 Fel ar ychydig yn ysbytyd o'r gweithio. Rwy'n mynd i'n rai'n cwmwysgol ar y ddweud. Let's talk about the subject of this entire day. Meaning. One way to discuss meaning is to consider it's opposite. To think about what it's like to have a life, not filled with meaning, but that seems meaningless. And that's where I want to start today, Cymru hwnnw sy'n oed yn dweudio'r ffordd cyfgrifennu, a chyrwch ar yr hyn yn cael ei ddweud o'r wahanol. Mae'r llai yn Ysgrifennu o'r 2016, rwy'n gwybod o'r tref-rhyw o south Wales. Be wnaeth i gŵl yma. Rhywb i'r no 10 yw rwy'n gweithio David Cameron. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gwybod. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r ysgrifennu yn gweithio'r llai'r bryd. A rydyn ni'n gweithio. Next door was his mate, George Osborne, who at that time still had only the one job. And the people in charge of the Remain campaign thought they had it in the bag. What convinced me they were wrong was an argument with a guy I met called Gareth Meek. Gareth was shaven-headed, he was barrel-chested, and he made it clear from the start that we weren't going to get on. And why should we? I was a journalist up from a posh paper in London. He was here in this small village called, and here I lack the requisite Welsh Flem, Clanhilleth. Now, Clanhilleth is just a few rows of small houses over which towers this huge building, a kind of cathedral. This is the Mining Institute, a drinking hall come social club, built by local miners out of their own money over 100 years ago. No government cash went into building this place, it relied on the prosperity and the pride of its community. Look at it, it says, we'll show the others we'll have the best social club in the valleys. But if you go now, the windows have these stickers in Brussels blue, because when the institute fell into dereliction and then shut, it was the EU that stepped in with public funds. And it's that building that Meek looks after. He'd worked in a factory until he got injured and then he landed up here. Now, think about that scene. A man who's come down in the world, in a building that's nearly died, in a part of the country where all the money's gone, decline upon decline upon decline. We get to talking about the upcoming referendum, the one you remember where Britain's all set to stay in. Except, like the vast majority of the people I've met in this Labour stronghold of South Wales, Gareth doesn't care about what Jeremy Corbyn and Ores say, he's out. Why? Immigrants. Now, I kept hearing this, put in much worse language, all across that reporting trip. Except the thing about most of South Wales, there are no immigrants. The place you almost like to find foreigners is inside the pages of the Daily Mail. So I say, you sound angry, and he is. But he's not really angry at immigrants or even at Brussels. No, what he's really furious at is the British government. Why? They sold the country out, there's nothing we own anymore. And while he talks, I'm remembering the drive out here, past abandoned buildings and hills that once been black with cold dust, now turned to a lush and deindustrialised green. All right, Gareth, how's leaving the EU going to help? It won't make a lot of difference, but the damage is already done. You ain't going to pull it back now. And then he fixes me with his long hard stare, and there's a big shrug of nihilism. So here is a man about to do something that he knows to be meaningless because his own life has been so saft of meaning. And in this week, of all weeks, you don't need me to underline the consequences. Now think about Gareth's life for a moment, his home now pretty much hollowed out so that even the landscape speaks to the broken promises of an entire political elite. Where's the new businesses? Where's the workers? Where's the cash? He's stuck inside a museum to the better days of his community, which was decades ago. Think about his lack of voice, no politician speaks for him, no paper represents his lived experience. And just listen to how he talks about the economy as some extractive inaccessible far-off thing. It's not just Wales. I've met Gareth in Trump's America, in crisis hit Greece, in Bepe Grio's Italy. I've even met versions of him in Mumbai in India. But spread across Britain are people and places united by a common condition. They've been deemed surplus to requirements. They used to be productive, now they're supplicants depending on handouts. They used to have a say, now they live in mute resentment. The market this guards them, the state this regards them. Until one day it can't, not any longer. All else being equal, the next time meaning have a conference, it will be after Britain's left Europe. And I think on a day like today, the phrase all else being equal has never really rung so hollow. But if Theresa May gets away, she'll be haggling over our future relationship with EU. A process that will take decades, could break many more ministerial careers. So we're stuck in a similar spot to the one our forefathers were in in the 1930s and 1970s. With capitalism failing us so badly, it now jeopardises the very function of democracy. We've reached a point where politicians are starting to take on border protests of Gareth Meek and others. Even Theresa May talks about burning injustices. The question is, what does she and the rest of the political classes offer him instead? We already know. An hour and a half strive from Gareth Meek's institute is this place. An Amazon warehouse, as big as ten football pitches. This is what counts for investment and job creation in Britain. For the honour of hosting two Amazon distribution centres in Fife and Swansea, the governments of Scotland and Wales paid the company a combined total of £16 million. I say they paid, but actually you and I paid out of our taxes. We know what kind of jobs are on offer in these places. Minimum wage, minimum rights. Where workers are too scared to take toilet breaks, so they pee in bottles. We pay for our fellow citizens to be treated like human battery hens. We know too that Amazon is one of the richest companies on the planet. One of the richest companies in human history. Yet in some years our government pays it more in grants than it gives in taxes to this country. But even while this government and others across Europe is intent on slashing welfare for the working poor, it keeps splashing out on welfare for businesses in direct grants and subsidies and tax breaks. Much of this spending is deliberately obscured. But one academic at York University, a guy called Kevin Farnsworth, has spent the best part of a decade researching this stuff, ferriting through archives and putting in the freedom and information requests. By his conserved testament, Britain spends £93 billion a year on corporate welfare. That's about twice the size of our entire education budget. Now, in a mixed capitalist economy, which is say pretty much every economy in the world, it's inevitable that the state will support private enterprise. But in Britain we do so in semi-secrecy and without demanding that businesses observe basic standards of fairness with workers, the environment or even the public exchequer. Just look at the tax contributions. The big bar is the top five co-ops in the country, which includes such titans of industries as milk. The small bar is Amazon, Facebook, Apple, eBay and Starbucks. Some of the richest companies in the world. Look at that, look at that huge golf and then ask yourself, who's more likely to get an audience in number 10, Mark Zuckerberg or the boss of Arla Milk? Who would Jacob Reese Mogg describe as a wealth creator, Tim Cook of Apple or the chief executive of the cooperative group? As a society, as an economy, we reward those people who not only need no rewards but who actively rip off the rest of us. Wether it's tax avoiders or train operators, in Britain we are world beaters in paying other people to rip us off. So much for mainstream politics, but the progressive answers are often just as guilty of top-down thinking. Tax-rich people spend more, nationalise things. Much of this is necessary but none of it is sufficient because how does any of that make the economy more accessible, more democratic to Gareth Meek or to you and me? As for the more radical solutions from either end of the political spectrum, well, they're often just sci-fi. How many times have you heard that robots are coming along and will change everything? That the future lies in automation and driverless cars? Well, look at this chart. This measures how far our economies are, I've got a density of robots per head of population. Right down the front you can see Korea, Japan, Germany. And you go right along to the other end of the scale, past Slovenia, past Slovakia and there's Britain. Now, what that chart partly explains is why when you take your car for a wash it's not a robot that does it, it's a knack in migrant workers. It's also why Amazon doesn't need mechanised pickers, not when it can bus in humans with blistered feet for a fraction of the cost. I have two big takeaways from all of this. First, that holding out for a big new thing or a new set of ideas is intellectual escapism. Remember how Cain said that in the long run we're all dead? Well, the president has a nasty habit of grinding on for a long time so we're best trying to improve it now. Second, we should actively avoid solutions. Now, in these bleak times I understand the hunger for them but any ready-made, out-of-the-box solution whether offered by a man in pinstripes or woman in groovy trainers is still being imposed from above. It still says my meaning is superior to yours. We don't need answers, we need arguments. Our economy, our country lacks an adult democracy in all its mess and noise and experimentation. What we have instead is a fake cynical democracy in which people who have never even changed a nap in their life pretend that they can represent people like Gareth Meek. And that's no surprise really because over the past 40 years we've been told there is no alternative. And the people who told us that, like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan made damn sure they've bulldozed any institution that could incubate alternative ideas. Unions, councils, even a BBC all now shadows of their former selves. So let's admit that there is no one big answer and go looking for the alternatives that are out there. That's what I chose to do this year for my paper, The Guardian in a series called The Alternatives. I went looking for examples of bottom-up change of people doing economics differently. And I found loads. One of my favourites is just up the road from here. This is the Bevy, any of you local. You should know this place, I guess. This is the only corruptively owned pub on a housing estate anywhere in Britain. And that's a guy called Jonathan. Now, without that pub, Jonathan would have nowhere to drink. But because it's more than a pub, he'd also have no community centre, no social hub, because when the private sector isn't bothered and the state is cutting back, it's the sort of people who brought the Bevy back to life and keep it going now, who create civic institutions and keep communities from collapsing in on themselves. Here's the grand before streets community land trust in Liverpool who brought their abandoned streets back to life and now develop social housing. This is Oldham, the poorest town in England, where the council's school dinner ladies feed their kids award-winning, locally sourced and organic meals, and they do it on razor-thin margins. Different people in different parts of the country do in different things with very different politics. Yet there are common threads. First of all, all of these people live in worlds that are thickly neighboured, as Vierce Pritchett once wrote of Rudyard Kipling's characters. They're not factures atomised individuals, nor are they camera'ns broken Britain. They care enough about their homes and their neighbours to try and make things better. Then there's values. This is Park Run, which organises community runs in parks for free for nearly a quarter of a million people every weekend. There's also Pressing Council, which awards contracts to local businesses rather than multinationals. What these projects have in common is they look at the way the market measures value and wave two fingers at it. They're about imbuing our economic lives with meaning. None of these ventures see a drop of that 93 billion quid. They get by on chicken feed, and they're small. As Boris Johnson pointed out at this Autumn's Tory party conference, here he is having go at the Pressing Council and its guerrilla localism. Boris, the thinker politician, has a point, but the point about Pressing Council is however small, however tentative. It's only been going for a few years on this road, and so far it's been pretty effective. Here's a story that was published just a few weeks ago. Now, where Boris has got a point is that we haven't yet got to the point where the alternatives are mainstream, which is what I'd like to see. The values of these small ventures are grafted onto the huge private sector. But as a country man of Gareth Meeks, Raymond Williams once said, to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. That's exactly what these people are doing. Those school dinner ladies in Oldham literally created a market by forcing their suppliers to go organic and local. Impressed them, they're mandating the behaviour of the private sector, even creating co-operatives. What if we would start doing that as a state? If we would start saying to Richard Branson or James Dyson, actually you operate here under a social licence and protections that the rest of us give to you. And we want certain things back in return, such as paying your workers a living wage, such as allowing them to join a union, such as holding to your account or giving you a new take and how much tax you pay back. Now, none of the alternatives come with bells and whistles. That's the point. The alternatives I looked at deal with food and housing and keeping children fed in school holidays and grandparents busy. Because in 21st Britain, we're still dealing with 19th century problems. You probably see lots of polling about political parties and Brexit and all the rest of it. But you hardly ever see surveys of what people actually want from an economy. Here's a rare example done last year for the right-wing think tank, the Legatim Institute. Think of it as a collective version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And look how basic they are. Food and water, emergency services, universal healthcare, house, a decent job, free education. Now look at what's at the bottom of the list, what they really weren't that fussed about. Owning a car, social media, Ryanair. Think about what else is not on there. No HS2, no third runway at Heathrow, no Garden Bridge over the Thames. And here's what the Legatim headbangers made of that, vehemently anti-capt list. But I think back to Gareth Meek and all the other people I met while reporting this decade. They want security, but the politicians offer them competition. They'd like some ownership, but all they get is low interest on a plasma TV. They want control, not some know-all with solution that will fail them like all the others have done. I say, let's start from there. Let's reacquaint our economy of democracy. Let's work to make everyone's lives have meaning. Thank you.