably the case if anyone can think of any good structural reasons why Brexit won't happen please please do tell me Rachel do you have any thoughts on well the Brexit will happen on we should keep doing clickbait yeah I'm facing how we on how we commission versus longer term situation yeah I mean again I think it's it is very much the structural stuff we're talking about so it's about it's about giving people the sort of ideological space but also the sort of practical comfort and capacity to generate that kind of content and that is a really long-term deep thing that's not going to happen overnight that's years of thinking about it and trying to put it into place and I think to me it's still very revealing that we talk about diversity and we can say that in terms of just on the page in terms of content then yes maybe journalism has diversified but you know when you look at power positions of power people who are editors people who are prominent writers people who are given a prominent space that is still very very narrow and that doesn't change organically and I don't really think we're going to be able to address the issue of content unless we address the issue of structure and I think you're right like for me commission during the general election and Trump and Brexit we gave a platform to such a diverse range of voices and you know one of the best articles during the election was an independent voices one which was saying you know young people come out and vote you can really change this like we said it it did well but I think you're right it's about who gets the exposure like when we talk about the pundits who are we talking about a sort of ruling class of pundits who you know do the paper reviews every day get the vox pops on tv and we need to break up that cartel like we need like people like you guys like doing those slots instead of some other people just a quick word on the structural problems I know this can sound a bit radical but I think it would do the commentary out of favour if polls were just banned because because it just reinforces pre-existing narratives and people get so bogged down in it honestly outside of an election campaign has anyone ever got has anyone ever been like polled I mean do you know anyone who's been polled I mean if someone if a pollster rings you up who's in government Tories are you're not thinking about it if an election's not been called in an election campaign I can understand there's a reason for it obviously France banned them in an election campaign because they dominate the narrative they should be about policies and what the government's doing and we shouldn't get bogged down in the day to day tittle tattle of Westminster and the whole polling thing I think feeds into that plays far too big a role and the way they're modelled is entrenched in bias like there was the whole thing of why most of the polls got it wrong last time was because they said people say they vote Labour but they won't vote Labour so they downplayed so when people were like oh Labour's doing really well but they were like that's the modelling modelling yeah it's all about bias yeah I think there's definitely a case actually just out of interest a show of hands who has been polled ever oh it's a good sample okay so they didn't call any of you guys then did they join the general election and before we move into the questions does anybody have anything that they feel like hasn't been raised that they'd like to talk about about why the public's got it wrong I mean we could be here all night let's be honest there's a party afterwards everyone go we'll talk about it there my favourite silver fox on this heli John Snow got it right when he was are we right I got it right when he said that the catastrophe of Grenfell actually crystallised lots of problems in our media class so it wasn't just a man made crisis in terms of the managed decline of social housing but emblematic of media callousness before there is a you know there are mass fatalities the fact that your tenants' associations coming together and saying there will be a fire which will cost like dozens and scores of lives that should have been front page news that should have been you know covering the pages of every local paper in that area the fact is that local papers in that same way don't really exist anymore and it's not just about diversifying our media classes because for me equality doesn't look like more brown faces in high places but saying the same old crap it looks like really changing the structure so we can talk to dare I say it normal people about the material conditions affecting their lives so I think you're right refocusing the media's attention on policy I think is one ginormous step in the right direction but also perceiving politics not as something that comes from the top down whether it's from the labour leadership or from Holly Toinby but something that we're living all the time that we're immersed in all the time and that should be reflected in the content that we're consuming and that segrees quite nicely into our Q&A session because if you've learnt anything tonight it's that the pundits don't know shit and we should speak to people more just before we move into the questions though please make sure it's a question no statements if you want to ask a question specifically to someone do say so can we have some hands for questions please and do we have the mics cool so man in the blue shirt and can I see any ladies hands some lady here I just want to say thank you very much to all four speakers you've made some excellent points it's been a very interesting discussion so far I haven't really got questions it's more question please just put a question mark at the end internet your voice at the end always works well I do have one question just to touch on what Steven mentioned earlier why do most journalists in the mainstream come from one university I mean it does strike me as rather bizarre that we do only seem to recruit from one particular university and I think we all know which university it is I'm not going to mention it but now I've asked a question I do want to make one common which is nothing epitomised for me what was wrong with the way political journalism has been done in this country more than two incidents when Dawn Foster went on to Sky News and prophesised rightly that there was going to be a hung parliament and was laughed at by Kay Burley and when she goes on to Navarro which I generously donate to she's treated with much greater respect and her views are treated as being worth listening to are hypothesis of John Friedan since we're all being up on him tonight just me he came up during the election campaign with this idea that with no evidence whatsoever to suggest otherwise that Yvette Cooper would be doing much better than Jeremy Corbyn in the election or was it Martin Cowell I don't know they're indistinguishable but the point is this is the problem there is this arrogance and smug we know best idea that's undergirding what mainstream journalism is but I did have a question so thank you one more question sorry again and also I'm a journalist so this feels a bit like asking questions to fellow colleagues maybe you should pass the microphone but very quickly something you didn't quite talk about is this question of tokenism within comment because it feels like every time that we on the broad left and I'm pretty sure that every single person on this panel when we're talking about even more insular issues will have very different views on certain things we're only taken on to mainstream medium or often or not as sort of like a token so for instance because I worked for the morning star for a few years I was only taken to speak on Channel 4 News about Corbyn from that very specific point of view and on nothing else and the same is said about I think background you name it how do we combat this take and it goes back to what Rachel said about this sort of right wing bias is the neutral it's invisible in that sense how do we combat this by making it still appropriate to have a commentator about a certain issue because they're an expert on that without just us being always reverted to for whatever reason on our identity and as a token I mean my response to why do most journalists come from one university and why are most journalists in the mainstream media so arrogant but is mounted to both those things the same class reproduction in it that's pretty much it on this thing about being a token which I read less as one of political identity and more one for me that I experience in terms of race and gender you're only a token if you stay manageable for them right so I you know get put on telly and I'm sure that there are people patting themselves on the back for making Sky just that bit browner but I'm only a token if I'm playing by their rules if I make an intervention and say hang on this framing is bollocks or this question is unhelpful if I refuse to be manageable for them then I no longer am I don't have control over what their intentions are and if I said no to every platform because I thought I was a token on it then I would probably be unemployed it's not why are you brought there it's what you do when you get there that I think is of relevance I don't know why they're all from the same university I would suggest that they review their recruitment policies and maybe because politics is not a management science it's an art and anyone can be good at politics people have a very unusual perception or conception of what a politician is they seem to think they're electing a kind of manager or CEO of the country it's just a person who makes choices whether you want to cut corporation tax or fund the NHS it's sort of simple like what are your values that's why you're elected that's why it's an elected position anyway in terms of like the tokenism aspect I think linked to that I think what you were saying earlier on left commentators pieces there were 40% of the electorate voted for Jeremy Corbyn and they're not getting the I think you'll see a change and move towards more left commentators through what is essentially market means so they say oh blimey the traffic on here is good better get some more of them in so you won't even need media media reform will take place I think naturally and that will have to happen it will be a natural equilibrium that develops otherwise they'll just go out of business I think though the specific point I think you were sort of making is that there's kind of this problem and as you say there are actually probably quite a lot of different opinions in terms of intra-left issues but you get called on as the kind of pro-Corbyn or actually on any kind of pro-left issue I mean this brow over uber is a really good example of this probably from like Matt probably just thinks we should nationalise it I and my very boring soggy social democratic way like we just need to regulate it better and make them pay more tax but we all think what they're currently doing is not fair but on a panel discussion about whether about uber's corporate behaviour we would be represented by one of us chosen at random against a right wing MP a right wing journalist and a right wing think tank and one of the one of the ways to if we want to drag discussion in this country to the left and not just temporarily win elections occasionally right but actually we have to combat that I have absolutely no idea how so I've just done that really useful thing like great point great point fuck if I know what the solution to it is but it is a huge problem on telly and radio I don't know if it's part I think one of the the thing with the only one university is the way to change it is to make it embarrassing for people we were talking about this the other day in the office and like this weird thing and it feels like you can either be diverse and from one university or you can be not from one university and not be diverse in any other way but those are the only two routes and actually that great and on the count right did successfully embarrassing people right it points out like oh wait a second there's a massive problem in this room and I think part of the way we fix the TV discussion problem is just like it is ridiculous than I have to like go and defend the whole of the left again slight yes whereas like you know yeah yeah well first the on embarrassing people it's amazing how unimbarestable they are Because, I remember that thing where the Labour Party announced it was going to tax, raise taxes for people earning more than 80K, right? And you know mainstream media was consumed with, well that's not very much money is it? And everyone else in the country was like, that's a shed load of money! It would kill to have a salary like that, what the hell are you talking about, right? mae'n etoedd y byw yn ei ddiddordebeth. Mae'n etoedd y byw yn gallu y bwyntia phosfficei ddelifer. Mae'n etoedd, os y gallwn gallwch gyda. Os mwy o'r lleidio gydaeth, maen nhw'n gallu'n gallu bod mwy fydden ni oherwydd werth oherwydd... Nod, rhaid i'n rhaid fydd ac nid. Rhaid i'n rhaid? Mae'r lleidio hefyd yn ddysgu ceis-seid y bydd yn costa patwch. Yn uchelogi'r cyfnod, oedd yma yn gallu chyfroしたry. Felly nes i chi'n mynd i gweithio i gael chi. Ond o'r panel gyda'r wych. Ja, ychydig. Cysylltu ar y gwasanaeth i fynd i chi'n ddod y gwasanaeth. Felly mae'r cyfrifwyr o'r ddod, lle mae'r panel y ffwrdd. Felly mae'r ddod o'r panel. Felly mae'r ddod yn gweithio. Mae'r ddod yn ddod a'r ddod, mae'r ddod yn gweithio. A'r ychwanegau yn hynny'n mynd i'n bwysig gyda'r ysgrifennu'r yw'r ystyried am y cofnodol yn ystafell. Mae'n bwysig i'n bwysig, a'r ychwanegau yw fodyd ein rydyn ni'n bwysig, mae'n cyfrifodd yn cyd-fynion yn ystafell, nad ydyrch yn cynghorion os y maen nhw'n bobl i ysgrifennu. …mae tynna'r amser yn ymweld yn iawn amser. Mae'n ystydig yw'i'r amser. Cymru yw'n i ddweud, mae'n ddweud o gwbl sut yn cydyddol. A gwbl o ddweud o'r amser sydd yn y cael eu ddiw ar y ddau. A ddweud i'r panel, a gael yr oedd yn 40%. Mae'r awdddiant yn yma dyna oherwydd os ydych chi Аρbwyll. ac yn ymddangos, fel roedd yn ymddangos y gallai fod yn ein parolid, yn ymddangos y dyma, yn ymddangos y pôr. Gwiynau, mae'r ystafell yn ymddangos, yn ymddangos ymddangos ymddangos, yn ymddangos ymddangos. Mae'r cwestiwn? Mae'r cyfo-hwyllgor ymddangos ymddangos. A gynnyddai'r ymddangos yma sy'n gael y llwyf? Hi. My question is, do you feel pundits feel held to account by a new wealth of punditry that is available in social media, like Matt, you've mentioned Arsenal Fan TV. Some of the insights that come from Arsenal Fan TV is phenomenal, is better than professional footballers sometimes. But also, maybe on a more serious note, as you mentioned Grenfell, and during the Grenfell Tower I watched BBC, but then suddenly on social media people were recording things on their phones and I was able to have so much more information that made me doubt a lot of the things that I was seeing by a pundit. So, how do you feel about social media as something holding you to account, or is it changing the way that punditry is occurring? Thank you. I just wanted to ask about the BBC specifically because I think there was some academic work that showed that the BBC was significantly more biased against Corbyn than Tannall 4, for example, and I kind of don't really understand why that's the case and is it still a case and what could we do about it? I'd like to maybe address the social media and Grenfell question. In terms of does social media hold pundits to account better, I would say yes or no. The thing about Twitter is that there's always beef, right? Just always beef. And it becomes really difficult to distinguish like antagonisms which are politically meaningful and that you should participate in and some petty bullshit that just keeps dragging on and on and on. And there's something about the form which I think obliterates distinctions as well as sharpening them. So, I think in terms of using social media as a method of accountability that becomes quite difficult because, you know, all you have is a kind of quite nebulous form of social power. You don't necessarily have leverage which is often that meaningful. So, that's a really like shit answer. I've been like, yeah, no. But I think the reality of it is yes or no. In terms of social media as a reporting resource, again it's something which can be intensely valuable. And I think you're right to raise the example of Grenfell. The reason why social media was so far ahead of the establishment media on that night and also in the days following is because for lots of journalists they had their first time going to not just that estate but any estate, right? They don't know who lives there. They don't know what goes on there. They don't know what kinds of, you know, community resources were there and were lost. Whereas if you live in that neighbourhood or your mates live in that neighbourhood, you know what you're looking for and you know what that content is going to mean to people when you share it. The flip side of that is that when things go out and they've not been that rigorously checked, that can be really quite dangerous, right? So I think that social media is a tool and like any tool it can be a weapon, right? That can often kind of rebound on yourself. So I think that one of the problems of social media is that it becomes abstracted from other discussions like ones of values, ideology, responsibility. I know that this isn't necessarily that hard an answer but what I'm saying is that it's got great potential. We've got no choice but to engage with it. But I think we need to be really thoughtful about how and why and what are the limitations of it when it comes to forming social movements. I'm just obviously picking up on the kind of Arsenal fan TV comparison. Arsenal Wenger conceptualises this by saying that when he first became a manager, we lived in what he calls a vertical society where there were a few experts at the top and they were the opinion formers and then that filtered down to everyone else. And in order to get to that point where you were an expert, I mean I think he's just talking about sports journalism to be fair, but you had to prove your credentials, you had to prove that you knew the game and you knew what you were talking about. And now he says we're in a horizontal society and everyone's got an opinion and everyone's voicing their opinion on Twitter and obviously some people are more influential than others and some people are given that influence or granted that influence for different reasons. And I think that it's really important that as we've transitioned from what Arsenal Wenger called a vertical society to a horizontal society that those who are still here from that previous construct, from that structural setup where it was, you know, experts at the top, and now in a sort of structure where it's a vertical society and there's more kind of democracy in the media that they are held to account because there are better people out there. We know that now. We know that actually there are no such things as experts in this stuff. There are people with opinions and those opinions and views can go out of date. And actually if people are getting it wrong time and time again, then make some room for someone else who won't get it wrong every week. So I think that that's really important. I think that's the thing. I mean even with Arsenal Fan TV they could fall into the same trap, you know. They're getting the same people up all the time, you know, tie his times running out. You can't keep saying Venger in every week. What was the other question? BBC versus Channel 4, say. I think it's interesting actually. I think that the BBC suffers from the same problems that the commentary suffers from. In that there are people that are at the BBC who are ideological and who have politics and politics that tends to be of the centre and they've grown up and they've progressed their careers through the Blair years and all their contacts are in people on the political centre. And actually I'm of the view that at the BBC I know we want them to be impartial but it's very difficult for someone who has come through the Conservative club at Oxford University who's down to Tory MP like some political correspondents are at the BBC to be impartial. Why don't we just say like, alright, you be the Tory person and you make Tory stuff and you be the Labour person and you make Labour stuff and stop trying to get these people, shoehorn these people who are clearly biased into this non-biased position. So I think that all needs to rethink to be honest. I don't know if you'll ever get it completely unbiased. There'll always be people complaining about it. And some people say oh that's because they're doing their job right but it's not really. With regard to the social media question, I think in terms of being just from like a commissioner perspective like when I get in the morning I'm like okay what pieces, what comment pieces do I want to be out there in the world today. We're accountable to social media insofar as it's a hungry beast that we feed. It's like what do you want from us, we'll give it to you, share it, give us traffic. Because that's the economy of the newsroom now, right? And that's really great when like during the general election it's like oh like people want pro-Corban stuff so you start looking around for more pro-Corban voices and that's really exciting because I work for a broadly liberal paper so that will, you know, that fits with us and that's okay. But I think that's like Asha, that's a weapon that can turn on you. And so we have another tool called CrowdTangle and CrowdTangle you can see who's doing best on social out of like the world's news outlets and like give or take bright bar is number one on number two. In the world and they're tiny like and I think that's because they understand that dynamic, they understand that there's like an audience there who wants a certain version of the facts and they'll give it to them and they don't care about, like they don't care about, you know, who they damage and doing that and there's a lot of UK outlets who do the same. I mean Prince had that problem for a long time, right? You make front pages that sell. But I think because of social and because we have these tools to measure social we can do it in real time and that's kind of terrifying because yet right now Corban is in favour so we'll put more Corban pieces out but what if all of a sudden it's someone different? That's the danger of it for me. I think in terms of holding individual people to account I think the problem exactly as Ash says with Twitter is because there's always a ruck on there. Actually I think it has the reverse problem. People will kind of go inside some crazy person has said and then it's a completely reasonable complain but because as well as this reasonable complaint someone swore at them they've been able to go oh well. Whereas actually I think weirdly the tool which when I've got something wrong has most made me likely to go I shouldn't have done that is one Matt texting me saying you shouldn't have done that but two also actually email. Readers emailing you because they have to take more time on it and also no one ever emails you abuse. They email you kind of, it's crazy abuse, right? If this makes any sense the email abuse I get is so different from the emailed criticism whereas on Twitter the kind of like Dulux colours chart chart from abuse to criticism is fungible and it's really tempting to focus on the bit in the middle. On the BBC point I think they have this massive problem that they do think and if both sides are angry with you then you've got it about right but on say climate change right if both sides are angry with you you have not got it right whether or not austerity is the correct way to manage the economy you haven't got it right. I think fundamentally the big thing, the big organising principle in terms of changing the media asset is to argue against this idea that impartiality and balance are the same thing actually they're not right the truth is not some weird cosmic point in between two opinions on any given issue one of those opinions is false and they can almost always be measured right like it's not like you, like you can have an impartial debate on whether or not I don't know spanking is fun, right? You can't have an impartial debate on whether or not climate change is happening right there are just facts and I think yeah as Matt says just have got to unpick that as an idea because that I think is the big problem because I was going to say whether or not it's okay to spank your kids or not and so I just, I was locked in so I just had to swear. We're all friends here, it's okay, say what you want to say. Well I'm going to say something quite tame in comparison which may come as a relief I don't know but yeah I think the problem is not just the BBC but I think the problem across the spectrum here is that the centre is not where centreists think the centre is and that's a really big problem if you're trying to be impartial or if you're trying to be balanced. You know 30 years of an economic policy that has caused pain exacerbated by an economic crash that plunged even more people into pain means that this, yeah, yeah thanks, yeah there's another round of that. It just means that the centre isn't where people think the centre is in things, in economic terms and that is why the Labour Party's manifesto was so popular on many things because for some time there has been popular support for things like re-nationalisation of utilities and energy companies, there's been popular support for investment in infrastructure, there's been popular support for raising levels of corporate tax and going after tax avoiders and support for the NHS, support for the welfare state. So all these things where media thinks there is some kind of debate that is more to the right, it actually isn't. They've shifted the conversation to the right but that's not where the population is on a lot of these issues. So I think that's how we've got this sort of mismatch in the kind of political coverage. And then one last round of questions. So can we have, we haven't had any from the back have we so far. There's a gentleman here in a white t-shirt and then are there any women on the back who'd like to ask a question? No, okay. Do you want to ask, yep, yep. And then this lady here at the front please. Yeah, did you get your mic? Yeah, you sir, yes you. Oh, the Simon guy in the Simon, I'm so sorry. How rude of me. I was having a real sort of sartorial existential crisis there for a second. I just wanted to ask, I mean I feel like everything has to be framed through sort of light BDSM chat now to kind of continue at the feet. But I was actually going to go back to the sporting analogy because I thought it was really interesting when Matt mentioned the financial crisis. And I'm interested in the extent to which kind of lobby journalists and pundits in your opinion, Steve. I mean everyone, but Steven maybe is perhaps kind of closest to that tribe have acknowledged and interrogated their own kind of lens when it comes to the fact that the political economy that underpins the political debate we're having has fundamentally shifted since 2008. And it reminds me of the American writer Matt Habie talks about baseball journalism in the 1930s and 40s in the American South obviously in the era of Jim Crow and talked about how you had a whole group of journalists who would go along to the games and they'd report on which players were doing well and which players weren't and the transfers between the different teams. And what was left unspoken the entire time was that it was a system of effective racial segregation and black leagues were completely separate and the entire thing was underpinned by a system of exclusion and violence. And to not be too facetious for the analogy, it seems as if that same problem of not interrogating the parameters of the thing that you're reporting on and not recognizing in the case of the financial crisis that really the shift in people's material conditions has affected a transformation in their political imaginations. That's a real issue with lots of the pundits and lots of the commentators that we have now and that most of the people we pay to kind of navigate that terrain for us are using outdated maps. So I just wanted to not just use even but anyone had any opinions on that specifically the kind of financial crisis and the way that that shifted. Cheers. I just want to say, Rachel's just pointed out that the general population is somewhere to the left of the centre if you can talk about it as left anyway. So does any of this matter? Maybe is it just masochism that people on the left are watching too much TV? I mean if anything, we can know anything tonight that masochism is clearly something that's really popular with us all. In terms of do journalists have a grip on the paradigm shift that was 2008, the answer is clearly no. Our political classes haven't either. Neither have our people who are the 1% who are in charge of the majority of the world's wealth. We have not come to grips with the reality of climate change and how much of a disaster that is and will continue to be. I think to blame it on your screwed over freelance journalist for not being able to adequately grapple with this. It's like this is a crisis of global capital, not merely a crisis of perceiving global capital and its changes. It's interesting that you brought up Jim Crow segregationary because that's actually something that I wrote down when you were talking, Rachel, because you were talking about, broadly there's public support for a well-funded NHS, broadly there's public support for a social safety net. Thinking about the initial framing of your question about there's a debate to be had around spanking children, oh wait, no that's not. I think there's points to something which is how do ideas become hegemonic, right first mainstream and then hegemonic, which that was really pretentious, powerful. The fact is in 1963 the majority of white people in the south were not pro-civil rights. They thought that the activities of even the pacifist wings of the civil rights movement overall were bad for the project of dismantling segregation. We now know that to be fraff. Again, if you go back 60 years the majority of people would be like, what do you mean you don't hit your children? One of the things I would like all of us to interrogate is that it's very easy for us to sit back and say, well yeah, our ideas are now mainstream. Yeah, well funded, well first state, imagine if you didn't think that that was important. The fact is that those ideas have got a grip on people because one it reflects their material circumstances and two because we fought for it. And there are some unpopular ideas which I think need fighting for too. And they're the ones which we've largely shied away from. So the question of the violence of borders, for instance, or indeed what it means to have a less racist, less violent police force. Even we on the left, because we've got a kind of sniff of blood in the water when it comes to a crumbling Tory government, we're shying away from these things. So the idea isn't just how do we reflect a mainstream popular world but also how do we change some of it for more just, more equitable outcomes? I think when things aren't going well for people they tend to want to know why and they become more inquisitive about why their circumstances have changed, why the context has changed since 2008, what's happened, become more engaged with politics more generally. I think that a platform like Labour's in the last election would only have been successful in the context where people can do their own research and read the manifesto. And yes the policies cut through and yes the broadcast strategy was brilliant and yes we had something to say every day and the Tories didn't. But that's because we departed from the orthodoxy that said that effectively what happens in elections is politicians, they make politicians statements which are things that people cannot possibly disagree with. Like I want everyone to fulfil their potential, no one's going to say I don't want anyone to fulfil, you know what I mean? Whereas what Jeremy Corbyn said in the election was we're going to tax these people more to pay for this thing. And what that does is it creates an antagonism because yes you can say we're not going to tax these people more because we don't want to pay for this thing. And when you do that you set the terms of the debate and that's what was really interesting. It wasn't just the fact that we had the means or the method in social media to carry the message but it was what the message was. And it was bold and it wasn't like all right we're just going to, you know, we won't rock the boat, we're going to try and be what people would perceive as competent and you know we were like no actually we're going to tax the top 5% and we're going to pay for this stuff. And I think that when you do that it does set the frame of debate and I don't think the left has done that in a long time actually probably since Attlee and interestingly it was the biggest swing to a political party in a general election since Attlee. So what does that tell you? In terms of the financial crisis and pundits reflect on how that impacted on people, working in a newsroom I definitely saw a generational divide about how people approached that. So a lot of the pundits who got it wrong were people who by the time the financial crash happened they had a house, they had a pension, nothing like there was no negative impact for them. I mean obviously they could see that it was all very terrible for people but it didn't impact them. Rather the time that it did maybe impact them or they did see it first hand was in the 70s when they saw that state led economies didn't work and they led to blackouts and what have you. So their sort of political awakening around the financial crisis was very different. What I did see there was young people in the newsroom, myself included, who were like I don't have a house. I spend most of my income on my rent, I have no pension, I have no future, like wages are stagnating, like where am I left because the financial crisis hit me. It hit a lot of younger commentators and I saw younger commentators getting it right and older ones getting it wrong so I think there's definitely a generational divide within that for me. I think in terms of the kind of curiosity in the lobby about the impact of the financial crisis, I think the problem partly because the hours are so long is what you end up recruiting for is stamina and curiosity and also crucially low attention spans. So there were lots of people who basically said in 2008 and you can see some of the people who got it wrong writing in 2008, look this is going to have big political consequences. And then what happened is in 2010 an Orthodox Conservatives elected and they basically went oh I got that wrong. And weirdly they've now had to have these shocks to start correcting back to the original sort of like oh wait actually this is going to have big consequences. But it's happening very slowly and in some places it's kind of this weird counter-evolution of actually I wasn't wrong. But overall people are starting to notice perhaps what's happened with wages is going to have political repercussions. Who knew? I think in terms of your point about given where people actually are. I mean terms like left and right obviously most people think of themselves as centrists regardless of where their views actually are on the political spectrum. Whether or not they believe in a top tax rate of 90% or they believe in detention centres for asylum seekers. People go oh I'm the middle ground. Which is why it is a bit of a weird pundit construct. But I think Ash is exactly right. It's very easy after a very good result, a massive advance particularly when you consider how bad the 2015 result actually was for Labour. To neglect the fact that this was a you know it's not like Jeremy didn't triangulate on the police. He didn't triangulate on immigration and the right to move wherever the hell people wish. And actually partly because the post financial crisis centre ground or common ground or whatever you want to call it is. The economic model hasn't worked but I actually don't like immigrants. And bluntly the Labour party did not challenge that centre ground in the last election. So I think it's very important yes to be happy about what happened but absolutely not to let go of the fact that there is a centre ground which is where voters are which is kind of fungible. But in terms of the absolute issues of left and right which would emanate us there were some things in which the 2017 election was a great advance for. And there were others in which was absolutely a kind of continuing retreat and the central one of which was borders themselves as a concept. Yeah I think that's a really important example of why it's necessary to engage with you know the toxic and self loathing pursuit of watching TV. Because it does because the political spectrum has been so narrowly defined for so long and the parameters have been so narrow for so long. There's something about even if those ideas and certainly those economic ideas are more popular than we might be led to believe. There's still something about putting it out there so that people have a confidence a political confidence an intellectual confidence in those ideas and the perception that they're not niche. They're not fringe they're not minority they are mainstream views and to follow on from that that is exactly why it's really important for Labour to take on this debate around immigration. Because that has been one area where it's been such a long constant or pervading drip drip anti immigration sentiment that has permeated our political discourse from left to right. And you can see on things like you know people the hostility that people have to migrants in the UK is always high apart from the ones that work in the NHS. And you can see that that's because everybody always bashes migrants apart from the ones that work in the NHS right. Politicians broadly do kind of throw out these sentences that say migrants do a great job in our NHS we're lucky to have them here it makes it run efficiently we all love the NHS right. So that's created this little bubble of progressiveness around a largely anti immigration conversation thereby kind of suggesting that if there was more of that kind of pro immigration conversation in the national conversation in a way that there hasn't been then that might actually filter down and a change public perception. Thank you. So before we give a round of applause to our amazing panellists it's been a really really interesting debate. There is a party afterwards which you should all come to. It's at Synergy on Middle Street no West Street West Street it's £2 if you have a wristband £5 if you don't there's tickets on the door we'll be there so yeah do come. And yeah thank you so much everyone.