 Thank you all very much. Thank you to all of you that are here and everyone who's joined us at home. This is a genuinely hybrid event and there are lots of people watching. The exhibition is great. I've just been rounded and it tells you from the first news which was little newspapers almost five or six hundred years ago reporting stories and it is both very moving and very illuminating and it takes you right up to Wagathor Christie and follows all the great newsmakers and the people who have really changed the way we see things. Tonight what is so great is that we have got speakers who are carrying on that tradition and they are making the news. As Bea said, I'm your host for the evening. I'm Rosie Boycott. I'm part of 5x15 which I run with Daisy Leitch and we are both incredibly grateful to be here and to be part of this fantastic event. We have a terrific panel as I think you will know and I'll introduce them all one by one, but Amelia Gentleman, Ed Miliband, Gideon Rackman, Oliver Bullock and Rana Ayub have all in their own different but completely incomparable and unique ways have made headlines either through what they have researched or from what they have believed. Making the news is not very easy. I mean gone are the days when you could pick up your copy or say The Daily Express and you would find out a new story. Nowadays you don't find out new stories from newspapers. You find them out in all sorts of ways. So I always thought there was a very significant moment just before the turn of the century when in terms of who got paid the most on a newspaper it suddenly became the columnist rather than the investigative journalist because the only thing you could actually buy as a newspaper was someone's opinion because no longer could you own the story. And if you go to the exhibition you'll see the amazing work that was sort of done in the past to uncover the solidamite story. I'm not saying that this wouldn't happen today because of course Amelia herself uncovered the Windrush scandal and indeed changed so many lives because of it, but it's a sign of how we work but it just makes investigative stuff more and more and more important. So the simple rules tonight were five by 15. We do what we say on the tin. We have five speakers. They have 15 minutes. All the speakers books are available for sale from our wonderful books or new books and they will be outside after the event and they will be signing. And there will be a ten minute interval when you can also buy books or have a drink. So I'm going to start off this evening by we've got one speaker joining us online. She's coming in from India and it's incredibly late there and it's very tough for her. So we're going to kick off with Rana IU. Now Rana is an investigative journalist and she's now thankfully a columnist for the Washington Post but she previously worked for the Indian magazine called To Helca and they commissioned her to do a series of reports, undercover reports on the state of corruption in Gujarat and it came out at the end with her book called The Gujarat Files the Anatomy of a Cover-Up but in fact the magazine never published it. Rana had to publish it in the book. She has now become among the ten most wanted journalists in the world and indeed the UN frequently have to contact the Indian government to make sure that she is safe. She has taken on the corruption in India and indeed to some extent the Modi government or to a large extent. So we're incredibly pleased to have her with us tonight. It's a great honour to be kicking off this tonight's story with someone who has showed so much bravery and Rana welcome here tonight to the British Library. Welcome to 5x15 and over to you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Good evening everyone. It is indeed an honour and a privilege to be speaking to each one of you this evening. As it was just pointed out that journalists should not really be the centre of the stories. They should be reporting stories but unfortunately we are living at a time when journalists have become the new enemies of the state and unfortunately we are being made the stories. Unfortunately we have to speak about ourselves so often and we are just unfortunate. Tonight I will not just be speaking about myself but I will also be speaking about India because that's the story that the world needs to know. It is the story because of which I have been constantly targeted, vilified, have multiple cases filed against me. In March this year I was supposed to join the Frontline Club in London for an event to speak about journalism under fire and I was stopped at the airport by Indian investigating agencies because they got a whiff that I was travelling to London and I was stopped at the airport. I had to get a code order eventually to travel to Italy and further on to the United States. The Indian government has slapped multiple cases against me including money laundering, tax evasion, very similar to Philippines journalist Maria Ressa who received the Nobel Peace Prize and who still needs to get code permissions to travel abroad despite the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes you hold that right. Why is the Indian government, particularly the Modi government, the Narendra Modi government who has the Prime Minister of India who has unleashed the worst kind of fascism in the history of India? Why is he targeting me? Well, because I'm not just a journalist who has been reporting on him the last 15 years, I also happen to be a woman, a Muslim woman at that. I mean all these criterias are enough for a person to be vilified in the times that we live in. In 2010, I got the first serving Minister of State for Home behind bars with my investigation for his extrajudicial model of Muslims. That man is now the second most important man in India, he's the Home Minister of India. You can imagine how easy my life must be after all that because the same man and the same cast of characters who went behind bars are now dictating the rules and are now formulating the rules to make sure that I do not speak the truth and I remain behind bars. Soon after I was just about 26 years old, I went undercover with eight cameras on my body with a French colleague who was actually in turn with us and who became my film director. So I became this Hindu nationalist girl who studied filmmaking at the American Film Institute Conservatory in America. Of course I did not go to, but I pretended to be one and I pretended to be a Hindu nationalist who hated the idea of Muslim appeasement in India. Initially I started going around with the filmmakers and socializing. I had a completely different look and I did manage to infiltrate the rank and file of Mr Modi's government who was back in the day, the chief minister of the state called Gujarat, where a thousand Muslims were massacred under his watch when he was the chief minister. In fact the United States did not give him a visa to travel to the United States for the human rights violation. Of course he now goes to the US and he's now considered an ally by no less than Mr Biden. So back in the day I went undercover, I got the truth of the genocide of Muslims, I got the truth of extrajudicial murder of Muslims. I came back to my publication, they refused to publish it saying that they had no idea I would be breaking this bigger story because they thought probably a 26 year old, I mean how much is she capable of. I put my life in there, I jeopardized my life. At any point in time when I was undercover, me a Muslim girl who was undercover as a Hindu nationalist, I could have been murdered, but my organization treated me as a guinea pig that was sent in for an experiment. This was 2011. I tried convincing my publication, they did not. I went to almost every journalism publication in India and they all say, wow what a story, this should be on the cover of a magazine. This should really change the way we view our politics and our journalism, but none of them had the courage to publish it. Three or four years down the line I even approached publishers wanting to publish a tell all book. Two publishers came on board and they said we are going to publish the transcripts of your sting operation that takes. As soon as it became clear that Narendra Modi would be the prime minister in there, they stopped taking my calls. Of course with that my anxiety attacks, my psychiatric medication also increased because I was sitting with the truth that I was not willing to take with me. So in the year 2016 I sold some gold that I had been jobless since Mr Modi came to power. So I sold the gold, took a gold loan, published my book and called it Gujarat files anatomy of the cover up and it became a success due to the word of mouth on social media. Almost every journalist in India, every editor in India gave me a standing ovation at the book launch and everybody sent me a message saying you are the hero of our generation. Next day, not a single publication published a single excerpt from my book. As we stand today, I have printed 700,000 copies in 15 languages, but still people in my country do not want to look at the truth. And that is emblematic of what's happening to journalism in India and journalism around the globe. That's the story of journalism. The reason why I am being silent is because I refuse to sugarcoat the truth as I see it. I see day in day out the Muslim identity of the 220 million Muslims in India being erased every single day. Muslims are being lynched on the streets for allegedly consuming beef and the cops do not arrest those who lynch them, but they actually go and check the refrigerator if the meat was actually beef. That's where we are. The other day, cops shot, there was a headline that cops shot at three Muslim men, but guess what, the cow was saved. That's where we are. Human lives do not matter. So when I speak, a lot of my well-meaning allies in the liberal circuit say, you know, for once speak as an Indian and not as Muslim. And probably that's why the government wants to censor my voice because I am speaking on international platforms about the story that needs to be told about. We are talking about what's happening in Ukraine. Yes, we must speak about what's happening in Ukraine. Yes, the United States must speak about what's happening in Ukraine like the rest of the world, but why the silence and what's happening in India. The reason why I'm speaking to each one of you today is because none of us can ignore the story of India, the story of journalists in India. My colleague Siddique Kappan, a journalist who was on his way to report the gang rape of a lower caste girl, was apprehended while he was on the way to report the story. He has been behind bars for the last two years. He was not even allowed for the final rights of his dead mother. He was not even allowed to perform the final rights of his mother. And the mother died waiting for her son. That's the price journalists have to pay. But do they have to pay this price? Do we have to be brave? Do we have to be courageous? I don't think we have to be. We knew that we had not signed up for a nine to five job. We knew this is more a passion than a profession, but why do we have to be brave, to be killed, to be silenced to do our jobs? Why do I have to face sedition charges? For three full days, the Indian media, which has completely collapsed under censorship of the Modi government, where every day is a dog whistle against the Indian Muslim. For three full days during election period, they played on television screens the charges of the Indian government against me. And there were television cameras outside my house as if I was a criminal. I was made to feel ashamed and humiliated for my journalism. My colleague Gauri Lankesh, talking of my book, which was files, my colleague Gauri Lankesh, she published my book in a regional language. And one day I was receiving, like, notiating online trolling. And I wrote something on my Facebook back in the day in 2017. And she said, babe, these aren't income poops. And she called me and she said, please don't worry, you're a brave voice. And the next day I was sitting with a friend for coffee and she said, do you know what happened? I said, no, what happened? She said, Gauri has been shot dead outside her house. She stayed in Bangalore in a metropolitan city and she was shot dead till today they have not arrested her killers. And Gauri, I was supposed to be in Bangalore to release the translation of the book, and we have not been able to do that and I could not do that with the book. So that's where we are. I'm speaking to each one of you today because my story is not very different from the story of Maria Ressa in Philippines or a journalist in Ukraine or a journalist in Mexico. We are all fighting a global battle. We are fighting an extremely unpopular battle. But I just take, despite in the fact that history will judge us and when history judge us and when history looks back at the events of the day, it will not hold its complicit. I know it's an unpopular thing to do right now, speaking truth to power, but that's the only thing that we have right now. I saw the killing of my journalist friend Shireen in Palestine, the Palestinian journalist. I saw the both sides that was being played in the media and I saw what was being done with her funeral and the coffin. Do journalists really have to go through that, not just while they're alive but while they're dead, the humiliation and still we refuse to call out the complicity of the Israeli state. Still we had to sugarcoat the boat to say, hey, let's not get ahead of ourselves. No, we were not getting ahead of ourselves. She was not to be shot dead. She did not have to be shot dead. She was not to be called brave. Shireen did not have to be brave for speaking for so many of us. So the only thing that I want to say here to an audience which is very discerning, neither Shireen nor Gori Lankesh need to have been killed for you to protest. Do not protest for journalists when they are killed. Speak for them when they are alive. We are fighting an unpopular battle. So, and all we have is your support. So thank you for hearing me today. I do hope that Rana can hear the applause. That was fantastic and absolutely the life on the line. I was very moved in the exhibition to see pictures of my old friend Marie Colvin who was shot just over 10 years ago who was blown up in Syria where she was reporting. And it is horrific what journalists have to go through but what she said does underscore the importance. Our next speaker, Oliver Bullo, is the author of two unbelievably important books in the last few years. The first was called Moneyland which explained how money just magics its way out of the system and into a kind of cloud. In fact, very many memorable things in that book that Moneyland would be the third biggest country in the world after America and China if you took into account all the corrupt money that never comes down to earth and fixes a pothole or does something actually useful for society. His new book is called The Butler to the World. Its subtitle is, How Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals. And in this he really, it's extremely topical. It couldn't have come at a better time but Oliver works on this stuff and he knows the stories of what particularly the oligarchs have done in this country but in a way much more important how this country has opened its doors and its banks and its hairdressers and its nail salons and its lawyer's rooms to the oligarchs. Oliver Bullo. I'm not going to lie, that's a tough act to follow. This is the second time I've spoken at a 5x15 event. The last time I told the story of a Saudi gentleman who had bought himself an ambassadorship in order to get out of paying a divorce settlement which at the time struck me as one of the most egregious abuses of money that anyone has ever done and I wanted to top it today. I am an investigative journalist, I write about miscreants and I wanted to talk about someone even worse than a Saudi man prepared to buy himself the ambassadorship to the International Maritime Organization for St Lucia. So I'm going to talk about this man here, the one on the right, that's some Reginald Jeeves. The one on the left is his employer or partner in crime, Bertie Wooster. You may not recognise them from this picture. If you like me you grew up in the 1990s, you may think that Jeeves actually looks like this. That may be the case. Either way, he entered the world. I mean I'm speaking in the British Library so I'm guessing I don't need to tell most of you who Jeeves and Wooster are but just in case there are people here who haven't read this very long series of stories, they are collected into five very thick volumes by PG Woodhouse. He entered our lives in 1916 in the height of the First World War, the same year as the Battle of the Somme when time was really tough and we gained this wonderfully light, frothy story. Bertie Wooster, man about town, flanner, has a terrible hangover. He's had to sack his valet because his valet keeps stealing his socks and he gets a new valet from the agency. The agency sends a man who shimmers in, appraises the situation. A young man has a hangover, knows what to do about it and mixes him, one of his patent, pick me up. This is what happened. Everything seems suddenly to get all right, this is told from Bertie Wooster's perspective. The sun are not shone in through the window, birds twitted in the treetops and generally speaking hope dawned once more. Jeeves can solve a hangover, Jeeves can solve absolutely everything and so the stage is set for six decades of stories about Jeeves and Wooster in which Bertie Wooster gets into a series of increasingly improbable mishaps and Jeeves sorts it out. Bertie Wooster gets engaged to an inappropriate woman. Bertie Wooster's friend gets engaged to an inappropriate woman. Bertie Wooster's aunt's chef quits and needs to be returned because otherwise his uncle won't have money, won't have nice food and so on it goes on and on and on and if you know the stories they are wonderful, they are light, they are fluffy. I've got bad news for you. Jeeves is a one man crime wave and if you read the stories as I have done during lockdown I read all five volumes and took extensive notes. They are evidence of I think an unparalleled willingness to break the law in the interest of earning tips from his employer and his employer's friends. I've made a small list here of some of the things he did. He drugs another valet in order to obtain a book full of inside information. The actual words he used was slipped him a Mickey Finn. He uses that inside information to terrify, to blackmail a fascist into silence who threatens Bertie Wooster's marriage prospects. He runs for a friend of Bertie Wooster's an illegal bookmaker at a time when that was a significant crime punishable by a major prison sentence. He has a particular problem, ladies and gentlemen, with the forces of law and order. He persuades a magistrate to essentially ignore evidence presented by a police officer in order to get one of Bertie Wooster's friends off a serious charge. He gives false evidence to police officers. In order to derail a police investigation he impersonates a senior police officer, ladies and gentlemen, not once but twice under the pseudonym chief inspector with a spoon. He assaults a police officer descending from a tree with a truncheon. In the words he uses in the story, I took the liberty of cushing the officer. I considered it advisable in the circumstances as the simplest method of averting unpleasantness. And he bribes a police officer. Or rather, in the words he used, I gave him a little present. Jeeves is a man who enables crime for money. He allows people his employer to get away with crimes as he needs to stealing a helmet on boat race night and going up all the way to stealing a novelty silver cow creamer from the silver cabinet of a friend of his uncles. It is pretty grim. Now, I can tell you're looking at me and thinking shouldn't he be talking about something a bit more consequential? Now, why am I telling you about... You may look at this and think that looks like national treasure in Polymath Stephen Fry and thinking why is he having a go at this delightful man. Yes, possibly I should be talking about something more consequential. Possibly I should be talking about one of the many oligarchs. And the reason I'm not talking about them isn't... I promise you anything to do with the fact that if I did I might well be sued into next year and possibly the year after that. So maybe the reason I'm talking to you giving a gross expose of a fictional character is because I really don't want to lose my house. But also I am convinced that PG Woodhouse, or to give him his full name, Sir Pelham Grenville Woodhouse, was a prophet. I think that he managed to see the direction that Britain was going in at a time when most people couldn't. Now, this first GC Woodhouse story was published in 1916. Jeeves takes charge. The last one, Arn't Gentleman, was published in 1975. Over that period, 1916 to 1975, Britain changed utterly. Now, it is a kind of extraordinary to think it was possible for it to change so much over the course of not just someone's lifetime, but a writer's professional career. In 1916 Britain is at war with Germany allied with Russia. In 1975 it's in the Cold War against Russia allied with Germany. In 1916 Britain is at the heart of the world's largest empire. By 1975 it is an island off the coast of Europe and part of what became the European Union. In 1916 Britain would go around the world bullying countries, telling them what to do if they didn't like their trade policy. We just send a gunboat to bombard them. By 1975 we were on the verge of the three-day week. It is an astonishing time in which someone lived. So, why is this interesting to someone who writes about oligarchs? Because also during this period there was a complete change in the way Britain makes a living. Now, I'm a Russianist, I'm a Russophile, an ashamed Russophile. It's a bit of a weird thing to admit to being at the moment. But I moved to Russia in 1999 in the, as it turns out, rather naive belief that I would be witnessing the transformation of Russia in a democratic direction. That Russia would become a member of the democratic family of countries. As it turned out unbeknownst to me, unbeknownst to most people, because most people weren't paying attention, just a few weeks before I moved there, this is in the autumn of 1999, a man called Vladimir Putin became Prime Minister. And he has been in charge of Russia either as Prime Minister or President ever since. And the story ended up writing as a journalist in Russia was not one of democratisation, not one of it joining the family of democratic nations, but the opposite. The various gains that were made in the 1990s towards having free political parties, free business, free media, free civil society organisations, these were gradually erased over the next few years. And we end up with a situation now when you can't call a war a war without being threatened with 15 years in prison. And it was frankly a depressing place to be working as a journalist because the story was so unremittingly depressing. But something kind of odd happened. And it's only struck me as odd with retrospect because it seemed normal at the time that while I was writing about this, the transformation of democracy into kleptocracy, the transformation into an oligarch, completely controlled by a tiny number of very wealthy friends of Putin, I used to get these calls from the editors in London and they used to say, this guy's bought the biggest house in London after Buckingham Palace, some Russian guy, who is he? Can we send you, can you write us a few words? Or this guy's bought a football club, who is this guy? Can you let us know who is this? Or, you know, some guy, I don't know, he's brought some kind of court case in the commercial court, he's spending a lot of money on QCs, who is this guy? And there was this very weird thing that was happening at the time, whereby the oligarchs who were responsible for everything that was going bad in Russia, all they had to do was get on a plane and land in Heathrow. And they weren't oligarchs anymore, they were entrepreneurs. And occasionally they were philanthropists. Sometimes they were business people. It didn't really matter what they were, but they weren't really oligarchs anymore. Somehow something was happening, something magic in the air in London was transforming the people who were ruining this country that I loved in Eastern Europe. They were ruining, they were looting everything. 500 people owned as much as 99.8% of the population, they owned everything. And yet, when they arrived here, the literal red carpet was being rolled out for them. Now I got a bit cross about this with some friends, so we organised something that we called the kleptocracy tours. It's a bit like the Hollywood bus tours we would drive people around west London, occasionally north London if the traffic wasn't so bad, pointing out mansions that belong to oligarchs and kleptocrats. Deputy Prime Minister of Russia here, the head of Russian railways there, the member of the upper house of parliament in that massive house with the swimming pool and the huge cinema in the basement over there. It was fun and we got a little bit of attention and all that. But really we were just scratching the surface of what Britain does. Britain doesn't just sell houses to oligarchs, hell no. What would be the point in only doing that? We also provide legal services and accountancy services. We float their companies on the stock exchange. We allow them to sue journalists in our courts to make sure people like me prefer to talk about jeevs rather than people with actual names. That's what we do. We provide the soft skills that oligarchs lack. Because what are oligarchs good at? Really they're good at stealing stuff, killing people, invading sovereign nations. We allow them to float bond issuances on international bond markets. All of these things which involve the ability to integrate and seamlessly into the international financial system. Look at jeevs. A repeated theme of the jeevs and Worcester stories is that Worcester has decided that some ghastly vulgar piece of clothing is stylish and jeevs persuade some it isn't. It might be a mess jacket or a cheque suit or a pair of spats. The oligarchs I remember when I first moved to Russia, they wore polyester leisurewear, slip on tassled loafers. They used to carry man bags. They had incipient mullets. Now they wear English suits and Italian handmade shoes and beautifully understated ties and they donate to philanthropic organisations. That is what jeevs can do for you. Jeevs can transform you from an oligarch into an aristocrat. What's the equivalent of jeevs is pick me up that he made for Bertie Wooster? That's private healthcare. Private healthcare just walked down Harley Street. It was a real shock for example to the politicians in Nigeria who had been enthusiastically looting their healthcare system for the last 30 years when the pandemic struck and suddenly they couldn't go and consult their doctors in London. How are you supposed to survive if you have to get healthcare from a country that earns $11 on healthcare per person per year? It's tough. Now, I mean I could go on. What's the equivalent of jeevs running Wooster down in the two seater to Tocly on the World? Well that would be the super yacht captains that we send over to manage all these super yachts. Astonishing fact when Alexei Navalny revealed that the Scheherazade, the largest yacht of unknown ownership in the world probably belonged to Vladimir Putin and revealed the crew manifest. Every single member worked for the Rana Slujbachrani, the federal guard service that guards the Kremlin, apart from one, the captain, and where was he from? Right, yes, he was from Butler, Britain, because of course he was. So just like jeevs earns tips, we earn fees, huge fees, lawyers fees, accountants fees, listing fees on the stock exchange, all of the things that we earn from oligarchs to transform them into aristocrats. And just like Wooster wouldn't be able to get out of his scrapes without jeevs help, the oligarchs wouldn't be able to do what they do without ours. Now if Bertie Wooster steals a policeman's helmet on boat race night, that's on him. If jeevs perverts the course of justice in the morning, that is on jeevs. Just like an oligarch might steal an oil company, that's on him. But if we allow that oil company to float on the London stock exchange, and if we allow that oligarch then to buy a house, and if that money goes back to Russia to buy weapons which they can use to invade a sovereign nation, that's on us. And I find that a pretty uncomfortable thought, really. And what I find particularly uncomfortable is the fact that it doesn't really get very much attention. And the reason why it doesn't get very much attention in my opinion is because, like the jeevs and Wooster stories, the story is always told from our perspective. Now, let's go back to that quote about why jeevs cost a police officer. It was to involve a little, to avoid a little unpleasantness. It didn't avoid any unpleasantness from the policeman's perspective, but it certainly did from Bertie Wooster's. If you are enabling oligarchs to come here to avoid unpleasantness for the oligarchs, you're not avoiding unpleasantness for all the people from Russia who have had their national wealth stolen, or the people from Nigeria having to live in a country that spends just $11 per person, per year, on healthcare. The money is stolen. It ends up here, but because we make money out of it, we don't tend to talk about it. But I suppose so what, you might think. People do say so what. They've been saying so what since we started doing this in the 1950s. If we make money from enabling financial crime and it brings money into our economy, what do we care about what happens in the rest of the world? And that's quite a difficult question to answer. When we ran the kleptocracy tours, we used to say, well, because all this money is coming here, house prices are higher in Nightsbridge and Kensington, and therefore you can't afford to live there, and people would quite reasonably say we wouldn't have been able to afford to live there anyway. But I think there's a more important question, which is that if our brightest and best university graduates are enticed by the extremely high salaries on offer in accountancy firms and legal firms and financial firms to go and work as butlers for the world's wealthiest, that means they're not doing other things. They are not solving all the very real and significant problems that we have as a country, whether that's in the question of transforming our economy, transforming our energy system, or just being doctors or being politicians. And interestingly, considering he's an idiot, Bertie Wooster actually had this insight long before anyone else did. Gives has just solved one of Bertie Wooster's many, many minor scrapes. And this is what Bertie Wooster had to say. I had betted on Gives all along, and I had known that he wouldn't let me down. It beats me why a man of his genius is satisfied to hang around pressing my clothes and whatnot. If I had Gives' brain, I should have a stab at being Prime Minister or something. Now, sadly, all of the people with Gives' brain are being Gives. They are moving money around, not just for Russians. We're butler to the world, not butler to the Russians. They're running around for Chinese aristocrats. And Nigerian aristocrats are all the others. And who do we have as Prime Minister? We have Bertie Wooster. Thank you. It was really fantastic. I can't recommend the books enough, and they will be outside and on sale. That was both funny and incredibly important that we all heard it. I hope you're still doing your tours. I think you might get a lot of sign-ups. Our next speaker is the wonderful Amelia Gentleman, who did personally individually break one of the most important stories, the Windrush stories. She's a guardian journalist and she decided that she would follow a small piece of information that correlated with another small piece of information. Like all good investigations, it began tiny, and suddenly she realised she had, in journalist terms, struck gold. But it certainly wasn't gold for all the people involved. The thing about Amelia's story is that while she exposed it all, and I've read the book and I advise everybody to read it, and you get to the end of it and you think, this actually is so shocking. This is so awful. I live in this country that's done this. Well, it's still going on, and Amelia's going to tell us how she cracked the Windrush case, what happened, what happened to some of the people, and why, sadly, today, a couple of years after the book was published, we still have not resolved the whole issue. Welcome, Amelia. Thank you, Rosie. Glumie building is the improbably-named lunar house. It's one of the key home office headquarters in Croydon. And I spend a lot of my time at the Guardian trying to work out what's going on inside it, trying to get a sense of the decisions that are being taken by officials within that building. It's a very untransparent place. The decisions that officials make in this building change lives profoundly. They dictate whether or not people can stay in this country with their families, or whether or not they face deportation. But the rulings that are made here very, very rarely make the news. Almost exactly 10 years ago, I think 10 years ago next week, Theresa May, who was then Home Secretary, gave a television interview where she announced that she wanted to create in Britain a very hostile environment for illegal migration. Her announcement unleashed an explosion of policy initiatives designed to make life in Britain extremely hard for people who were unable to prove that they have the right to live here. Legislation followed, which moved the kind of immigration checks that we normally associate with airports and ferry ports. And she introduced... They were kind of pushed into everyday life so that employers found that they needed to check the immigration status of all of their staff or face 20,000 pound fines so that landlords found that they needed to check the passports of prospective tenants. Medical staff were obliged to ask for proof of immigration status before offering treatment. And people who worked in banks or even in mobile phone shops were suddenly required to be forming the functions of border guards. The Home Office at that time put quite a lot of effort into encouraging journalists to report on the tough new measures that it was rolling out, which served this political purpose to show voters that the government was determined to be very tough on immigration. Press officers were encouraging us to write about the new vans that the Home Office had created, vans which were marked with the slogan go home or face arrest, and which were dispatched to drive around areas of high immigration across London. The Home Office... The Home Office Press Office was very cheerful in its dissemination of this robust new message, and it began issuing very upbeat tweets, like the tweet that it sent out on Valentine's Day in 2014, and the message, roses of red, violets of blue, if your marriage is a sham, we'll be on to you. But there was another kind of quite hidden consequence of the new hostile environment measures which Theresa May had introduced that began to unfold really quite slowly and entirely out of sight, both of officials and of journalists. When politicians announced that they wanted to create a very hostile environment for illegal immigrants, they made a fundamental miscalculation. They assumed that the Home Office would be good at deciding who was in the UK legally and who was an illegal immigrant. It turned out that the department's officials were actually extremely bad at making that distinction. This is Paulette Wilson, who was 61 when this picture was taken. She was somebody who was born in Jamaica, travelled to Britain entirely legally when she was 10 in 1968 to live with her grandparents in Telford. She went to secondary school in Britain. She had a daughter here, a granddaughter. She worked as a cook, paid taxes for decades. She spent some time working as a canteen worker in the House of Commons, serving food to politicians who would later go on to develop the hostile environment policies. From 2015 onwards, she began to receive a series of very, very frightening letters from the Home Office, telling her that she was a person with no leave to remain in the United Kingdom. She was told that if she was unable to prove that she had entered the UK lawfully in 1968, she was liable for removal, which is a polite term for deportation. She had no idea how to prove that she'd come here lawfully half a century earlier, and her many, many attempts to explain to the Home Office that they'd made a mistake failed. And so this entirely law-abiding woman was arrested twice and then detained for a week in an immigration removal centre, driven to Heathrow and booked on a flight back to Jamaica, a country she had left 50 years earlier and had never returned to. This is the view from my seat at the Guardian. My own desk is much, much tidier, but I wanted to show you this picture because I think it gives quite a good insight into the really messy, complicated process of journalism, which involves sifting through huge amounts of information, trying to understand what's significant, and discarding what is unnecessary. I think it's a useful image because sometimes films show investigative journalism as a very simplified, sanitised way portraying journalists as clear-eyed individuals who stride forward with determination and purpose to uncover truth, and the reality is much messier and much, much more chaotic. Paulette Wilson's situation arrived on my desk just to the left of this one in the form of an email from a charity in Wolverhampton, a charity that I'd visited a couple of years earlier when I was writing about Paul's legacy in that constituency. Caseworkers at the charity had been trying to help her untangle her situation and had managed, by that point, with the help of the local MP to secure a temporary stay of her deportation. I went to Wolverhampton, I met her, and we published a very long interview with her, highlighting that the Home Office had made a really, really serious mistake. In the wake of that article, we began at the Guardian to get a whole series of phone calls and emails from other people who had been experiencing similarly harsh treatment at the hands of the Home Office. People who had been classified wrongly as illegal immigrants, despite the fact that they'd been living in the UK legally for as long as 50 years. For months in the Guardian, we continued to publish stories about people whose lives were being entirely ruined by the hostile environment policy, a policy designed to target illegal immigrants which turned out on quite a large scale to be mistakenly targeting people who were actually here quite legally. It's almost impossible to overstate how badly people were affected. Among these people are ambulance drivers, special needs teaching assistants, former soldiers, meals on wheels, volunteers, lollipop ladies. Many of them were sacked from their jobs or evicted from their homes or told, for example, that they were not eligible for life-saving cancer treatment on the NHS unless they paid tens of thousands of pounds. A few people, like Joseline John, who's the woman just underneath, Paula Wilson on the right, were actually flown halfway across the world back to countries that they'd left as children. Joseline arrived from Grenada aged four in 1963, went to primary school in Britain, secondary school, worked in hotels, paid taxes for decades, for a while worked at the Ritz, but in 2014 was wrongly classified as being an illegal immigrant. She gathered 75 bits of documentary evidence proving, she thought, that she'd spent a lifetime legally in the UK, but the Home Office said that this was insufficient proof and she was flown back to Grenada in 2016. These were really hidden stories, partly because most of the people affected were so alarmed at having been classified as being an illegal immigrant, that they were very nervous about talking to the media about their situation. But even those who wanted to speak out had found it very hard to attract reporters' attentions because stories about visas and immigration difficulties are complex and often quite hard to shoehorn onto news pages. But we persisted for months. It took a really long time to get any political response. The Home Office, Press Office, worked very hard to try to tell me and my colleagues that we were barking up the wrong tree, that in fact there were just a very, very small number of people who had perhaps been a bit disorganised about their paperwork and they suggested that these people should employ lawyers and try and sort out their immigration status, ignoring the fact that the government had abolished most free legal aid as part of its austerity cuts and that most of the people affected had been pushed virtually into destitution as a result of losing their jobs because of the Home Office's mistakes. So they were in no position to spend thousands of pounds on hiring lawyers. Despite this concerted attempt to downplay the situation, so many people were contacting the Guardian that it became obvious that a really large cohort of people who derived in Britain entirely legally in the 1950s and 60s had been wrongly classified as being illegal immigrants as a result of the hostile environment legislative changes. Many of them, people who'd come from the Caribbean or other countries formerly colonised by Britain, many of them had never applied for British passports because they didn't have to. Before the hostile environment, Britain has always been culturally opposed to the idea of ID cards and we've never had a kind of papers please culture. But once the legislation was introduced, employers, doctors, landlords, all of them completely untrained in the complex process of assessing immigration status, had to begin checking people. And there was inevitably a racist tilt to these immigration checks. Diane Abbott said it's almost impossible to produce a hostile environment for immigrants and not produce a hostile environment for people who look like immigrants. It took about six months before the weight of coverage we were running began to trigger a political response. In April of 2018, the Guardian put this issue on the front page every day for two weeks and finally there was a government reaction. Initially, Theresa May was only grudgingly admitted that there might be a problem and she said that she would like to apologise for any anxiety that her policies had caused. It was obvious to anyone who had been paying attention that lives had been destroyed and that this was not a question of people feeling anxious. We continue to highlight the issue on the front page and the apologies became a bit more fulsome. Eventually, the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, resigned because she had told Parliament mistakenly that there were no targets for deporting people, but a colleague of mine at the Guardian had received some leaked emails, some of her leaked emails discussing very ambitious deportation targets that officials needed to meet. I'm glad to be talking about this here at the British Library during the time of this exhibition on the power of news and news organisations to force change because there were some hugely positive outcomes from the Guardian's coverage of these events. It is a really good example of how a well resourced or reasonably well resourced newsroom can allow reporters the time to investigate complex and hidden issues and highlight the negative consequences of some really politicised policy decisions. As a result of the coverage, the Home Office announced a compensation scheme and promised to pay out somewhere between £200 million and £500 million. A full review of the hostile environment was promised. Dozens of people were flown back from the Caribbean at the government's expense. Families were reunited. People who had lost their jobs were re-employed. About 15,000 people who hadn't had documentation were given it, and three consecutive Home Secretaries promised wholesale reform of the Home Office. Preeti Patel has made a commitment to transforming her department into a more compassionate institution. A training programme has been rolled out for all 35,000 members of the Home Office, for all 35,000 members of Home Office staff, which is designed to remind them that applicants are not just case files to be processed, but are also human beings. So, I'd like to finish on a positive note, and I do feel optimistic about the positive impact that this reporting has had in bringing a hidden scandal to political attention and forcing considerable change, but there's obviously a lot more work to be done. We know that politicians make a lot of promises and don't always deliver, and that's certainly been the case. The compensation scheme has not been a success. Thousands of people are still waiting for payments, and these are payments that might actually help them to start building their lives. A lot of the people who haven't yet received compensation are still heavily in debt as a direct result of the Home Office mistake. More than 20 of them have died in the long period between applying for compensation and actually receiving any money. Sadly, Paulette Wilson was among them. She died 18 months ago before receiving full compensation. The hostile environment remains in place, and the promised review of the legislation has not yet happened. I think that the whole Windrush scandal has been given new relevance with the recent announcement that illegal arrivals in the UK will be flown to Rwanda, and their asylum applications processed there. If there's one clear thing that we've learnt from this scandal, it's that the Home Office is not brilliantly reliable at distinguishing between people who have a right to be in the UK and those who don't. It's clear that journalists will be working overtime trying to work out what's going on inside the Home Office headquarters for many years to come. Thank you so much. That was a fantastic talk, and it is a fantastic book. And yes, as he said, without journalism, without you, none of this would have been known. So it's amazing what a difference you've made, and congratulations to you and the Guardian as ever. Our next speaker is Gideon Rachman, who is the Chief Foreign Policy Correspondent for the FT, and he has written probably a book that has arrived at the right time in the most extraordinary way. A bit like Oliver's arrived, but Gideon's is astonishing. It's called The Age of the Strongman, and he's looking at people like Putin, Xi Jinping, and a whole lot of other leaders around the world who are doing their best to demolish democracies. This is very timely and incredibly important, so we're thrilled to have him here tonight. Please give him a big welcome. Well, thank you very much, Rosie, and thanks to the British Library for including me in this illustrious company. I must say I was a little bit... I was both sort of really fascinated and awed by what the previous speakers had to say, and slightly embarrassed because they're proper journalists. I don't have the kind of heroism of Orana or the investigative brilliance of an Oliver or Amelia. I'm at the more luxurious end, which is commentary. But in a sense, what I'm going to talk about and what I talk about in my book does build on the kinds of things they're doing, because in my book I look at Russia, at India, and also try to fit it into a global pattern of what I call the rise of strongman leaders. In fact, it even touches upon what Amelia was talking about because one of the things that you'll hear that unites these leaders is they're all majoritarians who are often very hostile to migration and use it as an issue to kind of whip up their followers. So I say it's the age of the strongman. What do I mean by that? I think probably it's easiest to answer the three basic journalistic questions. When, what, why? When? Well, almost too kind of symbolically, for me the age of the strongman starts on the 31st of December 1999, which is when Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russia. Oliver said that when he arrived there he was expecting to cover the democratisation of Russia in that year, and he wasn't alone in this assumption. I think a lot of people, and in fact encouraged by Putin, initially thought that this would be a modernising leader democratiser when Bill Clinton met him three months in March 2000. He says this is the guy who will complete the modernisation, the democratisation of Russia. However, we discover over the course of more than 20 years now that in fact things take a different turn that Putin rolls back. The freedoms in Russia is an ardent nationalist and as we now discover, willing to invade a neighbouring country as well as to crush freedoms within his own nation. However, for a while it looked like Putin, even as we discover that this leader has a darker side, that there's a sort of comforting notion that, well, he's a bit of an anomaly, you know, that Angela Merkel says this man is a 19th century figure in the 21st century. In other words, he's a man out of time trying to behave like the sort of macho monarchs of the past, but in a technocratic age of globalisation, where's he going to get? But in fact, what we discover as the era rolls on, is that there are more and more leaders like Putin and indeed many of them take Putin as a model. So, to give you the chronology briefly, in 2003, Recep Tayyb Erdogan becomes the leader of Turkey and the reception for Erdogan is actually strikingly similar to that of Putin internationally, in that he is initially hailed as a reformer, as a liberal, as the guy who will reconcile Islam and democracy, which at the time, just after 9-11, seems like the most important task you could have and he's given a great reception in the West. But he too is still there 20 years later. He too has changed the constitution to allow himself to rule on and on to the future by abolishing term limits, something Putin does, something Xi Jinping does in China as well. And he too has assaulted journalists. Rana, I think, correctly made the point that this is something that's going on internationally. There are, I believe, or there was for a while more journalists imprisoned in Turkey than in any other country, even though this is a NATO member regarded as a democracy. I feel it at the moment quite strongly because a friend of mine, who was the head of the Open Society Institute in Turkey, was sentenced to 18 years in prison just two weeks ago along with a bunch of other civil society activists. So Erdogan is the next in line, if you like. I think probably the most important development, though, is when Xi Jinping comes to power in China in 2012. And one might say, well, you know, China's always been an authoritarian state. It's always been a one-party state. So why is this guy any different from his predecessors? But he actually is because in the aftermath of the sort of horrors of the Mao era, the Communist Party leaders who followed tried to create a more collective style of leadership. Deng Xiaoping, who was the great economic reformer, also put in place term limits. And they tried to move away from a personality cult. Xi reversed all of that. He has got his own thought written into the Chinese constitution, the first Chinese leader to do that since Mao. He has abolished term limits. And this November in a vital party congress, he will probably be confirmed as party general secretary long into the future. So he, too, is settling in for the long term. In 2014, you have Narendra Modi coming in as Prime Minister of India. And again, there is this positive reception in the West, and I have to admit with some embarrassment that I wrote the column at the time saying, you know, this guy is, you know, he has a sort of rough record in Gujarat that maybe he is the economic reformer that India needs. And the only thing I can say in my mitigations is that I am embarrassed by writing that, but also I was not the only person who made that mistake. The following year, Barack Obama wrote a column for Time Magazine saying that Modi impitimised the promise of a rising India. And Modi has been courted by Western leaders ever since, partly because of the geopolitical importance of India. And people really don't want to look too closely at the kind of things that Rana was talking about. 2016 is the crucial year in the West because we had said to ourselves, well, you know, this style of leadership is kind of alien to the Western democracy, surely. But in 2016, Donald Trump is elected as President of the United States. And he is a leader who frankly admires these strongman leaders who relates to them. He says to Bob Woodward, who's still around, that, you know, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I like them, talking of Erdogan. And his staff, some of the ones who fell out with him, people like Fiona Hill and John Bolton in their memoirs, write that they were pretty sure that, firstly, they could see how much Trump admired Putin, admired she spoke about them warmly and private. But in fact, Fiona said, you know, there was this idea that Putin maybe had was blackmailing Trump, had something on him, and she said it was simpler than that. Trump wanted to be Putin. He admired him. That was the style he wanted. And when Trump starts beginning to joke when she abolishes term limits, he starts sort of saying, you know, maybe we should do that in the United States. And everyone says, aha, you know, he's joking. And again, Fiona Hill writes, having worked closely with him, absolutely not, that was not a joke. And on and on it goes. So in 2017, you have, again in an autocratic country, you have Mohammed bin Salman that comes in as Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. And, you know, what's different? Well, what is different is that previously this had also been a kind of collective leadership. Who knew who the leaders of Saudi Arabia was a kind of a monarchy with an extended royal family. But he centralises power around himself, begins imprisoning some of his relatives, creates a personality cult, is a confirmed admirer of Vladimir Putin, and creates a special relationship with Trump. I don't think it's not coincidental. The first foreign visit Trump plays as president is to visit MBS in Saudi Arabia. 2018, you have Bolsonaro come in in Brazil, a man who revels in the name of, or nickname, the Trump of the Tropics. And he hugely admires Trump, he becomes a regular at Mar-a-Lago and so on. And indeed, shortly after the year afterwards, you have a left-wing strongman, Amlo, come in in Mexico, but a similarly very personalised leadership. There's a book about him written by a Mexican journalist called The Country of One Man, which gives you a sense of his style of leadership. He specialises in having a daily press conference of two and a half hours every morning. He's a bit of a megalomaniac. And then, you know, Africa has had many, many strongman leaders, but the one that I was particularly interested in the book is Abiy Ahmed in Ethiopia, because he again repeats this pattern of the West mistakenly embracing somebody as a liberal. I remember seeing him speak to a Western audience shortly after he came into power, he presented himself as a peacemaker so convincingly that he was actually given the Nobel Peace Prize. But then shortly afterwards, unleashed a pretty vicious war in Eritrea, not in Eritrea, sorry, in Tigray, and now Western leaders are sort of backing away, slightly horrified by what's happening there. So, you've got this global pattern and it collectively amounts to a really quite significant rollback of democracy around the world. Freedom House, which monitors these things, says we're now in a 16-year democratic recession which began around 2005, and that the amount of sort of political freedom collectively around the world has been steadily eroding. And if you think about the countries I've been talking about, they really are the sort of... these are peripheral countries. This is the core of global political power. You have in China and India the two most populous nations in the world. If you add Russia, that's three of... Russia and the US, that's three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Brazil and Mexico, the two most populous countries in Latin America. This is really the political trend of our times. I should try and define a little bit more what I mean, though. I think a judge once asked when... he was asked what is pornography. He said, well, I can't define it exactly, but I know it when I see it. And I think there is a little bit of that with strongman rule. You kind of know what I'm on about, but let me give you my sort of rough definition. I think key to it is a personality cult. Trump is always good for a quote, and he says in the 2016 speech at the Republican Convention, I alone can do it. And that is really the key claim of almost all of these leaders, that it's me. It's not the system, it's not the political party, it's not even really the ideology, it's me personally. And you can see that in almost all these countries, that for example, if you apparently, if you get vaccinated in India, the vaccination certificate has Modi's face on it. He's giving this to you personally. The Indian historian Ram Guha said that the message of the Indian state since 2014 is that India is Modi and Modi is India. And the same with Xi Jinping. All members of the Communist Party now have to study Xi Jinping's thought. They even have an app which allows them to do this. And I remember last time when you could still go to China, meeting a friend of mine and saying, come on, you don't really have this app, do you? And he said, yeah, yeah, I've got it, and he pulled it up. And then he said, oh God, I haven't opened it today, because they can monitor how much time you're spending studying, and this is clocked. So I alone can do it. The personality cult is critical. I think the, also, oddly, despite their incredibly different countries and different political systems they're coming from, I think really common appeal of all these is what I call nostalgic nationalism. These are all leaders, almost all leaders, who in one way or another will say, the country was great, it's been ruined by liberal elites, I'm going to bring it back. So Trump is saying, make America great again. Xi Jinping's slogan is the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people. Putin, as we know, says that the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union, the invasion of Ukraine is, in a sense, a reassertion of Russian greatness. Modi looks back to a recreation, not so much of Indian greatness, but perhaps of Hindu greatness, from not just before the British Empire, but before the Mogul empires. So these are leaders that say, the country's in a terrible state, but don't worry, I can bring it round, I can turn it round by my force of personality, and also by my willingness to break the rules. So that's the third common characteristic, I would say, is that these are leaders who, because they appeal to a sense of national crisis, and because they say, I know what to do, say, well, one of the things we've got to do is not be bound by all these kind of international conventions, or even our own domestic legal systems, because we need to, as Trump would say, get tough, we need to, and if that means locking up journalists, if that means packing courts, we'll do it. And they tend to be what I call simplists, people who have three-word slogans often that will sum up what they're going to do. So in Trump's case, it's build the wall. In the case of Brexit, and I do talk about where Brexit fits into this, into the book, it's take back control. Or in the case of Putin, it's invade Ukraine. These are people who pitch simple, brutal solutions who don't accept the liberal idea that it's all a bit complex and involves trade-offs and so on. So those are the primary characteristics. Why is it all happening? There are many reasons. So let me just give you, it would be nice to say there's a single reason, but that would be the kind of simplest explanation by a strong man, so I'll give you four reasons. Some of them are economic, and I think those are the things that were highlighted, particularly in the West, rising inequality, the number of people who are very susceptible to the idea that the system is broken, because for them it is. I think it's very striking that, for example in the United States, that the life expectancy of white men without degrees actually begins to fall in the 1990s. So when Trump says there's an emergency, there's an opioid crisis, the elites have sold you out. There are a lot of people who would agree with that. I think actually the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to that sense that middle America had somehow been sold down the river. But I think there's also a social element, and I mentioned earlier how what Amelia was saying had kind of rang bells, because I think that very often it's not just a sense of economic anguish, but it's when you tie it to the sense that you belong to a group that sort of epitomises the country, but that has been betrayed by the country, perhaps by uncontrolled migration that you're really in business. And if you look at particularly the voters for Trump, they are often people who not only feel that they're worse off, but also feel that they are being discriminated against, whether it's through affirmative action or through illegal migration. These are people who are susceptible to the idea that there are outgroups, minority groups, that are getting what we should be getting. And again and again, you see that appeal made by strongman leaders. And often, you know, Rana was talking about the persecution of Muslims in India. It often is actually Muslims who are the group that are particularly highlighted. So I talked about Trump's attempted Muslim ban, but you have also in India persecution of Muslims. You have a million plus Muslims imprisoned in China. Viktor Orban, the strongman of the European Union, really makes his name by building a wall to keep Muslims out. And so those economic, social, those technological elements I can see Rosie hovering. So I wind up. I think it's not a coincidence that a lot of this happens in the era of social media, which happens to be perfectly attuned for the use of strongmen. And I think there's an emulation effect. I think that as Putin and others come in, they create a new style of politics that a lot of these people begin to follow. So let me finish by saying, you know, are we in the middle or at the end? I think there is a chance that because this is a very flawed model of leadership, which does over-concentrate power in the hands of an individual, it often needs to catastrophic policy errors. We've seen Putin make one in Ukraine, I think. And I hope that that will begin to discredit this strongman model because, as I said, Putin is, has been an inspiration for a number of these leaders. If he had won in three days, as I think he would win, as I think he thought he would win, I think it would have given a huge boost in prestige to this idea and he would have had other strongmen leaders doing that kind of thing. I hope that, you know, if he is defeated in Ukraine, then perhaps we could begin to say we're beginning to see the end of the age of the strongman. So thank you very much. Gosh, I'm sorry that we're in 5x15. You were fantastic, Gideon. I could have listened to that for a long time, but I have to be mindful of the time. That was riveting and terrifying. But I hope that your final thoughts are right, that we may be seeing the end of that. A final speaker tonight doesn't need much introduction. Ed Miliband has been a politician all his life and he's here because we don't often see in this quite the same way how much politicians themselves make the news and I don't mean make the news because you're the MP for Romford who's committed to spend the other night in prison. Ed made the news because he actually came up with lots of incredibly big ideas and radical thinking about capping energy prices, creating national investment banks, encouraging business investment with tax breaks. Ideas that at the time were seen were very radical but indeed have now been adopted by the Tory government. We need thinkers like Ed in our government and his new book which is about big ideas. What's it actually called, Ed? Go big is a very, very important idea because certainly in the areas that I work in around say food policy everyone just takes tiny little ideas and we are in a state where we need big ideas and big changes and Ed, it's fantastic to have you here. So welcome. Thank you very much. Well look, I feel somewhat daunted to follow those four excellent contributions. Rosie was kind enough to gloss over the fact that I led the Labour Party until 2015 and some of you may not know this but I lost the general election in 2015. Let me start by giving you some advice that if you're leading a political party, if that happens to you, it's better to win than to lose. When you lose the first thing you do is resign. The second thing you do is you grow a beard. You have a midlife crisis and grow a beard. This is sort of serious. You go from planning a phone call with him to being grateful for a call about that, your PPI. You go from having a team of these people to making your own travel arrangements that are quite difficult. Particularly a few weeks after the election, I got used to people whisking me around. I tried to get the train home to Kentish Town and I ended up there. Jill who worked for me, I said, Jill, I've ended up in St Albans. She said you weren't supposed to be there. Now that's the sort of light entertainment bit over with. So from the day I resigned I wanted to stay in politics and the voters were kind enough to give me the chance to have more time to think and more time to reflect. So I decided to, as Rosie said, write a book and which came out of a podcast that I do. I wanted to offer you some reflections on that tonight first and it follows on very well, I think, from what Gideon had to say, that the moment we're in demands big change. Looking back on my time as leader Rosie was complementary, I was big in my analysis but not big enough in my solutions, I think. And I just say this about Britain. Think about what we have gone through in the last decade or so. We've been through the financial crisis. We've been through Brexit. We've been through COVID, common with the rest of the world, but that has illustrated a lot about our country. We're now going through a devastating cost of living crisis for many people. Basically, people feel the country is not working for them. The first part of my case is nobody looking at these issues can think a small tweak around the edges are the solution. I want to underline the point about the thirst for change. I represent a constituency, Doncaster North, it's an ex-mining constituency. It voted more than 70% for Brexit. That wasn't my position, but that's how people voted. You might wonder why did your constituency vote for Brexit. It wasn't so much because of immigration, although people think it is that issue. It wasn't so much because of Europe, that people think it might be that. The biggest refrain was the demand for change for a new beginning. The most common thing I heard from people was it can't be worse than what we have at the moment. We need something better. I'm voting for a new future for my kids. My book is not supposed to be a work of political strategy, but I think the first of Gideon's four points is absolutely central here. I've observed both as leader when I faced David Cameron and then the new people that followed him. There's a big change. If you think about Trump, Johnson, Brexit, they are seeking to channel the the the the the channel, the emotions, the unhappiness, the sense that the country isn't working for people that the left used to channel. If you think about the Remain campaign which was led by David Cameron and George Osborne, that basically said to people in terms of Brexit, that basically said to people, things are really good. Don't mess it up now. 52% of people thought well no they're not. Now why is this relevant to what I'm saying? I think it's because I would say the way to defeat the strong men is not with small incremental change or being the defenders of the status quo. Because I think you have to meet the sense people have about the country and its need for change at the level it's at. So that's my first case. Second point I want to make is really learning of my own about politics, still a work in progress, but Otto von Bismarck, the first German Chancellor coined a phrase which many of you will have heard, politics is the art of the possible and I've come to think that he was only partially right, which is the politics that really makes the biggest difference is that which makes the seemingly impossible possible. If you think about all of the big changes that have happened in our society and all that once seemed impossible, think about a few things for our country and think about how long they took but from anything else. The NHS was first proposed in the minority report on the poor laws in 1909, seemed unthinkable and happened in 1948. The minimum wage was first proposed in a Labour Party manifesto I think in 1929, it happened in 1999. This is not meant to depress you. LGBT rights were fought for in the 60s, 70s, 80s. Change seemed unthinkable today we have equal marriage in our country. Those changes once seemed impossible but they happened. That should make us cheerful I think. Thirdly is the challenge, is the reason why some of the big things we need to happen aren't happening because the ideas aren't out there. I contend no. I think British politics is incredibly parochial but I think if you lift your eyes we're not short of solutions. We might be short, we might be limited by our imagination and our political will but we're not short of solutions. My book talks about some of the things we could be doing. Universal childcare in Scandinavia, social housing in Vienna, citizens wealth funds in Alaska, you've probably got your own ideas too. It's not that we are short of solutions. So then the really hard part and if I knew the answers to this I would probably not be standing here I'd be Prime Minister. We need big change. There are good ideas out there and it's big change that really matters in the long run. So how do we make it happen? I want to say two things. One about civil society and one about politics. The author Rebecca Solnit said this on a podcast. Big ideas, big transformations, social revolutions new frameworks and transformations often end up in the centre but they never begin in the centre. The centre is where they're validated the centre is where they come into the spotlight and a lot more people know they're there including really powerful people but all these things start on the margins. So she's basically saying the best ideas begin on the margins and end up in the mainstream and actually if you think about the right just for a second some of the worst ideas started on the margins and ended up in the mainstream. Now politics can bring about that shift and I'll talk a little bit about sort of how I'm trying to do that in my own small way in a minute but I think what should give us hope is that social movements can do that too. Politics is definitely too important to be left to politicians in my view and there are examples that should give us hope. The fight for a $15 minimum wage began with $200 in the US began with 200 fast food workers walking out in New York and now 22 million people are covered by a $15 minimum wage in the US. Florida just passed in the same year that it voted for Trump in 2020 it passed essentially a constitutional amendment saying there should be a $15 minimum wage. Think about the divestment movement. It began as on a college campus I think Swarthmore in the US it's now a multi-trillion dollar movement all round the world and what's interesting going back to what Solnit said is that these things definitely began on the margins and they definitely now influenced the mainstream so politicians go around arguing for a living wage and a $15 minimum wage George Osborne introduced something he called the living wage in this country if you think about the whole argument about fossil fuel divestment and so on the mainstream is not necessarily arguing for that but it has said to take it seriously not nearly fast enough but it has had influence Now one thing I want to say about this is this is hard and complex it's not easy I think sometimes we look at these movements and we think aren't they good at mobilizing people and it's sort of plain sailing it isn't plain sailing anyone who's involved in these movements know it's hard I mean those in the organizing community make a distinction between organizing and mobilizing and these successful movements are organizing the painstaking work of grassroots is organizing after I lost the election I went on a a course run by an organization called Citizens UK which campaigns for the living wage in this country they have put the living wage into the mainstream from the margins into the mainstream and it's taken them probably 20 years 20 years hard work with FTSE 100 companies and so on I'll just do one little digression on this because the story that left the most lasting impression with me and gave me hope on that course was about some Somalia British young people and the fight that they were having with this organization Nandos Nandos for those who don't know is a self chicken and basically these young people whose families come from Somalia they lived in Cardiff and they felt pretty disaffected with life and citizens got in touch with them and said what do you want to change about Cardiff and they said well I think the thing that really pisses us off is that there's three Nandos in Cardiff but none of them are Halal and we can go and have Halal Nandos elsewhere in the country but we can't here and so they said about trying to make change happen they wrote letters to the suits at Nandos and so on to cut a long story short and I do find this story very inspiring they eventually persuaded the Archbishop of Cardiff and the General Secretary of the Muslim Council of Wales to threaten to dress up as chickens to support to support the young people and they won their campaign and those young people have now gone on to be community organisers campaigning for a living wage they've won this prestigious award but it's a long way from Nandos to the big change we need but I'm making this point because I think social movements can have a massive impact on this but it is hard, it's painstaking and it needs organising now where does that then finally leave me because I'm now back seven years on from the beard I am now back in front line politics I'm the shadow secretary of the State for Climate Change and net zero and how do we we know the climate crisis back in front line politics is because of the climate crisis David Attenborough says that what we do in the next few years will determine the next few thousand years how do we um how do we get the kind of change we need globally is maybe a longer conversation but even nationally and maybe this makes me a ludicrous optimist but I think there is there are big coalitions to be built for big change when it comes to climate and it is about it is about this idea I think most simply of the green new deal now some people think this idea of the green new deal it's just a sort of slogan a good slogan it isn't just a good slogan I think it's saying something quite important to us which is there are people who are devastated at the moment by the cost of living crisis who are worried about how they get to the end of the week or the end of the day not so affected by that crisis everyone's affected but not so affected who are worried about the end of the world what climate means and you've got to unite those two groups of people and that's the kind of coalition building you need and you know I've been involved in this the climate sort of campaign struggle for a long time I was climate change secretary 2008 to 2010 I suppose the single biggest thing I've learnt is we've got to be truth telling about the scale of the threat that its own isn't enough we also have to present people with a better world and here is the thing which I find inspiring and exciting which is that in the process of making these big changes to the way we heat our homes travel around use our land are we really saying we're going to go from the high carbon unjust world to the zero carbon unjust world surely not actually in that transition we can do extraordinary things why can't we end fuel poverty in our country as we have this massive transformation which we're going to have to do anyway because of the climate crisis why can't we have a decent public transport system as we transform the way we travel around which we have to do because of the climate crisis why can't we give people access to green space as we have to transform the way we use our land in this country and what we cannot do is simply put a green coat of paint on an unequal an unfair economy now of course you know the challenges of thinking big in politics and I know this from my time as leader are incredibly hard and you know there's a certain element of PTSD for me being back in front line politics is not quite as bad as being leader of the opposition but challenging nonetheless but I do it because I think there are big because I think we do need big change and in a way my appeal through the book and other things I do is to say agree with the Green New Deal or the UBR universal basic income or whatever else but think commensurate with the scale of the challenge that the country in the world faces and that's the point I want to end on 1945 Labour Government is a bit of a political cliché at least in Labour circles but there is a reason for it which is that they face the most appalling circumstances a country weighed down by war and debt and they didn't lower their ambitions they raised them they didn't say well there's nothing we can do it's all really pretty difficult we're going to have to think small they thought big and I would want to quote to you by way of hopefully inspiration a speech that Ernest Bevin who was then the Minister for Labour made in the House of Commons in June 1944 and he said this with my right honourable friend the Prime Minister I had an opportunity visiting one of our ports and seeing the men of the 50th division among others going aboard ship the one question they put to me when I went through their ranks was Ernie when we have done this job for you are we going back to the dole both the Prime Minister and I answered no you are not now look we've not been through a war ourselves but we've been through multiple crises and I think we owe it to people to aim for something better we owe it to people to meet the challenge of our time at the scale that is necessary and I think we owe it to people to go big thank you very much that was a great note to end on and yeah so many good things we do absolutely I agree with you need to think big and we need journalism at all of you to take us forward so thank you all very very much for coming thank you all to everyone who's watched us at home please come to 5x15 again please come to British Library again I'm going to be here in fact talking about 50 years of spare rib in about three weeks time so you could come back then go and see the exhibition it is really terrific breaking the news it's on every day and it's on until the end of August and please come and buy books and meet all our speakers and writers and I thank them all very much indeed to well answer the British Library to Oliver, Amelia Rana, Gideon and Ed and thank you to you, good night