 Good afternoon and welcome to the Scottish Parliament. I'm Alison Johnstone presiding officer of the Parliament and I'd very much like to welcome you to the 2022 Festival of Politics. I can see that there are faces who have been joining us for events that have taken place previously. Lovely to see you back again. This year we celebrate the festival's 18th year of inspiring and informing audiences from every walk of life Three days of engaging debate in a safe and respectful environment. We're delighted that you can join us to participate in this event with our panellists. It's brought to you in partnership with the John Smith Centre, whose mission is to promote the positive case for politics and public service. There'll be a chance, of course, to get very involved with questions and comments during this event. And if you're keen to share your thoughts on social media, please do so, ac mae hynny'n hynny'n hynny'n FOP 2022. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio Rhesym Catechahol, Brian Taylor ac Dr Fraser McMillan. Rhesym Catechahol yw head of policy in government affairs Europe, Middle East, and Africa at Wys, a financial technology company. Rhesym Catechahol yw head of engagement for women to win, an organisation working to get more women elected to parliament, and a board member of the John Smith Centre. Brian Taylor will be a very familiar face to many of you from his time as political editor of BBC Scotland, a writer, broadcaster and lecturer. Brian is now a columnist for the Herald and frequent broadcaster on politics and current affairs, and Dr Fraser McMillan is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow working on the Scottish election study, an academic project focused on Scottish electoral politics and voting behaviour. He obtained his PhD at the University of Strathclyde and regularly contributes his expertise to BBC Scotland election coverage. Now before we, well before we pass over to yourself so I'm just going to put a couple of questions to the panel and I'm going to kick off first by asking Brian. Brian you've worked with and around politicians for many years, do you trust them? I was tempted to give a simple answer, no, but unfortunately that would be rather to succinct and you know we've got 90 minutes so it might need a little bit more than just to say the simple no. I tend mostly to trust them, I tend mostly to trust them, I'd make two perhaps preliminary points that get us going. First of all the atmosphere, the present atmosphere, the present environment, the present political environment, economic and social environment is the most uncertain, anxious and apprehensive I have ever encountered and I've been a journalist as you were kind enough to mention for one or two years, I've covered Scottish politics since Braveheart was a boy, but the atmosphere is incredible, it isn't just the hideous plague of two years of pandemic, it isn't just the pending recession, although those combined together it isn't just Ukraine, it's the combination of all of these things, people are feeling frankly terrified and they're perhaps looking for individuals to blame and I believe in those circumstances of anxiety and disquiet, the chances of them being trust in the organisations that are seen to be running affairs and perhaps are seen to have contributed to the problems is likely to be low. Just the other tiny thing, a tiny point I'd make as a sort of generic point is to say that the politicians, when we're asking whether we trust them, it's whether we believe them, first of all do we believe what they're saying, well that's one thing, I think it's whether we trust them to act in keeping with their own interests or in keeping with ours and I think mostly they try to act in keeping with our interests, because what, because they want to get re-elected and that in a democratic system that is the great clout that you can see, I think the phrase was once used, a shiver run along the front bench looking for the spine to run up and that is the case with politics, when politicians, when MPs are in the commons, when MSPs here at Hollywood contemplate a political crisis, they contemplate it frankly in genetic terms but also in terms of what's it going to mean for my seat, what's it going to mean for my chances of getting re-elected and sometimes people think well that's awful, that's dreadful, they're thinking about themselves but no you think about it, it's the only way the electorate could imply a continuing sanction upon them between elections is to threaten them frankly with getting kicked out and I think that's healthy in a democracy, consider the alternative, they have no fear whatsoever of being removed and that way you have totalitarianism, so I think on balance we are in a particularly dark age of an absence of trust, it may improve but I think on balance that I trust them to a certain degree as long as we have, we're exerting that democratic and electoral control over them. Thank you Brian, because that was a long, a lot much, much longer answer, I should have stuck to know it was better. No, it's grand, we have plenty of time at the moment at least, Resham, do we trust politicians, we hear a lot about how trust in politicians is declining is it and if so what's causing that decline? The answer to is it declining kind of from the evidence base is yes it is, IPPR did research showing that in the 40s the number of people, the percentage of people asked that believed politicians were out for themselves was about one in three, that went up in the early to mid 2014 time, around the 10s it went up to one in two and now that's up to two and three, so two thirds of people think that politicians are out for themselves and what does this mean? It just means that you are far less likely to believe that your politicians are acting in your best interests that they are putting their own needs ahead of yours. Now why is that? I think partly it's the spread of social media and I do think that's in some ways been a great leveler, a great equaler, you don't have to be particularly educated, you don't have to be particularly well connected to be able to either access or share your views and I think that is fantastic, the democratising of people being able to share their views, to share access to what politicians say and do and how that impacts the world but equally that means that we are judging the world and what our politicians do through often 280 characters or by clips that are taken out of context which means that there is a real possibility for polarisation, a real possibility thanks to algorithms that you no longer see the other side, you no longer understand the other view and it is very easy to find material to prove your belief should you wish to that politicians change their mind or do not stick to what they've said and I think that's concerning because actually we want politicians to feel as though they are not going to be punished for changing their minds and it is not healthy for democracy for us to beat people over the head if they change their political views or change their belief to the best solution to a problem we have in the UK so I think actually we do have to recognise that that by incentivising politicians to change their minds when more evidence comes out or to act in a different way that is a good thing and will increase trust but one of the biggest issues I think is representation and you know there are fewer women than men in parliament, there are even fewer people from different social classes and backgrounds people without university educations, people who have had experiences carers, people who have had all sorts of experiences and actually our parliament still does not look like the countries that it seeks to represent and so the more we can increase that you know Brian you mentioned a really good point about do we believe that people in parliament are acting in their own best interests or in our best interests the more we can converge those interests the more we can make it that our interests are the same as politicians interests the better and I think you can see that in decision making it was you know infuriating to me that as a woman where facial hair is not considered something that is societally acceptable that my husband was allowed during Covid to get his facial hair dealt with far sooner than I was and that seemed crazy to me but it was because it was mostly men in the room making the decisions and actually if we'd had more women if we'd had more ethnic minority women if we'd had people with different health conditions maybe that view and it sounds silly and small but actually it's just one very easy example to make of where when our politicians don't look like and have the same experiences as us we feel as though those are them and us and then the final thing I'll say on that that I think will come on to in more depth is actually politicians need to hold themselves to a higher level of integrity and account and actually there has to be more account taken by people at the top of parliament or parliaments that actually if people in your party behave poorly or improperly or if you do so yourself there should be the integrity and the the follow-through that you remove the whip or that you stand down from your position because actually if we see there being one rule for us one rule for them it becomes much harder to convince people that politicians do act in our interests and hold themselves to the account that we expect thank you very much and Fraser your your research focuses on voting behaviour and I wonder how how that's impacted in terms of trusting politicians so in some ways what we've spoken about so far I think we're almost in danger of moving or aspiring towards an ideal that never really existed of this this kind of platonic like we all just get around the table and look at the evidence and have a nice discussion and then that's it but the bread and butter of politics is disagreement and it's more about finding a healthy outlook for that in the democratic society and obviously it can cause huge problems for democratic participation when people lose trust in institutions and there's a difference between institutions per se so you know the Scottish Parliament or democracy in general and the the specific actors within that but what we've seen over the last kind of half century in Britain as a whole is a decline of trust in both and to some extent based on a couple of the trends you've talked about it's much more difficult now I think for individual politicians to maintain that trust because the level of scrutiny is so high because expectations are often quite high and it's inevitable you're going to let people down and in response to the kind of overall question of the panel do you trust politicians I'm going to kind of be the contrarian here and argue the affirmative and I suppose Brian saw I did but it was a bit you know mixed with personal experience like maybe it's not sitting on the fence I've done it very comfortably for about 40 years you know generally speaking so my main area of research at least until I joined the Scottish election study was manifestal pledge fulfilment and believe it or not politicians generally speaking fulfil the vast majority of what they promise to do and the main kind of reasons for variation in that are basically how much power they wield as a party so if you get a stable single party government with a majority they'll go on to often do 78 or 90% of what they pledge to do in the manifesto if it's a coalition government obviously you're going to end up having compromises made if there are you know negative economic conditions they need to change their policies away from what was promised but people don't know that right people generally if you ask people in survey questions vast majority of people don't believe that politicians fulfil their promises and in some ways you know we do want them to change their mind when conditions change but I don't think it's it's something we can just you know say oh it's great everyone fulfills our promises in the ether and expect people to be oh well that's great I love it I trust politicians now and it's much more all-encompassing than that and I think the environment of the kind of modern you know modern democratic life across the world makes it much much more difficult to kind of sustain that trust for a long time and generally kind of people have a negativity bias they perceive you know negative events as more like they wait them more in their thought process and positive ones so they see the broken promises and they don't necessarily see the fulfilled ones but over time governments just become unpopular there's a concept in political sciences as close to you can get as a law in social science the cost of governing the longer you're in office the more trust and you know your popularity gets chipped away that's just because you get blamed for everything one of the only instances that that hasn't actually occurred is right here the s&p government being in power for about 14 15 years now and they don't seem to have paid the cost of governing and but maybe we'll get some more pertinent questions on that later on thank you all very much for that you you spoke about the impact of social media on I suppose on how much people are aware of what their politicians are doing we're just having a little discussion before we joined one another on the stage here about the fact that we know where party leaders are on holiday now and people may take a snap on a phone and the next thing we can all see it so on this question of trust do we are we only talking about trusting politicians to do the right thing for the public or is it absolutely essential that politicians are trustworthy in their personal lives too um I think I'll go to Breshawn first on that one I thought you would um I think that it's a really interesting question to me because I worked in parliament for a for a Baroness for a year and then for a member of parliament in Westminster for two years um and it was so interesting the number of people who had written saying why can't we have MPs or MSPs who are just like us and I found that really interesting because actually in everyday life um you know I'm not not going to ask for a show of hands if you know anyone who's had an affair or done something they shouldn't have done that you would not well why's that individual leaving but you know it was really interesting to me that that was an issue because I would kind of say so you want people like you apart from in all these certain circumstances and of course we don't want politicians who break the law we don't want politicians who will avoid taxes but um you know I think if you'd asked me that question 10 years ago when I was younger and saw things more kind of black and white I'd have said well no if you're going to have an affair or if you're going to do x y z then you know of course you're a bad person in every element of your life and actually the older I get the more you know I realise it's spectrums of grey um does perhaps doing something inappropriate in your personal life so long as it's consensual and not breaking the law prevent you from being able to do what you think is best for your country or putting your constituents interests first or representing a manifesto pledge and delivering that um no I don't think it does but equally culturally um you know we live in a country where people still conflate the two um you know if you were to look at other European continental countries that's far less of an issue um so I don't personally think it means that you are incapable of being able to do your job with integrity um but I think it's just a societal expectation that if you could do that to your loved one you're going to do worse to the public and I don't think that's true but freezer it's a it's a tough one in some ways it's encouraging that you know people's assessments of Boris Johnson weren't really affected by the fact we don't actually know how many children he's got um you know things have moved on a lot in the last few decades um and obviously I think it would make it makes sense to infer if somebody's personal conduct is extremely bad then obviously they're not fit to you know govern or represent people um but generally speaking I think it's it's good to have that kind of separation between the personal realm and the the political one um and yeah voters care less and less about people's personal lives now um so it's yeah better that they evaluate them on what they actually do and your view Brian we we Boris Johnson might have got a waiver there if it wasn't for the general atmosphere party gate was was idiotic and and and reprehensible but he might have got a waiver there it wasn't for the fact that around the country people were dying and were unable to see that their sick relatives at the same time as as the the creatives crates of cider were being lugged into Downing Street if he didn't think that that was a problem then in my view he wasn't fit to be prime minister he is desperate to be liked he's always desperate to be popular when he appears at party conference he likes to be the jack the lad in the comic the comic stand up but but but he he he he he got himself into the position of prime minister and still behaved in that same fashion and he was obviously he's always been brought brought down by a an individual who departed from his side whom I will will not name but but he he I think he landed himself in some some difficulties a consequence I think it is the atmosphere if you look at the behaviour of of individuals who have been in very high office in the UK if you look at Gladstone who used to rescue women of the night on a fairly regular basis the question is how many he kept is is is another matter you look at Lloyd George who won the first world war but also contrived to frankly sell peerages on a fairly industrial scale if you look at probably the greatest of them all Winston Churchill who had was in such financial difficulty that he had to do a deal with an American financiers to rescue the properties that that he owned these these would never have been leaders now and I'm not I'm not in any way defending that behaviour and I'm not I'm not defending the need for I'm defending perhaps the need for for allowing some flaws and allowing some some humanity but also you get people able to change their minds I mean we had that that referred to earlier the possibility of changing your mind again the great example is Churchill who was a conservative and then a liberal MP for the great and noble city of Dundee for 14 years and then he switched back again to the Tories and as he said himself anyone can rat upon a party it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to rewrapd and I've always always liked that because it's the idea that you know who was it it was Keynes wasn't it said when when the facts change I change my mind what do you do sir and I I think that we need to allow some degree of flexibility in that regard but but only some perhaps we've entered a society where the degree of tolerance is less I also agree with the point that that Fraser made that there has to be a degree of controversy and contention do not settle things by sitting around the table and holding hands and having a group sing of kumbai I just it doesn't it doesn't work you know you don't settle for example the question of whether we have the union or whether we have independence that's kind of a big deal and it's going to have to be resolved in a different fashion and resolved by electoral choice so what I would like to see is the electoral choice is presented frankly to the people and honestly to the people and and the people being ready to accept those frank and honest representations because at the moment it strikes me they're not they're looking for fairytales on the question again of social media and I think we've all experienced some negative interaction there and it's a very difficult place to have a new on debate in fact quite frankly it's it's impossible just don't read it presiding office it's the best way to stand just ignore it I have to tell you I'm incredibly good at not reading it well done well done yeah I'll not I'll not get into that at the moment but you know there's a view that social media is based well it grows the more negative it is it seems to negative engagement is a good thing as far as social media is concerned it seems to be the case too often do you think there'd be more trust among politicians if they all switched off twitter I'll ask Fraser that first that's very difficult to say probably not um I think it would make politicians lives easier I think they're they often perceive that they're being monitored by the public more than they actually are um but because everyone in politics is a political obsessive you know if you're an MP you are originally a nerd so you know you you like twitter because you get all the news straight away it's good gossip blah blah blah they should probably stay away and just you know let someone in their team handle things for them it would make their lives easier but I don't think it would really make a dent in trust because in some ways it's less the I mean the individual abuse of like MPs and you know representatives and candidates is obviously a huge problem that comes from a pretty small minority of people the the big issue is you know people who don't really interact online and get kind of filtered in their own wee silos and you know fall prey to the kind of psychological biases that we're all struggling with all the time confirmation bias um getting sucked into your own echo chamber and things like that um they don't post on comment sections but they read the news and they get little notifications all the time um and you know my my cousin was talking about how she's glad that my auntie's retired now so she spends more time in the garden than less on facebook mainline in fake news so um that I think that is what has created a lot of the kind of current environment it's a lot more accessible um if you want to quote quote do your own research you can do it there are no gatekeepers anymore and I think that's kind of created a little bit of a crisis of institutional thrust that maybe wasn't there before Brian what do you think would happen if all elected members came off twitter I think it would be healthy frankly I I have a Twitter account which I have literally never used um I've promised to tweet on the day that dundie united win the european champions league um after thursday that's looking a bit less and less less likely a bit less precipitous but I'll tell you what I'll tell you I'll tell you two two two anecdotes I was sitting in margo's bar downstairs with a very very senior minister in the snp previous administration and this individual said to me why don't you tweet and I said I don't I can show you why I don't tweet I said send out a tweet saying you're having a drink with Brian Taylor and I went 10 nine eight seven we got a six I think and flurry came in what you're doing you know drinking with that traitorous git and he's a traitor to scotland and all this sort of thing if it'd been if it'd been a Tory I'd have got exactly the same on the other side which is is is comforting but there is I said and the the my interlocutor was established by this and said you know I can't be right and I said you know welcome to my world um so I don't the other the other story is it's not a little story a fictional story from the west wing I'm sure you're all fans of the the west wing far fabulous one and it's the one where someone is determined to answer you know just obsessed with replying to the this tweet and and CJ forbids him for doing it and says I forbid you to do this some of these people may not have taken their medication today and that that's a that's a thing to bear in mind you don't you don't know with whom you are interacting if you're interacting online now I'm going to reverse from that and say that social media can be advantageous it can be useful it can give people a voice as as was said there I've generally haven't required a voice and I do a column in the Herald I you know I was on the telly in the wireless so I don't really need that but but but I can understand it's it's advantages but I think it's disadvantages are currently far outweighing the advantages and there's another element if I can add that I'm concerned about I'm concerned not just about social media but I'm concerned about the point I think the point you made a very good point about silos because we are we're beginning to hear the argument that there is there is no longer objective truth there is your truth and my truth and I can put forward alternative truths it was obvious example example being a team team trump saying that they had the the biggest turnout for an inauguration ceremony when he plainly didn't and when it was put to them that they plainly didn't have as many as for example Obama or probably Lincoln they they they said yeah well that's your truth we've got an alternative truth and they genuinely meant that and I hear that a number of times saying we have an alternative to your perspective and it's I say but it's not an alternative opinion you know it's it's it's it's objective fact if we can establish objective fact we can then argue about how you move forward with with these with these facts but there is now because of I think social media and because of the the the silo point that you made so well I think there is now a situation where we have people genuinely believing what what they see as opinion on on on the confined areas and I think it's still relatively few people I hope it's still relatively few but I think we need to try and try and counter that in some way so I'm I'm I'm a skeptic a real skeptic of the advantages of social media while I can see them being an online is is of course completely excellent available to all people have even abused the scotch election study to our account they don't know who's it's just it's just a flag and a name you know they don't even know who's behind it but yeah we've been slagged from all sides which I suppose is yes we're doing something yes I mean Rysian what's your view on elected members being engaged on Twitter on social media I mean I would label myself the political geek you refer to I wake up and before I've kind of even opened my second eye I'm already on Twitter but I think it should Twitter is very much a read rather than a put out place because I actually think you know as you mentioned you invite a lot of abuse it's very easy you talked about the the positive and negative and how we focus on the negatives actually I think when you get abuse on Twitter it's very easy for that to overwhelm you and you actually stop I obviously have never been an elected official but I have fought two elections and it becomes very poisonous I fought the first time in 2015 I had organ surgery through A&E totally unexpected and I was in hospital recovering from a very big surgery and I had not that many thankfully and there were far more messages that were you know wouldn't vote for you but hope you know they needed to tell me they wouldn't vote for me but not going to vote for you but I hope you live and you're like gee thanks that's a low bar but thanks um but but there were you know probably 10 uh either Twitter DMs or emails um that were you know I hope you die you effing Tory you know blah blah blah kind of whatever choice of swear words that they chose to use and actually it was really really hard because you know you have to have a thick skin when you're in politics but there are times when you're vulnerable there are times when you're weak there are times you don't have you know as I did at that time not have the physical and mental strengths to deal with that and actually I was horrified lying in hospital thinking like who are these people that hate me this much that they have taken time out of their day to open up Twitter and think oh I know what I'll do today I'll tell someone I hope they die and I actually found that really surprising and I stopped reading the responses to my tweets I would tweet stuff because I thought it was important to say hey this is where I'll be or this is what I'm doing um but when I fought in 2017 it was a target seat I was selected um moved straight to the constituency and uh I was new to the constituency I'd never lived there so I started sharing Facebook videos and Instagram videos and actually it was incredible what I could have done for 5 000 pounds with with a leaflet dropped to every house I could do you know I spent 50 pounds on pushing promoting a Facebook video and it got 50 000 views and actually that meant 50 000 views with post codes in my constituency got to learn who their candidate was um obviously not thousands enough to win um but at least it meant that it opened up that people who wouldn't have been able to know who their candidate was could know so I do think there's some value add um but I think here is where big tech has to do more I mean I have it's worse for women it's worse for bme people and it's the worst uh for poor Diane Abbott um but if you are a woman um it is a case of when not if you will get death threats uh as not even a politician as a candidate and as a candidate and forgive me if you already know this I didn't um when you're a candidate you're not paid uh in fact the research shows that in 2015 so it's possibly more expensive now but in 2015 uh the cost to a candidate of fighting a target seat as I fought in 2017 was on average 18 to 19 000 pounds that's in accommodation so when I fought Coventry I had to move from London to Coventry accommodation transport lost earnings you have to arrange fundraisers because no one gives you money to spend on the leaflets that you're expected to distribute so you have to fundraise you then have to pay for raffle prizes for your fundraiser which you then have to buy tickets for to show that you are supporting your fundraiser and then you can't keep the prize because you know you have to give that to someone else um so the whole thing is just ludicrously expensive and so we talk about um the challenge for candidates the safety is one the cost is one and then actually big tech should just have to take more responsibility there is if you can take a photo of a woman breastfeeding down within an hour why can you not take down accounts that send death threats and rate threats why is the solution to tell a candidate to wear a panic button why is the solution to tell a candidate who's had their tyres slashed and a swastika dogged on their driveway as happened to a friend of mine that she should find somewhere else to live for the rest of the campaign why is the solution to telling an MP who's taken maternity leave and is receiving death threats on social media to tell her to not read it and i think actually these are really big issues because the worse it gets the fewer people understandably are going to want to do this because if you have a good career and some sanity you're probably thinking i'd rather not give up my life for that level of abuse and when we've seen two MPs be murdered um you actually realise that it's not just a case of saying this is something that's on social media just ignore it because the reality is it might come off social media into your real life and i i know i've taken that to a very dark place but i do think sorry i do think that's important yeah no it's i mean we're here today to discuss trust in politicians but yesterday i was chairing a panel which was about making sure that we continue to attract women into into politics because we don't have enough at the moment we don't have a parliament that looks like the people um so i think your comments are are very very pertinent indeed i'd very much like to to come to you now um pleased to see how many people have joined us this afternoon so if you'd like to raise to to ask a question if you could raise your hand or just to make a comment um if there's a particular panel member you'd like to direct your question to please say so um and we'll keep this discussion going we have a we have a hand up here hello i'm sorry i i just feel this is a very light hearted discussion and i feel we're living in an appalling state of politics in the uk if you look at let go back to brexit the lies that were told to people and and you know and what's has the result been and these people are all in you know people are in power as a result of that their deception you know do you trust politicians no and you know well certain politicians yeah but you know it's i don't think it's a light hearted matter at all i think we've got the energy crisis you would think that was happening on another planet the government the uk government is kind of on holiday isn't it the leadership elections happening and nobody's addressing it and there's you know there will be people losing their lives because of this energy crisis there's no action being taken they're not seriously addressing it they're not looking at you know the government in France they've been making proper you know taking proper steps to protect people i don't think the you know our government in Westminster is interested in protecting its citizens quite frankly and it just makes me furious you know i think the whole thing sorry i'm just ranting but you know i think the answer is no they have to work for the public yeah i don't think they are i mean i suppose we've been setting the scene about the the atmosphere in which debate is taking place in which politicians are working but here's a question this is a getting it i don't think this is a question the um the uk had a vote on an issue that was put to them policies were described in a certain way i'd be very interested to hear what you think brian about the gentleman's comments you're plainly disappointed by the the brexit outcome and so therefore there's going to be a certain degree of of of the stories that were told that were just lies well well perhaps they should have been pointed out rather more vigorously by their opponents had had that been the case i think the treasury will perhaps sleep at the wheel on on that one and i take no views to whether it was wise or otherwise to to to leave the the the european union i i i can understand your anxiety and it was by no means around it wasn't it was a plea for for sanity and for a transformation of politics i agree with you with regard to the the the state of the problem i think as i said at the outset i've never seen anxiety like it as the as there is at the present moment it is quite staggering and once the energy bills kick in it's going to be 100 times worse but i don't think i do not think that either the uk government or the scolish government are sitting back and rubbing their hands and ignoring it or going on holiday i really don't think that i think the um the the contrary is the case they're trying their level best to to find some ways of addressing it but the problems are absolutely gigantic the problem of the economy is huge the problem of the energy bills is huge and the the problems perhaps the attendant problems caused by brexit are currently insoluble because frankly brexit has gone ahead and we have to find a way of accommodating that i i i do think our politicians are trying i think the the the governments are trying plural are trying i think the civil servants who work for them are trying and struggling but they are currently finding it impossible to turn back the tide of crisis that we are facing and i don't think it's going to get any better in the near situation where you have the bank of england forecasting our recession lasting 14 15 months or longer freezer yeah i mean i have a lot of anxiety about the fact that we're going into a kind of once in a generation crisis and having just emerged from a once in a century pandemic which is obviously contributed to that a lot and i think there's a huge amount of uncertainty about what that'll mean um you know for politics as a whole but also just for society is a giant an enormous social crisis we're facing and i think the the thing i found very disappointing about the Tory leadership election is obviously leadership elections because of the nature of them the party has to the mechanics have to appeal to the selector it so in this case the Tory members so they need to say things that the Tory members will like and that's why they're doing all this you know fat child lapping and um you know trying as as hard as possible to you know take on that mantle and um making pledges that to be honest they're not really fit for the kind of scale of the crisis and i think i i'll share a lot of the anxiety there um in some ways it's it's probably just bad timing but i don't think at the moment governments in um you know like long in the tooth industrialized democracies really have the the luxury of ideological purity um we heard a test of that during the pandemic and obviously to some extent there was you know unprecedented public spending from a conservative government on the other hand um you know i think ryshysunach only became popular because of decisions he was forced at gunpoint to make and he resisted the impulse to do anything that would deviate from the kind of coer Tory ideology um at least in the first year or two um so i'm not entirely sure what i'm trying to say here i am also very worried and don't know what's gonna happen uh and we'll just well yeah it's the culmination of a lot of different um kind of factors and it's not it's not even like the 70s where um there's a there's a book by an american sociologist robert putnam called bowling alone and somebody might have heard of that and it kind of traces the downfall of associational life in the united states and a similar kind of things happened here right we used to have mass membership trade unions and parties um you know a high share of the population went to church we've become a lot more atomized um thanks in some ways to technological progress and secularisation um and you know individual you know material gain um but at the same time we're not necessarily equipped as much to deal with a kind of huge economic shock because we're yeah a lot a lot more kind of individualized in some ways um and there's also you know things like the housing crisis have been decades in the making um and that's partly because of you know successive governments following a this is this is what I really struggle with is that the democratic kind of incentive for you know governments who wanted to represent the the wishes of the general public was to push up house prices but over decades a policy of pushing up house prices is a completely insane housing policy that you know it ends up resulting in what we've got now which is like people not being able to afford anywhere to live um young people can't get a house etc etc and you know paying through the nose for rent and these are the kind of issues that you can't just solve in one or two elections either um and they need it's so cliched to say it needs a bold radical new vision right we kind of know all the various options on the table we know what the tools are but the question is whether we're half political elites that are actually up to the challenge and that's something that I'm quite concerned about yeah I think um you know Brian mentioned earlier the need for political parties to ensure that the electorate have all the information they need before them and there's real frustration there from our contribution from from the audience about yeah how well informed people are when you know these big decisions are being debated and discussed and we obviously you know I've previously been a member of the political party and and debate is is based on that discourse and it has to be an open and frank one um you know so your frustration there there's a lot going on at the moment we have the energy crisis the cost of living crisis there is a an internal party election for for the country's next prime minister um and and we have recessed to I'd be interested to hear your response Fresham so I think that was a great question and two really valuable follow-ups because I think it's it's triggered a few different things for me um I was born in 89 I'm a millennial uh kind of the first political thing that I really followed um other than Tony Blair being elected when I was eight but only because my dad was very unhappy uh about that so I just remember him uh on election day but really it was Iraq uh then it was the financial crisis and the and the crash after that graduating into that in 2010 uh a real struggle then of course oh we had some expensive scandal then we had uh the repercussions then we've had COVID then we've had uh kind of everything that's happening right now and I think if you look at my generation and younger um you know we keep hearing this once in a generation once in a generation and we're like we are one generation and we are having multiple crises it's like crisis after crisis um there does not feel like there's any stability and actually I've been reading studies about the state of anxiety a lot of um people kind of my generation and younger feel and I know you know you say this and sometimes people say oh you know you didn't live through the war and of course we didn't and that's you know a valid point to some extent but equally the reality is um from a political stability point of view it feels like we just career from one thing to the next and you're barely out of COVID and suddenly it's like okay how will we pay heating bills and we're on to our I don't even know how many number of prime ministers you know since 89 and it's just it feels very unsettled and very unstable and I think the reality is um that actually we have some very big problems and I don't think often that those are communicated to the electorate the way they should um by politicians by the media by anybody because actually the housing crisis um the social care issues climate change the NHS all of these are huge complex um decades long in the making and will require decades in the fixing issues they are not something that can be fixed in one electoral cycle but as Brian mentioned earlier MPs need to be reelected in order to maintain their careers you know you can't be an MP if you lose the election and therefore you can't make change so you are incentivised to think and talk about what you can do or achieve in three to five year cycles which means actually you're not incentivised to do things that don't show results before the next election or in the near future after the next election and actually I think you know we talk you mentioned needing creative solutions um some of them are things a government could do with a majority big enough you know why not allow young people to use their rental payments on time to work towards their credit score why shouldn't that be evidence that you could pay a mortgage if you've always paid your rent some of those will require decades long solutions and cross-party working and whether that's an independent body or an internal parliamentary system that enables that solution to be created actually we're going to have to do some of that working together um we talk about um people voting and engaging um younger people are far more likely to think about singular issues rather than they are about allegiance to a political party um so how can we talk to people who are not interested not engaging not voting in a way that actually connects and encourages that engagement and as part of that you know I know schools do some teaching on politics but I mean I left school uh I did a level economics so I did learn about you know fiscal taxes and fiscal policy but but actually so many people graduated 18 suddenly told here you can have a vote but we don't actually teach the difference between the deficit and the debt we don't teach you know how taxes work or interest rates or inflation and it's like we expect that you get your 18th birthday and suddenly these big things that will impact every element of the way you live and work for the rest of your life we just expect people to miraculously learn that and then the final point I'll make is actually we need really strong opposition and actually it is unhealthy in my view to have a democracy where your opposition is weak and I think it's personally less relevant how long you've been in government if you have a strong opposition to hold you to account although of course I think turnover is healthy um but actually you need a strong opposition to point out where you are saying things that are not factually correct or where you've misinterpreted them we need you know fact checking bodies to to receive more attention so for everyone in this room um if you aren't already doing it check fact checking websites and the next time you share something share that because actually we can educate each other uh and lift each other up from kind of being fed things that are incorrect so yeah fact checking I think that's something I feel as if I'm beginning to hear more about more and more about this in in my own role but the thing is of course someone puts out a piece of information and it's it's you know it's trying to globin in seconds so there's a big big challenge there and I think it is something we have to address from the earliest stage of education you know from the earliest appropriate stage now who'd like to ask this is this is fabulous I'm going to um well we will try and get to all of you but I'm going to put the onus on our assistant thank you thank you um that there's so many things however keeping this fairly brief Resham you you are reminding me of something really important which is that these are huge huge things that will take a long long time and I feel so emotional because I've always really trusted politicians on the whole um my daughter works in Westminster we're but I think I question the whole a question the whole basis of this because we need this common purpose this common good to work for decade after decade towards things not three to five years etc so to me it just I don't know I don't know where politicians are in in the scale of things in these huge huge scales I don't know why so much power is lying with them that's my main point there thank you okay can I take a movie I'll try and take I'll take another question as well and then I'll take two or three um can we go to the the back row there yes I just wondered um one of the most infuriating things to me is when you meet someone who says oh I never vote they're all the same and nothing changes and obviously that's caused by an alienation and some of the behaviours of politicians but it's also ridiculously irresponsible because we need to take responsibility for our democracy you know and the oh they're all the same argument is completely wrong and I just wondered do you think it would change our politics if we had compulsory voting like like they do in Australia I think you have you've got a small fine if you don't take part in the election and at least that might with all the pros and cons force people to take ownership of their own democracy and and I'd be interested to know what you thought of that and how you think our politics would change if everyone had to vote thank you I'm good to take one final question I think it's the third or fourth row here the fourth row hand here yes thank you thank you hi there thanks very much um two slightly related questions Fraser could you expand more on why the SMP have broken the the one rule that they're supposed to be in maintaining power for so long and also I think something that's not really been spoken to in this context given we are in Scotland as well is the impact of the constitutional question in then what parties and politicians feel in terms of their security because we've been in a bit of a deadlock for quite a while now um with the uh with lots of things happening but then the constitutional question maybe this is disagreeable over determining the politics and maybe as a barrier but also there's reasons for that so if you could speak to that as well it'll be great okay thank you so three very interesting questions there um I think the first one I just got the impression you really want to trust your politicians I suppose there's something there about knowing your politicians and it's fair to say that in other countries standing for election is is more normal um you know for example they may have far smaller areas of governance at local authority level um you know there's there's very good work being done on this you'll be well aware of it you know one in every few hundred people will have stood for election I mean I know when I decided I was going to get into politics no one I knew you know was involved it was pretty unusual it seemed like you know a fairly extreme thing to do so I think we have to normalise that and make sure if our candidates are people that that we know and maybe grown up with then they've got a sort of you know just broad base in the in the constituency or region they represent I think that helps it's that accountability and just just feeling you have someone who is like you representing you at a point that Resham has made I think that the question about one of the great things I'm privileged to do in my role is to meet speakers from across the globe and recently met the speaker from the parliament in western Australia so we have had a little discussion about that you know how they ensure that great greater level of engagement with that particular aspect of democracy so well worth a discussion on and obviously yes the constitutional question I'm going to stop talking there and pass over to to we'll go to we'll go to Fraser and then Resham and then Brian on these hi so in response to why do we give politicians so much power I mean I think Alison made a good point in that local authorities in Scotland and also the UK as a whole are way too big and they should be you know broken up in a much smaller units and that tends to be healthy for you know aggregate level political trust and empirical studies and but the reason that representative of democracy it's they will have it you know it's it's kind of like the old you know least worst option thing and in Switzerland for example they have lots of referendums and they have you know quite a strong emphasis on direct democracy in the cantons and the federal level but the participation in those is extremely low people just don't have the capacity to make that many kind of minor decisions and if you are somebody in Switzerland that has a pet issue and you'd like to get a certain outcome it's actually quite easy to do it even though most people disagree because they're just so fatigued with having to constantly make these calls that they know nothing about that you can kind of force something through if you have a few hundred folk in your area that want to do it and and to some extent we see that reflected here with you know that the housing crisis a particular bug bearer mine and we see that with kind of nimbyism here and you know the planning system puts far too much power in the hands of a small number of people who are very very invested in preventing developments from happening and it means because there's a lack of centralised control at aggregate level you end up you know falling far behind on the number of homes you should be building and so to some extent we can't really avoid having representatives as the kind of vehicles for you know public sentiment and whether you know electing people in a certain way as we do in the UK or Scotland at four or five year intervals is the the absolute kind of apex of that I'm not entirely sure and and I suppose that kind of brings me on to the next question about Australia they have much shorter terms of three years so in some ways it means if a government's performing badly and people want to get rid of them it's much easier to do that because elections happen more frequently but that also has that you know you've got trade off there of the kind of short termism and becomes even more acute and I think that would probably explain why there've been such climate laggards because the government's never been incentivised to do anything about it until obviously the whole country went up in flames right after the last election and in terms of compulsory voting actually I'm assuming there's a political science literature on this I would if you're feeling very anoraki you could punch it into google scholar and look at some abstracts of papers you know compulsory voting political trust I'm assuming it probably has some impact on it at the margins but again there's a kind of trade off in the sense of do you want people who are very disengaged from politics and don't care about it vote being forced to vote it might be better that people self-select out to some extent and that you don't slap them with fines for it and so you know it's you I think you always have to kind of think of the counterfactual and and weigh up the kind of positives and negatives and then on the constitutional stuff why the SNP haven't paid the cost of governing is essentially because they were initially elected in 07 it was kind of by surprise that people were expecting Labour to remain the largest party and and they got in because people kind of swingy voters decided that they represented you know a kind of more competent managerial governments for Scotland and that was driven by the perception that that originates way further back that the SNP would stand up for Scotland better there's a concept in political science called valence which means managerial ability and so if if you vote on that basis and that that's becoming increasingly common in the last sort of half century in British politics and you know you're not so much deciding on ideology it's about whether you think they'll do the best job but the SNP had an inbuilt advantage because people perceive them as capable of sticking it to the the Westminster government which at that point was obviously Labour that were coming more unpopular then you had the Tory's coming and that allowed the SNP to kind of draw a stronger contrast then because they got the majority in 2011 on the basis that people perceive that they've done a good job in those four years they activated the constitutional issue which completely reshaped Scottish politics so one in three SNP voters in 2011 was at least nominally against independence that dropped to I think about one in ten in 2016 at the next time asking and it's falling even further since then so what we've seen over the last kind of decade since the constitutional issue was activated is a sort of extreme issue polarization on that one particular topic and in the SES the Scottish election study survey data last year I think it was 87 percent of people voted basically in line with their constitutional preference so if you're a yes person you almost certainly will vote yes for the SNP at the constituency and then SNP are green on the list and if you're a no person it depends who you're kind of more instinctively aligned with but there's an increasing degree of strategic voting among no people to try and keep the SNP out and that was effective in the sense that it prevented them from getting an overall majority last year and and that's essentially why they've been able to evade that at least until now I think they are encountering some issues and I can see in the next kind of five ten years they might start to bear some of those costs because it's just that any of the constitutional thing just continues rumbling on and people even very enthusiastic people on either side will get very bored of it and they've now got more power than they had before which means you know they carry the can for more decisions and things like the ferries that's the sort of thing that chips away at people but even then you know things that were criticized for before last year's election like education policy for instance if you look at the breakdown in the Scottish election study data along you know people people's yes and no support folk who support yes generally still rate the SNP pretty highly on education folk who support no rate them really negatively so we've got this kind of polarization going on from that originates in the constitutional issue but gets filtered down into the party system but they might begin to struggle in the next few years especially if Labour can kind of find a kind of balanced finessed position on the constitution that appeals to more habitual SNP voters so yeah sorry I've gone on for ages and ages that is fine interesting three questions I will have yeah probably ask for a bit more brevity now because I know we've still got folk wanting to to contribute Resham and then Brian on these three points yeah trust mandatory voting constitution I have very little to add on the third one that you haven't already said all I would add is that I think we saw with the Brexit vote that when you have a government that is able to blame another government or another kind of parliamentary body for its issues you are able to push away some of the blame so the UK government has for decades blamed the European Union for issues it didn't want to take responsibility for itself and I think to some extent the SNP has been able to blame Westminster for issues that it does not want to take responsibility for but other than that absolutely nothing to add you're right to add that because they have the the imbilt advantage of being able to say if something goes wrong they say that's why we need independence right yeah exactly and I think the parallels are really interesting to see to see on that in terms of compulsory voting I've read no evidence on it instinctively I feel very uncomfortable making that compulsory actually I would much rather that we go the carrot way instead of the stick and actually incentivise people to engage in politics make it interesting I where I lived until last year in London I got on very well with my MP and I said to him look you're a lovely guy but you are much older than the people going to the schools that you go in to talk to you know your father was an MP you come from a very privileged background they're going to look at you and think I see no parallels why don't you take me with you and so he took me to schools with him to talk and it was really interesting you know I'd never won an election I didn't have MP after my name but it was really interesting how young people reacted to having someone who stood for parliament even though it was unsuccessfully tell them about what it was like and what you could do and so I think a having a more representative parliament would make people think actually this is something I want to engage with something I want to vote for I see someone who looks like me in parliament I see someone who comes from my background that would make them engage more but actual active participation and encouraging that engagement so getting MPs to go and speak at schools more some of them do a great job and do it all the time others don't but I think that I would much prefer to compulsory voting and then on you you know I have to say I hope your daughter likes that I loved my time working in Westminster when I started working in parliament it was not with the ambition of wanting to be in frontline politics I actually was very passionate about development policy and I say that because I just want to explain the context that when I went to parliament I had a very poor view of politicians I thought oh gosh they're all in it for themselves I'm only here to work on development policy and I worked in parliament three years and I've spent many years since trying to get other people to work in parliament and actually I have to say that 98% of the MPs I interacted with over the past decade have absolutely been in politics for the right reasons you know that they genuinely believe in public service they believe in wanting to change the country they don't all agree with how to do it and I think that's the beautiful thing about democracy but actually they got into politics wanting to serve their community serve their country and actually if you talk to MPs about why they got into politics you'll hear stories from I had cancer my child you know had an accident my parent needed care and I decided I need to change the system most of them will have reasons that drove them into wanting to make a change and the reality is change is very difficult it's not for a lack of wanting to create positive change in many cases often the system is slow and it doesn't allow it because you run out of debating times with the online safety bill that would make platforms have to challenge some of these issues we've talked about that's just been delayed to laughter recess and and that's not because people didn't want to make positive change it's just because of the system so I'd say have faith have hope tell your daughter to stand for parliament too but but actually I do think lots are in that and I do have to give a plug right now for the john smith centre of which I'm very proud to be on the board of because actually you know one of the things we talked about do politicians represent us and do the right thing you know the john smith centre and plenty of other organisations do internships for people from backgrounds that are not heavily represented in politics because actually what that does is even if they decide not to stand themselves it increases engagement it shows them that there is a place for them at the political table but it does also mean that they are more likely to stand and understand how to do it so the more we can do that and open up politics to people rather than making it feel like it's the reserve of the rich privilege and highly educated the better it will be for the country carrot or stick brine when it comes to mandatory voting you know will you solvans book missing million people who never vote in Scottish elections I think I think probably I think probably carrot I mean the latest social Scottish social attitudes survey said that 94 percent of people thought it was important to vote the turnout they last election to this parliament was 63.5 so there's a bit of a bit of a gap there but I can understand that when I was working for the BBC I was always very careful never to say to people please go and vote tomorrow or today or whatever because I felt that would be wrong I think the wrong thing to do it's a personal choice but what I tried to do was to say in a gentle way there are consequences in not voting if you boycott a supermarket because you don't like their products then they will if enough of you do that they will notice the difference and they will change their ways if you boycott an election the the the elected will simply govern without your consent and they will carry on governing and all that has happened is that you have not amended the the overall pattern of voting at all so I'm I'm still in favour of it being a voluntary matter but I would I would agree strongly we should try and gather as much information as we can but I think that's often down to the elected as well rather than to the electorate where rather than down to those of us who are trying to disseminate information I think people need to find out more for themselves and ask the tough questions to our friend here I would simply say have faith and I would exhort you to bear in mind that it's perhaps not as bad as it seems the current crisis is dreadful but the political structure is perhaps not as bad as it seems I'm going to address perhaps most of my remarks if I can to the the point about about the the constitution and the constitutional divide phrase is entirely right there is a core fault line in Scottish politics which has generated this this this complete division and people voting on on constitutional lines it's entirely reasonable it's a gigantic question as to whether Scotland is to be an independent country to use the phrase from 2014 or whether it's to remain part of the union or whether this to be a form of the union it is a gigantic issue and you know you're not solve it in in a in a small way and therefore I think that is understandable that that dominates Scottish politics but it doesn't just do so for the SNP it is done so for the the opposition parties what what happened was that the people people moved from thinking in in a UK way to thinking about Scotland when they were taking the decisions about politics it used to be what will this do for the UK or GB or the Britain or the government or Westmore whatever they started thinking what's it going to do for Scotland and increasingly you saw parties um literally putting a kilt upon their approach in in in Scotland this there was this sense of Scottish identity that came to the fore and it came to the fore and it became more um preeminent and that same that that central sense of Scottish identity created the SNP in the first place 1934 in a malgwm of two previous parties one Tory and one one of the left it it created the SNP it obliged the the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats to act with the creation of this this parliament this devolved parliament John Smith to whom we referred called it unfinished business I think that business is still still unfinished as far as the SNP and the Greens are concerned so it did those two things but it all but obliterated the Conservative Party it obliterated the Scottish Conservative Party all but they lost every single seat in 1997 two years before this parliament was created and they were they were they were the party of the patriots they were waving the flag boy were they waving the flag it was just for the Scottish electorate they were increasingly waving the wrong flag they were waving the union flag rather than the salta people were clutching the salta and beginning to think about what it does for Scotland I do not mean that in a nationalist way they were thinking what the policies mean for Scotland and and the the Labour Party would say this is what it means for Scotland but they're looking over the shoulder at what Tony or Neil or whatever thinks the Conservatives were saying no we don't want this we we don't want that approach we want a UK approach with the party of the union it's only the SNP that was able to say we are thinking ineluctably and without any any bad adventure about what this means for Scotland we stand for Scottish interests but cleverly instead of people say they pick fights with Westminster and they do it it's a right that they say you're quite right in saying that if they find something to blame and say this is Westminster's fault sometimes it is Westminster's fault to be absolutely frank but sometimes they use it as an excuse but if people you know you say that they pick constant fights with Westminster really really have they annexed Benwick for example have they marched upon Darby I mean that's the sort of thing that Scots used to do they haven't done any of that sort of thing actually what they've done what actually what they've done is from from 2007 on as a deliberate act of policy sought to govern consensually within within the powers given to them while simultaneously saying if we can do this with devolution just imagine what we can do with independence but I mean think think more more more seriously about that have they refused to set a tax rate in Scotland have they withdrawn from from Westminster have they taken any of these steps at all that for example parliamentary parties in Ireland in their own up to 1922 did none of those none of those whatsoever they have governed within the system they have worked within the system while trying simultaneously to change the system and that is why and the Conservatives have come back into prominence they've become the the the leading opposition party not by standing on policies of taxation educational whatever but by standing as the party of the union and say say trying to aggregate to themselves to corral to themselves all the pro union votes it worked up to a point it got them to about mid 30s and then folks that said but this that's the Dory's that's that's the Dory's you know I'll tell you a story this is a true story they thought about offering a tax cut you know the Scottish Parliament's power you can put tax up or put tax down they thought about offering a tax cut you know why they didn't do they tested it and they tested it around the doorsteps they tested it in focus groups you know what folk had they heard the word cut they had the word cut and they thought story cuts they're going to bring in they did they're going to bring in story cut and they dropped it and went back to saying we'll we'll go as it is but vote for the union vote for the union so that their problem now is they can get it up to about 34 35 to get beyond that they have to start winning votes on taxation education and the economy and they're not presently able to do that and that is where Scottish politics is is at the moment but I agree with Fraser it is eminently possible that there could be an erosion in the in the SNP vote if more and more issues come come together and and concatenate into a problem for the SNP I'm not forecasting that more great questions and answers what I'm going to do now in interest of time if you want to direct your question to a particular panel's please do if not I'm probably going to go one question one panelist in the interests of time just this here on the edge and then two at the front here it's not not particularly party political comment how many times have I heard that just going back very recently to the only own Patterson issues in Parliament now most of you will remember own Patterson was given took some money which was seen to be lobbying and then didn't declare it I think in the register of Parliament interests I used to be a serving civil servant if I taken money that way I would have been sacked what happened there Boris Johnson tried to change the rules to save Owen Patterson now I try to trust politicians but I've got to say that over the past three or four years it's been eroded and that one incident said a lot to me about what people in power were prepared to do to save their bodies prevent a by election and I did begin to think that we're missing a bit of a trick here because a civil service code is a much stronger code than what our politicians are required to serve under so why don't we look at a civil service code and bring in more elements of that to prevent the sorts of you might say abuses that have taken place over the past three or four years so really it's not partly political it's really for any of you but I suspect that the politicians have probably got a more direct knowledge and interest of the regulation for politicians than the lay people if I can call you that I think I'll put that one to to Richard in the first instance yeah I totally agree I think politicians should not be able to self police um and I think I mean the example you've given is one very clear one there have been many over the years uh from all parties financial related sex related abuse related and actually I think the code should be much higher it should not self police um it's very easy to get tribal and to forget that actually it is not just about defending your majority which it should never be about but actually that it's about serving the country and setting an example so yes we should bring in a stronger code but as an example if you're being um emotionally physically sexually um kind of harassed assaulted whatever by the MP you work for you have to report that to their whip who is their colleague and most often their friend and the power imbalances are incredibly challenging they've done some work to try and fix that but actually it's an all-round problem that's about their outward behaviour their legal behaviour and their conduct as employers and I do think that needs to be strengthened because not only does it make it difficult for the public to trust politicians but it also makes parliament sometimes a less safe working pace for often young people who are severely disadvantaged by that power balance thank you so yes two questions at the front um this one here and then the front row two thank you yeah in thinking about uh public trust and public perceptions of politicians i want to ask about a specific angle um political communication and decision making can be highly reliant on special advisers the Scottish government has 18 special advisers or SPADS the UK government has 126 four of which are uh Alastair Jax and we've seen special advisers go from behind the scenes king makers or queen makers to Cary Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Bernard Ingram, Peter Cardwell and the list goes on and the public engaging with shows like Borg and the thick of it and so on so my question to the panel and the presiding officer can choose who's best suited is what is the role and influence of special advisers on politicians that might potentially be affecting our trust because they do have a lot of sway in some ways okay i think i'll put this one to Fraser um could actually pass that to Brian he's spent an awful lot longer around to them you know okay okay i was waiting up in my head between you know your own specialist subject and and Brian's and yeah Brian's knowledge to but more than happy thanks so much jolly great no they have they have risen they've risen for for a uh a simple reason that they ministers get a degree of support and i'm sure our friend here gave marla support as a as a civil servant to ministers and others they've they get a degree of support but civil servants can only go so far and quite rightly quite rightly they're constrained from saying and also minister this would stuff it to the opposition they can't they can't say that might be tempted to say it sometimes but they they can't say that so sometimes ministers need someone next than to say this is good this or to say the opposite this is going to be an absolute stinker electorate this is really going to stink an example was um the policy that was kicking around this parliament for a while was that of a local income tax everybody was in favour of a local income tax except they really weren't the liberals had it on their policy books since Lloyd George they um the the SNP came to power and i said we're going to have a local income tax and they actually looked at it and they looked at it seriously but with civil servants looking at it and spads looking at it and discovered who would lose out from a local income tax and they discovered it was a complete stinker and they dropped it very very swiftly that's the role of special advisers special advisers can get too easily above themselves they can get very very much too easily above themselves of the one you mentioned i don't think about anything and was a special adviser i think he was a civil servant but but but i think he was downing street um director of communications but i'm i'm prepared to be to be sway swayed on that he was certainly very very partisan when it came to defending the blessed margaret but that's that's a different a different matter but they can get they can get above themselves they've got to watch where they get above themselves i dislike it when they become figures of of public demonstration as well you're right about about the the the situation where where they become two two four foreground i think it's it's okay i think it's it's a different form of advice that can be very very useful to to ministers to first ministers to prime ministers but it can go too far and we have to watch it i have to certainly have to be very careful of it i'm going to take yourself in the front and then over here and then back there but please continue to show hands and we'll try and fit as many as we can in the last 10 minutes or so it's a similar question i think i think the majority of politicians set off to do well they set off to do the right thing they think they're going into the business to make a better world a better place for all of us but there there obviously things happen once once they're down there how much does the ownership the funding of political parties influence the policies in a way that is almost beyond the power of individual politicians i'm thinking of things like the environmental thing the the fuel crisis just now there's a lot of big wealthy donors i think influencing maybe the politicians who set out to do the right thing okay Fraser i think the the way that funding works here it it makes that at least less pronounced than it would somewhere like the united states where donations are effectively unlimited you can give as much as you want an individual candidate and they often will respond very directly to you know whoever is kind of lying in their pocket i genuinely don't know how how pernicious that is i would favour i think moving to a model of public funding for political parties to kind of remove any of that suspicion right because even if there isn't anything massively untoward going on it can give the impression that there is and it also i think depends on the party because they have very different funding models in the uk yeah i think i'm not sure if anyone else has got other thoughts on that that's pretty much off so i think if politics is presently unpopular with the people the idea of that we we sponsor political parties is going to go down really badly indeed it's it's it's inferior a splendid notion i think it's unworkable in practice the public would never stand for it it's the same as you know pay in representatives more right so i know try try to pay rise for for MSPs it's not possible with regard to politicians i mean that we we elect them by by a random means we don't necessarily pay precise attention to what we're doing and some of them are serious powerful individuals who could hold down serious jobs in in the professions or business and some of them you wouldn't assign for a message and but but but that is but that but that is the joyous nature of of democracy it's the it's the glory of democracy and and sometimes the depression as presiding officer i of course have to remain fully fully impartial at all times now i will try and we have a question up here and then i'll come to yourself and then then to you and then we'll have another final show of hands and i'll maybe i'm going to take these three together and then see how we get on okay my view is spads is that they've become too many and too expensive probably though valuable in principle um and do they affect or influence public appointments is another thought however my question on trust going back to brand's first remark about um glanston and pierages is it really remotely realistic or just um burning in my antitrust in him fury that that Boris Johnson is allegedly going to have a resignation lift of how many people who then no doubt along with some senior civil servants will then have because the scrutiny power subsequently is so poor capacity to earn after pension after payout if they lose office you know extraordinary salaries on the lecture circuit now that cannot surely build trust it can only destroy it okay thank you um two questions here in this role and please anyone else who'd like to put put a question please put your hand up uh my question is probably like the compulsory voting one a hypothetical one that probably won't be realistic um but what does any of the panel think um the impact would be your free voting of any um because i agree with you Fraser that represent the director i'm actually sorry it doesn't it doesn't really work and I agree with Brian that in theory you know representative parliamentary democracy should work but to me whips and three line whips in sort of that kind of being a team player and going against your views seems to be a real fundamental flaw of our parliamentary democracies um i mean if MPs could actually vote for what they believe in which hopefully then Brian is what they're representing you know their their constituents they can it's just that they have some certain sanctions upon them you know okay and and this yeah the original question was can we trust politicians but i'm just wondering can we trust the press to represent the politicians okay thank you there's a lot of interesting questions there i think that one about you know free voting is sort of tied into to funding too you know there's there's something in that if we think about why we now have a political party system it was in the past we had individuals who were wealthy enough to be able to go into parliament um so we've had a bit of a sea change there but there is i think that's a very big question and who am i going to prove that to i'd like to do the peerages one okay that's all right carry on um because actually i do have to say um you know i haven't done much of my feminist chat and i heard that and thought actually firstly i do think there should be far greater scrutiny on on the peerage process and making peerages um i uh also think though that we need to look at the fact that there are 92 hereditary peers uh and of that only men can inherit those peerage titles which means right now we are reserving 92 seats in the house of lords at all times for men and when we are talking about a more representative parliament it is appalling and outrageous to me that we are still saying men deserve to be overrepresented in the house of lords where they have the ability to create vote on uh edit and the bishops as well who are normally men yes but well those two thank you Brian yes exactly more men uh and so we think you know it's not just the calypher and the quality of new peers that are going in which i agree you know i think there should be far more kind of attention paid to that but the fact that we have a very big house uh with no incentive for people to retire no incentive for people to uh go in and actually do their work you can get paid for just turning up and not actually doing a huge amount um and whilst i am in favour of the house of lords uh i think many to be a huge amount of work done to change it uh and first off starting with um a campaign called daughters rights where we should make it so that men and women are equally represented thank you i'm going to put the question on the free voting to Fraser and then the press to Brian uh yeah so the idea of having no party discipline is a terrible one uh cause it that is the kind of foundation of uh parliamently democracy um if there was no weapon it would be chaos and um nothing would ever get achieved uh maybe that's like a bit a bit forceful of a review but um no i mean in theory it's again it's like ideally we would all have you know it would be a meeting of minds and everyone would debate all the issues and come at very consider positions and vote their conscience but um parliament is amongst them very strongly depends on party discipline this ties i don't have read too much on Brian here but it ties slightly in the next question which is about the press which is that since the rise of kind of tv interviews of politicians that there's a style of political interviewing in this country specifically that i find quite corrosive because it's designed to catch people it's almost you're trying to trip people up about them having party loyalty and voting as they're kind of told to for the sake of party unity and they can't they can't on the tv say well oh actually Jeremy Paxman i'm going to vote against this thing that you know i've always said i was in favour of because ultimately i'd like to see a Labour government elected and i'm not going to rebel on this one little issue so um but i think you know political pundits have got quite a lot of mileage out of that um kind of aggressively pursued people for perceived you know um chains of opinion stuff when everybody who knows what's going on knows that they're just following the the party line um but yeah i'll talk sort of with Brian on that question Brian can we trust the press i'll have a go at that i mean much political discourse that we endure at the present moment is bogus it's it's you get bogus indignation voiced about your opponents you get bogus indignation voiced about whatever they say um the government or the government in westminster or the scolish government here puts forward a proposal it is routinely condemned and damned by by the opposition as as as the worst idea since the since the slaughter of the innocence and they they those who are advocating that from the opposition benches don't believe it for a second and those on the government benches if their ministers are generally in my experience in a lather of indecision all of the time an honorable lather of decision all of the time because they're taking extremely tough decisions why do they persist in this bogus nonsense because they have been told that that's what gets them on the telly and gets them in the press and we need a truce we need we need we need honest reporting in in in in return for honest discourse and so my minister standing up and saying i don't know i haven't got a clue what do you what do you reckon and that would be the honest position generally but they have to stand up and sound certain and they have to sound precise and sound vigorous now when i when i've made these sort of remarks before i generally finished with follow it with with one remark which is trust me i'm a journalist yeah that always gets the response so i'm going to show you i'm going to show you that you can trust me i've got the t-shirt look at that trust me i'm a trust me i'm a reporter i got that at the washington museum which was a wonderful place uh a wonderful place but the which which it was about some of the glories that have been in in press coverage there really have been some good things done by press people i think of you know the exposure of thalidomide i think of of the bringing down various policies and challenging various policies does it go too far yes it does but what concerns me mostly it's when it becomes when it becomes bogus when when you you are covering a discourse that you know is is is fake and and yet you persist in doing it because it gets on page one or it gets on on the telly and if we could break that cycle i know i'm not sure who first started it whether it was you know obfuscating politicians or whether it was over eager journalists but we need to break that that cycle and find a way out one very quick thing is we do have the option to vote as well on you know with our money or with our clicks online if you see a newspaper that has nicholas dirgin and teresa may and it's an up kind of leg shot of their legs and it says legs it don't read it don't buy it don't click on it if you see an article about women in downing street and what they're wearing when they get promoted to the cabinet don't click on it because if we start reading this stuff uh this junk that rewards people for taking sexist or populist views that are harmful to society harmful to women or people from bme backgrounds or different social backgrounds coming into parliament if we start reading it they'll start writing it now i know we're out of time but i am aware of two um people at the back would you like to ask a question so you know i'm going to take these two questions we're going to answer them briefly and then we'll definitely be be finished so we'll take one after the other thank you hi um first of all i'm just going to say i can um appreciate reshams words on the centre because i actually did do the internship um well this year and last year and i can say for well first hand it is really good so um thanks then for that um but my question's on proportional representation um and it seems to me there's a couple benefits in terms of trust that come with that so well if you have pr then you'd have you know not the duopoly of um tories and labour right so hold on has a good up one um so yeah i'm thinking you'd have more um more turnover of different parties which means you couldn't say as much oh they're all the same because in a sense they are because it's only two parties really that you're choosing from and then also if you had more coalitions say like in europe then you'd show the public you'd kind of demonstrate the public the value and the reality of compromise and also a politician's changing their minds like for example the the green energy minister in germany has decided to you know restart coal power plants because of the the energy crisis there right now and that's that's a massive compromise there um and you're not really going to get this sort of thing without your just wondering your thoughts on that yep thank you and just the their own front um i was wondering what the panel's thoughts on what structural reforms or policies could be used to shore up trust in politicians to try and make this question less relevant okay thank you um okay we will we'll answer these two huge questions within the next few minutes i think i'll go to Fraser though would proportional representation what role might it have in increasing trust in politicians it's a really tough question because as you know if you look across the world in you know comparative studies companies that have pr do tend to have better overall outcomes in terms of satisfaction with democracy political trust even um you know like gdp stuff um they tend to just be better places however because we've had such a strong um you know the westminster style of politics is very very deeply embedded here the the scottish parliament was kind of designed with that in mind as a a negative template that was i think that was the phrase that the constitutional convention used um but i think it's you know they've found very very difficult to to kind of escape that that mould and people have a hard time even now accepting kind of coalition governments in the uk context so i'm not sure if it would work transplanted here i mean i personally i would i would be in favour of it um because i think first of all the post incentives is a lot of bad things but i don't know if it would improve political trust it might even dent it because people don't they don't want compromise they want their side to win um because that's what they've been kind of you know trained to expect yeah i mean of course we have a local government level um so well as you'll appreciate we have many different electoral systems and which can cause confusion and uncertainty but on the question of structural reform that might engender greater trust in politicians if you were to do one thing i'm going to ask ratio myne bryne what would that be i think making the mpc independent was a brilliant move in 97 um i don't really remember what it was like before but from what i've read um and i would suggest setting something up for housing and climate change similar independent bodies with funding to do things separate to government so that actually they could look decades ahead and set up things that were separate to electoral cycles i would go further with a reform that was brought into the scolish parliament which was the idea of of enhancing and consultation by having pre-legislative scrutiny it's been used i believe very effectively by many of the committees i would try and go further with that and try and lose this the any suggestion that it is in some way just a you know a patronising way of of tapping public views i would go really really down with that and try and get that involved so that before we get to the legislative stage we have examined the the the detailed um content of of the proposal that and i'm sorry i would go with that and make make that a really big change i think it's it's politics is still it's still working away it's still still getting there and i believe there have been some some absolutely dreadful examples of of malfeasance but but i think we should still seek to trust it and still seek to build upon it i think it was a church said that the democracy is the absolutely the worst system of government in the world except for all the others and i'm kind of kind of with him on that one because if you don't have a democratic system if you have talk about trusting politicians if you have the opposite if you have adulation for politicians then that way lies dictatorship so i would i would say be skeptical don't be cynical be questioning don't be condemnatory and i think that way we can get a decent balance and on that note we will draw this event to a close can i thank you all for your contributions for your participation in this really interesting event um can i ask you to join me in thanking our panellists and thanking russian protector Brian Taylor and Dr Fraser Mcmillan can i also thank to our partners at the john smith centre and can i take this opportunity to remind everyone that the festival continues there's going to be a lively discussion i am sure on the state of the union it's 6 p.m and an in conversation with poet and author lem sissy about his memoir my name is why and that starts at half past six thank you again joy the rest of your day thank you that was excellent